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It’s the hand on her shoulder that gets her to stop and listen to him when he approaches her in the hallway.
“$DOYLE, please ,” he tells her, and there’s that hint of desperation he’d never quite managed to purge from his most pleading of tones. “I-I don’t know what to do. ”
She lets him steal her away into an unused meeting room on the forty-third floor of the Exchange: though nobody ever walks the middling-numbered halls of $NYC’s tallest building, it’s better to be safe than sorry. Crying travels, and $SOLIS’s lip is quivering.
Truthfully, she already knows the revelation he’s about to drop on her. Her Value’s been falling for what feels like forever, and probably has been for as long as the Exchange has lived. $DOYLE has not once left a fiscal year with her Value higher than when it started; she’s lucky to scrape by with net zero change.
And with two Consumer Reports in two years….
$DOYLE’s been living on borrowed time and daggers in moonless nights, hoping her use to the Board of Directors, if not the Exchange as a whole, would be enough to keep her around. Yet with the world around her changing, ever-slowly as it does, and the Millionaires promised expansion beyond their wildest dreams, it’s a miracle she, a relic of times long past, has made it seventeen years with them at all.
A brief spark of anger. Seventeen years, and now they want her gone. So much for loyalty. She’s not the flashiest―is that her problem? Have they forgotten what she can do, forgotten the whole point of it is that nobody can remember?
“It’s been on the books for a while now,” $SOLIS says as if to read her mind, and with all they’ve done together he probably can; who are they but each others’ left hands? His voice is stable; he’s bottled the fear up, or at least taken a counter-feeling for it while her mind wandered. “ Years— at least five, maybe more. $9 and $SOUL put you on the backburner ‘till now. Guess you can thank them for that.” He sounds like he wants to laugh, but can’t.
They are perhaps the only members of the Exchange who can speak casually to each other: with their years of training and business meetings counterbalanced by years of tag-teaming and missions together, with a pincer, backed by trust that money can't buy, unparallelled by even the hivemind of the Corporates. Quickly, not devoting more than a moment’s thought to it, she wonders what he will do for sanity when she is gone.
“Prospective replacement. They’re thinking of bringing a Carver onto the Board. Old money, new face, sharp knives. This one likes blood.”
Flashier , she thinks. So she had done her job too well.
“When are they planning to do it?” She speaks, and her voice is heavier, rustier, than she expects. She swallows, trying to clear her throat.
“They don’t want to wait until the end of the year. Maybe the second quarter, if you’re lucky.” He leans in closer, and opens his mouth again, but no voice comes out.
She knows what he wants to say. I don’t think you’ll be lucky.
For a few minutes, they sit, a sterile few feet from each other. $DOYLE takes in the view from the forty-third floor. Smog residue cakes the windows, despite the best efforts of the most hard-working cleaners that money can buy. Today, it is lighter than usual, and she can make out the building across the street. With her eyes, she traces where she knows the not-water damage had crept up to before the floods retreated.
Immateria. If the Millionaires have their way, she will soon be intimately acquainted with it again.
“You know that once I’m gone, they’ll go after you next.”
“It doesn’t need to be said.” $SOLIS smiles, wear evident on his face. He gestures to himself. “Washed up. Guilty as charged.”
$DOYLE crosses her arms. “You need a plan.” I’m not leaving you, she doesn't say. He's the man of empty words; hers still bind her. She can't make a promise she won't keep.
“But you know I’ve been working. Everyone knows I’m the one who got $BEND pulled back from Boston.”
That had been a tactless move in the moment, but it had kept the unwillingly named $MOON from tearing the Exchange apart with Thorns-typical revolutionary spittle and however many claws she possessed, so it was not immediate grounds for $SOLIS's Liquidation. “And you’ll reckon they’ll return the favour?”
His silence tells her more than he could ever say.