Morgan stared at her phone then put her head back down. How had word gotten out? Somehow, Tim must have tripped something while he was getting the summoning ritual.
Someone set something next to her elbow. She looked at the coffee cup and then up at Luke.
“I shouldn’t have called you a liar. I know what the human marketing says about us, and you had no reason to believe otherwise. And you’ve never lied to me. I don’t think.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Also, you really wanted the coffee. It was loud.”
She couldn’t remember the last time someone brought her something just because they thought she wanted it. Morgan smiled back, startled. For a moment, their eyes met and the anxious spiral of her thoughts stilled. There were flecks of sulfurous yellow peeking through the warm brown of his eyes, she realized. She shook herself. He didn’t mean anything by it; her desires were probably just annoying him and he’d wanted to make the noise stop the same way she wished she could halt the construction upstairs. She took a sip, letting the welcome bitterness wash over her tongue. “Thank you.”
She should tell him about her mother, shouldn’t she? Before she could say anything, he cocked his head.
“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird.”
“What is?”
“You wanted the coffee and now you feel better.” His facehad the startled look of someone who had bit into what they thought were whipped prunes and discovered it was chocolate mousse instead.
She looked at him sideways. “I mean, yeah. I had the coffee. I’ll want another one later.”
“But youfeel better. You don’t just want an even fancier coffee. You’re…”
“Satisfied? Yeah, that’s what happens when humans want something small and reasonable and then get the thing they wanted.”
From the look on his face, this was a revelation. “This plane is amazing!” He looked at the coffee cup and shook his head. “Plus, you’ve got so many souls to spare you can even play games with them!”
“What are you talking about?” She couldn’t handle another thing. Had he been capturing souls somehow? What if her mother had felt the ripples?
“The little men in the table! You flick them back and forth to hit the ball. It’s an ingenious way to keep long-term suffering cycling. It’s even better than the Sisyphus set-up.”
“Luke.” She covered her face with her hands. “There are no trapped souls in the foosball table.”
“No?” He looked disappointed. “I guess that explains why Carter gave me a weird look.”
Her phoneblunged. She checked to see what fresh hell her mother had unleashed. Instead, it was Kelly on Slack approving the webinar deck, reminding her to keep it aimed at the top of the marketing funnel, and not to get too specific.
“OK.” She took a deep breath that did not help. One problem at a time. The others could wait, this couldn’t. “I need you to moderate the chat.”
“I know what each of those words mean separately, but I have no idea what they mean together,” he said.
She logged his laptop into the webinar platform. “Collect the questions while I talk, because I can’t read and talk and still make sense. If you can differentiate between the potential customers who want information or competitors like the Hawk guy from GreenField UnLtd. who are secretly trying to trip us up, that would be helpful.” She’d thought she’d scrubbed them from the registration list, but it wasn’t like she could keep them from lying about who they were when they signed up.
“What if there aren’t any questions?” he asked.
“Then pretend there were questions!” she said, then held up a hand. “You don’t have to lie exactly. You know all the stuff in the objections handling guide from yesterday: ask one of those.”
“If marketing involves this much lying, why do you glare at me every time I soften someone’s unwillingness to listen to Kelly’s pitch?”
“Later,” she said. She didn’t have a good answer for why humans were hypocrites. “I’ve got fifteen people in the waiting room already.”
The first half of the webinar was an adrenaline-fueled nightmare, but didn’t actually seem to be going that badly. Talking to an invisible audience, with no ability to get any feedback at all, was distinctly surreal. She stumbled her way through the points, guessing as best as she could how they might be connected. She could feel the cold sweat soaking into her clothes, starting from her armpits and slowly creeping toward the center of her back. She hoped it wasn’t visible on camera.
Somewhere around halfway through the deck, she started to get the hang of things. The pitch started to come more smoothly. She caught a few comments in the chat out of the corner of her eye and managed to weave them in. She even threw in a joke or two. Luke had to cover his mouth not to laugh out loud. She liked this, she realized with a start. She could do this. This must be what Kelly felt like all the time.
Suddenly, from the floor above came an earsplitting whine. The construction crew was back from break. The drill had to be biting into something that projected all the way down into their space again. She could feel the window near her elbow rattling.
“Sorry, folks, sounds like our neighbors are doing some renovations!” she said, praying that the webinar platform’s background noise cancellation was trimming out the worst of it.
One more slide. She just had to stick the landing. She was doing great. Brad was going to be so impressed he’d ask her to step in permanently. No, that wasn’t very likely, but maybe the new Head of Marketing would be impressed enough to keep her doing webinars full time. Something heavy dropped right over her head and she jumped.
“And let’s go to Q&A!” she said, with a touch of relief. Almost done.
