Yet, over the next fifteen years, Arthur apparently began to have some minor regrets about the fact that his business practices had caused untold human suffering across several continents. He joined a church, started charities that actually gave money away instead of just laundering it, and grew an elaborate mustache (that last one may seem unrelated, but he saw it as a crucial part of his personal rebranding). This attempt to go legit, unfortunately, steered Arthur into unfamiliar waters he was ill-equipped to navigate. His enemies closed in, now possessing the power to make bricks shatter like glass and steel melt like wax. Thus, the man whose high school class would have voted him Most Likely to Leave a Giant Smoking Crater When He Dies had such an award or his high school actually existed, did exactly that.
It was only after his murder that it was discovered he had left his entire empire to a daughter he’d only spoken to once in his entire life. Arthur had not discussed this decision with anyone and, predictably, chaos ensued. On several occasions Zoey nearly joined Arthur in that part of the afterlife reserved for people who die particularly weird and gruesome deaths. But she made it through, much to everyone’s surprise, and that’s how in the autumn of the following year Zoey wound up standing in her foyer trying desperately to explain herself to Shae LaVergne and probably doing a terrible job of it. Why had she stayed there, sleeping in the same home as her infamous father and doing a job with duties so alarmingly vague and varied that the news usually just referred to her as an “heiress”?
The real reason was one that she rarely articulated even to herself, because it was probably the same reason Arthur had left the business to her in the first place: sometimes, the story of your life gets so jumbled and messy that you just want to erase it completely. Like some kind of a, you know, clean slate.
Stench Machine found a better spot at the corner of the bed and Zoey rolled over, finally feeling herself drifting off. She thought that she’d dream of superpowered nerds smashing into her room and twisting her head off. Instead, she plunged immediately into the nightmare she’d had a hundred times since moving to the city. She was back in Fort Drayton, Colorado, late for her shift at Java Lodge. She was trying to start her old car and it was giving her that Battery Discharge error and she’d already been told if she was late one more time that she’d be fired and Cassie was managing and Zoey knew she wouldn’t cover for her and she kept hitting the start button over and over and she was crying as she watched the time tick down on the dashboard clock and—
Zoey jolted herself awake. She rolled over and the last thought she had before drifting off again was that she’d rather die than go back there, to that place she was in her life less than one year ago.
Literally, rather die.
THIRTY
DAYS
LATER
6
Less than a year after promising to do only good with the fortune she’d inherited, Zoey Ashe had spent $4,500 on a Halloween tree for the foyer of her embarrassingly large mansion. In her defense, she thought she had actually done quite a bit of good with the money in the last ten months or so, and the tree provided easily $10,000 worth of holiday spirit. So if anything, she had saved $5,500. It looked like a fir tree that had gotten charred in a forest fire and was covered in little mechanical skeletons that climbed around the branches. Holographic ghosts swirled and moaned all around it, programmed to occasionally shriek and lash out with ghostly hands when sensors detected someone walking too close. The kids would love it at the Halloween party. Yeah, that’s who it was for. The kids.
Zoey was in a business-y gray skirt and blazer, having just returned from a brutal day of meetings with people asking her for money or permission to do things she didn’t fully understand, trying to appear attentive while her shoes were slowly grinding her toe bones to powder. She wanted out of these clothes before her soul asphyxiated.
She encountered Carlton, the ancient butler, at the foot of the twin staircase in the foyer and said, “I wish this house had a machine that would make my bra go flying off the moment I walked in the door.”
“If such a device existed, Ms. Ashe, I’m certain your father would have had one installed long before you moved in. A package arrived at the gates this afternoon. It is marked for your urgent attention. It is currently at the guardhouse.”
“Well, I think I’m out of attention for today.”
“Understood, but I must make it clear that it is rather large, the size of a steamer trunk. It also appears to be armored and, in place of recipient information on the invoice, there is only a bloody handprint.”
Zoey was not as alarmed by this as you’d assume.
“Thank you, Carlton. Considering there’s a ninety-nine percent chance it’s a box of cow turds or something from my ‘fans,’ I’m thinking Wu can open it tomorrow. Or, you know, never.”
Zoey’s hate mail was both plentiful and elaborate. The latest thing was to rig packages with cameras to try to stream her shocked/dismayed expression when she opened them, as if she was dumb enough to even open anonymous mail. The only reason Wu examined such parcels at all was to decide if they represented a genuine threat. If someone tried to mail a bomb, that package needed to be traced and the sender paid a visit. But otherwise, Zoey knew the harassers’ game—guys like that weren’t exactly an exotic species. She knew that her attention was their prize, that the idea was to occupy her mind, rob her of peace, to tie her in knots so that she couldn’t live her life. Granted, it had taken a nervous breakdown and two weeks in a very fancy mental health facility over the summer for her to learn that lesson.
The trolls couldn’t be ignored, her therapist had said, but they could be contained in her mind, locked in a little room until she chose to address them. For example: this scary package, which was undoubtedly from some bored sadists who’d adopted her torment as their hobby, was intended to ruin her Friday night and hopefully her whole Halloween weekend.
Carlton said, “I would suggest Wu give it a look sooner rather than later, the scan at the gate revealed no presence of known explosives, toxins, or remote detonation mechanisms. But this being Tabula Rasa, I believe the key word there is ‘known.’”
“Sure, when he gets back from parking the car let him know to do that and to dispose of whatever’s in there and never speak of it.”
Zoey laboriously made her way up the stairs. She was going to submerge herself in her brand-new bathtub, one designed with an amazing set of incredibly precise pulsing jets. Her fling with that tub had actually been one of the most satisfying intimate relationships of her adult life. Zoey told the bath to start while she was still walking down the hall and left a trail of clothing outside her bedroom.
She was still soaking a half hour later, promising herself she wouldn’t watch any street streams tonight. Tabula Ra$a was a hotbed for that genre, commentators narrating live Blink feeds of gunfights and Mob hits, riffing on the action and keeping score of which side held which territory. The feeds had first taken off in cities like Juarez, Jakarta, and Miami, but none of those cities had deviants who could pick up a car and chuck it into an oncoming train. If you liked watching real-time chaos, there really was no competition. It was an odd thing to take pride in, but the locals definitely did.