Head weirdo in charge

  He looked like a big kid. Sitting there shoveling e chi and drinking so much Dr. Pepper that the waitress had given up on refills and brought him a whole pstic pitcher of it, the kind they normally used for tea or ice water. Philip could see the fizz from where he arked, sed row from the front. Michael had a window seat and had looked out and made brief eye tact with Philip when he pulled up, but beyond that had dohing else in the past ten minutes besides eat an ungodly amount of that shiny chi and check his phohe whole god dam city was lit up over the shooting, cop cars squealing down all the highways and bck-tied feds flying in from everywhere while the media sent its sneakered foot soldiers crawling all over everything even somewhat lio the gun py, ahis fat fuck was having an early lunch. He was always like that. Aloof as be until something made him mad. Philip hadn’t seen anything make him really mad in years, aried to vince himself that he wasn’t afraid of seeing it again.

  Michael got up and id a wad of cash oable 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 css that tells too many fart jokes, smiling and holding the door open for some mom and her boung 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 dy chi made Philip reach for a cigar.

  “What’s the 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 . 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 oing up in the dreamworlds had been near impossible, but with Kra’s ability to link them all together, he would have thought it would be the default method of unication.

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

  Philip wao 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 particur you wao push on, other thaarget?” Philip asked.

  “No, better not. Keep your es tight fht now, besides the necessary logistics.”

  Philip uood. 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 iraffic.

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

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

  They moved into traffid 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 reition. Pure spirit. An old-school professional from aime. Here with a bunateurs, save one, getting pyed by ts he would have ughed out of the office years ago. Maybe his pride really was mispced.

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

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

  “Either we gh this thing, a be known we be worked into doira for free, or we drop out a uood that we don’t take jobs sold underhandedly.”

  “Or that we’re afraid of plications.”

  “This isn’t plications! This is fug fraud!”

  Michael chewed his dy and the bright faux citrus dueled with the tobac 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 whe angry.

  Michael felt the city. It spoke to him in memories, pulled on him with its sery, bounced his past self across its surface like a magi rolling a on his knuckles. He let it. Others of his breed had learo bee deaf to the self, to sile pletely. 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 ck on his part. It was just the way he was made. So, he listeo the self, asked him what he felt and not just what he knew, and often learhings that raw knowledge might never have divulged.

  “Sometimes, you just know,” someone had said aeons ago. His positions in his heyday had beehan managerial, and he had always felt, looking up from the trehat the real struggle of a leader must have been dealing with all the people under you, their oddities and plexes. 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 fug headache.

  The first jobs ba the saddle had been simple enough. Less choio shopping for ts. If they were looking for work, Michael was w. Then as his horizons broadened, he remembered what he had hated about all of it. The politics. The w. Nothing was ever just a job for a price. The interlog meshes of alliances and rivalries that formed the Hardworlder “unity” had dohing but get more tangled since he left it. Everyone was thinking about their p the pile, and the ts had to be just as shrewd. Slip the best jobs at the best rates to the teams they didn’t want oher side of their endeavors. Another abstra. 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 Kra. 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 st 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 st-sed stumble onto greatness notwithstanding, it felt like a rigged deal from the jump. In hindsight the kill itself even added to the sensation. Something fotteurning. An old friend who hadn’t aged.

  Then there was the t’s insisten the debrief at the Allclub, some a older than most Hardworlders w now, a trust in the Principality of the Allworld and its ability to broker a ral secret meeting free of rec 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 iy years. Even at the end they had been out of style. The questions. The uone 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 bato the groove, but it was thrown off food. And wouldn’t you know it, the mome up this m, 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 w for the same t.

  If Michael left Hardworlding behind him, what brought him baext time, the team regroups and repns, while enemies across the city do the same. episode, Hunters.