by Ruby Ryan
The rock had hidden a hole the size of my fist, and inside was a stone figurine.
The figurine was some strange animal. It had the body of a lion, but the head and curved beak of a bird. And sprouting from its back were a set of wings, thick with feathers and folded in on themselves like it was waiting to take flight. On the top of the object was the obvious source of the glowing light: a rectangular emerald the size of my thumbnail, set in the back of the animal's neck.
The figurine pulled at me. The high-pitched noise had returned to the air, blocking out all other sound and making it difficult to think. Foreign thoughts invaded my brain: if I didn't pick it up, someone else might. They could snatch it away at any moment, even though that was stupid since I was alone in this tiny room. Do it, my mind insisted in a voice all its own. Take it.
And unable to resist, I did.
The moment I touched it the ringing noise fell away. The statue felt heavy in my fingers, an immense unseen weight that didn't make sense. It was smooth with age, and I turned it over to admire the emerald. It was cartoonishly large, and almost certainly fake. There were no prongs that I could see, but it was somehow set into the stone like it had always been there. Like it belonged.
"Ethan?" someone called from a far away place, voice full of urgency. "Ethan!"
The spell having been shattered, I shoved the figurine in my pocket and crawled back out.
"Where'd he go?"
"He was just right here..."
"He couldn't have just disappeared, could he?"
My friends were frantically calling out and shining their flashlights around the room when I emerged from the tunnel. Roland saw me first, and came darting over, practically sliding down the rocks between us.
"Dude!" He panted in the darkness and grabbed my arm as if I would disappear again. "Where the fuck'd you go?"
"I was right here..." I began, twisting to shine my flashlight at the low tunnel.
Andy appeared a moment later, with Orlando right on his heels. "Ethan, what did we say--"
"I'm fine," I cut him off, annoyed by the sudden attention. "You guys are overreacting."
"What possessed you to go down there?" Orlando asked, squatting down to look at the tunnel. "Good lord. How'd you even fit?"
I moved my hand to my side, where the figurine hung heavily in my pocket. I wanted to show them. It was exciting, and they were my friends, and it would distract them from worrying.
But as my hand went into my pocket, something stopped me.
My brain was inundated with excuses. They'll laugh at you. It's probably fake; then you'll look really stupid. Or they'll want it for themselves. My head still pounded from the hangover, and showing them what I had right then would only increase their frenzied annoyance. Right now I just wanted to be left alone.
"I was just curious," I found myself saying. "Sorry. It won't happen again." And the minute the words were out of my mouth, the insistence in my head disappeared. Like it was satisfied.
Goddamn. I really needed some food.
Before they could question me further, a retching noise drifted from across the cave. Five sets of flashlights whirled to illuminate Sam, who was bent over and vomiting liquid against the far wall.
"Dude..." Roland muttered.
"Sorry guys," Sam said, brushing back his blond hair. "Really. Must be the aftereffects of last night..."
Andy put an arm on his shoulder. "No sweat, buddy. Maybe this was a bad idea."
"No, I think I'm okay!" Sam tried to stand up straight and wobbled a little bit. "I just need a minute..."
But Andy was shaking his head, a strange insistence now in his voice. "Forget about it. This was fun, but I was probably overzealous. Let's get back to town and grab some food."
"We just got here..." Orlando began, but something had gotten Andy and he demanded we leave.
Orlando was the only one who tried protesting further, but with him outnumbered he soon relented. Our guide shrugged and led us back the way we'd come.
I'll tell them later, I decided. Once we all had some food in our bellies, and were somewhere calmer. Yeah, that sounded good.
But as we climbed back out into daylight, a quiet calm had come over our group. Like a secret had passed between us, one none of us could understand.
When we returned to the villa Andy made everyone sandwiches, ever the group mother. We chatted quietly while eating, passing around a big bag of potato chips. Everyone seemed to stare off, lost in thought.
We spent our final day in Belize relaxing on the beach. We went out to dinner at a restaurant, made toasts to one another to the happy lives we'd built since college. We played drinking games in our villa, beer pong and quarters and flip-cup, reliving the idiotic days of college when we were simpler men.
And throughout it all, the only thing I could think about was the weight in my pocket, and the emerald too large to be real.
2
JESSICA
Being a temp was not as glorious as I'd expected.
"Jessica, where's that software inventory?" Mrs. Arnold called across the office. "I told you I needed it for my 10:00am meeting!"
Okay, so it wasn't glorious at all. But I hadn't expected it to be this shitty.
"I thought I sent it out," I mumbled, hastily alt-tabbing across my computer screen. I stopped when Outlook popped up. "Yeah, here it is. Sent 45 minutes ago."
"Well I didn't get it, Jessica," Mrs. Arnold said, growing impatient. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her rise from her desk and stride over here. "Don't blame technology for your own fuck-ups."
I pulled my metal hair clip from the band of my Apple Watch and twirled it in my fingers, a nervous tick I'd had since I was a teenager. "You're right, I'm sorry. I'll send it again."
She stopped behind me and crossed her arms. I could practically feel the burn of her gaze over my shoulder as she watched me open a new email, attach the software report, and hit send.
"If you had done that the first time I would have gotten it," she muttered.
I did send it that way the first time, you blind fucking witch of a woman. Ohh, it would have felt so good to say that right then. But the feeling of having a job, no matter how shitty, felt better than the fleeting satisfaction of telling her off, so what came out of my mouth instead was, "You're right, Mrs. Arnold."
"If anyone needs me, I'll be in that Asset Management meeting. The one you've made me late for."
She strode from the room with her laptop.
Still twirling my metal hair clip, I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, savoring the silence.
The temp job was only scheduled to last another week, but I still had high hopes that it would turn into a part-time, or even full-time position. That didn't seem likely, based on how my boss acted, but I clung to the irrational hope nonetheless.
This was the first real job I'd had as a temp since graduating. Two contracts as a secretary, and one as a data entry drone, and then this. Systems Administrator, running real-time software and hardware reports against the company's database. Infinitely more satisfying, Mrs. Arnold aside.
But the server-client system they used was a mess when I arrived, a chaotic jumble of folders and sub-folders and sub-sub-folders. It'd taken me a full week just to figure out the data schema, and I'd been banging my head against the wall ever since. Whoever I was temporarily replacing was a huge dick.
It didn't help that Mrs. Arnold kept interrupting me every ten minutes with some new, menial request. It was tough to get into a groove in SQL when you kept getting distracted.
So I savored the solid hour of time while she was in her meeting. Slipping the hair clip back into my watch band, I created three new reports that had sat on the top of my to-do list for too long, and then created email subscriptions off those that would go out once a week. With that finally done, I went in and begun cleaning up some of the computer collections, sorting them by location and software type and other categories that would be useful later.
&n
bsp; Hopefully useful to me, if I somehow turned this into a full-time gig.
Mrs. Anderson didn't return from her meeting, which meant she'd gone straight to lunch. And feeling extra motivated by the solitude, I decided to skip my own lunch to get more work done.
I was not going back to the temp agency after this. I was too smart, too hard of a worker. Especially compared to the other temps who worked there. Most of them only had administrative experience: glorified secretaries, men and women who thought the real world boiled down to sending emails, scheduling meetings, and taking notes. I wanted to do real work.
My cell phone flashed on my desk with a text message. Careful not to look at it, I flipped it over so the screen was face down. I couldn't deal with him right now.
I pulled up Mrs. Arnold's calendar and looked up her later meetings. A 3:30 with the head of the I.T. Security department, probably to go over the compliance numbers for the most recent Anti-virus upgrade. After that she had a meeting with Legal, which would be about the new Exchange Mail data retention policy. I pulled up my SQL code and proactively began running the reports I knew she'd need for those meetings.
If she was going to treat me like shit, I was going to kill her with kindness. Even if it killed me in the process.
I was halfway done when my desk phone rang. It was Mrs. Anderson.
"I was just--" I began, but she cut me off.
"Why aren't you at the airport?"
I blinked. "The what?"
"You were supposed to be at the airport ten minutes ago!"
I quickly opened my calendar. What the fuck was she talking about?
"Ethan's flight comes in at 12:30," Mrs. Arnold explained, sounding annoyed at needing to. "Didn't you get the email I sent?"
Don't blame technology for your own fuck-ups, I wanted to spit out, but with a saint's worth of restraint I stopped myself.
"I must have missed it. Ethan who? And why isn't a car picking him up?"
"Because it's silly to send a car when we can send you," she said. "Ethan Masterson. His office is down the hall." And without another word, she hung up.
I stared at my screen, proactive reports only half completed.
I didn't know Ethan Masterson, much less anything about his flight, and I sure as hell didn't want to call her back to ask her. I pulled up his calendar, but nothing was noted there. I did a search for his name in my inbox, but that gave me too much info: he was CC'd on most of the emails I had. Not to mention I only had ten days worth. His office had been dark since I'd been here.
Eventually I called our Travel department and found his flight info that way. And sure enough, he'd landed ten minutes ago.
Great. Another person to disappoint today.
I grabbed my keys, cursed to myself, and ran out the door.
*
I was thirty minutes late by the time I pulled up to C Terminal at DFW Airport.
I'd realized too late that I had no idea what this guy looked like. He could be my age, or he could be an octogenarian, though the latter seemed unlikely since he worked in the I.T. Department. So what did I end up doing?
"Ethan?" I asked a balding man who walked the window of my car. He looked at me like I was crazy. "Hey--are you Ethan?" I asked the next guy--who ended up being an acne-faced teenager, once he got close enough for me to see.
Not wanting to make that mistake again, I left the car running and got out.
For the next five minutes, I was the crazy lady accosting every man who walked by. The airport cop monitoring traffic even came over to make sure I wasn't legitimately crazy, but she gave me a sympathetic look when I told her what I was trying to do. I found two Ethans, both of whom looked shocked that I magically knew their name, but neither were the one I wanted. I twirled my hair clip nervously, not wanting to return to Mrs. Anderson empty handed. That was a hole I didn't think I could dig out of.
I'd almost given up entirely when I found him.
"Ethan?"
The guy exiting the terminal wore khaki shorts and a tight-fitting T-shirt over a broad chest. "Yes?" he said, blinking in surprise.
"Ethan Masterson?"
"Also yes."
"Oh thank God." I almost hugged him I was so relieved. "I'm from the office. Mrs. Arnold sent me to pick you up."
A funny smile crept onto his face, and he gazed at me with eyes so green it was like they were neon signs. "She too cheap to pay for a car?"
"How'd you guess?"
We hopped back in my car and left the terminal. I looked sideways at him as I exited onto the freeway; he was gorgeous, especially the way he filled out that shirt with muscle, but his eyes were bloodshot and he looked like he couldn't breathe out of his nose.
"You sick or something?"
He waved a hand. "Just hungover."
"You look worse than hungover. You sure you're not gunna give me the Spanish flu? I can take you home instead of the office."
"Thanks for your concern."
I eyed his sandals. "You can't go into work dressed like that."
He shook his head and said, "I've got a change of clothes in my office. And I've got too much shit to do when I get there. Lots of catching up."
"Yeah, that place is a mess right now. It doesn't help that Mrs. Arnold makes every inconvenience out to be the end of the world."
He snorted in agreement. "I got an email from her when I landed. The ditsy temp they sent fucked up all my database schema while I was gone. It'll probably be days before I have it all back to normal."
I felt a pang of surprise, then rage. "Wait, you're Ethan? Login account GID0224?"
"In the sunburned flesh."
It was him. He was the reason I'd struggled adjusting to the department: his stupid, shitty organization in the database.
I drove for a few minutes, and then couldn't hold back any longer.
"Maybe the database was fucked up before, and now that the collection boundaries are all configured to proper Microsoft standards everything will run smoother."
He gave a start, slowly turning his head toward me. "We don't use proper Microsoft standards for boundary discovery because we have more than 20,000 clients in our environment. It just makes everything crash. At least, until we upgrade to the newest version of System Center."
My face must have gone white as a ghost, because he suddenly smacked himself.
"You're the temp we brought in while I was gone, aren't you? Shit. I called you ditsy, didn't I? Shit. Shit."
"I'm Jessica, yes. And it's fine," I said curtly. "Ditsy was probably Mrs. Arnold's description."
"Actually, it was!" he seized on the excuse. "But seriously. Did you really redo the entire database schema?"
I stared straight ahead, and then said in a small voice, "Maybe."
"Whelp. I know what I'm doing today. And tonight. And tomorrow."
I wanted to apologize, but the weight in my chest wouldn't let me.
3
ETHAN
Mrs. Arnold stood in my office, a scowl on her face so deep I wondered if it were stuck there.
"You should have left more explicit instructions."
Part of me wanted to throw all the blame on the temp. Jessica. I hadn't expected some worker drone to come in here and redo the entire database schema. If I had to leave instructions to not do something like that, I might as well have included instructions not to burn the building down while I was at it.
But I felt a pang of sympathy for the poor woman. She was clearly more technical than I'd expected, if she was able to redo the schema all by herself. And she'd done it properly, even if it was the wrong thing to do. That was impressive by itself at a new company.
"It's entirely my fault," I agreed. "Next time my instructions will be more clear."
"There won't be a next time," Mrs. Arnold growled, "because I'm never letting you take a vacation day again." She narrowed her eyes at me. "Or a sick day. Blow your nose and get to work. All of this needs to be fixed by tomorrow so we can resume normal software deploy
ments. If I have to explain to the Legal department why we can't run software inventories, I'll lose my job too."
She left in a huff.
Did I really look that bad? I certainly felt like shit, an aching in my joints and an exhaustion so deep it was like I'd run a marathon. Which was weird, because me and the guys didn't drink much last night. I'd woken up early for my flight, but that still meant a solid seven hours of sleep.
So why the hell did I feel this way? Maybe I was sick.
The couch in my office suddenly looked like the most comfortable place in the world. A ten minute nap would do me good. I could lock the door, close the blinds, and pretend I wasn't here.
I remembered the object in my pocket, bulky yet too precious to toss in my carry-on bag. I removed the little figurine and admired it as I'd done every hour since finding it, running a thumb along the smooth body, then along the ridges of the feathery wings.
And that gem.
I'd assumed it was fake the moment I saw it deep in that cave, but now? I wasn't so sure. It felt real beneath my thumb, dense with value instead of just plastic or glass. In its green depths I could see faint tangles of imperfection, the kind of thing that could only be present in a real gem. It was a wonder I got through customs with it.
I frowned. Was the emerald glowing brighter than before? The light coming from it was more than just a reflection of the ceiling lights; it had a luminosity all its own. Like it was calling me. Begging me to do something.
It might make you feel better, a thought drifted across my mind. And in that strange moment the logic made sense. If I surrendered to the figurine, I would instantly be imbued with new energy. If I let it take over everything would be better.
My thumb traced the outside of the gem, pulsing like it had its own heartbeat.
"Mr. Masterson?"
The pulsing cut off as the temp--Jessica--stuck her head in my office. I shoved the figurine back into my pocket and turned around.