Bereft

- 2 -

Five Hours Earlier

Not for the first time that evening, I wondered if I had, in some inexplicable twist of fate or bad grace, stumbled through the Gates of Hell.

Hell was a gilded ballroom in a downtown hotel chain on a Sunday night. Hell was a too tight pair of heels biting my toes and a black dress unearthed from the back of a dusty closet, where it'd hung in exile for more years than I could remember, where it should have remained for more years to come. Hell was an overdone corporate launch party I direly wished to escape.

Leaning into the marble wall at my back, I counted my breaths and let the cold of the stone press into my shoulders and bare arms. The clattering of pots and pans continued, the scent of smoke in the air drifting through the service corridor. Opening my eyes, I watched a caterer sneak inside the hall again with ash still smudged on his heel—and now smudged on the carpet. Sunset crept around the edges of the outer door, the back alley filled with greasy light caught and tainted by Verweald's pollution, and the city seemed to sigh like a lazy lizard in August's petulant heat.

"—spard!"

Go away. My hands curled into fists as I grimaced at the ceiling. Please, just go away.

"Gaspard!"

Martha stormed from the kitchens clipboard first, the flimsy barrier of particle board acting like the prow of a particularly tenacious ship breaking through rising waves. I slumped as she spun about in her flat shoes with her glasses flashing and clipboard raised, her sharp gaze taking in the dim passage before she found me.

"There you are," she snapped. "You were meant to get the list from the caterers and return!"

"They didn't have a list."

"They do now." With that, Martha struck the clipboard as if it held all the answers—and I wagered it did, at least in Martha's opinion. Flat-eyed Martha, who could control the world with tidy lines of black ink and a few scathing comments. "Honestly, was that so hard?"

I swallowed my first cutting retort, then the second, both lodging like bits of glass in my chest. Mouthing off to a supervisor never got anyone anywhere. "I needed a moment to clear my head."

"As if it wasn't clear enough as is." The remark came without venom, without intent, her attention lowered to the papers she rifled through. "Do you have a copy of the itinerary?"

"Martha, does it look like I have anything, itinerary or otherwise?" Frustrated, I held out both hands—small and empty and pale, cheap polish chipping along the nails. "No one's told or given me anything. I wasn't even meant to be here tonight."

"Yeah, I don't know why they called you in." Martha sneered as she snatched up one of the pages and shoved it into my grip. "They could have called anyone else."

Anger curled in my middle, hot and furious—then cooled, fizzling when the effort needed to shout at wretched Martha succumbed to overwhelming listlessness. We stared at one another in the empty corridor, the muddled noise of pans clattering and machines working thick behind the flimsy divide of silent disdain. Hatred came easily to us: Martha Howard, stalwart go-getter chasing the highest climes of the corporate ladder, and Sara Gaspard, a bitter and unmotivated literature major lacking the ambition to get out of bed most mornings. That our paths ever needed to cross seemed another petty torture of Hell designed to test both of us.

Martha jerked into motion. Her arm brushed mine in passing and my eyes flicked away, jaw tight, before I turned to follow her and kept pace. With one quick stroll, we emerged from Verweald Plaza Hotel's service area into the exasperating polish of the main lobby, the hum of voices coming together in dull tones, the great doors to the ballroom propped open, an easel by the entrance bearing the crooked words "IMOR Advances: Magna-Chip Launch."