A dismissal. Ava turned to leave, then paused at the door.
“Mr. Morningstar? The building only has sixty floors from the outside.”
“Does it?” The curve deepened by a fraction. Something glittered in those too-dark eyes. “How observant. Conference Room Seven, Ms. Feng. The partners will want to meet you after.”
The elevatorto sixty-six required a special key that Derek produced with obvious reluctance.
“Fair warning,” he said as they rose past floors the building’s exterior had somehow forgotten. “The Henderson merger is complicated.”
“How complicated?”
“The last three associates who reviewed it quit within a week.” He stared at the elevator doors, not meeting her eyes. “One of them moved to Alaska. Another became a librarian. The third… nobody knows what happened to the third.”
“Quit?”
Derek didn’t answer.
The elevator opened onto a hallway that felt different. Heavier. The air carried a charge, like before a storm, that pressure against the eardrums, that sense of electricity waiting to discharge. The lighting was wrong too. Gas lamps instead of fluorescents, their flames flickering in patterns that seemed almost deliberate.
Conference Room Seven had a door of solid black wood with silver hinges that looked like they’d been forged, not manufactured. Inside: a table of volcanic glass that reflected nothing, three boxes of documents, and silence so complete it had weight.
“Extension 666 if you need anything,” Derek said, setting down the boxes. “And yes, I know how that sounds. Just…” He hesitated at the door. “Be careful what you read too closely. Some of these documents, they read you back.”
The door closed. Ava was alone.
She opened the first box.
Standard acquisition documents at first: regulatory filings, due diligence reports, the familiar landscape of corporate law. She relaxed slightly. This she could do. This she understood.
Then she reached section 847.
The language shifted. Latin, but not legal Latin, something older, something her tongue couldn’t shape naturally when she tried to sound it out. Words she had to puzzle out:animafor soul,pretiumfor price,aeternumfor eternal.Vinculumfor binding.
She pulled out her laptop and started cross-referencing. The subsection Victor had mentioned was worse.
The more she read, the colder she got. The volcanic glass table reflected nothing, not even her, but sometimes she thought she saw movement in its depths. Shadows that weren’t hers.
An hour passed. Two. She found cross-references buried in footnotes, definitions hidden in appendices, an entire architecture of meaning concealed beneath the surface text.
Three hours later, she understood.
The Henderson merger wasn’t just acquiring a pharmaceutical company. Hidden in deliberately obscure language, language designed to be overlooked, to slide past conscious attention like water off glass, was a clause that would transfer something else entirely. Something that belonged to Henderson’s employees. Something they couldn’t legally give away because it wasn’t theirs to transfer.
Their souls.
Not metaphorically. Not as a figure of speech. The contract specified mechanisms for extraction, storage, and transfer. It referenced previous cases. It cited precedents.
This was real. This waslegal. Someone had written case law for the buying and selling of human souls.
And Victor Morningstar had given it to her on her first day. As a test.
What kind of test had an answer like this?
She was still staring at the page, her hands trembling and her coffee long cold, when the conference room door opened.
Victor entered first. Five others followed.
“Ms. Feng.” His voice was smooth, unruffled, like he hadn’t just walked in on her discovering that souls were a tradeable commodity. “Allow me to introduce the managing partners.”
