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And one of them was right in front of me.
“I have a proposition for you,” Ax said. “Come work for the company I’m founding. I have a pile of Wynn’s cash burning a hole in my bank account and a mandate to hire whomever I want.”
Oh sure, not suspicious at all. Maybe he had a white van I could get into where I could meet a deposed overseas prince who needed my social security number. “What’s your company called?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. It’s my first time doing this, and I want my brand name to be special.”
“Who else has joined?”
“No one. You’d be employee number one.”
“What does this company do?”
Ax grinned. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Wynn invests in people, not concepts.”
Hoo-boy. “So you’ve got no idea, no experience, and no one else on board,” I said. “That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
His feelings were immune to my bluntness. “Maybe,” Ax said. “But that’s okay. Wynn’s number one motto is that failure is the best teacher. There’s no real consequences for taking risks other than learning valuable lessons.”
Another Silicon Valley–slash–Bay Area attitude I’d heard a lot. Fail fast! Fail over and over again! Fail like there’s no tomorrow!
“Take me as an example,” Ax said with a faint smile that indicated he absolutely loved it when people took him as an example. “Before I met Wynn I was trying to build an audience for my online video channel. So I crashed one of his parties and handed out business cards that looked like raffle tickets for a Lamborghini. I got the emails of a lot of rich and famous people that way. The guests were pissed off when they found out there was no car, but Wynn liked my style, so instead of calling the cops he brought me into the program. Had I been afraid of failing, I never would have come this far.”
The entitlement on this one was as thick as the Earth’s mantle. Though maybe he and I were more similar than we appeared. I mean, I’d tried to upend the entire celestial pantheon this very morning. The stunt I’d pulled even shocked Quentin, the king of outrageous stunts and—oh god, I’d completely forgotten about Quentin and the yaoguai.
I glanced around and they were gone. “Ax, we gotta wrap this up,” I said, shifting my weight side to side impatiently. I must have looked like I needed to go to the bathroom.
“All right then, here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ll pay you a salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year if you drop out of school and come work for me.”
I stopped dancing in place and clenched my jaw to keep it from hitting the pavement. I took a deep nose breath, blinked slowly, and stayed silent for a while, long enough to make Ax laugh.
He probably thought that as a poor person, I couldn’t comprehend the sheer amount of money he was waving in front of my nose, like a medieval peasant witnessing a match being lit by a time-traveler for the first time. Golly gee mister, I didn’t know numbers went up that high!
In truth it was the opposite. I was taken aback because I knew exactly how much money one hundred thousand dollars was. When I was younger I’d heard snippets of frantic conversations, late-night arguments, screamed obscenities between my father and mother that were about sums of money roughly in that range. A hundred racks was the size of a common small business loan, the kind that had wrecked my family.
And more recently to the point, it was enough to cover an ambulance ride, a few ER visits of varying severity, ongoing courses of heart medication, and general health costs for a non-smoking man and woman of my parents’ ages. There was no particular reason why I’d looked that information up several times over this long weekend on
my phone. No reason at all.
“Why would I have to drop out?” I asked. I’d thought the entrepreneurship for young people that Wynn Ketteridge blathered on about meant a side gig you did as an extracurricular, instead of debate team or chess club.
“Wynn wants to make sure that his protégés are completely committed to his philosophy,” Ax said. “So you’d have to burn your bridges and publicly declare you’re rejecting the concept of higher education. I dropped out of this very school myself. I sneak back on campus regularly to recruit for the program. As you might have guessed from last night, the message is lost on a lot of people.”
Ending my academic career before it truly started? “I—I don’t even go here,” I murmured. “I haven’t begun applications yet.”
“Even better,” Ax said, unfazed that he’d been talking to a high schooler this entire time. “We could call a few local reporters after you complete your apps and get into a few good schools. Make a big story about you saying no to every single one. It would be great publicity for the foundation.”
Like Trish and Kelsey, Ax had no problem warping me into the future where I already got in to a school as exclusive as this one. And the trip was making me nauseous. Either they knew something about me I didn’t, or maybe you lost your memory of what the struggle was like once it was over.
“I can see you’re on the fence,” Ax said. “I’ve never met a better candidate for the program than you, so how about this? You have until the end of the long weekend to decide. After that, the offer’s gone forever. You’d be blacklisted from working with any member of the Nexus Partnership ever again.”
I frowned at him. “You’re going to give me less time to make an important decision because you like me?”
“It’s a negotiating tactic that Wynn teaches us. We use it when we really want something. You’re a unicorn, Genie. A pretty girl like you, who can code? And a minority to boot? You could be the next face of the program.”
I wanted to tell him that his deadline was dumb and unfair. And to break his nose for how sexist and racist his other comment was. But before I could do either, a greasy, crumpled-up paper bag landed at our feet.
“Ax, you don’t even go here!” a girl shouted from the third-floor window. “Get the hell out before I call campus security!”
