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Yvette Caldwell stepped into her office and let out a long, careful breath.
The walk back from the private room had been tense. The toast itself had cost her something. Her relationship with Hargrove had been strained for years, and offering a public acknowledgment after such a long silence had taken more emotional preparation than the surface-level grace of the moment had suggested. Standing in the doorway of her own office, with the door closed behind her, she finally let her shoulders drop.
She crossed to the small recess at the side of the room. With practiced movements, she unbuckled the rose-red shoes that matched her qipao and stepped out of them, letting her bare feet sink into the white wool of her office carpet.
She walked the length of the room, picked the lock on a tall cabinet she kept by her desk, and opened it.
Inside, instead of the leather-bound dossiers, archival ledgers, and confidential files that the office's executive aesthetic suggested, were rows and rows of snacks.
Salted plums. Caramel popcorn. Several varieties of imported chocolate. A box of dried mangoes she had been rationing for two weeks. Wafer cookies. Three different brands of potato chips. A small jar of glass-bottled honey that she ate by the spoonful when stressed.
She gathered an armful of supplies, walked back to the carpet, and dropped them in a small heap.
She lowered herself onto the floor beside the heap, crossed her legs the way a much younger version of herself would have, and began the careful, unhurried business of selecting a snack.
Outside this room, Yvette Caldwell was the proprietress of one of the most exclusive establishments in the capital. A self-made entrepreneur with a personal fortune in the ten-figure range. The cool-mannered, self-possessed woman whose calligraphy collection rivaled that of senior politicians and whose quiet refusal of certain men's advances was the source of fifteen-year grudges.
Inside this room, with the door locked and the world held at bay, she was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who liked sweets and had never quite figured out how to sit elegantly on the floor.
She had earned this version of herself.
She got about ninety seconds of it before someone climbed in through her window.
On the exterior wall of the building, Ethan was making good progress up the third story.
If the location had been more public, or the lighting better, he would have abandoned the climb on principle. The last thing he needed was for tomorrow's national news cycle to feature a viral video of him scaling the side of a restaurant. He could already imagine the headline: Young scientist Ethan Mercer caught climbing a famed proprietress's wall by night.
Fortunately, the alley along the southwest face of the building was unlit, the side street beyond was sleepy at this hour, and the architecture of the older quarter put plenty of weathered handholds in convenient places.
He kept his pace measured and his weight close to the wall.
Internally, he was still working through his irritation.
The waiter's polite refusal downstairs had been a small dignified pebble dropped into the lake of his evening, but the exchange had been worse than the refusal itself. The waiter's eyes, in the moment of refusal, had carried a clear subtext that Ethan had read with the particular sensitivity of any young man who had ever been gently dismissed:
Look at yourself, kid. You think the proprietress is interested?
He found, climbing the wall, that the look bothered him.
He had two consistent emotional triggers in life. The first, and the more important, was anyone insulting his family. Frank, Linda, his deceased parents. That was the line that could not be crossed.
The second, less defensible trigger, was anyone underestimating his face.
Ethan was aware, intellectually, that he did not have leading-man features. The serum had improved his physique substantially, but it had not given him cinematic bone structure. His face was, at its kindest, pleasant. By any honest evaluation, the looks ledger of his existence sat somewhere between average and slightly above.
He had made peace with this in adolescence. He had told himself it didn't matter. He had focused on building a future that was about competence, not appearance.
And then he had taken the serum, and J.A.R.V.I.S. had picked out his outfit, and the barber had cleaned up his hair, and for the first time in his life, he had stood in front of a mirror that morning and thought, I look genuinely good.
Three hours later, a waiter at a fashionable restaurant had communicated, through one efficient look, that Ethan was nowhere near the league of the proprietress.
It stung.
The audacity of it, Ethan thought, scaling the second-floor cornice. The pure, undisguised audacity of that look. I am wearing a twelve-thousand-mark suit. I have a custom haircut from a place that books up two weeks in advance. I'm in arguably the best shape of my entire life. And this man took one look at me and decided I was wasting my time.
The injustice fueled him up the next handhold.
This entire climb, he reminded himself, is not for personal reasons. This climb is purely for the sake of New Future Technology Energy Co., Ltd. and the future of clean energy in the Republic of Valoria. This is a recruitment mission. I am acting as a senior executive of my company, in service to a strategic acquisition that will benefit both my firm and the country.
This is absolutely not because I am annoyed at being underestimated by a waiter.
He reached the third-floor balcony, swung himself over the railing, and dropped silently onto the polished stone.
The window beyond the balcony was slightly cracked, allowing fresh air into the office. Through the gap, he could see warm yellow lamplight and the white expanse of an interior carpet.
He took a step toward the window.
He froze.
The cool, composed proprietress who had walked through the dining room downstairs in a rose-red qipao with the imperious grace of a woman accustomed to commanding rooms was, at the moment, sprawled on her belly across the white carpet of her office. Her shoes were off. Her bare feet were kicking absently in the air. She had a bag of caramel popcorn open beside her, a chocolate bar in one hand, and a salted plum in her cheek.
She was, in the privacy of her own office, twenty-eight years old, and very visibly enjoying it.
For a brief, unwelcome moment, Ethan's brain failed to update its mental model of her.
Oh.
Oh, this is going to be much more difficult than I thought.
Yvette Caldwell, lying on her stomach on her own office carpet, sensed the intrusion before she saw it.
She had cracked the window for fresh air. She had not, however, expected the air she was getting to include a person.
She raised her head, registered the silhouette on her balcony, registered the shape of the silhouette as a young man, and inhaled to scream.
Ethan, sensing the scream incoming, made the decision that no future scientist should ever have to make.
He moved.
In two strides, he was through the window, across the carpet, and crouching beside her with one hand placed gently but firmly over her mouth.
"Mmf, mmf..."
"Senior Sister. Senior Sister. Look at me. It's me. I'm one of Hargrove's pupils, I was at the dinner downstairs, please don't scream, I'm here for a legitimate reason."
She had been about to fight him. He could feel the tension in her shoulders coiling toward action.
The word Senior Sister stopped her.
She blinked, recognized him, and the readiness in her shoulders relaxed by a perceptible fraction. She held up one hand to signal that she was not going to scream, and Ethan, with significant relief, removed his hand from her mouth.
There was a brief, awkward pause.
Both of them were now keenly aware of the geometry of the situation. Yvette was on the floor in her qipao with her shoes off. Ethan was crouched beside her after just having held his hand over her mouth. The room had a snow-white carpet, ambient lamplight, and an open window admitting cool evening air. Half the open snack supply was scattered around them like the aftermath of a small catastrophe.
If a photographer had walked in at this moment, the photograph would have ended Ethan's career.
He stood up. He took two careful steps backward. He kept his hands clearly visible.
Yvette pushed herself up to a kneeling position, reached for her shoes, and slid them back on with the unhurried, dignified motion of a woman who had decided to recover her composure on her own timetable.
She rose to her feet. She straightened the collar of her qipao. She walked past Ethan to her desk, sat down in the leather chair behind it, and folded her hands neatly in front of her.
The transformation, from sprawled-on-the-carpet snack-eater to composed corporate executive, took approximately fifteen seconds.
When she looked at him again, her face was calm and her voice was very dry.
"Junior Brother."
"Senior Sister."
"I am extraordinarily curious about what could possibly motivate you to scale my building in the middle of a winter evening and enter my private office through a third-floor window."
The dryness was not anger. It was, Ethan realized after a moment, the specific dryness of a woman who had spent her professional life being approached by men with bad intentions and was now genuinely curious whether this approach would prove to be unusual or merely a more athletic version of the usual.
He cleared his throat.
"Senior Sister. I am going to apologize before I explain. The apology is sincere. The explanation is going to sound bizarre."
"Begin with the apology and I'll evaluate as we go."
"I'm sorry. I should not have come up the wall. There was a way to do this that didn't involve trespassing on your private space, and I took the wrong way for the wrong reasons."
She nodded, very slightly.
"Continue."
"Dr. Hargrove asked me to talk to you tonight. I'm starting an energy company. He's been concerned about the company's executive staffing for the operations and commercial divisions, and he's quite firm that you would be an excellent fit. He asked me, on the sidewalk outside this restaurant, to extend an offer to you for whatever role you'd like to take. Senior management or above."
Yvette's expression did not change.
"He vouched for you with the kind of urgency I have not heard from him before. So I came up here to honor his request as quickly as possible. The waiters downstairs would not direct me to your office. I was either going to sit in the dining room until you eventually came back down, or I was going to find another way."
"And the other way was the wall."
"It was."
She looked at him for a long, evaluating moment.
"My Junior Brother, you are going to have to accept that 'the other way was the wall' is not a normal sentence."
"I accept that, Senior Sister."
She let the silence sit for a second longer, then nodded once.
"Tell me about the company."
Ethan, suddenly back on familiar ground, drew breath to speak.
He never got the first word out.
The door of the office burst open with the violence of a man who had not bothered to knock and was operating on substantial alcohol momentum.
Garrison Pike had finished an additional three glasses of wine after Hargrove and Ethan had left the private room.
The combination of the wine, the residual humiliation of being publicly displaced from his traditional seat, and the fresh shock of seeing Yvette Caldwell again, had pushed him past the threshold where his career-trained discipline could keep him composed.
He had stood up from the table about ten minutes after Yvette's departure, mumbled something about the bathroom, and had instead headed for the third floor with the specific shaky determination of a man who had decided that this evening was going to end with him telling Yvette Caldwell exactly what he thought of her, and her of him, regardless of how many times she had previously declined the conversation.
The waiters downstairs had attempted to stop him.
He had brushed them off using his seniority in Hargrove's pupil-line, and the waiters, lacking explicit authorization to physically restrain a guest at the senior pupil's status, had not been able to fully intervene before he had reached the third floor.
He had reached Yvette's office. He had not knocked. He had pushed the door open.
What he saw inside detonated the last of his self-control.
Yvette Caldwell, the goddess of his fifteen-year fixation, was sitting at her desk, her shoes recently and visibly back on, her composure recently and visibly recomposed, with the new junior pupil standing across the desk from her in the soft yellow lamplight.
Caramel popcorn was scattered on the carpet.
A bag of salted plums lay on its side near her feet.
The window was open.
In the wine-flooded interior of Garrison Pike's mind, the available scene resolved itself into a single, devastating interpretation. The new junior pupil had somehow gotten alone with Yvette Caldwell. They had eaten snacks together on the floor. She had taken off her shoes. The window had been opened, presumably to cool down the room.
If Garrison had arrived a half-hour later, he was reasonably sure of what he would have walked into.
The humiliation, the fifteen-year accumulated rage, the shock of seeing Yvette warmer with the new junior than she had ever been with him, all of it converged into a single moment of catastrophic loss of self-control.
"WHORE."
The word ripped out of him at full volume.
The room went very still.
Across the desk, Ethan's face went through a fast, controlled cycle of reactions. The composed expression he had been wearing for Yvette's benefit cracked, briefly, into something dangerous. Then he locked it back down.
Yvette's reaction was different.
She did not flinch. She did not stand up. She did not visibly react to the slur at all.
She simply lowered her hands to the surface of her desk, folded them, and looked at Garrison Pike with the specific cold expression of a woman who had been on the receiving end of his particular flavor of resentment for far too long.
"Garrison."
Her voice was level. Controlled. Almost gentle.
"I have respected you as a senior pupil for fifteen years. I have offered you patience well beyond what was deserved."
She paused.
"You will leave my office now. You will not return to it. You will not speak to me again, in this building or any other, for the remainder of your natural life. If you violate any of these terms, the protection my standing in this district affords me will become available for the purpose of ending your access to my industry."
The words were delivered without volume. They did not need volume.
Behind Garrison, in the corridor, the sound of urgent footsteps approached. The head waiter, a muscular man in his thirties, tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of practiced calm that suggested he had handled this exact situation before, appeared in the doorway with three other waiters behind him.
"Ms. Caldwell. I am very sorry. He represented himself as a senior pupil and we were unable to confirm with you in time."
He turned to Garrison.
"Sir. Please come with us."
Garrison opened his mouth. He produced a sound that was, perhaps, intended to be a defense. The head waiter and his three colleagues did not wait for the sound to organize itself into words.
They walked into the room. They each took an arm or a shoulder. They escorted Garrison Pike out of the office with the firm efficiency of men who had been trained, specifically, to escort intoxicated men out of this office.
In the corridor, Garrison's voice rose into incoherent shouting. The shouting receded down the stairs, then down again, growing fainter as the waiters moved him toward the front door of the restaurant.
Yvette closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, she looked at Ethan with an expression that combined exhaustion and dark amusement.
"That, Junior Brother, was Garrison Pike."
"I gathered."
"I would like to apologize on behalf of the pupil-line for what you just witnessed."
"You don't owe me an apology, Senior Sister. He doesn't represent the pupil-line."
She gave him a small, tired smile.
"You're being kind."
She gestured at the chair across from her desk.
"Please. Sit down. Tell me about the energy company."
Outside, in the front courtyard of the restaurant, Garrison Pike was being dumped into a cab. The waiters had, with admirable patience, ensured he was placed in the vehicle without injury. They had paid the driver's fare in advance to Garrison's hotel. They had retreated.
In the back seat of the cab, the cold winter air through the half-cracked window slowly returned a fraction of Garrison Pike's higher functions.
Somewhere underneath the wine and the humiliation, a sober part of his brain was already working. He thought about what he had seen. He thought about what he was certain he had seen.
He thought about the new junior pupil, the kid named Evan Wright, alone in Yvette Caldwell's office with the window open.
He thought about how he was going to use this.
His hand, sweaty against the cold leather seat, slowly closed into a fist.
The kid had crossed him three times in one evening. The seat. The deference. And now, this.
Garrison Pike, swaying gently in the back of a cab, made a quiet decision about the trajectory of his next several months.
The new junior pupil was going to be destroyed.
The proprietress who had refused him for fifteen years was going to be exposed.
And Garrison Pike, by the end, was going to make sure both of them understood exactly who they had crossed.