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I approach her office on tiptoe. The door to her outer office, the one inhabited by her assistants, is wide open. The computer screens are blank. The lights are low.
The portal—it’s way too impressive and huge to call a door—leading to Mom’s office is closed. I press my ear against it. I hear the murmur of voices. Not happy voices. Angry voices. Of course, that’s normal enough in Terra Spiker’s office.
My fire extinguisher bangs against a planter and instinctively I say, “Shhh!” But I doubt anyone hears. Not over the sound of yelling.
“Hey!”
I spin on my heels. A man and a woman have come up behind me. The woman is small, dark-skinned, with penetrating eyes and an extremely long braid. The man is sweating. He is large in all dimensions and has on a name tag that reads DR. MARTINEZ.
I stare at them. They stare at me. No one knows what’s going on, it seems.
“Are you here to see my mother?” I ask.
“Are you?” the woman demands.
The man asks, “Is there a fire?”
“Oh, this?” I glance down at the extinguisher in my hand. “This is—”
He leaps for me. But he’s a large guy and definitely not a quick guy.
I back up, banging into the door as he slams into the wall to my right.
“Martinez!” the woman cries. “Get her!”
“Get me?” I repeat it in shock. Seriously? Get her? It sounds so comic book.
“She’s the boss’s daughter,” Martinez protests.
“We’re probably going to kill the boss,” the woman points out in a voice that’s all reasonableness, with just a tinge of hysteria.
This isn’t news to Martinez, but he seems embarrassed by it. It’s something they don’t want to say in front of me.
Martinez lunges. I push back against the door. It gives way and I stumble back. I drop the extinguisher. It rolls a bit, then comes to a stop. I catch myself before I can fall, then pivot to see the tableau before me.
My mother’s office is as extreme as ever. The waterfall still pours. My father’s extraordinary, oversized sculptures still hang on wires from the impossibly distant ceiling.
My mother stands behind her desk. She is casually dressed in a custom suit flown in from her London designer, a twenty-thousand-dollar watch, and a diamond necklace worth more than the lifetime wages of a hundred Guatemalan families combined. As always, she radiates the scent of Bulgari. I can’t see her shoes, but I am morally certain that they are not a beat-up pair of Nikes.
“Evening,” she says, frosty as ever. “Your timing is unfortunate.”
Tommy, the scientist with the tattoos, is here. There’s also an Asian guy and a shrimpy little middle-aged nerd.
Tommy has a gun in his hand. No one else is armed, as far as I can tell. The gun holds my attention. It’s funny how a gun will do that, kind of make everything else blur into the background while the gun occupies the entire foreground.
I’m suddenly feeling a certain sympathy for Maddox. It must have been terrifying, seeing that gun leveled at you. Watching the trigger being squeezed.
I remember that Aislin and Adam aren’t that far behind me. But neither of them has a gun. They won’t help. They’ll just make things worse.
Where is Solo? Sullivan said something about vats.
I’m trembling.
Is Solo dead?
“Tommy, Tommy, Tommy,” my mother says, with a condescension that would shrivel a medieval baron, “you do realize you’re not going to manage this, don’t you?”
“I’ve managed it so far, bitch,” he says. Even he seems appalled by the B-word. The temperature in the room drops ten degrees. No one breathes.
