Bright Stars in Dark Skies

Chapter Two

I had never heard a room go that quiet. Not even a church.

The man who had just fired me stood frozen, his back to me, one step from his elevator. Clarissa's face went red, then redder.

"How dare you!" she hissed. "Guards! Take this girl out of here right now!"

"Stand down."

Mr. Thorne didn't raise his voice. The guards stopped anyway, as if someone had pulled their strings.

He turned around slowly. Then he walked back across the marble, and each step of his shoes seemed to count down my life. He stopped three feet away. Up close, he smelled like dark coffee and cold rain.

"Say that again," he said, very softly.

Soft was worse than loud. My knees were shaking under my skirt. Every part of me wanted to say sorry and run. But I thought of the corn field and the frost and Dad's tired, stubborn smile. So I planted my boots and looked up.

"The Eastern region report," I said. "Two weeks ago, back in Pine Ridge, I read it on the notice board outside your branch office. I was waiting on my paperwork, so I read all of it. The tonnage on page two doesn't match the fuel numbers on page four. It's off by four percent."

"And?"

"The report says your trucks get twelve miles to the gallon. But the Eastern roads are all mountains. Up a steep hill, a loaded truck drinks more fuel. It's closer to eight. The report calls the missing fuel an 'office margin.' It isn't. It's a leak. You're losing more than two hundred thousand dollars a month."

A murmur ran through the crowd. Somebody coughed.

Clarissa laughed. It was a loud, thin sound, like a plate cracking. "This is nonsense, Julian! She's a country girl who got stuck in a door. Our numbers were checked by three outside firms!"

He didn't even glance at her. His eyes stayed on me, and it felt like being read, line by line, like a page.

"Twenty-five senior analysts reviewed that report," he said. "All of them have advanced degrees. You are telling me they missed something that you caught?"

"I'm telling you numbers don't care about degrees, sir." My voice shook, but only a little. "Computers only know what people type into them. Somebody put a flatland number into a mountain map. Give me five minutes with your real ledger, and I'll show you the exact row."

He stared at me. One second. Two. Five.

"Five minutes," he said.

"Julian!" Clarissa's smile fell off her face. "You can't bring her upstairs!"

"My office. Now."

And he walked to the elevator, as if he had never doubted I'd follow.

His office was on the forty-fifth floor, and it was bigger than our whole farmhouse. The walls were dark wood. The windows ran from floor to ceiling, and the whole city lay below like a box of gray toys. His desk was black walnut, wide as a barn door, with three glowing screens on it.

He sat down and folded his long fingers under his chin.

"The clock is running, Miss Vance. Four minutes."

I hurried to the desk and looked at the middle screen. There were no buttons anywhere. Just smooth, curved glass.

Okay. Just touch it. Gently.

I touched it. Not gently enough.

The screens flashed red. A voice said, "INTERFACE ERROR," and the brightness shot up so high that white light stabbed me right in the eyes.

"Oh, goodness!" I stumbled back, blinking tears.

Clarissa was leaning in the doorway, and she laughed out loud. "Look at her! She can't even use a screen! Julian, let security take her before she wrecks everything!"

"Quiet, Clarissa."

The room went still. My eyes were still watering. I looked at the glass and decided it was never going to like me.

So I stopped trying to be nice to it.

Under the edge of the desk, I found a real keyboard, with real keys. Plastic and wire and honest clicking. I pulled it toward me, closed my eyes for a breath, and brought the report back into my head, page by page, as I had read it on that notice board.

Then I typed.

The keys went click-click-click so fast that even I was surprised. For a moment the whole world shrank down to numbers. They always make sense to me. They never laugh.

The screens flickered. I slipped past menus, and past more menus, down into the plain, raw data from six months ago. I found what I was looking for and pointed.

"There. Row 402."

He leaned forward.

"The program grabbed an old toll rate from two years ago, instead of the new mountain rate. So every truck leaving the depot is being counted wrong. And that mistake keeps growing, row after row, all the way down."

He didn't answer. He pulled his own keyboard close and typed in a long code. The whole Eastern ledger started to rebuild itself. Numbers slid, flipped, and settled.

At the bottom of the screen, white letters appeared.

$242,500 MONTHLY DISCREPANCY DETECTED.

Behind me, Clarissa made a small noise, like air leaving a tire. I looked back. She had gone the color of paper.

Mr. Thorne stood up slowly. He walked around the desk and stopped in front of me. He looked at my yellow dress and my scuffed boots. He looked at the ink on my knuckles. And then, for just a moment, he looked at my face, and he didn't look away right away.

There was no smile. There was no thank-you. But something behind those ice-gray eyes had changed. It wasn't warm. It was curious, like a man who has found a tool he can't name.

"Your math is correct," he said.

I let out a breath I'd been holding for what felt like a year. I smiled before I could stop myself. "So... can I keep my trial, Mr. Thorne?"

The stone came back over his face. "You have a good head for numbers, Miss Vance. But a good head without discipline is useless here. You will have one week, as a junior archive assistant. If you are late once, if you break one thing, if you fail one task, you're gone. No appeals."

"Thank you!" I said. "You won't regret it. I promise!"

"Clarissa will take you to your department." He turned toward the window and picked up a gold pen. "Begin immediately."

That was it. I was dismissed.

But as I picked up my bag, I caught something out of the corner of my eye. His reflection in the window glass. He wasn't writing. The pen sat still in his hand, and he was watching me leave.

Then the elevator doors slid shut with Clarissa and me inside.

She waited until we were between floors. She didn't look at me. She looked straight ahead at her own face in the shiny doors.

"Enjoy your little win, Daisy," she said, soft as a snake. "By the end of this week, you'll be begging to go back to your farm."

The elevator hummed all the way down. I held my father's watch in my pocket, and I felt every tick of it against my fingers.

It had only been one morning. And I already knew this was going to be a war.