Head weirdo in charge

He looked like a big kid. Sitting there shoveling orange chicken and drinking so much Dr. Pepper that the waitress had given up on refills and brought him a whole plastic pitcher of it, the kind they normally used for tea or ice water. Philip could see the fizz from where he was parked, second row from the front. Michael had a window seat and had looked out and made brief eye contact with Philip when he pulled up, but beyond that had done nothing else in the past ten minutes besides eat an ungodly amount of that shiny chicken and check his phone. The whole god dam city was lit up over the shooting, cop cars squealing down all the highways and black-tied feds flying in from everywhere while the media sent its sneakered foot soldiers crawling all over everything even somewhat linked to the gun play, and here this fat fuck was having an early lunch. He was always like that. Aloof as can be until something made him mad. Philip hadn’t seen anything make him really mad in years, and he tried to convince himself that he wasn’t afraid of seeing it again.

Michael got up and laid a wad of cash on the table and grabbed his big coat. His oxford hung down untucked and Philip saw the edge of his pistol press through it as he threw the coat around himself and walked out the door. He stood there, well over six feet tall and an easy three hundred pounds, with hands like oven mitts and a face like the kid in class that tells too many fart jokes, smiling and holding the door open for some mom and her bouncing kids. Made sense why he worked alone. Going unnoticed looking like that wasn’t even an option.

He got in the passenger seat and the smell of wok-fried candy chicken made Philip reach for a cigar.

“What’s the next move, Boss?”

“That’s what the meeting is for,” said Michael

Philip finished lighting his cigar and hid his sigh in the smoke. Heavy weighs the crown. Michael had made Philip his right hand but still had to be cautious. Couldn’t let the supervisor think he was better than the rank and file. Too bad for Michael, Philip would have thought that even if his job was just filling their sippy cups.

“Shouldn’t we meet in the dark?” Philip asked. Most teams Philip had been on, meeting up in the dreamworlds had been near impossible, but with Klara’s ability to link them all together, he would have thought it would be the default method of communication.

“No. Good to meet face to face when you can. Keeps back the doubt.”

Philip wanted to say that any team member who couldn’t hold their spirit on their own should be out on their ass, but he knew better than to try and hash that out again. Whatever his reasons, Michael had decided the kid was staying.

“Anyone in particular you want me to push on, other than the target?” Philip asked.

“No, better not. Keep your connections tight for right now, besides the necessary logistics.”

Philip understood. Pushing was a two-way street. Anyone he knew about could also know about him. No telling what kind of Operators or even Sages were on this job.

He stopped at the end of the lot and looked for a pause in the traffic.

“So the client didn’t mention any other teams?”

“If they had, I’d have charged them more,” said Michael, acid on the edges of his words.

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They moved into traffic and Philip let the city slide by around him without arousing any memory. If his own mother jumped in front of the car, he’d run her over without any recognition. Pure spirit. An old-school professional from another time. Here with a bunch of amateurs, save one, getting played by clients he would have laughed out of the office years ago. Maybe his pride really was misplaced.

“So, what’re your thoughts on dropping out then?”

“How’s that?” Michael opened a bag of neon disc candy.

“Either we go through this thing, and let it be known we can be worked into doing extra for free, or we drop out and get it understood that we don’t take jobs sold underhandedly.”

“Or that we’re afraid of complications.”

“This isn’t complications! This is fucking fraud!”

Michael chewed his candy and the bright faux citrus dueled with the tobacco in the air. At the stoplight, he took a soda out of nowhere and twisted it open.

“Let me worry about our reputation. I know how to maintain one.”

Philip had some replies for that, but he let them smolder out at the end of his cigar. He had decided he didn’t want to remember what Michael was like when he got angry.

Michael felt the city. It spoke to him in memories, pulled on him with its scenery, bounced his past self across its surface like a magician rolling a coin on his knuckles. He let it. Others of his breed had learned to become deaf to the self, to silence it completely. Not an easy thing to do, and for Michael it had proved impossible. Eventually, he had been forced to admit that it wasn’t due to any lack of trying on his part. It was just the way he was made. So, he listened to the self, asked him what he felt and not just what he knew, and often learned things that raw knowledge might never have divulged.

“Sometimes, you just know,” someone had said aeons ago. His positions in his heyday had been less than managerial, and he had always felt, looking up from the trenches, that the real struggle of a leader must have been dealing with all the people under you, their oddities and complexes. But from the top, he could see that was far less than half the struggle. The team he loved. Truly. It was everyone else that gave him a fucking headache.

The first jobs back in the saddle had been simple enough. Less choice. No shopping for clients. If they were looking for work, Michael was working. Then as his horizons broadened, he remembered what he had hated about all of it. The politics. The networking. Nothing was ever just a job for a price. The interlocking meshes of alliances and rivalries that formed the Hardworlder “community” had done nothing but get more tangled since he left it. Everyone was thinking about their place on the pile, and the clients had to be just as shrewd. Slip the best jobs at the best rates to the teams they didn’t want on the other side of their endeavors. Another abstraction. Professional headhunters, Hardworlder talent agencies, hustling for their cut between hired and hiree. Michael had tried to cut them out, with limited success. Thank God for Klara. That was her world, and she had kept him out of it since he brought her on. Finally he had found a groove, free to focus on the jobs themselves, which had gotten tougher but more streamlined. Until the last job.

Nothing about the office job had felt right. That old sixth sense had gone off the moment he dropped in. It felt like nostalgia. That’s how he knew. Gradie’s last-second stumble onto greatness notwithstanding, it felt like a rigged deal from the jump. In hindsight the kill itself even added to the sensation. Something forgotten returning. An old friend who hadn’t aged.

Then there was the client’s insistence on the debrief at the Allclub, some ancient custom older than most Hardworlders working now, a trust in the Principality of the Allworld and its ability to broker a neutral secret meeting free of recording eyes no matter how powerful the Speaker or the Maker, and an old superstition about meeting face to face, at both ends of a job. He hadn’t been to a meeting like that in twenty years. Even at the end they had been out of style. The questions. The undertone of distrust. As if despite everything that had happened over nearly three decades, Hardworlders were still just oddities with a novel use, little more than demons gone corporate.

He had tried to shake off the feeling, get away from it, slip back into the groove, but it was thrown off for good. And wouldn’t you know it, the moment he got up this morning, there it was again. That nostalgia. Like his life had picked up a story he had stepped out of years ago. Like unpausing a video.

He was unnerved, but he wasn’t surprised.

After all, they were working for the same client.