It sounds simple, but I know it won’t be.
Belle must sense my hesitation. “Are you still in?” she asks, voice soft but insistent.
I nod. “I’ll do it.”
Sari looks pleased. “Excellent.”
Belle leans back, surveying the table as if she’s already picturing the aftermath. “It’s going to be a night to remember,” she says.
I glance down at the blueprint, memorizing the fault lines.
Great. I’ve thrown my lot in with the Legion of Doom.
The Socialite Finds A Flaw In The System
PHILOMENA
The party is tomorrow.
It feels like a lot of effort and time were consumed getting ready for this damned thing, so it had better be fantastic. I’m tired of hearing about it. I don’t think they will appreciate all our hard work. The boys say that when they have a bad feeling, their fangs twitch. I’m sure it’s a metaphor—good on them for using it correctly—but if I had fangs, they’d be twitching like crazy with this mess.
The girls and I made our own plans for this fiasco.
From the beginning, I’ve worried that the days of having a community-wide party to honor the birthdays of the doubles and droids have become passé. The last few have done more to stir up trouble than to have a good time and because of the madness of some of our members, I think gathering everyone in one place and giving malcontents an audience is like bringing an ice cream truck to a dieting convention—a recipe for a riot.
By the time I have the patio checklist half completed, my left eye is twitching. I’m keyed up and irritable from the endless hours of labor that have gone into prepping for this event. The surface sheen—the illusion of effortless, well-oiled celebration—directly results from three weeks’ worth of harried prep, most of it invisible to the untrained eye but glaringly obvious to the people who actually made it happen. I walk the length of the trellised corridor, mentally cataloging every garland, every string of lights, every tastefully disguised camera and motion sensor tucked between swags of imported flowers.
There is satisfaction in this; I want everything perfect, and perfection demands vigilance.
The boys, once again, are nowhere to be found—typical. All the actual work is shouldered by the girls: organizing, coordinating, troubleshooting. It doesn’t go unnoticed, even if it’s never acknowledged. I’m used to it, but that doesn’t make it any less infuriating.
Hex and Leo decreed that the food stations be laid out like a map of the old country, which meant I spent six hours last night moving tables centimeters at a time to satisfy their idiotic nostalgia. It’s not even their country; they have no ancestors and no sense of smell, so what’s the point? Beyond that, every single decorative element had to be triple-inspected and cross-referenced with the guest list to avoid triggering any of the more sensitive attendees.
The droids are easy; the clones, less so. The human contingent is, as always, the wildcard.
After the boys pronounced the job done, it was time for Sandrine’s security sweep. To be fair, if anyone is going to spot a flaw in our perimeter, it’s her. She approached the review withher usual obsessive thoroughness, stalking the property line with the silent focus of a predator, her black hair a streak behind her as she scuttled from sensor to sensor. She took notes on a battered tablet, lips pursed, ignoring everyone around her. She missed nothing—except, apparently, the gap near the driveway, which is exactly where my well-practiced paranoia had warned me to check.
The cat’s loyalty is unwavering, but her attention drifts, and when it does, she leaves holes. I take it upon myself to double-check everything after her pass. It’s not a lack of trust; it’s a form of love, or at least something close to it. I want her safe as much as I want the rest of us safe, even if it means cleaning up after her.
With the master list in hand, I walk the outer path, runway-walking out of pure spite at the undulating garden path, and inspect the faint shimmer of the security wards. They look solid, but I know better. There’s always a spot that catches on the wrong frequency. I find it two meters to the left of the main drive, just past the ornamental fountain. I note it, then toggle my phone to ping Sandrine’s shadow, who is supposed to be monitoring for lapses.
She’s not where she should be, obviously—she’s in the kitchen, harassing Leo—so I make a mental note to have the tiger dispatched outside to recalibrate. I know with absolute certainty from lived experience that if a problem arises tomorrow, it will come from this blind spot. The possibility is remote, but possible, and if there’s anything all those years of training have taught me, it’s that remote possibilities are the only ones that ever matter.
Worse, we have an entire squad of party crashers who would kill for the drama of a full-scale security incident.
Not literally, hopefully, but the lines between performance and reality have blurred beyond all meaning in this group, and I would not put a single thing past any of them. The coyote has clarified that this is a chance to shake up the system. Her posts in the group chat oscillate between self-deprecating humor and the kind of radical rhetoric that makes you worry about the cutlery. If anyone is going to fuck with us tomorrow, it’ll be her or one of her hangers-on, and that means the line between us and them is more than just metaphorical.
I am so lost in this internal monologue that I almost miss the high-pitched ringing in my inner ear, which is the telltale sign of a perimeter breach. At first, I think I’ve just imagined it—my mind is so saturated with worst-case scenarios it invents dangers for fun—but no; the sensation is real. I check the readout and see an alert pinged from the sensor array down by the pool house.
Of fucking course it’s the pool house.
The single most disgusting, inhospitable, off-limits place on the entire property, and someone is tripping sensors down there on the eve of the event. I roll my eyes so hard I almost dislodge my own visual sensors.
The structure was once just a pool house, before the droid boys decided it would be a good idea to re-engineer the ecosystem inside with imported insects. Now it’s a festering swamp of carnivorous plants and bio-engineered beetles, the air so thick with pheromones and humidity that you can practically see the moisture beading on your skin when you walk inside.
It is the last place I want to go on the best of days, and today is not the best of days.
I check the internal cams and see nothing out of the ordinary, which means the interloper is either cloaked or small. Either way, it’s a headache. I send a silent curse to whoever it is, then walk toward the back entrance, heels stabbing the flagstones with more force than necessary.
