And not Wheelin’-n-Dealin’ Chase, on her other side, either. Same as Bonnie, he’s the manager of an open-to-all-ranks establishment—a coffeehouse. The cheap coffee he manages to get his hands on draws crowds into the Fill-n-Sip Cup and they bring rubies with them. Simple enough. She can smell his head oil, the overhead lights playing on his bald pate—she guesses that he shaves it—as he squashes grapes between his teeth. The number four would be too eager to leverage the secrets, to play all the cards at once.
One of the Jokers—Samm or Sue—releases a loud burp. Jada barely bothers considering them at all. The two are splayed on the floor by the food table with their backs against the wall, sucking on chocolate cherries. They’ve been in this room much longer than her single year; she’s heard that in the beginning they were invited to join in on the voting on this or that town issue but always took opposing sides just for the fun of it. The pair—numbers five and six—are warm bodies filling a couple of spots and thereby keeping out others. She’ll have to get past them somehow—perhaps start a rumor that they’re breaking up and turning over a new leaf as responsible, boring citizens—but that’s easily manageable down the road.
Poulsbo the Handyman, across the table? The number eight is too weak to be an effective ally. The handyman’s inability to say no to any request to fix this or build that makes him a familiar face around New Seattle’s neighborhoods, but in this room he rarely contributes. He has a perpetual eye twitch that Jada finds annoying.
McKinsey, she of the eleven hobbies? In the last Tenner spot, McKinsey is in the most precarious position. Together they might make an effective team—a partnership that could propel one of them to the top, but there’s no telling who. Too much of a risk.
The double doors open and the number nine comes in, his pace unhurried, his excessive goatee always seeming to enter the room before him. Partnering with Franz would involve a lot of unnecessary chatter. The self-proclaimed Relationship Wizard is an expert at compromise, not action.
Which brings her back to…Rick. Jada has known since the town party that Rick is more than willing to do the dirty work. That he’s willing to do anything. Vain, self-centered Rick coasted to fame on good looks and Delilah’s coattails. Delilah gave him his big break and, from that point on, kept him by her side. He never made a move against her. Today Rick’s wearing a frown under the perfect hair and Jada knows why. Bonnie’s pulling ahead in the battle for number one—rubies are streaming in for her.
After Franz takes a seat, leaving only Delilah’s empty, Bonnie raises her voice to drown out the side conversations. “Who’s going to lead the meeting?”
Rick swivels in his seat—he’s been watching the Joker duo by the food table, or, more specifically, Sue—and points out that he’s the number two and therefore it’s his job. Echoing Jada’s own thoughts about Delilah’s pretense at royalty, Bonnie responds with, “New Seattle’s not a monarchy. There’s no right to succession and nothing’s guaranteed, Rick, you know that. What’s the saying? Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”
“Town Offices sent today’s agenda to me.”
Bonnie directs a shrug in his direction. “I wouldn’t read too much into it.” The rubies in her halo carry an earnest tone (“Bonnie knows everyone’s name, Rick only his own”) while Rick’s are a bit more superficial (“Handsome Rick for number one!”).
“Please, somebody just start,” Chase interrupts the bickering, though Jada is content enough to sit there watching Bonnie peck at Rick. It suits her purpose today.
Rick clears his throat, the brow still furrowed. “Let’s see, last week we tried to tackle the bird problem…”
Chase interrupts again. “Also known as the Ben-and-all-his-gems problem.”
“…but we were deadlocked, evenly split between dual proposals,” Rick continues, ignoring the interruption. “Delilah wanted feeders in Pike Place Market to draw the sparrows there and McKinsey, here, argued for even farther out, in the Edge Garden.”
McKinsey had stood up to the Duchess and had some support, a rare occurrence. Delilah used voting as a test of loyalty—she had plenty of leeway to put things into motion without a vote or even a discussion.
“No danger of a tie today.” Chase delivers the words with a wink. “McKinsey wins.”
The joke falls flat. No one, with the exception of Poulsbo, is going to miss Delilah but the tension around the table forestalls any laughter. Bonnie shakes her head as if Rick’s already failing at leadership. “Why are we talking about birds? Given what happened, people will expect action.”
“Why would they expect us to do anything?” Rick recommences bickering. “It was the Incompetent Intern’s fault, not ours.”
“I propose a Maintenance safety check, balconies first.”
“Not everyone has a balcony, Bonnie, so why start there?”
“Because that’s where it happened.”
“It makes us look elitist.”
“Pretending to be worried about the under-a-hundred crowd won’t bring you rubies, Rick,” Bonnie slings an arrow. “You have to mean it.”
“Don’t think I don’t see past your holier-than-thou demeanor, Bonnie, as if you’re better than the rest of—”
Franz steps in. “Let’s keep it civil, shall we?” He steeples his fingers—his way of signaling that his mediating skills are being put into action. “Poulsbo, you’re in Maintenance. What’s your take on this?”
“I’d say…that we need to train…more maintenance workers.” Poulsbo is a slow speaker, each word a weight to be pushed out from deep within. “I’m in Small Repairs, as you know, assigned to Housing Seven, Eight, Nine, and Ten… What you want is…the Large Repairs crew. I’m the one to bring in if there’s a leak under your sink… They are the ones to bring in if…if there’s a structural issue.”
“And we need more persons in the Large Repairs crew, you say?”
“We could retrain actors,” Bonnie latches onto the idea, “and turn the theater into a gym or a garden.”
“Now just a minute,” Rick snarls. “The theater is key to the emotional well-being of the town. It provides entertainment, relaxation, art. It’s a job like any other. Besides, I don’t know a thing about building repair.”
Not with those soft-looking hands.
Bonnie slings another arrow. “If I get to number one… Well, I’m not saying I would do it, either—change things. Just a reminder that it may not be up to you, Rick.”
“Well, you do need Eternal Life more than me,” Rick responds rudely. “Fifty-nine, is it, Bonnie? That’s…why, that’s just about a nice round two decades more than me. The light at the end of the tunnel is starting to dim, is it?”
“Tenners, please. Let’s set aside any talk of closing the theater.” Franz calls for a vote and the safety check, starting with balconies, wins a nod from everyone at the table.
Chase folds his hands behind his head. “Excellent, it’ll take months for Maintenance to get that done—and if there’re additional accidents in the meantime, we can blame them. Which brings us back to Ben.”
“He’ll be in come Monday, I expect,” McKinsey says.
“I suppose it can’t be avoided,” is Rick’s take on it.
Poulsbo glances around, perplexed. “Why don’t we want Ben to be a Tenner? He’s promised to fix the…the bird problem.”
No one bothers explaining that if they have to have someone new, it’s best if the person is as docile as Poulsbo himself or simply in the room for the extra perks, Samm-and-Sue-style. They vote to take no action regarding the sparrows for now, effectively shifting all public expectation over to Ben. The birds are not of much concern to Jada, other than that it’s an ongoing battle to keep them away from the bins at the back of the Oyster.
With a nod, she signals Rick to stay behind after the meeting winds down, pulling him aside as if they’re merely getting in a last bit of food. She could send him a thought but some subjects are best discussed face-to-face. It’s a curious f
act, it strikes her, that nuance often evaporates in thought exchanges—that the flesh does a better job of revealing where a person really stands.
Once they are alone, she addresses Rick with a frank, “An empty chair at the head of the table, rubies piling up for Bonnie, and what of poor Rick? You didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you, with Delilah out of the way? That you’d simply slide into the number one chair.”
Rick kicks aside an empty fruit basket left behind by Samm and Sue. “Guess not.”
Delilah is gone. Things have turned out even better than the plan she and Rick hatched together in a private moment the evening of the town party. She throws him a morsel. “How would you like to be number one—guaranteed—when the List updates on Monday?”
This gets his attention. “How?”
“I know something about Bonnie—something she wouldn’t want revealed.”
Rick’s reaction is swift. “I thought all that secrets business died with Delilah,” he spits out, a forehead vein throbbing under the curls. For a moment Jada wonders if she’s underestimated him. Rick’s looks have no effect on her. Romance is an unnecessary distraction, a guiding philosophy she picked up from Delilah and one she’s learned to appreciate. The way of the world is that you have to look out for yourself, first and foremost. An occasional hook-up is fine but falling for someone—not that it would be Rick; he’s too full of himself, plus her forty-one years place her in the “too old” category for him—would signal weakness, expose a gap in the armor where a knife may strike.
“I’m the keeper of the secrets now,” she says easily. “Besides, you and I, we’re on the same side, aren’t we? Our arrangement still stands.”
This makes him pull back. “On the same side, yes… I hated her. She just couldn’t let me have an opinion of my own, ever. She enjoyed it—tormenting you, me, every single person who stepped foot into this room, boasted how she had dirt on all of us, except Poulsbo of course, who has no vices and was happy to do her bidding.” A sharp intake of breath. He’s having trouble controlling his anger. “Where did you find them? I looked all over her suite. She told me once she wrote the secrets down instead of making a corkboard—that she didn’t trust the privacy of her ConnectChip.”
“Under her bed—she’d jotted everything down on the back of her event invitations.”
“Did you find anything on me?” Rick chuckles uncomfortably.
“I already know all your secrets,” Jada says lightly. Her own is that she always voted Delilah’s way to stay on her good side—a trap with no way out.
“What’s Bonnie’s?” Rick asks.
“You don’t need to know the details. It’s nothing lurid, just a small secret, but that might be for the best. Bonnie won’t feel backed into a corner… What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard something.” Jada peers into the main hallway, then checks the utility room, but finds both empty. A vacuum starts up somewhere, its drone muffled by the walls. Just the cleaning crew. She turns back to Rick. “As I said, the details aren’t important.”
But Rick has already moved on. “I don’t see why the town thinks Bonnie would be better than me anyways.”
Now he’s pouting. She just needs to tie it up with a bow. “Just whisper in Bonnie’s ear I know and watch her fall in line.”
“And what do you get out of it, Jada?”
When the time is right, after Rick has whispered into Bonnie’s and other ears, he’ll be easy to dislodge. She permits herself a thin smile. “You’ll owe me.”
He catches her by surprise by asking, “Why do you want to be number one so badly, Jada? Want to live forever, or as near as you can get?”
Her answer comes out quickly, a mask slipped. “I don’t care about Eternal Life. Or the extra money, or the attention, or any of that stuff.”
“What, then?”
“I want to be the best.” She knows Rick’s picked up on the hard edge in her tone. And what she didn’t say: “Be sure of this—no one will stop me.”
Rick reaches for the last of the grapes. “When I get there, I’ll care about Eternal Life… Will it work, pressuring Bonnie? Three days is not a lot of time.”
“It’ll work.”
9
Monday, March 22
Someone bumps into my back. It’s Lu, who’s just come around a building corner at a fast clip. Dax is with her. “There you are, Scottie,” Lu says, rubbing the shoulder that connected with the back of my head. “Why are you standing in the middle of the street? Something wrong with your bike?”
“I hit a pothole and the vacuum bounced out,” I explain, trying to wrestle the machine back into the basket. New Seattle’s vacuums have been slowly dying off over the years and I have to ferry mine on assignments. Today’s was in Work Three.
“We sent you a thought to meet us at Puget for dinner,” Lu says after they help me secure the vacuum and we all move aside. “You didn’t respond, so we had to look for you on the map.”
Puget Chow, near the youth center, is what we grew up on and it’s the place we still go to. They serve all ranks and have their own version of cafeteria mix, the previous day’s leftover fried chicken.
I lie. “Sorry, I had my in-thoughts muted.”
Dax’s eyebrow goes up. “For vacuuming?”
“The birds”—I duck as one swoops into a nearby bin for a scrap of something or other—“really are getting out of control. Fine, I did get the thought. The truth is, it’s not good for you two to be seen in the company of the Incompetent Intern.”
“Of course we want your company.” Lu gives my arm a squeeze. “I’m glad the fallout wasn’t worse, Scottie. Let’s hope it’s over.”
Another Monday and the onyxes from Evan and Vicky have sent me to 9,653—four hundred spots closer to last place. I don’t say it, but I’m not so sure about Lu’s take. I’m still getting nasty looks over breakfast.
“C’mon, I’m starving,” Dax says. We set a course for Puget Chow, with me pushing the bike, and pass under a Tenner billboard, where Rick’s the new number one. The snapshot shows him raising a glass in celebration. “It was nice of Bonnie to give him a leg up, wasn’t it?” Lu says. “It’ll bring her some good karma. I caught her thought on the Commons asking everyone to give a ruby to Rick, so that’s what I did.”
“If you ask me, it was a peculiar thing to do,” Dax says, “but I guess we’ll see how he does.”
I refrain from commenting. I know for a fact that niceness has nothing to do with it. Jada has dirt on Bonnie, though I had to beat a hasty exit from the utility room before hearing the details. Whatever it is, Jada and Rick have leveraged it successfully. Below Rick on the billboard is Bonnie, then Chase, Sue and Samm, Jada, Poulsbo, Franz, McKinsey, and, finally, Ben at number ten. Samm and Sue have toggled, everyone slid up by a spot, Ben is in, and Rick got what he wanted.
A pile of lumber for balcony reinforcement, the result of a safety push announced by the Tenners, forces us to switch to single file in an alleyway. Once we’re side by side again, Lu returns to the topic she broached at the town party. “Try and change your mind about upscale eateries, Scottie. I’ve been going with Wayne, but he won’t mind if we make it a PALs thing instead.”
“Can’t afford it,” I give my usual answer. “Unless—are you and Dax bored of Puget?”
“Would that change your mind about it?” Dax asks.
“No, I’d just tell you to go on ahead without me.” Momentarily distracted from the disgust I was feeling at seeing Delilah’s snapshot replaced with Rick’s, I ask, “Wait, why won’t Wayne mind? Are you two fighting, Lu?”
“Not exactly.”
“What, then? Spill.”
She makes a face. “It’s nothing, he’s just being stubborn. He’s picked up a couple of onyxes recently.”
Dax takes this as an opportunity to recite, “Onyxes shouldn’t be given on a whim. Section A: Spiteful gems have a tendency to make the giver look bad, so save the g
rumbling for—”
“That’s just it,” Lu interrupts, unusual for her. “Wayne doesn’t know the people involved, only that they’re accusing him of rude behavior. He says it’s nothing to worry about, that gems just don’t strike him as that important anymore, not at this stage of his life. He already has a ruby from me and there’s not much I can do beyond that.”
Under normal circumstances, the Discovered brand would have garnered Lu invitations to many a party and event—ones she could have taken Wayne to and worked on his image. But with Delilah gone, so is the interest in the new protégée. Lu has been bumped by the onstage introduction to 610 and that looks to be it.
It dawns on me that Lu isn’t asking for advice and I remind her that I gave Wayne a ruby during my brief stint at the Agency, not that it counts much given my low rank. Lu’s avoiding looking at Dax. “It’s just that Wayne doesn’t have anyone to fight for him in matters like these… He says he never connected with anybody enough to consider them PALs.”
A gem from someone with Dax’s rank—141, the result of the most recent win in the tennis tournament—would go a long way toward helping Wayne. Dax responds with a casual, “I’m not sure I know Wayne well enough yet—not for a ruby.”
Lu bites her lower lip, then recovers. “I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, Dax. Forget I asked.”
“Well, invite Wayne out to a drink or something,” I say. Dax is sticking to his overly rigid philosophy—the issue’s come up before—when there are Tenners trading in secrets and possibly worse. You didn’t think it’d be that easy, did you, with Delilah out of the way? Jada said it as if she and Rick planned everything together and Rick was the one who pushed Delilah off the balcony. The pair are guilty of blackmail against Bonnie, if nothing else. But Cece isn’t allowed to record conversations—eavesdropped on or not—and I have no proof. Doubtful Bonnie would be willing to admit she was their target. If I reported them, it would be seen as an attempt on my part to shake off the Incompetent Intern brand…which isn’t far from the truth.
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