HELLBOUND WITH THE ALPHA

CHAPTER 4 The Callback

The email arrived on a Thursday morning while Ava was eating toast over the kitchen sink, which was where she ate most of her breakfasts because the kitchen table was still covered in the remnants of the application system she had not yet dismantled.

She read it three times to make sure she was reading it correctly.

Varek Industries Human Resources was pleased to invite her for an interview the following Tuesday at ten in the morning. She should bring two forms of identification and be prepared for a two-stage process. The dress code was business professional.

She put her toast down on the counter.

She picked her phone up and called Zara, who answered on the second ring with the alertness of someone who had been waiting for this specific call.

"They responded," Ava said.

The sound Zara made was not entirely dignified, but it was entirely genuine, "I told you. I told you, didn't I? Marcus came through."

"It is only an interview."

"It is a foot in the door. That is all you need. One foot in the door, and you will do the rest yourself." A pause. "What are you going to wear?"

"I have a grey blazer."

"The grey blazer is fine, but we can do better than fine. Come over tonight and we will sort something out."

She called Eli after she called Zara. He answered from what sounded like a coffee shop, background noise soft and warm.

"Varek Industries," he said, when she told him. His voice was careful in the way his voice went when he was thinking about how to say something. "That is a big company, Ava."

"I know."

"With a complicated reputation."

"Every big company in Ashenvale has a complicated reputation. That does not mean the work is not real."

"No," he agreed. "It does not." She could hear him considering. "Is this what you want?"

It was the kind of question Eli asked that nobody else thought to ask, the ones that got underneath the practical considerations and touched something more honest. Ava looked at the kitchen table with its stack of applications and thought about what she actually wanted, which was not so different from what she had always wanted. Something real. Something she could build on. A place where she could be useful and grow into the person she was pretty sure she was capable of being.

"I want the opportunity," she said. "What I do with it after that is up to me."

"Then go get it," Eli said simply. "And call me after."

The weekend before the interview, she ironed the blazer Zara had approved, which was a deep charcoal that Zara said made her look authoritative without being intimidating. She practiced answers to standard interview questions in the bathroom mirror the way she had done before every important thing in her life, her grandmother's voice in the back of her head reminding her that preparation was not nerves, it was respect for the opportunity.

She went to bed early on Monday night and lay awake for two hours thinking about the third floor of a building she had never been inside and a job she did not yet have and whether she was ready for whatever came next.

She decided she was.

She fell asleep just before midnight and dreamed of nothing she could remember in the morning, which she took as a good sign.