The Proximity Contract

Chapter 11: The Ride Down

The garage took up the whole bottom of the tower. At that hour it held six cars, maybe, out of forty, and the strip lights ran the length of the ceiling with nothing moving under them but air.

Ostrow walked the second row and stopped at a black sedan backed in near the ramp. He opened the driver's side, waited, and Elliot went around the front and got in on the passenger side.

The car smelled like cold leather and, under that, something sweetish he couldn't place. He put the bag on the floor between his feet, sat with his hands on his knees, and kept his back an inch off the seat.

"It's not much of a car. It'll get you where you're going."

He hadn't looked at it until then. He looked now. Clean dash, dark seats, air already coming out of the vents.

"It's nicer than anything I'm going to be driving for a while." That was easy, and it was true, and it did what he wanted it to do. "Some of us would have to put in a few more years before we could get near one of these."

Ostrow laughed through his nose and turned his head, and then he leaned across the seat with his arm straight and his hand open, reaching for the belt.

Elliot had the strap over his shoulder and the buckle in the catch before he got there. Click.

"I've got it."

Ostrow sat back. "Sure."

He started the car. The dash lit, the concrete slid away behind them, and then they were going up the ramp with the walls turning and the street coming in at the top.

"You're a beta too, aren't you."

"Yeah."

He looked over with nothing on his face. "Why."

"No reason." One hand on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh. "Beta's the easiest thing to be, out of the three. No heat to plan your life around. No bond. No mark. Nobody's got a reason to keep track of a beta. Nothing for anybody to look into."

Elliot didn't answer. He let it sit, and he let the sitting look like he was working out whether he'd been insulted.

They came up off the river road and turned north, and the buildings got shorter. Ostrow didn't seem bothered by the quiet. He had the radio off and the fan on low and drove the way he probably drove every night, one hand, a little fast.

"Anyway," he said. "You've noticed the workload."

"It's been a week."

"The first week's part of it." His thumb tapped the wheel twice. "There's a second part."

The light ahead went red and they stopped. Elliot watched the crosswalk, the two people on the far corner with a dog, the countdown.

"Somebody's got it in for me," he said. He let it come out uncertain, like he'd only just caught up with it.

"I never said that."

"Then what's the second part."

"Here's where it sits, Vance." Ostrow checked one mirror and then the other, for a car that wasn't behind them. "Assignments get handed out by me. Reviews get written by me. What shows up on a sheet at the end of the month, and what doesn't, gets decided by me. Right now you're carrying about four people's worth. That's a choice, and it's a choice that can be made a different way."

Elliot kept his eyes on the signal. "Why would you do that."

"The two of us have the same designation." He said it slowly, like he was being patient with someone who hadn't caught up yet. "So there's no complication. No alpha who's going to come asking after you. No omega who's going to make noise about you. A beta doesn't leave a trail."

The light changed. Halfway through the intersection he took his right hand off the wheel and put it down over the back of Elliot's hand.

Elliot pulled his hand out from under it and put both of them in his lap. "Don't."

Ostrow put his hand back on the wheel. He wasn't angry. He didn't look like he'd been told anything at all. He drove a block, and then the next one, and he was the one who broke the quiet.

"No hurry," he said. "I mean that. This doesn't have to be anything we settle tonight. Take the weekend."

Elliot turned his head and looked at him and let his voice come out unsure. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"You don't have to say anything. That's the part I want you to get." They were past the campus now, on the dark side of it, where the lots sat behind fencing and the residence halls were brick and four stories and lit in patches. "But there's a version of the next six months that goes a lot easier than the other one. For both of us. Anything that's coming down on you right now — I can make it quiet."

"Right."

He didn't say anything else about it, and neither did Elliot, and the rest of the drive was the two of them and the streetlights and the radio staying off. Elliot left the worry where Ostrow could see it. The disgust he kept underneath, and it stayed put.

The car stopped across from the residence hall. Ostrow left the engine running and both hands on the wheel.

"You know where my office is, Vance."

"Yeah."

Elliot got out. "Thanks for the ride" came out of his mouth on its own, and he shut the door and walked around the front of the car and across the street, and he didn't look back until he was at the door, and by then the car was pulling away.

The bathroom at the end of the hall was empty. He ran the water until it went hot enough to sting, soaped both hands, turned them over, washed the backs, rinsed, and dried them on the towel by the sink, and it was still there. The flat weight of a palm, and the dry slide of four fingers coming off the back of his right hand.

He did the right one twice.

He knew about this. There was a policy, a module, a page with a phone number at the bottom, and he'd seen the wording somewhere and never once thought it was for him. Where he came from there had been two sexes and he'd been on the easy side of them, so it had stayed on the wall. In this one he'd assumed beta meant nobody would want him badly enough to bother.

Wrong read. A beta couldn't be marked, couldn't be bonded, and by Ostrow's accounting wouldn't leave anything behind that anybody could pull — no paper, no record, nothing he could hand to anybody.

He turned the water off. He'd spent the whole week holding on to the idea that he could walk out if he pushed it far enough, and standing there with his hands over the basin he understood that the car had taken it, someplace out past the campus, and that he would be in the building on Monday like nothing had happened.

He ran it back once more on the way to his room. No message. No email. No witness. A car ride, a hand, and a set of sentences that had all been conditional on purpose. What stuck wasn't the hand. It was that Ostrow had known about the workload — known it wasn't an accident, known who was doing it, and said so without saying it.

Five days inside that building, and tonight was the first time Hale had been in front of him at all. If he walked out now, there was no telling how long it would take to get that close again.

And whoever was handing Ostrow his orders was going to be at a desk on Monday. If he quit, he'd never have the name, and the person would still be there, still doing it, and he'd be somewhere else, starting over, five days behind.

He wasn't going to be the one who left.

He also wasn't going to write any of it down, or say it out loud to anyone, or go anywhere near the office where complaints went, because he'd already worked out what he'd be bringing them, and the answer was a ride home.

Sam Renner was in the common room with his laptop on his knees, one earbud in, a plate on the arm of the couch with a fork on it and nothing else.

"Hey."

"Hey."

"There's pasta in the fridge. I made too much." He tipped his head toward the kitchen. "It's there if you want it."

"I already ate."

Sam looked at him. The look stayed on him a beat past casual, and Elliot knew what he looked like, and there was nothing to be done about it, so he put his hands in his pockets.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Some stuff got dumped on me." Which was the true part. "It's work."

"Work." Sam turned the laptop a couple of inches on his knees. "You've been there a week."

"Five days."

"Uh-huh." He put the earbud back in and looked at the screen, and then he took it out again, and Elliot waited for it — the question, the offer, whatever was coming — and Sam said, "Night, then," and that was all of it.

"Night."

Elliot went down the hall to his room and didn't put the light on. He lay down on top of the blanket with his shoes on and his hands at his sides, and after a while he got up, went back down the hall, and turned the water on again, and this time he didn't stop until it ran cold.

***

The flight got in late. Bell was at the curb with the tablet and the door already open, and he waited until Adrian was in the seat before he started passing information.

"Nothing on your calendar until Monday that can't move," he said. "Do you want me to have them take you home first."

"Office."

Bell's thumb stopped over the screen for a second. Then he said, "All right," and set the tablet down against his knee.

The contract had taken two weeks and it had gone federal, which meant three time zones out and more lawyers than engineers, and four nights where Adrian hadn't slept at all and one where he'd slept in a chair. Bell had been holding this afternoon and evening open for eleven days, with a hotel in the city in case he wanted to stop instead of flying straight through.

He closed his eyes for the length of the drive. When the car came off the ramp and stopped under the tower, he opened them, and by then the tiredness was out of his face.

In the elevator he put his card to the reader and the private car came down for him and took him up. The numbers went past, one after another. Twenty-two went past. He looked at Bell.

"How much work do the interns get?"

Bell's fingers stayed on the tablet a moment before he answered. It wasn't a question that got asked in this car.

"What fits," he said. "Basic work, mostly, at the start. I wouldn't call it heavy."

Adrian didn't answer him. The car stopped on thirty, and the hall was on its night setting, half the lights down and the rest of it dark.

He dropped his jacket over the back of the chair and gave Bell the rest of it from his desk.

"Operations. Marketing's numbers for the month, on my desk in half an hour."

"Tonight."

"Tonight."

Bell noted it with his thumb.

"And I want marketing to brief me on what they've been running. Two hours."

"Two hours." Bell had the phone out by then. "Want me to have them come up?"

"No." Adrian pulled the laptop open. "I'll go down."

Bell wrote it down, didn't ask why, and went out to send it from the elevator. The door clicked shut behind him.

Briefings happened up here, in the chair across the desk. Nobody had ever had one on their own floor.

He didn't go down yet. Half an hour, the numbers, and then twenty-two, and whatever was on that sheet was going to get read the way he read everything, line by line, with a pencil. He turned the light off over the desk and worked by the screen.