by Robin Hale
All of that was true and my spine grew tense while I waited for the ‘but’.
“And the board knows it, too.” Carrie’s eyes flashed with determination as she gained momentum. “But they don’t care. They don’t care that it wouldn’t have existed, because it does now.” She paused for half a breath, meeting my eyes. “They think you’ve made them something profitable and they don’t need you anymore. They think they can bring someone else in to squeeze SparkSignal for maximum profit. Someone to follow along with what the board wants. And that’s never been you.”
I watched Carrie finish, her back rigid and her jaw set — then her eyes went wide as she realized the speech she’d just given me.
“Ma’am,” Carrie appended.
“Right,” I murmured. That was the problem, wasn’t it? That had always been the problem. ‘Does not play well with others’. “Short of a personality transplant, what do I do about that?”
Carrie’s eyes slid away from mine and the feeling was footsteps on my grave.
“What?” I didn’t growl it, but it was a near thing.
“Before you freak out —”
“‘Freak out’?”
“— I want you to think about how much you love being the CEO of SparkSignal and how much it has meant to you to get her ready for IPO.” Carrie’s voice firmed. Good. That was what I wanted. That was why I hired her. She was smart and she could hold her ground, even against me.
“I imagine I’m going to hate this.” I lifted a brow.
“I imagine you will. But the thing we need isn’t for the board to realize that you made SparkSignal — they’re modern conquerors. They don’t care. We need them to realize that, from the public’s point of view, you are SparkSignal.” Carrie let the statement hang in the air for a dramatic moment.
“How the hell do we do that?” I asked, barely the near side of bewildered as I sagged back.
“Social media,” Carrie said.
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not.” She edged forward onto the lip of her chair. “I know you mostly don’t pay attention to these things, but you were the subject of a viral post yesterday —” Carrie retrieved her phone and slid open the lock screen. Even before she turned it toward me, I knew where we were going with this.
“Oh god. Not that. Dahlia sent it to me this morning to torture me. Not you, too.” I stopped the flow of words with another mouthful of smoothie. It was almost as vile as having a photo of my ass making the rounds on the internet.
“We’ve had eight times the expected new accounts and four times the expected traffic on ad-bearing content since the post went live.” Carrie’s face was serious. Not grim, but determined.
“That can’t —” I frowned.
Carrie’s finger flicked over her phone and a tidy over-time chart appeared on my desktop screen. “It is.”
Shit. Shit, she was right. My eyes flew over the screen, soaking in every last detail — including a slump a month prior that I made a mental note to investigate — and coming to the same conclusion Carrie had.
While I had been focused on conference room and code contributions, I had neglected the effect a start-up CEO’s minor celebrity might have.
“How do we leverage that?” I asked and Carrie grinned.
“The account that created the post that went viral — not the original post, but the one with all the engagement —” Carrie began.
“Please tell me you didn’t respond to it,” I groaned.
“Of course I did.” The smile she flashed was nearly wicked. “I know your coffee shop order. Unfortunately, there’s no prize for being right.” She shook her head. “Anyway. The account that created the post belongs to a freelance social media consultant.” Carrie turned the phone to face me again.
“That’s a dog.” I frowned down at the screen.
“Oh,” Carrie said. She retrieved her phone and swiped her finger across it. “Right. She’s got this long-running thing about corgis. But the point is that she’s a social media influencer. One we can hire to handle this campaign.” She turned the screen back to me.
And there was the face of the dark-eyed girl from the coffee shop. Her rose-colored lips were pursed around a straw and her tousled hair caught sunlight somewhere beachy and bright. Definitely not San Francisco. Not recently.
She had silver earrings in her ears. Double piercings in the lobes, a hoop ringing part of her cartilage — she looked like someone’s stock-photo idea of a Bay Area hipster. Someone you could take to a protest or a poetry reading then home to meet your mother.
She looked like I’d scare the shit out of her.
And I was relatively certain I had.
“What does that mean — ‘social media influencer’? She’ll direct us in creating the campaign?” I asked. I couldn’t look away from the screen. It couldn’t be her, but it was.
“It means she’s Internet Famous and willing to rent her fame out for a rather reasonable fee,” Carrie remarked. She didn’t take the phone from my hands. I think she knew better than to try.
“When can we schedule a meeting?” A meeting. Work. A campaign to keep hold of my company. Those were the things that mattered, not finding out if she wore the same scent every day or if yesterday had been special somehow.
“I’ve already sent a car for her.” The grin in her voice didn’t show up on Carrie’s face, but it didn’t need to.
It had shown up on mine.
4
AMBER
It was a beautiful day for late winter in San Francisco. It wasn't raining — at the moment, anyway — the wind was calm, and the clouds had parted enough to give me my first glimpse of bright blue sky in weeks. By some miracle, the men lingering on the street respected the presence of my headphones, and no one called out to me while I pretended to listen to music in between sips of boba tea.
Things were looking better than they had the day before. The Iris Spark post had done significant numbers. I had a whole slew of new followers — followers who were known to engage with posts, which were the best kind. New followers didn't translate directly into making up the impending hike in my rent, but the increased counts would let me pitch to the clients who would.
My stomach went tense, discomfort rising as my anxiety peeked out from behind the clouds that had parted. The rent increase was a problem. And who knew if the work I was doing would be enough to make up for it by the time it hit? The lack of certainty, the lack of stability was the worst part of being a freelancer.
But on the other hand, what other job made it a productive use of my time to admire the well-sculpted glutes of a rockstar CEO? It was important to consider the perks, too, when I was feeling like that.
By the time I’d gotten a third of the way through my tea, slurping pearls through the oversized straw, I had become aware that something was not quite right. Anyone who lived in the city got used to the sound of traffic: the rumbling of tires over asphalt, the stop-start of creaking brakes, and the soft thwump of car doors both opening and closing.
Without music pouring through my headphones, it was increasingly clear there had been far too little of the first two of those sounds and an unnervingly nearby third. I closed my fingers around my phone in my pocket, ready to call 911 as the rest of my body went tense and I turned to face the source of the noise. It was a black car, expensive-looking and devoid of anything I considered a usefully identifying feature.
"Ms. Kowalczyk?" A man in a black suit and an honest-to-God driving cap called toward me. Points for him, he'd even pronounced it correctly.
"Can I help you?" I asked, keeping my distance on the sidewalk.
"Ms. Spark requests a meeting," he said. His face was friendly, bland, and I tried to imagine him saying the same thing if the name had been 'Mr. Capone' instead of ‘Ms. Spark’. It seemed unlikely. Iris Spark probably had better things to do with her time than attach cement blocks to my feet and drop me in the bay, no matter how many photos of her butt I had publicized.
The ghost of a smile appeared on the driver’s face and he lifted a bushy brow while he gestured to the screen of his smartphone. On that screen was a photo of the very boba tea I was carrying.
Right.
I'd gotten so in the habit of snapping photos of things I thought my followers would like and sharing where I'd found them that I sort of forgot I was basically always sharing my physical location with them. I made a mental note not to mention that to my mother the next time she called.
"Ah. Right. So I'll just…" I gestured vaguely toward the car.
The driver came around to my side of the vehicle and opened the back door for me. "This way. Ms. Spark appreciates your cooperation."
As I settled into the plush backseat of the luxury vehicle, the specter of every rumor I had ever heard about Iris Spark rose in my mind. They said she was a dragon. That she was a nightmare to work with. That she tore the heads off interns at the slightest provocation. That things were either perfect or she would destroy people until they became that way. Granted, that didn't jive with my experience having ruined her post-run jolt of caffeine, but it was enough to make me think that I maybe should've been less cavalier about climbing into an unmarked vehicle to meet her at an undisclosed location when she was possibly a bit irritated with me.
Ah, well. Too late now.
* * *
THE BUILDING where my fancy kidnapper — although it was probably unfair of me to think of Mr. Stevens as a kidnapper, given that I had climbed into the car willingly — drove me didn’t have an enormous logo on the side. No name emblazoned on it like a giant dog marking its territory the way Fallon Industries had stamped its San Francisco office. It had its street number in tasteful gold letters and a series of labels next to the badge-accessed elevator.
The only hint that Iris Spark had a presence in the building at all came in the form of the little flame logo I’d seen on app store charts. But it was definitely her. All the way at the top of the building.
I consoled myself that the building was covered in security cameras. If I went missing someone would figure it out eventually.
I definitely had a better chance of being noticed on camera than I did by the people around me. I glanced again around the lobby. Could I still call it a lobby? If it hadn’t been for the subtle logo next to the elevator call button, I would’ve sworn Mr. Stevens had dropped me off at a mall. There were two separate coffee shops that I could see from where I was standing. A juice bar. A sandwich stand currently doing a brisk trade in some sort of chicken wrap, judging by the sign on the countertop.
And then there were the people. Mostly they looked like tech workers. They might’ve worked in the building where I was standing, assuming the elevator led to offices and not Iris Spark’s personal torture chambers. And the rest? Tourists. Scads of them. Mostly wearing ‘I ❤︎ SF’ sweatshirts that were the banner of the ‘I thought California was supposed to be warm’ brand of tourist.
Heck, I had two of the damn things stuck in the back of my closet from getting caught in the fog on a day I’d expected sunshine.
Morosely, I turned my attention back to the elevator. Better to get the whole thing over with rather than piss off Spark any further by dawdling. I lifted my hand to the panel and hesitated. How was I supposed to call it? There was a badge reader ready to pick up some sort of signal off a pass I definitely didn’t have. There was a call button — but who would it call? There were a bunch of different names listed. Maybe you were supposed to select them in sequence. First the call button, then the name? Vice versa?
It might’ve been nice of Mr. Stevens to give me a hint that the next step involved an escape room.
Rubbing the pads of my fingers over the tension building in my forehead didn’t immediately present me with a solution. Damn it. But I was relatively smart, right? I’d figure it out. People were meant to be able to use the elevator. Probably.
The moment I’d resolved to try my first series of badge-less button presses, the shiny metal doors of the elevator opened to reveal a warm wooden interior that had never once heard the uncanny-valley tones of elevator music.
I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one else had crept up behind me with a badge. No one nearby. That was fine. Nothing unsettling about that.
Someone in Iris Spark’s office was probably monitoring one of those cameras and realized the girl their boss wanted to shout at needed some help getting upstairs. Stairs. That might’ve been better. Less…confining.
The movement of the elevator was utterly silent. It was disorienting. I had lived in San Francisco long enough to know that the elevators were generally ‘of a certain age’ if they were present at all. They were rattling claptraps that made you question your decision to get inside. But this one flowed smoothly and silently upward. The only thing I could hear, aside from the slurping sound of bubble tea pearls rising in my straw, was the faint rush of — waves? Quiet ocean noises?
I squinted up at the top of the elevator car, looking for speakers. Where could they have hidden them?
“Ms. Kowalczyk?”
I jolted as the sound of a woman’s voice startled me out of my search and I spun on my heel to face the sound. The other side of the elevator car had opened. Of course it had.
“Yes! Me. Present.” I fought to keep the wince off my face, and the well-dressed woman past the open doors smiled blandly, kindly pretending she hadn’t noticed I was an idiot.
“Right this way, please,” the dark-haired woman said with a graceful gesture for me to please get out of the elevator already. “Ms. Spark is expecting you.”
I followed the movement into an open space: light and airy and filled with couches and tables where the contents of the nearest four coffee houses had spilled out — laptops and all. All right, so this wasn’t Iris Spark’s private torture chamber. Or if it was, she kept it very well-staffed and liked a data-driven approach.
Oh no. I looked down at my boba tea as if it had knowingly betrayed me. Too much sugar. Too much caffeine. Keep it together, Kowalczyk.
The walk to Iris Spark’s office was a short one, barely enough time to get the nearly overwhelming urge to giggle under control. It was really, really not the time for that particular stress response.
“Can I get anything for you, Ms. Kowalczyk?” The woman — Spark’s assistant, maybe? — asked as we approached an imposing door. We’d made it.
“Uh, just — is there somewhere I could get rid of the rest of this?” I lifted the boba tea with a sheepish smile and my escort whisked it away somewhere I couldn’t see. Neat.
Disposing of the tea had been the last of my shields against my impending meeting with Spark and I took a slow breath as the assistant — “Hey, sorry, I didn’t catch your name?” “Carrie, Ms. Kowalczyk.” “Great, thank you.” — as Carrie opened the door into a space that looked like it belonged in a movie rather than someone’s real life. It was bright, open, with long vertical lines and clean shapes that made me feel like I was teetering on the top of something. About to fall at any moment.
Even someone with my complete lack of interior decorating sense could see it was a power move in three different dimensions.
“Ms. Kowalczyk.” Blonde Runner — Iris Spark — stood from behind a desk that clearly cost more than my annual rent, and I was struck by how stupid I’d been not to recognize her.
The woman in front of me could have stepped out of one of those photoshoots for Forbes or some tech magazine. Her shining blonde hair hung in chaotic waves around her shoulders, disheveled in a way that looked like art against her cheekbones. She wore the iconic black sweater, the dark-wash jeans. The worn-in charcoal brogues that no fewer than seven fashion bloggers had reported were hand made by a menswear company when she’d inquired about women’s
sizes. The sharp focus in her eyes was trained on my face in full force and I wanted to step back from it.
It was ridiculous, but I could feel my heartbeat picking up pace from the weight of her look. I was lucky she’d barely seen me in the coffee shop. I might not have survived otherwise.
“Ms. Spark,” I broke in, eager to head off the verbal ass-kicking surely headed my way. “I just want to start by saying that it was not at all my intention to insult or embarrass you. And if I have done that, I apologize.” I held up my hands in front of me and watched as an amused glint settled in those bright blue eyes.
“Did you think I called you here to yell at you?” Ms. Spark asked.
“I — yes.” I still couldn’t come up with an alternative theory, but I was perfectly happy to be proven wrong.
“Then why would you come?” Blonde hair fell to either side of a graceful neck as she cocked her head, amusement painted on the hint of a lift at the corner of her mouth.
“It — honestly, it seemed like the best way to avoid being sued.” I rubbed the back of my neck while I finally let out the wince I’d been holding back for eons.
Iris Spark laughed like the sound of pouring whiskey, and something dark and surprising coiled its way around the base of my spine.
“It was legal for the photo to be taken —” Iris held up a hand as soon as I opened my mouth to interject. “And I know you didn’t take it. You didn’t engage in defamation or damage SparkSignal. Frankly, my lawyers have better things to do.”
Oh. Good. That was good. Not being sued by someone who spent more on shoes than I did on food seemed like a pretty good outcome. But then — “So, can I ask, ah, why I’m here?”
The click of the door’s latch reminded me that Carrie was still in the room, silently observing up until that moment. She met Ms. Spark’s eyes briefly, wordlessly and swept over to the desk to retrieve a tablet and hand it to me. My eyebrows drew together in confusion even before I saw the images on the screen. What could possibly be the explanation for —