“Crystal clear. See you in an hour.”
The Phoenix Ridge financial district had been designed by someone with a strong conviction that width was an imposition on humanity. Everything was sleek and vertical. Tower after glass tower in stacked planes of silver and gray, each one angled to catch the light and return it amplified, so that the whole area glittered. Nellie was not, as a general rule, a person who found glass and steel spiritually stirring, but she’d grant that the Alburn Systems building was its own category of extravagance.
She stood on the pavement and squinted up at it.
And up.
And up.
Forty floors of reflective glass. A lobby she could see through the revolving doors from here, marble so pale it looked frozen, and something hanging above the reception desk that it took her a moment to process as a chandelier. It was steel, or something close to it: an enormous lattice of interlocking angular forms, suspended from the ceiling by cables. It was the most aggressively corporate art installation Nellie had ever seen, which she appreciated on a purely anthropological level, in the way that you might appreciate a specimen jar.
Nellie shouldered her bag, sidestepped a man in a three-piece suit who did not break stride, and pushed through the revolving door.
The lobby hit her like a different climate. The ceiling was high enough that she spent a disoriented second recalibrating her sense of interior scale. The marble floor—she’d been right about the color, somewhere between cloud and glacier—reflected back the steel chandelier in a long, faint ghost ofitself, doubling the installation into something almost organic, the way root systems mirrored their canopy from underground. She registered this observation and immediately understood that she was the only person in this lobby who was looking up rather than ahead, because everyone else was moving with the brisk, purposeful directness of people who saw this particular stretch of marble every single day and experienced it with approximately the same wonder as their own hallways.
At the far end of the lobby, a long, curved desk in pale wood and chrome held court beside a row of electronic entrance gates, attended by two receptionists in matching charcoal. One was on a call. The other, a woman perhaps in her thirties with a blow-out so architectural it constituted a structural element in its own right, looked up as Nellie approached.
The look she performed in the following three seconds was a complete assessment—head to toe, boots to braid—delivered with such professional efficiency that Nellie almost admired it. She clocked the loose thread at the hem of Nellie’s sweater. The wrinkled cargo pants. The canvas bag with the WILDERNESS PROTECTION ALLIANCE patch beginning to detach at one corner. Her expression reset into a kind of cool neutrality that was, technically, polite, but felt like razorblades against Nellie’s skin.
“Good morning. How can I help you?”
“Hi.” Nellie’s hand got halfway to a wave before she realized it probably wouldn’t seem like normal conduct. “I’m here for a meeting. With Sawyer Alburn.”
The receptionist’s expression didn’t change, exactly—nothing so rude as a sneer—but something around the eyes performed a very small recalibration. Her gaze dropped once more, briefly, to Nellie’s outfit.
“Ms. Alburn,” she said slowly, as if she believed Nellie was not all there in the brain function department, “maintains a very full schedule. Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes, I have a meeting,” Nellie said again. “With Sawyer. Alburn.”
“And your name is?”
“Nellie Fuller.”
The receptionist typed something. Or appeared to type something; the keystrokes were so light they might have been decorative. She studied whatever had or hadn’t appeared on her screen. Then she looked up with a smile so tight it could have been stenciled. “I’m afraid I don’t have any record of?—”
“She called me herself. About an hour ago.”
“I understand. Unfortunately, without a confirmed appointment in our system, I’m not in a position to issue a visitor pass, which means I can’t grant access to the?—”
“Could you call up?” Nellie suggested. “Or email? She’s expecting me.”
The smile didn’t flicker. “Ms. Alburn’s schedule is managed through her executive assistant. In order to arrange a meeting with Ms. Alburn, you’d need to submit a request through our website, and the team would?—”
“I don’t need toarrangea meeting,” Nellie said patiently. “I have one. It was arranged this morning, via phone call, by the woman whose building this is.”
The receptionist arched a sharp eyebrow. “With respect, Ms. Alburn doesn’t take unscheduled meetings with”—she paused, and her gaze made one final, very deliberate circuit of Nellie’s general presentation—“walk-ins.”
Nellie sighed.
She heard what had almost been said, the words that had been left hovering in the space where the pause was, and clung resolutely to exactly how much she wasnotgoing to escalatethis. She was familiar with the dynamic. She had, at various points in her career as a woman who regularly showed up to meetings that happened around trees, run headlong into the particular wall that got erected in front of people who didn’t look like they belonged, in places that had been built to discourage them from thinking they did.
She was not going to argue with this woman. Instead, she was going to call Martha.
Plastering on a saccharine smile to rival Ms. Blowout, Nellie pulled out her phone.
Martha picked up on the first ring.
“Nellie. On your way in?”
