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front of the door. That tore it. I wasn't going to
be getting out of the room until we reached some kind of accommodation on
whatever Eric had in mind, and God help me if I tried.
     
I picked up the laptop and tucked it under my arm. “What’s the real issue,
Eric? How bad is it?”
    Eric
looked away and flushed slightly. The admission that something was seriously
wrong shocked me; I’d thrown the question out there primarily to elicit a
denial, a confirmation that everything was in great shape. The fact that Eric
wasn’t denying anything was scary, a piss-your-pants bad warning sign that the
storm was coming.
    He
finally looked at me but paused a long moment before saying anything. “I don’t
know. Maybe it’s not anything. I’ve just been getting a weird vibe from
BlackStone lately. They tell me everything’s great, but when I ask about
whether we’re going to be showing at any of the trade shows they keep putting
me off. And with the milestone eight payment coming up—the big one—it’s just
got a weird feel to it.”
    I
stepped closer and shifted the laptop's weight. I'd dropped one once and still
hadn't heard the end of it from IT. “Why would they want to kill it? It’s
great, it’s as close to ahead of schedule as you can get, and it’s going to be
a hit. It wouldn’t make any sense to kill it.”
    “Their
decisions don’t have to make sense to us, just to their bottom line. If they’ve
got another shooter that’s being done by one of their in-house studios, and
they want to protect it, then maybe it makes sense to them to kill ours. Not
that it’s the case, mind you—I have no idea what they might be thinking, if
anything. Like I said, I don’t know. It could be nothing.” Suddenly, Eric
snapped back to himself. “All of this is between you and me, understood?”
    I
nodded, once. “Understood. Completely.” We looked at each other for a moment
longer, then Eric opened the door.
    “Good
luck with Michelle. Try not to kill each other.”
    I
stepped past him, a tight grin on my face. “No worries. We got that out of our
systems a while ago.”
    “Uh-huh.”
Eric sounded unconvinced. “That’s not what half the office thinks. Or Sarah.”
    “Sarah
knows better,” I said, my words clipped. “And that’s what matters.”
    “Whatever
you say, Ryan,” Eric said, and shut the door. From behind them, I heard a crash
that sounded a lot like someone kicking a chair into a wall. I didn't go in to
see if Eric was all right. After all, they were his chairs.
    Besides,
he'd told me to act like everything was fine.

 
     
     
     
    Chapter 2
     
     
     
     
     
    Michelle
was in my office when I opened the door. More specifically, she was in my
chair, with her feet up on my desk a series of rough storyboard sketches on the
whiteboard. The air was thick with the scent of overworked dry-erase marker,
and she was grinning.
    I
dropped the laptop onto what passed for a flat surface, then stopped. I looked
at her, then at the board, then back at her. “Am I really necessary to this
process?” I asked, “Or have you and Eric gotten it all doped out, and you just
want me to do the typing?”
    “Oh,
relax.” Michelle pulled her feet off the desk and scooted herself upright in
the chair. “Most of what you’ve got is fine, I think. He just wants to start
the presentation off with a bang, and I do bang better than you do.”
    “I
think it’s best if I don’t respond to that,” I said and sat myself down in the
visitors’ chair against the wall. It was a small office, cluttered with papers
and empty game boxes, and nearly every square inch of wall was covered in
pinned-up maps, charts, or other documents related to the game. On the door was
the only personal touch I'd allowed myself, a poster of Charlie Chaplin as the
Little Tramp. Someone—not me—had added a thought balloon over Chaplin’s head
that read “At least I’m not making video games.” Everything else—desk,
bookshelves,