The city looked incredible from sixty-two floors up.
Vivienne Ross stood at the window of her corner office with her hands behind her back. At seven in the morning, Manhattan was reluctantly coming alive, like an accountant rummaging through his drawers, looking for the cocaine that would enable him to look at numbers all day without throwing himself off the roof.
There were cabs gridlocked, delivery trucks double-parked outside restaurants, and a man in a business suit sprinting across an intersection like his life depended on it. Somebody's always late to something in this city.
The funny part was that she owned a piece of most of what she could see.
The youngest CEO in Liang & Howard's hundred-and-twelve-year history, appointed at thirty-one after a boardroom campaign so surgically precise that three of the directors who voted against her sent congratulations cards afterward.
Her coffee sat untouched on her desk. She'd forgotten about it twenty minutes ago, which meant it was cold now, which meant she wouldn't drink it. Vivienne Ross did not bust her ass every day just to end up drinking cold coffee.
There was a knock at her door.
"Ms. Ross, the Meridian Group is here. Conference room B."
That was Priya, her assistant. Priya Nadkarni, twenty-seven, terrifyingly competent. Three years and she had never once asked Vivienne how she liked her coffee. She just knew. Vivienne had given her two raises in eighteen months and would give her a third before the year was out if she kept it up.
"I'm on my way."
Vivienne picked up the folder from her desk, gave the skyline one last look, and walked out.
---
Conference room B had twelve chairs, all of them leather, all of them uncomfortable. There was a long table made of walnut that cost more than most people's cars and a projector screen that Vivienne had never once seen display anything without at least one person complaining about the resolution.
She didn't sit. She never sat in these meetings. Sitting put her at eye level with everyone else, and Vivienne Ross did not do eye level like some sort of peasant.
"Good morning," she lied. It was a decent morning at best.
Twelve faces packed with wrinkles and insomnia looked back at her. VPs, partners, a few outside investors. All of them older than her.
She tapped the first slide on the board.
"North American retail, up eleven percent quarter over quarter. You can thank the logistics restructuring for eight of those points. The other three are seasonal. We'll lose them in Q1 but that's fine because the restructuring savings are permanent."
She advanced to the next slide.
"Southeast Asian distribution, up six percent. We moved the regional hub from Jakarta to Ho Chi Minh City in February. The operational costs dropped fourteen percent and blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah." She glanced at the room. "Blah blah, blabba blah blah blah. Blah."
Nobody said anything. That was fine. Vivienne didn't need them to say anything. She needed them to listen, absorb, and then leave her the fuck alone so she could do the job they'd hired her to do.
She went through the rest of the deck in nine minutes. Revenue targets, margin improvements, two underperforming divisions she intended to restructure by end of quarter, and a brief note about the Tokyo office lease renewal.
Goddamn Tokyo office.
"That's everything. Thank you for your time."
Chairs scraped back, people stood up, collected their folders, wiped the drool off their chins, and filtered out. A few of the VPs gave her those tight little nods that men give when they're acknowledging competence from someone who should, by their math, still be in middle management. Vivienne collected those nods like trading cards.
She was already thinking about the call she had at two when a hand appeared in front of her.
"Wonderful presentation, Ms. Ross."
The woman was tall, blonde, and had the kind of face that magazines put on covers when they were firmly in the red and needed to make money. There was a sharpness to her jaw and her eyes were very, very green.
Vivienne took her hand.
The woman's grip was firm and her palm was warm and for about two full seconds Vivienne Ross, who had shaken hands with senators and billionaires and once, memorably, a sitting president, did not have a single thought in her head.
[Stop that. You're not some horny teenager.]
"Thank you," Vivienne said. "I'm glad it was useful."
"Very. I look forward to working together."
The woman left with the rest of the group and Vivienne stood there for three seconds longer than she needed to before picking up her folder and walking out.
---
Vivienne did not leave the office on Friday night. She left Saturday evening, which was technically still the weekend, so that counted.
The building was empty. Saturday at Liang & Howard meant skeleton security on the first floor and maybe two people in accounting who were hiding from their wives.
Vivienne's floor was dead. The lights in the hallway had switched to motion-sensor mode, which meant they clicked on in sequence as she walked toward her office, one panel at a time, like the building was reluctantly acknowledging she was still here. Sixty-two floors of glass and steel and she was the only warm body above the lobby.
She sat down at her desk.
There were still things to do. There were always still things to do. But, instead, she pulled up her phone and checked her messages.
Her mother had stopped calling two years ago. Vivienne had told herself she'd call back when things calmed down. Things had not calmed down. Then six months went by and it was awkward, and then a year went by and it was worse than awkward, and now it was two years and calling would require an explanation that Vivienne did not have. So she didn't.
Her sister sent a birthday card last year. Vivienne had replied "Thank you, love you" eleven hours later. There'd been nothing since. She wasn't sure when her sister's birthday was. March, probably. Or April.
[It's fine. You're busy. Everyone's busy.]
She put the phone down and stared at the Tokyo lease.
There was a tightness in her chest. It had been there for a few weeks, actually, the kind of thing she kept meaning to see a doctor about and kept not seeing a doctor about. But suddenly it got worse. It got worse fast, in a way that made her sit up straight and put her hand flat against her sternum.
There was a pressure building behind her ribs and it was spreading up into her left shoulder and down her arm and she thought, very clearly:
[That's not stress.]
She tried to stand. Her legs didn't cooperate. She tried to reach for her desk phone and her fingers curled against the wood instead. There was a ringing in her ears and the fluorescent light above her desk was getting brighter.
[Oh, fuck. I'm dying.]
She was thirty-two. Vivienne Ross, thirty-two, CEO of a company that did not bear her name, died at 8:47 PM on a Saturday in a corner office on the sixty-second floor. The fluorescent light above her desk kept buzzing.
The Tokyo lease sat unsigned on her screen, victorious.
---
God turned the lights back on. They were red.
That was the first thing she noticed. The second thing she noticed was that she was on her back on something soft. The third thing she noticed was the faces.
There were three of them, and they had horns.
Someone was holding her wrist. To her left stood a woman with black horns, purple eyes, and purple skin. To her right, someone with red skin and white hair was sobbing loud enough to shake the room.
Vivienne tried to turn her head and couldn't. Her body had become smaller. Her hands were tiny and pudgy, with fingers the size of cocktail shrimp.
[What the...]
The red one choked something out. Vivienne didn't catch a word of it. It was some foreign language.
She grabbed one of Vivienne's hands and held it up for the tall one to see, face wide open with awe and about three seconds from total emotional collapse.
The tall one replied with two flat words.
The red one said something louder and gestured at the hand again.
The tall one looked down at Vivienne and said something with the cadence of an introduction. A name, maybe.
Vivienne understood nothing. She did the only reasonable thing available to her.
She screamed.