Internal Planning
Ms. Woeburne jostled into the empty conference room with a phone trapped between her shoulder and her ear.
"Calm down and listen to me, Roderick." She pulled shut and locked the door. "Can you do that? I don't understand the problem; we went over this line-by-line three nights ago. I left very specific instructions with Shauna. If you need someone to hold your hand, find hers."
Los Angeles plunged through the glass walls. Downtown was a honeycomb of disorganized light—none of which could reach these tall floors. Venture Tower was quiet, sleek, and cool. The air tasted of ventilation and the furniture smelled new. Up here, S.W. was safe, and she was alone.
She stood in darkness on nubby gray carpet. Not a pencil shaving or espresso spill had ever hit it. Her calves and the backs of her hands looked startling in the aggressive cleanliness of this place, and against the unclean glow of city, sanitized by its windows. The vacuumed office chairs were tucked neatly around polished black wood. There was a nice enough moon outside. She left the light switch switched-off.
Ms. Woeburne sat in one of them, dropping her armful of folders in a smack upon the varnished table. Because no one was here to look disapprovingly, the Foreman wheeled backwards, threw a pen onto the stack, and allowed herself to slump.
"I'm sorry to have to rush off and leave you holding the bag—really I am. But that's why they call them orders and not suggestions." She leant back in her chair, legs flung forward, one palm pressed open on the enamel. A heel slipped out. She pushed the shoe forward with her toes, arches cramping, glad to have stopped for the brief time it took someone to finish printing her paperwork. A sullen ghoul nearly collided with S.W. five steps outside Sebastian's penthouse, nodded wordlessly, and handed over a foot-thick primer, swearing the rest would be xeroxed in ten. Essential data, it claimed. She scoffed.
"You're going to have deal with it. This isn't forever. I'm coming back; I just can't tell you exactly when, all right?"
Ms. Woeburne had no real personal attachment to Roderick Dunn. She could not tell you his middle name or eye color; had never asked if he'd any siblings; didn't know what the bony, fast-talking, red-haired Associate thought of his fifth year at Hendon. Ms. Woeburne was sure that, as the young man's direct superior, she did not relish the thought of her holdings in someone else's hands. But it couldn't be dealt with remotely. There was too much else to do.
She had no conscious recollection of how blunt front teeth were making mincemeat of her bottom lip. The taste of flesh was only an afterthought when, later that night, our soldier would glance into a lonely mirror of a lonely apartment bathroom. The reflection that looked back was merciless, staid, milkiness with a suggestion of something hollow, like a baby tooth or a horn. Her eyes glinted in dark circles. Predatory disinterest. She must have been somewhere in there. Somewhere, surely.
"Roderick, why are we discussing expenditures? I don't even want you to think about finances. Ms. Maldano has the critical figures and she'll handle them. All you have to do is make sure the house is in order and nothing explodes. That's it. You are an answerphone with a face."
When Ms. Woeburne first entered Mr. LaCroix's employ, now many years ago, she had felt like a balloon leaking helium. There was a hissing down her limbs, a coldness in her jaw, a perpetual rush. There was odd pressure that never receded, one dozen china balls in the air, the head-pounding impression that a single punch to your glass house would kill you. It was enough to make a person insane. Her wrists began shaking the fifth day; she didn't regain control of them for weeks.
Forty-some years, and there are still those moments she feels them itch, restless, threatening to tremble. She'd flatten ten fingers down on a nice, solid surface, or fold both hands tightly behind her back.
"What do you want me to do about it? Because you must realize I can't do anything. I can't manage you from here." There was no use in feeling badly about it. Liminal space is the Ventrue idea of a harrowing. If you cannot keep up, step aside; too many steps, and you will fall off the earth. It's the cakewalk you have to whittle yourself down for. "Everyone survives this eventually, do you know that. I did. Shauna did. You should. You don't need teacher scratching check-plus on your reports. What do you want me to tell you, exactly—natural selection? Because that's what it is. Accept that. And if you muck something up, that's what I'll tell Mr. LaCroix. I'm not taking any pleasure in this, but understand where you are. Are we clear, here?"
What Ms. Woeburne felt was not quite guilt. A coffeebean lock tickled her lobe. Her eye pencil was beginning to bleed.
"Now don't pin all this on me. It wasn't my notion to up and scrape you all into the frying pit. And look, I'm sure you'll do fine. Passably, at least, and passable is really all I need from you. You aren't expected to reinvent the wheel. Just stick to the directions I left for you. Don't beg, for God's sake, Roderick," she warned—but, of course, he did.
S.W. tried to be reasonable. She tried to be someone to want advice from. "You're getting this all wrong, you know. I'm not testing you. No, I know what it looks like. But I don't have the leverage to be your crutch. I don't even know what I'm doing here," Ms. Woeburne snapped. Selfish, juvenile emotion—scold your subordinate because your clockwork mind is not one-hundred-percent sure how else to conduct itself. "You have a detailed set of instructions. Follow them."
A hank of her short hair—shame—snagged a blazer button, and she spent a frustrated minute unsnarling.
"Fine. Fine. Just. Read me the message." A finger drilled into her eyebrow; she resigned. She didn't have the energy to fight about it anymore. "But this is the one and only time, all right?"
The Foreman listened blandly as Roderick shuffled notes, uncapped a pen, and read-back a letter some London Harpy's assistant left two hours after Ms. Woeburne clapped down the front stair. She didn't gasp or console him. She didn't offer any happy mm-hms. Deciding I may as well get a jumpstart on all these documents, she pulled off her glasses, flung them upside-down across a SWOT assessment, then read something else. More dossiers incoming. Her rental keys and apartment number would be ready tonight. In this life, with these people, you learn to plan in the interim. Liminal spaces. S.W. could not remember a time where she just sat.
Opportunities, alliances, advantages, benchmarks, capital. Because she is a Ventrue and her prioritizing has a deadly edge, Ms. Woeburne set context aside and immediately flipped for the tab labeled THREATS.
"Of course I'm listening," S.W. grumbled, nose crinkling, a definitive sign of her telling a lie. Her hands were full of printed pages, damage assessments, and proceeding transcripts. Square nails flick-flick-flicked.
"Wait—hold on. Security fees? What did she say…?" There it was: precisely where she knew it'd be, precisely what she'd been trying to avoid. Anxiety. The old swarm. A thousand unnecessary things beginning to look necessary: things that said intervene, take charge, get kicking, organize this mess. These are hallmarks of Ventrue ambition. Hers had a humble ceiling, but it lived there, buzzing and contracting within the confines. Her spine racked straight in the mildly comfortable chair. There was nothing friendly about the way she laughed. "Hah! Hah-hah! Is it! Oh, that's precious. That's not about to happen. And what did you say?"
You had to wonder about it sometimes, didn't you. What did the empire ever say to make so many empired people join? What can you say to make a conquered soldier pack up his old self, put down the old country, and dress up like you?
They said The Raj will protect you. They said You Have Nothing To Be Afraid Of Now.
A folder thumped back to the table, spilling pages. Kuei-jin insignia and Hollywood expenditures sliding apart across black enamel. Had she not sixteen other things on her mind, Ms. Woeburne might have noticed how the Red List split where she stopped at Chinatown; she might've come to think it odd how, not knowing why Sebastian brought her to LA, THREATS fell open to a sheet that said ANARCHS, and a satellite photograph of three. The names read: ISAAC ABRAMS, ELIZABETH BECKMAN (ALIAS: DAMSEL), NINES RODRIGUEZ.
"They're playing chicken with you, Roderick. The best thing to do is stand your ground. You're not in the jungle, so don't show them any fear. Or it'll get worse. It will, you know; that's fact; that's a one-hundred-percent; that's an absolute, sure thing." Her feet slid back into neat black shoes. "Listen: new instructions. You're going to wait for her to contact you again. You're going to explain to her in your most pleasant voice that Mr. LaCroix will attend to this matter the moment his schedule permits. And then you are going to hang up the phone and ignore her. Do you understand me? Do you see what I mean?"
She was just about to pick the next page out of her stack when a rap hit the door.
"Ms. Woeburne," Joelle called through. Red lapels hollered through three inches of viewing glass. Her tease was insultingly chipper, and swooped every vowel. S.W. suspected the strawberry poof probably wasn't French. "Everything is ready for you now! Come downstairs to the lobby and pick up your things when you like."
And just like that, in the space of a simper and knock, every stitch of her impatience was back.
"Do what you see fit," she told Roderick, then hung up the phone.
With a great deal to do and little reason to stay, Ms. Woeburne stood, rolled her neck, gathered the few sparse belongings she carried and left. There was stillness again behind her. The papers marked THREATS cut back together and disappeared with a mean, disciplinarian snap.
She was sharp as a tack, as they say.
And it's true that Ms. Woeburne was a bombardier-type. The whole truth, though, is a little less sure than a tidy john hancock and telephone call. Because—if you are going to do business in the West—you'll have to know this: Ventrue are nasty little caltrops. They act fast and they think faster, which means that no matter how reliable your good soldier is, it's not safe, you know. To scatter tacks. To unbox them and let them just lie around.
So if you've got a tack in your hand, just lying there, you had better use it. You'd better have an eye to stick it in.
