Sign Here(30)

“I don’t expect you to do this out of the goodness of your heart, Pey,” KQ said, as if reading my mind. “I’m willing to make you an offer to sweeten the pot.”

“What’s that?”

“Access to the Sixth Floor.”

That got my attention.

“You won’t live there, obviously,” KQ said as she swung her feet off the desk. “But I can give you a limited-access elevator pass, so you can use their amenities. And trust me, Pey. You want to use their amenities.”

I swallowed. The Sixth Floor was the highest floor in all of Hell. It didn’t get better than that without crossing into Earth’s delicious atmosphere. Not only that, but the Sixth Floor had one thing even Earth didn’t have, and my plan was impossible without it.

The Looking Glass.

“Okay,” I said. “Yeah. I’ll do it. Thank you.” I smiled and reached across KQ’s desk and took her hand, forgetting the toothpick and all of the repulsive things I’d seen her do with it.

“Fantastic. Here is your first target. Student. Whatever. I need you to be with them every second you can be. On your calls, at your meetings—take them into the bathroom if you do anything impressive in there. Teach them whatever you’ve got. Ride them as hard as you want; I won’t do much monitoring. But if they don’t start meeting the marks, your ass will be on the line.”

She handed me a manila file. There was a paper clip on the front, which held a small card. The elevator pass. I grazed the smooth surface with my fingertip and had the urge to pull it to my lips. I fought it, instead slipping the card into my ID lanyard.

“Don’t fuck it up.”

As soon as I’d walked out of KQ’s office, I opened the manila folder.

I should’ve seen it coming. I bet you did.

Calamity Ganon.

I turned around, about to bang on KQ’s door again. About to point out that Cal wasn’t bad; she was just new. About to say whatever I had to say to get her away from me. But then I remembered KQ’s words. I could do whatever I wanted to get results. I would be the one in charge. I sat down at my cubicle and flipped open the folder again.

Plus, now I had her file.





SILAS





SILAS FELT HIS KNEES crack when he crouched down to the liquor cabinet to brush the winter’s dust off the gin bottle’s neck. He would need to get more later that week. He stood back up, extending his leg a few times and listening for the pop. He had noticed his bones more lately, the way they sizzled and snagged on one another. He wasn’t an old man yet, not nearly. But his body had more to say than it ever had before, and he didn’t quite know how to listen. He poured heavy and pushed the bottle back onto the shelf. His fingers were sticky with lime juice, freshly squeezed. He used the bottled stuff at home, but not in New Hampshire. This house was about taking the time to do things right. He watched the tonic fizz over the ice and pulled open the screen door onto the porch, then took a seat on the deep lounger that overlooked the yard out to the lake.

He’d heard the girls out on the water earlier, but now the yard was silent. As silent as it ever got here, which was way less silent than their suburban neighborhood back home. This house had always been drenched in the sounds of life, wild in all its forms except for human. Right now, in the thick golden light, Silas could hear the sounds of the katydids rise and fall. If he closed his eyes, he could mistake their rhythm for his own breath, the way their noise overtook everything else until it was inside him. Silas sighed and took a sip of his drink.

This house was his favorite place on Earth. It was his home, in the truest sense. No matter what was happening in the Harrison family, they came here every summer. Silas could walk through the halls and point to each stain on the wallpaper, each dent in the screens, and tell its story. When his children were little and interested in him above all else, he would do exactly that. He could still remember the way they would ask for more, always more. It had been a while since either of his children had asked him for anything of his, other than his wallet. Of course, being back at the New Hampshire house was bittersweet. Every inch of that house held atoms of his brother, cells from his skin or his breath. Silas looked at the driveway, at the motorcycle he had wheeled out earlier from its tomb in the shed. Silas took out Philip’s bike every summer, first thing. He loved the process of caring for it, washing away the winter of neglect with gentle coos like it was a missing pet that had just come home. In those moments, Silas could pretend he could wash the time back.

When his mother was still alive, she couldn’t stand the bike. She couldn’t stand seeing any of Philip’s things, and it was the only fight they ever had. Silas hated how she changed Philip’s room into an art studio just a few weeks after he died, as if his grunge posters and blackout shades had never existed. As if he had never slept there until well past noon, awaking only to Silas’s persistent knocking, begging him to come outside and throw the ball or take him for a ride. His mother wouldn’t talk about it, but Silas watched her face enough to know it wasn’t just sadness that kept Philip’s name, his memory, at bay.

She was enraged.

Whether with Philip himself or with the lifetime of choices and fate that put him there that night—the weather, the traffic, the high school she enrolled both her boys in that promised skills for a successful future—Silas didn’t know. He had often wondered if the rage was meant for him, for throwing the party in the first place. If she couldn’t look at Philip’s things without hating her one surviving son. It wasn’t until he found himself a parent of a teenage boy who favored few words and closed doors that he realized the truth. She was enraged with herself. But by then, she was gone, too, the death certificate saying ovarian cancer but Silas knowing it was the rage that killed her: she grew those tumors like teeth to eat herself alive.