Chapter 23
Day Two
(age twenty-four)
Kelli’s ears rang as the doors to the warehouse closed behind her.
Through a hall and up another, shorter flight of stairs, the guards led her into a peculiar room.
The noise of the rest of the distribution center fell away, near-perfectly muffled.
The doors closed behind her and Rowan and left them in a sitting room, red and brown, plushly carpeted and covered in wall hangings, everything lavish and overstuffed.
Even more scent diffusers hung from the ceiling here than in the other corridors Kelli had walked through, and the smell of cinnamon and sandalwood suffused everything, so overpoweringly that it drowned out the eggs.
In the biggest, squishiest armchair at the center of the room sat one of the most striking women Kelli had ever seen.
She wasn’t beautiful. Her face was jowly, her figure broad.
She was olive-skinned and middle-aged, with dark shiny hair cut to chin length and immaculately waved.
She wore a perfectly tailored red skirtsuit and matching flats, looking very expensive but not especially daring, aside from the color; it was the kind of suit a politician might wear.
But what caught Kelli’s attention over and above all that was something harder to define.
It was in the way she held herself, sharp and regal, relaxed and alert; it was in the way everyone else in the room held themselves.
Even to Kelli, who wasn’t very good at nonverbal communication, it was immediately clear that this was Conchita Quixada, the crime boss Rowan worked for.
It was immediately clear that everyone else in the room would jump when she told them to, or maybe even before that, and that she expected no less.
Conchita glanced at Kelli with mild interest, as if Kelli were the dozenth contestant in a dog show with hundreds of similar-looking, preening, straining specimens.
Kelli, who had forgotten to ask about the etiquette for meeting a crime boss, just stood there.
Rowan was the one who inclined his head with a little flourish.
“Boss, this is Kelli Reynolds, as requested, Inspiration’s script supervisor for Ship of Fools. Kelli, these are my clients, Conchita Quixada and Rosaura Quixada.”
Rosaura sat perched in a chair at Conchita’s left side, a startlingly young-looking girl, even though Rowan had warned Kelli she was turning sixteen.
She’d inherited her mother’s broad figure but also someone’s large eyes and pointed chin, her eager face ringed by long, bouncing curls.
She wore an iridescent gown with a flouncy, floor-length skirt and long, sparkly nails to match.
She looked up at Kelli with an unnerving intensity, like Kelli was the best and fluffiest dog in the whole show.
Kelli didn’t know what to do in the face of both of those stares. Bow her head? Shake their hands?
“Um,” she stammered, “pleased to meet you. And happy birthday.”
One of the guards gestured her into a creakingly soft chair and poured her a glass of garnet-colored wine. Kelli didn’t drink, as a rule, but she took the tiniest of sips to be polite.
“Pleased to meet you,” said Rosaura. “You don’t know how much I love your work.
I am positively in love with Orlando. I am his biggest fan—I earned that title formally on the fan feeds, you know.
I do know you’re not allowed on the fan feeds—Mama’s explained to me how that works.
But that only makes me ever so much more grateful to be able to meet you like this.
Please, tell me everything about him. Is it true what Rowan says—that he used to be your imaginary friend, growing up? ”
“Well,” said Kelli, “not quite an imaginary friend. It’s not like I was having conversations with him in my head.
But I used to tell stories and act them out with Rowan and my other friends.
Orlando was in some of those stories, only back then, he was actually a woman.
We loved the idea of a lady pirate, back then. We called her Orlande.”
“That’s ever so delightful,” said Rosaura, clasping her hands in pleasure.
“Rowan and his ilk always told me that Inspiration’s algorithms are designed to remove anything human and personal, but I knew it couldn’t quite be true.
Not when characters like Orlando are still capable of touching our hearts. So is Orlando entirely yours?”
For a moment, Kelli wondered if Rosaura was trying to bait her into confessing to something she shouldn’t have done. But she hadn’t done anything like that. Even when she wrote the character kernel, she’d played by the rules.
“Well, I created him using KernelGen, of course,” said Kelli.
“It’s more complicated than the StoryGen that you use when you’re in school, but the principle is the same.
You write a little, you ask the program to write a little, you modify it where you need.
It’s never completely one person, but it’s like anything else. It’s turn-taking, isn’t it?”