“Maybe someday you’ll get to play with that stormsword, if you ever get promoted to the weapons lab,” Hal said.
I ground my teeth. No one wanted to fix toasters for a living, and everyone longed to get promoted to the weapons lab, including me, especially me. Over the past several months, I had submitted designs for blasters, cannons, and other items, hoping to get moved or at least promoted to a supervisory position in the appliances lab. But all my ideas had been rejected as being either too expensive or too impractical, along with all the other polite corporate ways you could be told your work simply wasn’t good enough.
Hal stepped even closer to me. “I could arrange for you to be transferred into the weapons lab, although I would require a personal favor in return.”
His gaze trailed down my body as though he could see right through my lab coat and the clothes underneath. Maybe he could. Like most corporate mercenaries, Hal had been pumped full of chemicals and enhanced multiple times.
I repressed a shudder. “I should get to work.”
Hal grinned, his white teeth flashing like tiny daggers in his face. “See you soon, Vesper.”
I walked away at a slow, steady place. I didn’t look back, but I could tell that Hal was staring at my ass. I could feel it with my seer magic. Ugh.
My workstation was in the back of the home appliances lab and consisted of two long tables that formed a large L, giving me the illusion of a corner office, if not the view and privacy. I slung my backpack down onto one of the tables.
While I waited for my terminal to boot up, I glanced over at the projects littering the other table. A serrated kitchen knife that sharpened and sanitized itself every time you tucked it back into its block. A whisk that moved of its own accord in a magnetized mixing bowl. A pair of thin flesh-colored gloves that were designed to look and feel like human skin. I’d been assigned the kitchen knife and the whisk, but the gloves were my own design. The idea had popped into my mind a couple of months ago, although I didn’t know what, if anything, the gloves would ever be useful for.
“ . . . Kyrion Caldaren . . .”
A few feet away, Bodie, another lab rat, was staring at his own terminal, viewing the same program that Tivona had been watching earlier this morning. How long was that overly perky gossipcaster going to talk about Kyrion Caldaren and the Regals and their stupid ball—
A chrome brewmaker landed on my desk like an anvil, accompanied by a smooth, silky voice. “Hey, Vesper.”
Anger exploded in my heart, and I stared at the shadowy image of Kyrion Caldaren stalking through that never-ending corridor on Bodie’s terminal. Perhaps there were some advantages to being the most notorious killer in the galaxy. I bet an Arrow like Kyrion Caldaren never had to deal with the indignity of working for his incessantly smug and infinitely less talented ex.
I plastered a neutral expression on my face and looked at the man standing on the opposite side of the table. “Conrad.”
Conrad Fawley smiled at me, oblivious to the fact that I could have cheerfully yanked the kitchen knife out of its self-sharpening block and stabbed him through the heart with it.
Roughly a year ago, Conrad had been transferred from an office on a neighboring planet to the main R&D lab here on Temperate 42. I hadn’t paid him any mind until he’d asked me a question about the brewmaker he was working on, the same model I’d tweaked for Tivona last week. Conrad was quite handsome, with shaggy blond hair, ruddy skin, and dark brown eyes, and I’d said yes when he’d asked me out to dinner as a thank-you for helping him.
To my surprise, he’d been attentive and charming and deeply interested in my work, especially my ideas for improving various Kent Corp products. One dinner had led to another one and another one . . . until we’d ended up at his apartment. The sex had been nice enough, and Conrad claimed he was falling hopelessly in love.
Me? Well, I was never one to crack my heart open after a few dates, and I certainly hadn’t expected to have some fairy-tale truebond with Conrad, but I’d cautiously started to hope we might have something real, something that would last.
Then, three months ago, while we were eating lunch on a bench outside, Conrad had said he wanted to talk. Like a fool, I assumed he meant about work, not our relationship. Conrad had smiled, looked me straight in the eyes, and dumped me.
Oh, it had been a little more involved than that. He’d clutched my hand and tearfully spouted all the usual clichés about how much he cared about me, how he needed to figure out what he really wanted in life, and how we were better off just being friends.
Despite how good I was at seeing how things worked, I hadn’t seen the breakup coming. Or maybe I hadn’t wanted to see it. Looking back, there had been plenty of warning signs that Conrad wasn’t happy—or at least, that he wasn’t happy with me. He had started obsessively watching the Regal gossipcasts, going off-planet with his friends to party, and ignoring my calls even when we’d scheduled a video chat.
In some ways, my seer magic had made the breakup even worse. Usually, my power warned me when bad things were going to happen, but it hadn’t given me any clue about Conrad. For the first time in a long time, I’d been caught completely off guard, and I was just . . . stunned. So stunned that words had deserted me, and I had just sat on the bench and blinked at him, like a warning light on one of those brewmakers I was always fixing.
“You’ll be so busy with work you won’t even miss me,” Conrad had chirped, as if my being good at my job made it perfectly acceptable for him to throw me away like a piece of trash.
Conrad had taken my stunned silence for agreement. Thanks to my magic, every time I saw him now, memories of that moment flooded my mind—the relieved smile on his face, the unexpected jolt of him giving me a friendly slap on the shoulder, and especially his quick, light, buoyant steps as he hurried away from me and toward his wonderful new future.
I’d sat there, as limp and wilted as the hydroponic spinach salad I’d bought from a campus food cart, for five minutes before the shock had finally worn off. Then I’d thrown my uneaten salad away, trudged back to the lab, and returned to work as though nothing had happened. A few tears had stung my eyes, but I’d hidden them behind my safety goggles. Conrad Fawley might have scraped me off the bottom of his shoe like a wad of chewed gum, but I didn’t cry over him.
Not then, anyway. I made it through the rest of the workday and then had a proper breakdown in my apartment that night. Tivona even used our new brewmaker and the one small pint of genuine ice cream we had to make me a strawberry cheesecake milkshake to try to cheer me up, although the gesture just reminded me of how I had helped Conrad tweak the brewmaker’s design.
But the worst part was that Conrad had come to work bright and early the next morning with the new love of his life hanging on his arm—Sabine Kent, the daughter of Rowena Kent and the heir to House Kent.
Tivona got the story from a friend of a friend of Sabine’s who also worked in the litigation and negotiation department. A few weeks before, Conrad had met Sabine in a club on Corios. The two of them had downed a chembond cocktail and had a grand time together. After that, one thing had just naturally led to another . . . ending with me getting dumped and Conrad scaling the Regal ladder like so many others before him. Oh, yes. Conrad Fawley was nothing but a climber, a derogatory term for people who ingratiated themselves with Regal lords and ladies in hopes of eventually becoming one themselves.