Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
I pull up at the address, but the old building does not look like it used to. When I was born here it was already in decay. The efforts to tidy it up were constant and ill-fated.
I park in front of a freshly renovated warehouse. The old rotten panels have been replaced with yellow metal. It looks Bauhaus in design and cheerful. There’s yellow, red, blue, and the black lines of the steel frame outline the various sections. A big sign over the door says Runaways.
The last time I was here, this was a rundown building with more than half the windows broken, completely infested with rats, and sometimes people who took refuge to do drugs along with the trash they brought and left. I remember leaving with a sense of disgust, and a faint idea about having the whole thing bulldozed. Never acted on it, of course.
Now the building has been broken up into office spaces and contains three levels. There’s a ground floor where people seem to congregate in a loose office sense. I walk up the stairs in the middle of the building, to find the second floor, which is full of art and computers and I suppose stock.
It’s the third floor I’m looking for. More of a loft office than a full floor. It’s set into the apex of the roof, and commands a view out over the industrial city as a whole. I’m impressed. There’s a few dozen young people milling about, paying me absolutely attention at all. I move through this place like a ghost. It’s an interesting feeling.
I can scent the pack nature of those here. A lot of shifters going about their business, happy, relaxed. There’s a chaotic energy in some places. Some of the young guys are wrestling in the corners, and I can hear video games being played in back rooms. All in all, though, I’m impressed with them, and not very impressed with our own monitoring.
“Can I help you?”
I am finally acknowledged by a young woman with pink hair who is sitting at a desk near the top of the stairs. She has a phone in front of her, which she taps through while she is waiting for me to respond. Less than a second was still too long for her. Understandable.
Tinny music escapes through speakers as she glances down at the media that has just popped up. I can’t see what it is. I don’t care to know either.
“Where is Nick Love?”
“Nicky isn’t taking visitors today,” she says. Her attention has now been entirely captured by the phone. She could not care less about me. This is a strange experience. I am used to a certain level of deference from shifters, especially young ones. This lot have not been taught anything about proper manners, it seems.
“The hell he isn’t. I own this building.”
That is true. I do own this building. I have no idea how so much work was done on it without anybody mentioning it to me, but I suppose tradesmen don’t usually ask for proof of property ownership. They do what they’re paid to do, because people don’t usually do upgrades on buildings they don’t own. Everything about this situation is incredibly odd.
The secretary gives me a brutally effective Gen Z stare. I feel myself being shrunk down to irrelevance as I stand here getting practically no response at all.
“Okay,” she says, her voice a monotonous drawl, unimpressed, unstressed, and uninterested.
I growl inwardly. This little pack is out of control. I could handle the secretary brat, but she’s not on my list of people to deal with. I’ll get one of my lieutenants to take care of her at some point. Every single one of these little upstart whelps is going to have to be taught how to behave properly.
With her disinterest registered, I decide to just go ahead and go in. I am curious as to how Nick, or apparently, Nicky Love manages to run a pack when everybody in it is so absolutely badly behaved.
I wait for the secretary to hit me with the ‘you can’t go in there’ line, but she doesn’t bother. She goes back to her phone without even bothering to shrug. The fact that Nick Love’s main line of corporate defense is a young woman who doesn’t care who walks through to see him is an indication the resistance I have been expecting from him won’t materialize.
I walk into the main office. A room like this could be a very impressive large office space, but for the great deal of storage, shelving, and general stuff about the place that makes it seem smaller than it is.
The closest approximation to anything I have seen like this before is the backroom at a bar, crossed with the offices of a tech startup that aims to ‘disrupt,’ which in my experience means burn investor capital and then go belly up.