Monsters - Matt Rogers (icecream ebook reader TXT) 📗

no fuss. Mary thanked her father’s precise, clinical nature for that. An engineer to the bones. She still wasn’t sure if he’d ever even experienced an emotion.

Her mother, on the other hand…

Mary said, ‘What is it? Something’s off. You don’t sound like you’re all there.’

A pause. Mary crossed the street, avoiding a trim cyclist on a carbon fibre bike. Catherine took a deep breath. ‘I got a call from your aunt.’

Mary winced, thankful that the expression didn’t make a sound. ‘How’s she doing?’

She wasn’t expecting to hear good things.

Catherine said, ‘That’s what rattled me. She sounds so different. Like she’s a whole new person. Y’know, one of these days I was expecting her to not answer the phone. I thought I’d see something in the news…’

‘She told you she’s different?’

‘No. Normal conversation. But she was upbeat. Happy. She asked questions. When’s the last time your aunt asked you a question?’

Mary said, ‘I haven’t spoken to your sister in months.’

She realised they were still doing it. Not using her name. She and her mother had started referring to her as “aunt” or “sister” around the same time, some kind of unconscious way to detach, bracing for the day she wouldn’t pick up.

Catherine said, ‘Anyway, you should give her a call. I’m not imagining it.’

‘I will. Gotta go, mom. Just got to work.’

Another pause. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

Mary smiled in the shadow of the grand lobby. ‘Love you, Ma.’

She hung up. She hadn’t needed to go right away, but she needed to make another call before the elevators. Heels clicking on the marble floor, she swiped back to her contacts and touched a name: Jack.

It rang and rang. He didn’t answer.

He always answered.

She sighed, then nodded to the building’s reception staff, all of whom she knew. She needed to speak to him. It wasn’t exactly urgent, but he’d been her mentor, her rock, for all her time in the turbulent boat of Silicon Valley. And there were work concerns. More serious than she perhaps wanted to admit.

A knot twisted her gut. If you were on the board of Vitality+, you answered your damn phone when a senior employee rang. That wasn’t even taking into account the paternal factor, the unspoken truth of de facto fatherhood. He guided her where Walter Böhm could not. Always had.

She pulled up “Find My Friends,” in front of the bank of gleaming elevators. It seemed wrong. It had only ever been used the other way round, ever since Mary had told Jack she didn’t always feel safe walking home and he promised to monitor her whereabouts when the need arose. Even San Francisco had its dangerous pockets. No major city was immune.

The app displayed his location: an apartment building in the Tenderloin. That was odd in itself, and made her hand freeze before it touched the elevator panel. Then the screen refreshed, uploading new data to replace the old that sometimes lagged when the app was first opened.

Jack was in the building.

Mary furrowed a brow, used a two-finger pincer to zoom. Her stomach fell.

He was in the boss’s office.

Mary could only describe Heidi Waters as mercurial at the best of times, and the CEO of Vitality+ had never gelled with Jack’s soft-spoken, probing questions. He wanted the best for the company, and technically so did she, but their methods to achieve that couldn’t have been further apart. A one-on-one couldn’t be going well, not this early in the morning.

She took the elevator up to 18 and burst out at a fast walk. She still nodded respectfully to her coworkers but she beelined for Heidi’s office at the end of the floor. Sun streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the terrace that overlooked Palo Alto, but basking in the warm glow didn’t ease her concerns.

The office door was ajar.

Mary paused outside a moment, tried to listen through the crack. She heard nothing.

She knocked, but hadn’t realised she was stressed, and she put more force into it than she imagined. The impact of knuckles against wood swung the door open inadvertently.

Heidi Waters sat behind her broad desk, hunched over a sleek MacBook.

There was no one else in the office.

As the door swung open Heidi’s gaze snapped up, eyes wide. A flicker of recognition as she saw Mary. ‘What?’

‘Oh,’ Mary said, cheeks flushing hot. ‘Uh…’

She took a surreptitious glance at her phone, swiping down on the screen to refresh the app. No change. Jack’s beacon, pinging incessantly in the room.

‘Sorry,’ Mary continued. ‘Must’ve been a mistake.’

Heidi hadn’t ascended to CEO at twenty-nine years of age by skirting around tough questions. ‘What the hell are you talking about? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

Mary didn’t think about what she was saying. Too caught up in the moment. She looked at Heidi. ‘Do you have Jack’s phone?’

Something flared behind Heidi’s eyes, then was instantly snuffed out, stifled. But she’d shown it, a flash of understanding, and she knew her face had betrayed her.

She lifted a finger from the laptop’s trackpad and beckoned.

‘Close the door,’ Heidi said. ‘And sit down.’

3

Mary hesitated, but was she really going to say no?

She stepped inside, closed the door, and sat down across the desk. ‘Um…’

Her heart throbbed. Her chest ached.

The carpet was so thick it absorbed any trace of an echo, like they were talking in a phone booth. Heidi showed no hint of her public persona. Usually that wouldn’t bother Mary. She knew all about hamming it up for the cameras, falling back on soundbites for the interviews, plastering a broad smile on your face at all times. But beneath that there was usually something human. When she was angry, Heidi Waters was a soulless husk. She could wipe out emotion at the drop of a hat, which led Mary to believe it never existed in the first place.

Smoke and mirrors.

Heidi didn’t speak. Just stared her cold, vacant stare. Mary could see computation occurring behind the eyes. Possibilities assessed and discarded, considered then thrown away. Her face was a stone wall, but