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  The fact that he was right to do it didn't help me feel better, not one little bit.

  “We,” he said, and I winced in anticipation, “are going to be doing the current gen console and PC ports of the project they call Salvador. That means that we’re going to be on a tight schedule. It means we’re going to be busy. It may even mean that we need to do a little staffing up, but,” and he paused for effect, “if we do a good job on this, there could be more work coming down the pike. A lot more.”

  Pandemonium resolutely failed to erupt, just a low rumble that was half grumble, half excited whisper. Leon made a noise like steam escaping from a busted pipe. “Man, that sucks. Blue Lightning would have kicked ass.”

  “I know.” Something in my tone made him look at me speculatively. Up front, Eric was answering questions, each one no doubt of vital importance to the future of the studio, but I wasn’t listening.

  “Shit. This has got to blow big time for you. I’m sorry.”

  I hitched my shoulders. It might have been a shrug. “At least he let me know first.”

  Leon shook his head. “Yeah, like giving you the blindfold and cigarette after he shows you the bullet with your name on it. That’s cold, man. That ain’t right.”

  “It’s the publisher, not Eric. He’s just doing his job,” I said, but it sounded hollow, even to me. Leon said something that might have been “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” and slid off into the crowd. I watched him go for a moment, then turned my eyes back to the front of the room.

  As I did, the lights flickered briefly, never quite going out, but dropping to a definite dim for a good half-second or so. People looked at the fixtures, worried for that split second until the roar of the air conditioning unit reawakening confirmed that we did in fact have power.

  “No big deal, just another brownout,” someone ahead of me explained, and woman standing next to him—a new hire, I thought, a younger woman who’d just graduated from one of the video game degree programs popping up like mold in a bachelor’s fridge—nodded, relieved to know that we weren’t getting a flyover from a UFO and instead were just teetering on the edge of a blackout because too many people in the local grid had cranked their HVACs too high. Behind her, I could just make out Leon talking excitedly to someone, but from where I stood, it was impossible to see who.

  Eric took that opportunity to wrap things up. “That’s all I’ve got,” he said. “I know it’s a lot to digest, so I’m going to unofficially shut down production for the day. If you want to stick around, play games, talk—whatever—I’ll be here in my office until six. Otherwise, if you want to get out of here, go ahead. We’ll get a fresh start on Salvador tomorrow.”

  He turned and walked slowly toward his office, trailing would-be questioners like a celebrity trolling a string of reporters. By the time I looked away, the rest of the group had already started to break up, drifting into clumps mostly broken down by department. In ones and twos, people were straying back to their desks, far more than were headed for the door. I stood and watched, shaking my head.

  “Pathetic, huh?” said a familiar voice at my elbow. “Give them the day off and they still head right back to their desks.”

  “Maybe they’re just packing up, Michelle,” I said stonily. “Or they have other things to do.”

  “Uh-huh.” She sounded unconvinced. A hand, which I was reasonably sure was hers, latched onto my elbow. “Leon and I are going out to Montague’s so we can get properly drunk and pissed off about this whole thing. Are you coming?”

  I turned to face her, brushing her hand off my arm in the process. She stood there, her arm half-poised in midair to try to tug at me again, face caught in an expression that I’d long since grown familiar with, then gotten weary of. It was the look of “What am I going to do to Ryan for his own good,” as portrayed by widened eyes, a mouth turned down into a concerned frown, and an ever-so-slight head tilt to the right.

  “You go,” I said, feeling myself falling into the steps of a familiar dance. “I want to see if Eric's got any docs on the new project I can look at. You know, get a head start on tomorrow.”

  “God, you're bad at this corporate rah-rah shit,” she said, gently re-attaching her hand to my arm and then closing it in a grip that told me she’d been studying with fiddler crabs. Not-so-gentle pressure drew me down the hall and toward the door. Leon was already there, holding it open and blessedly doing so without comment. “We can do this one of two ways. Either you can say something stupidly noble, which will piss me off enough to argue with you in the middle of what is really looking like a shitty day for everyone, or you can just let me drag you off peacefully.”

  “Those are my only choices?” I asked, barely bothering to try to slow the pace. Honestly, there wasn’t much point to it.

  Michelle shook her head, hair going everywhere. “Not much of a choice, to be honest. Either way, you end up at Montague’s, completely shitfaced, before lunch. The only question is how long is it going to take to get you out the door.”

  I looked at her, bemused. “Yeah, whatever. I’ll be fine.”

  In response, she spun me, shoving far harder than someone her size should have been able to and slamming me up against the wall. My head hit maybe an inch from a framed poster celebrating one of our early games, a misbegotten platformer starring an anthropomorphized vulture named Varney. It had tanked.I had about six-tenths of a second to consider that before Michelle was up in my face, furious with me. “You listen to me, Ryan Colter. You will not be fine. You are not fine right now. You are having a really crappy day, and the best thing I can do for you, as a friend, is take you someplace where you can shut your brain off for a couple of hours and tell everyone how you really feel about what just happened, because today you get a mulligan. Today, you can be a dick and no one will call you on it. So even though you’d rather pretend to be noble where everyone can see you, you might as well take advantage of this one time offer and the fact that you actually have people in this office who care about you.” Her volume had been rising as she went along, until by the end it was a full-fledged shout. She stood there, red-faced, and glared at me. Somehow during this exchange, her hand had moved from my arm to the front of my shirt. It looked for all the world as if I were being mugged.

  “You’re not supposed to care about me anymore, Shelly,” I said. “It’s very sweet, but—”

  She slapped me. The crack of skin on skin echoed like a pistol shot, deafening in the enclosed hallway. “You stupid son of a bitch,” she said, and took a step back. “I don’t. Leon does.”

  And she turned and walked away, out the open door, while I stood there and felt all the eyes on me. Leon shot me a glance that said everything that needed to be said, then let the door swing shut and walked down to the parking lot, a few steps behind Michelle.

  “Ow,” I said to nobody in particular and rubbed my cheek. It stung where she’d popped me, and I was quite certain that the left side of my face was now fire-engine red. “Brilliant,” I muttered and headed for my office. There was no sense in heading home, not until my face got its usual pasty sheen back. With my luck, Sarah would decide to come home for lunch, and explaining to her that I’d been slapped at the office by an ex-girlfriend was simply not something I really felt up to doing.

  Instead, I figured, I’d get a head start on tomorrow’s work. I’d archive all of the Blue Lightning documents and prepare the closing kit, the virtual steamer trunk full of everything related to the project that would get tucked away into a virtual attic in case anyone ever wanted to see it again. The decks would be cleared for Salvador, assuming I stuck around long enough to work on it.

  I’d been at it for all of ten minutes when there was a knock on the door. I looked up to see who it was and spotted Terry, half-leaning around the corner. “Can I come in?”

  I nodded. “Sure. Have a seat. I wasn’t doing anything important, just cleaning up some old files.”

  He blinked, then ambled in. Terry fit the first hal
f of the old saying about game developers, “rail or whale,” and he looked like turning up the HVAC would blow him clear out of the building. He was tall and skinny, with a shockingly round face and black hair that was maybe ten bucks’ worth of trimming away from being done with a Flobee. As he folded himself into the spare chair, I finished packing files into the archive I was building and waited for him to speak.

  “So, uh, what do you think?” Terry’s eyes were focused somewhere about a foot above my head and to the right, which was as close as he was likely to get to looking me in the eye.

  “About this?” I shrugged. “It’s business, Terry. Eric did a great job taking care of everyone.”

  He leaned forward, his arms resting on the edge of my desk. “But he didn’t take care of everyone.”

  “Hmm?” I shut down my web browser and chat programs and glanced in Terry’s general direction. “We’ve all got jobs, don’t we? That’s what’s important.”

  “You don’t sound like you believe that.”

  I shook my head. “What’s not to believe? Who didn’t get taken care of?”

  He blinked, then said solemnly “Blue Lightning.”

  “Blue Lightning?” I laughed. “I’d say Blue Lightning got taken care of once and for all.”

  He snorted, his face turning red. “Blue Lightning’s a great project. They should have let us finish it.”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Terry,” I said softly, then got a hold of myself. “I think so, too. But it’s out of our hands. If we want to have jobs tomorrow,” —And do you?, my subconscious kept asking—“then we have to wave goodbye. I don’t like the decision, but I can’t argue with the logic. Besides,” and the words tasted like the inside of an ashtray as I said them, “I hear some cool things about Salvador.”

  Terry looked crestfallen, and his face went from red to white. “I thought you’d be the one person to really stand behind the project, Ryan. It was your vision. You’ve been on it longer than anyone else. Why aren’t you trying to save it?”

  The shutdown sequence on my system started, I spun in my chair. “Because there’s no way to save it. I can’t fly to BSoft headquarters and convince them to fund the game when they’ve made up their mind already. I’m not going to drag my heels and screw up the next project, and get people fired. What exactly do you want me to do, Terry, because I don’t know what it is that I can do? Hell, I don’t even know what I want to do, not that it actually matters worth a damn.”

  Terry’s eyes opened wider, and he rocked back into his chair. “Jeez, man, I’m sorry. I know you’re upset about this—”

  “I’m not upset!” He stared at me. I coughed into my hand. “OK, maybe I’m a little pissed off. Not at you, Terry. But Blue Lightning is going away whether we want it to or not, so I can’t—we can’t let ourselves go crazy over it.” I tried to smile. “You did some really great work with the AI. Did I ever tell you that?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. A couple of times. You said you liked the detection algorithm that would chain the state changes through the guards.” He looked pleased at the memory. “And I really hate to throw away that work.”

  “It’s not getting thrown away,” I told him as I stood up. Ideally, Terry would get the hint. “We’re keeping all the Blue Lightning assets.”

  “We are?” Terry’s face lit up with hope. “Are they staying on the network?”

  I thought about it for a minute and took a couple of steps toward the door. Coincidentally, this took me a couple of steps closer to the still-seated Terry. “I don’t know. Eric didn’t tell me how we’re going to handle things, though I think we might just back up the database and pull it off Perforce. But BlackStone isn’t taking the assets. So who knows? Maybe someday we’ll be able to resurrect the game and do it properly.”

  He nodded, a little too eagerly, and uncoiled from the chair in a cloud of knees and elbows. “That would be great,” he said. “If we could work on it again some day. Thanks for your time, Ryan. I really appreciate it.” He grabbed my hand, shook it, stood, then shook my hand again and walked off with a particularly energetic, stiff-legged gait. Just watching him go made me nervous. It reminded me of water striders and Daddy Longlegs and things that live under the bed when you’re six years old.

  A ping from my system told me that it had finally finished shutting down. There was no reason to stay in the building, not any longer. I might have given Terry the party line, or at least some of it, but there was still a lot of thinking I had to do for myself.

  The lights in my office suddenly seemed much too bright. I turned them off and left.

  Chapter 6

  I'd made it almost halfway to my car when my iPhone started blowing up with text messages. A quick look told me they were all from Leon, and all variations on the theme of MAN WHERE R U?

  GOING HOME, I texted back, and made it maybe ten feet further toward my car before the response hit. “WRONG ANSWER. EVERYONE @ MONTAGUES. WAITING ON YOU.” Then, a second later, “RUNNING OUT THAT FRUITY BELGIAN CRAP YOU LIKE. HURRY.”

  In spite of myself, I laughed, then sent back a response. “NO THX—MICHELLE.” It zipped into the ether with a ping, and I crossed the rest of the distance to my car.

  It was silver (mostly) and looked new (mostly), at least until you peeked inside and saw the impressive amount of crap strewn around the back seat. Fast food wrappers, abandoned electronics packaging, unopened mail, dog-eared books, and more rattled around back there, accurately reflecting my state of mind most days.

  The phone rang as I was swinging myself inside. “You’re kidding, right? Nobody uses phones to actually talk anymore, Leon.”

  He snorted. In the background, I could hear yelling and the clatter of glasses, overlaid with a thin coat of jukebox George Thorogood. “You text too slow. Shelly said just call you and end the drama.”

  I shut the door and pulled my seat belt on. “You seriously think I’m going to swing by so Shelly can take another swing at me?”

  He laughed. “You asked for that one, Ryan. But if you apologize real nice, I think she might let you buy her a beer and tell her you’re sorry.”

  “I’m not supposed to be buying my ex-girlfriend beers, Leon,” I said, hitting the ignition button. “Or had you forgotten that?”

  I could almost hear him shrug. “Details. Just get over here, all right? I’ll see you when you get arrive.”

  “Sarah—” I started, but he cut me off.

  “She knows. I called her and told her you needed to get pissed, and she gave her blessing after I promised I’d get you a ride home.” He paused. “You got a smart woman, bro. Now come on over to the ‘gue, get stupid, and get it all out of your system before you go do anything stupid. No argument.”

  He cut the connection before I could protest, and I flipped the phone onto the passenger seat. I thought about it and decided that if Sarah was good with it, I’d better be good with it, too. Besides, Leon was right—better to talk things through with people and maybe come to an informed, reasonable decision before talking to Sarah about the future.

  None of the other folks walking across the parking lot waved as I pulled out, but that was all right. I didn’t wave to any of them, either.

  * * *

  Montague’s was not technically what one would call an Irish pub, not in this day and age. For one thing, it was most emphatically not decorated in chintzy pseudo-Celtic knickknacks, black and white pictures of James Joyce, or huge reproductions of classic Guinness posters. The old-school jukebox—which meant that it wasn’t digital— featured precisely one Chieftains CD, and every time someone tried to play a track off it, the bartender cut the feed to the speakers in under thirty seconds. They did in fact serve Guinness, as well as Harp and Magners and a number of more obscure brews that originated in Ireland, but this was a matter of customer preference and not part of any horseshit prefabricated theme.

  By the time I got there, the drunk was already well underway. Shelly and Leon may have led the charge, but several ot
her folks had gotten the same idea, and the center of the bar was a knot of grumbling game devs pondering their next move. There were already enough in place for the central table amoeba to have formed, with numerous smaller ones pushed together to make one contiguous, oddly-shaped seating arrangement.

  I stood there, framed in the doorway for a moment while my eyes adjusted to the light, or lack thereof. The board at the end of the bar announced the day’s specials. There were $2.50 drafts for beers I’d never heard of, a burger with stuff on it I’d never eat, and a mixed drink called a “staggering squirrel” that sounded like a third-string Batman villain. The televisions over the bar were on but muted, two showing soccer games and one showing a combination of stock tickers and talking heads.

  When my vision cleared, I could see Leon at the far end of the mass of tables, an empty chair next to him. A purse hung over the back, and a half-empty beer sat on the table. For a moment, I thought it must be Michelle’s, only to my knowledge she’d never left a beer half-finished in her life.

  “Dude!” Leon had spotted me, half-rising out of his seat and waving me over. “I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  Heads swiveled and a couple of beers were raised in my direction as I made my way over to the table. “Hey, folks,” I said, and pulled up a chair on the other side of him from where Michelle’s stuff lurked. “What we have here is a failure to lubricate.”

  “That should be taken care of immediately,” he said and raised an arm for a waitress. “This man needs a beer, bad.” I cringed, but the server, perhaps recognizing that this had been One Of Those Days, just nodded and vanished into the darkness behind the bar.