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  The window blinked and spat back a “Too many characters” error at me. I watched it blink for a minute, then took a sip of coffee and closed the window. The hell with it, I decided and started working on the revised UI flow instead.

  Shelly sent me a couple more messages, but I ignored them. The only logical solution to this little conundrum was that she'd made the changes, and if that were the case, I didn't much feel like talking to her. All she'd had to do was ask, and I would have gone along with them. I had to admit it—on the whole, the tweaks she'd made had improved the presentation. The points were clearer, the images more striking, the message stronger.

  But there was no reason for her to have felt like she needed to sneak those in, or to sneak onto my system to do so. If anyone in the building knew me well enough to guess my password, she'd be the one. The coffee was probably just a way of distracting my attention.

  I took a sip. It was cold and bitter. I could feel the grounds on my tongue. “Screw it.” Shutting down the chat application, I went to work reconstructing my torn and tattered napkin, the road map of my revised inspiration.

  At six, Eric left for the day. He stuck his head in my office as he passed. “Everything OK?” he asked.

  I nodded. “I'm still not quite sure what the hell happened with that slide deck, but what the hell. As long as you're happy with it.”

  He scratched behind his ear. “Whatever. I think you just misremembered or something. It's off, and until we hear from Phil, there's no sense in worrying.”

  “We haven't heard from him yet?” I looked up in surprise. “I thought you sent it before he left.”

  “Yeah, yeah. He's not exactly the most punctual guy when it comes to getting back to us. You know that. Anyway, if there's nothing else?”

  I grinned at him. “In other words, there had better not be anything else.” With empty hands, I shooed him off. “There's nothing, I swear. I'll catch you tomorrow.”

  “All right,” he said, and vanished from the doorframe. “Try to get out of here sometime,” I heard his voice echo from down the hall as he walked away.

  Try, I thought to myself. Try indeed.

  Chapter 4

  “Mmmm?”

  “Shh, honey. Go back to sleep.” I eased myself out of bed, one questing foot hitting the carpet before I dared move the second one. Beside me, Sarah snuggled close, maybe a quarter awake at best. I leaned over and kissed her forehead. “I love you.”

  “Mmmm,” she said again, and then, in a small voice thick with sleep, “Hurry back.”

  “I will,” I promised, and extracted myself from the bed. She rolled over, curling the blankets to her in a maneuver that I knew well. I stood there, watching her for a moment, my eyes adjusting to the darkness of the bedroom even as the klaxon of NOT TIRED NOT TIRED NOT TIRED echoed in my brain. I'd been in bed for a solid hour, lying as still as I could in the dark so as to avoid waking Sarah, eyes open and staring.

  Eventually, I'd decided that sleep just wasn't in the cards and thought I should do something useful instead. First, though, I waited and watched until Sarah's breathing grew regular and she'd bunched a pillow up to curl herself around. I pulled the sheets up to her chin, resisted the urge to kiss her again, and shambled off to my office.

  The night was warm enough that I didn't have to worry about a bathrobe; stripey pajama bottoms were good enough. I sagged into my chair, making sure the office door was shut behind me, and fired up the computer. A quick email check, I decided, and then some useful competitive analysis, by which I meant playing a game for a while. I thought about working on my novel—it had been sitting peaceably at a cool fifty thousand words since NanWriMo ended—but decided against it. Too tired, I told myself. Whatever I wrote wouldn't be any good.

  The company email page took forever to load, grumbling along like it was dialup. Someone at the office was downloading something big, I decided. Probably porn, or maybe BitTorrent movies. Either way, I didn't much care. I just tapped the desk with my fingers until, one by one, the screen elements popped in. I checked the clock. 3:30 AM. I'd been counting sheep longer than I'd thought.

  “Just a quick mail check,” I repeated, and scanned the list. One item caught my eye. It was from a BlackStone address, a familiar one.

  When Eric had sent the presentation over to Phil, he'd cc'ed me on the message. I'd paid no attention at the time.

  Phil apparently hadn't paid any attention either. He'd hit Reply All, not just Reply, which meant that I could take a look at his thoughts on our presentation. With luck, he wouldn't be asking for major changes, and I could spend minimal time making his requested tweaks. BlackStone was funny that way, constantly moving the target that the third party studios were supposed to hit. Michelle had voiced her suspicion, more than once, that they were just doing it so they could call “breach of contract” whenever they felt like it. I'd been more generous—I'd said that they didn't know what the hell they wanted, either.

  I clicked the link. Phil's email opened up.

  The third time I read it, it finally sunk in.

  Eric:

  Thank you very much for your presentation. I'm sure it is excellent. However, it is my understanding that the Executive Board has decided that it is not in BlackStone’s interest to pursue the Blue Lightning project at this time. This is not a formal announcement, of course, but I wanted you to be aware of the way the wind was blowing. I do know that they are very pleased with your studio's work and plan to offer you something else to make up for the disappointment.

  I am sure we will be in contact soon.

  Best Wishes,

  Phillip

  I stared at it for a while, then stared some more. There was a soft ping, the sound of new mail, and I looked down.

  It was from Eric. Apparently, he'd been having trouble sleeping as well. I opened it up.

  Not a word to anyone.

  -Eric

  That was all it said. That was enough.

  I shut down the computer and walked out of my office. The bedroom was to the right, warm and inviting.

  I turned left, went downstairs, and spent the rest of the night sitting in a kitchen chair, staring at the wall.

  * * *

  Sarah was her usual bustling self in the morning. If she noticed that I hadn't come back to bed, she didn't say anything about it. For my part, I didn't say anything about the email I'd seen. I had a bowl of cereal; she had an egg-white omelet with low-fat cheese and a precisely measured pinch of parsley, and then she was off in a whirlwind of newly promoted efficiency.

  I stood at the front door and watched her go. It wasn't until after her car's taillights had faded into the distance that I dragged myself upstairs and threw myself into the shower.

  Maybe it was a mistake, I told myself. Maybe Phil jumped the gun. Maybe I didn't actually read what I thought I read. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  But in my gut, I knew it was bullshit. I knew the project was dead. Maybe it didn't know it yet. Maybe I wasn't allowed to tell anyone that the sentence had been passed. But it was over.

  Hot water sluiced over me. I stood there, letting it run down my back, and leaned into the wall. It should have been no big deal. Projects got killed all the time. There were guys I'd met at Game Developers' Conference who'd been in the industry ten years without ever shipping a title, because the games they were working on always got axed or handed off to another studio or otherwise taken away.

  But this was going to be the one. I'd felt it. So had the team. There was something magical in the game, a real sense of something new and exciting and cool. This was going to be the one to really make us as an independent studio.

  I was the creative director, and it was going to be the one to make me. Now, for reasons that would never be explained and that I would never comprehend, it was dead.

  Just like that.

  I sank down onto the floor and let the water flow over my skin until it was freezing. I was thirty five, positively ancient in game-development terms, and
I'd just seen my best shot go bye-bye. Maybe Sarah was right. Maybe it was time to let her pay the bills while I tried to do something else, something that didn't rely so much on so many other people, so far away.

  Eventually I turned the water off.

  * * *

  Eric was waiting for me when I walked in the door. “My office. Now.”

  “And a good morning to you, too, Eric.” I dropped my laptop bag on the floor outside my door. “Is this a before-coffee or an after-coffee conversation?”

  He glowered at me from behind his desk. “It's a now conversation.”

  “Right, then. No coffee.” I was already headed toward his office as I said it, any cheap bravado I'd felt draining away.

  “Shut the door.”

  I did.

  “Sit.”

  I sat.

  He leaned forward over his desk, looking tired. Looking beaten, for lack of a better word. There were dark circles under his eyes, which were reddish in the way only a sleepless night or a long drinking binge can bring. There were lines down his face, and his hair looked like he'd done the five-finger brush job instead of his usual immaculate grooming. There was stubble on his cheeks.

  I was shocked. There was never stubble on Eric's cheeks. Other times when we'd had contracts pulled, other times when it looked like the entire company might go tits-up, he'd always managed to maintain a positively respectable appearance. I'd asked him about it once, and he told me it was simple—if he looked like there was nothing to worry about, then other folks would figure there was nothing to worry about. Look like the world was caving in, and there would be panic in the streets, which would then make his job that much harder.

  Today, he looked like crap.

  “So,” he said, “you saw the first email in that chain. Would you like to know the rest of it?”

  “I'm not sure,” I said cautiously. “Should I know this stuff?”

  He rubbed his eyes. “You're going to have to, sooner or later, so you might as well. The short version is that there were about fifteen more messages back and forth last night after I chopped you out of the cc list. Some was with Phil, some was with the higher ups, but none of it was what you'd call good.”

  “So we're screwed?” I felt myself deflating, even as I asked. There had been some tiny particle of hope that the email I'd seen had been incorrect, that Phil had gotten his wires crossed or had been since overruled. Now, it was snuffed out.

  “Blue Lightning is screwed,” he clarified, and looked at me through his fingers. “That’s why I called you in here. As for the suckage, it’s real simple. Their marketing department ‘no longer has confidence’ in Blue Lightning, and are no longer supporting the project. We are to stop working on it immediately, if not sooner.”

  Feebly, I protested. “But...we have a contract.”

  “In theory, we’ll get a kill fee.”

  I blinked, suspicious. “In theory?”

  Instead of answering, Eric stretched out in his chair and stared up for a long moment at the ceiling. “In theory,” he finally said. “In reality, I expect that trying to recoup it from them will take somewhere on the order of five years, and cost us a half a million in lawyer’s fees.”

  “We can’t afford that,” I blurted out. The pressure in my chest eased infinitesimally. As dire as this seemed, the fact that Eric was talking to me indicated that he had something else up his sleeve. If he didn’t, he probably would have been setting the place on fire for the insurance money. He was a practical kind of boss; that was one of the reasons everyone liked working for him. Still, having Blue Lightning cancelled was a kick in the creative crotch. To lose it now, well, that was a lot of work they were asking us to throw out. A lot of late nights and passion and skull sweat, a lot of weekends blown to make milestones and self-imposed deadlines, a lot of hours spent as a small part of a medium-sized team trying to make something big.

  A lot of love.

  “No. We can’t,” he agreed. “Which is what they’re counting on.” He left the sentence hanging, as if daring me to finish it.

  Another bout of panic seized me. “Do they want the assets?” If they did, we’d have to bundle up every bit of work we’d done—art, code, design, sound—and hand it over, never to be seen again. BlackStone could then theoretically turn the project over to someone else to do whatever they wanted with it, or they could sit on it, or they could just use the discs we’d backed everything up onto for coasters. Every trick that we’d come up with over the course of the project would be theirs, never mind that we’d done a lot of the heavy lifting before they sent dime one in our direction.

  Eric waved off my concern. “No, they’re not asking for that, at least. They just want us to stop working on it.” He gave a wan grin. “I don’t think they particularly want the IP, to be honest, which tells you how little they think of it.”

  I tasted cold vomit in the back of my throat and swallowed hard, trying to clear things enough that I could actually speak. “And those guys want everything. Wow. They must have really hated it if they’re willing to let it go.”

  “They don’t think it will come back to hurt them,” he said. His fingers drummed the desk. “The really angry-making part of this is that they’re probably right.”

  I stared at him, suspicion beetling in my mind. “There’s something else going on, isn’t there?” I leaned back in the chair and tilted my head back toward the ceiling. “OK, I’m not seeing it.”

  Sound, rather than sight told me that Eric had gotten up. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Looking for the other shoe,” I replied. “Any second now, it’s going to drop.”

  He laughed despite himself, and came around to the front of the desk. “I hate to say it, but you’re right. There’s a one-two punch here, and there’s no way to duck.”

  “Part one is killing our project. Part two is….”

  “They’ve offered us something else.”

  My head snapped down so fast I could actually hear my neck crack and feel my molars bounce off one another. “Something else?” My eyes narrowed. “Like what?”

  He held up that damnable piece of paper. “That’s the bitch of it.” Someone knocked on his door, and without turning he called out “In a meeting. Come back in five minutes.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Five minutes? You’re an optimist.”

  He fixed me with a decidedly humorless stare. “I don’t think either of us will want to continue this conversation past that point. Look, here’s the deal.” He started pacing, ticking the points off on his fingers as he did so. “They want us to do an old-gen port of their new FPS project. Maybe PC, too, if we look like we can handle it. They’re offering acceptable money and a longer contract if we just roll everything off of Blue Lightning and onto this new thing, which they’ve code-named Salvador.”

  “That’s nice and humble,” I said, but he waved me to silence.

  “If we say yes, everyone keeps their job. We might even need to do some hiring. We get steady work for at least another ten months and at least one SKU on a project that they’re going to be devoting a lot of time and money to, not to mention a major marketing push. We’re talking TV, print ads, serious viral stuff online—something they weren’t going to give Blue Lightning.”

  “Because they didn’t own the IP,” I said softly. Eric’s voice had the strangled sound of a man trying to convince himself it would be better for everyone if he murdered his wife. Including, I might add, the wife in question. “And in exchange….”

  He sighed. “You know what the exchange is.” He stopped and turned to face me. “We kill Blue Lightning, at least for the duration of this project, and with the way the tech is going, that effectively means forever. That’s why you’re in here and we’re having this talk.”

  “Is it?” I couldn’t meet his eyes. There was a very interesting patch of carpet near his left foot, however, and I studied it intently. “You’re the boss, Eric. If you say we’re doing Salvador on an Etch-a-
Sketch, I’ll go make it happen. You know that.”

  “Yeah. But that’s not the point. You know exactly what’s going to happen when I announce this.”

  “If,” I corrected him. We both sat there in silence for a second. “OK, when. You’re right. Your job is to make sure everyone else has a job, and that means you have to take the deal.”

  He nodded. “But it’s going to be ugly. We’re going to have people at least think about quitting. We’re going to have a lot of yelling and screaming and anger, and we’re going to have a lot of resentment toward whatever project comes next. And depending on what you do, it could be bad, or it could be bloody awful.”

  I blinked. “Me?”

  “You. You’re the creative director on the project, the leader of the team. A lot of people around here, for whatever reason, regard Blue Lightning as your baby. If you put up a fuss, they’re going to rally behind that and make the next year or so miserable. Even if you just drag your feet on the new project, a lot of people are going to be following your example.”

  My throat, I decided, had done enough involuntary tightening for one day. It needed to relax and let me breathe. That was all I really wanted from it.

  “On the other hand,” Eric continued, “if you dive into the new project with something approaching enthusiasm, anyone who dogs it is going to look like a bit of a tool, which is going to make getting up to speed on Salvador a whole lot easier.”

  Suddenly, my chair felt too confining. I stood, fighting the urge to put something solid behind my back as a psychosomatic itch popped up between my shoulder blades. “So let me get this straight. You’re asking me to smile and play nice when you tell everyone out there that the project we’ve been sweating blood over for the last two years is in the crapper? What happens if I don’t? Do I get fired? Or do you just make my life miserable enough that I quit and you can bring someone else in? Wait, is there a bonus if I play along? Because I think I see where this is going, and I don’t like it.”