Chapter 19
She woke up to satiny scales pressed against her back, and for just a minute, did her best to luxuriate in it instead of jumping straight to the worrying. Lucareoth rolled over and gave her a slow, sleepy smile. A little later they had to rush to get out the door on time.
She managed to carry the glow all the way through her first coffee at the office before it died.
Kelly knocked on the door right around the time Morgan was considering throwing the laptop out the window. Here came the question Morgan had been dreading for weeks. “How’s the demo looking?”
Luke scootched his chair back. He wasn’t sure how much he should touch her in public, she could tell. She wished he could have squeezed her hand.
“I can’t get it to work,” Morgan confessed, feeling the weight of her failure.
She should have asked. Sure, there had always been other priorities, but she should have confessed.
Now they had four hours before they failed in front of people who could rip out their throats and then all of New York fell to earthquake and fire.
Also, she lost her job and didn’t get a good reference.
It was going to make Winter Solstice with her parents awkward, one way or another.
Kelly glanced at Carter.
“It doesn’t work,” Carter said.
“Wait, what?” She blinked at him.
“It’s a demo,” Kelly said. “I didn’t ask how it worked, I asked how it looked.”
“But that’s,” she trailed off.
“The whole demo is a lie,” Luke said slowly.
“It’s not a lie, it’s a demo,” Carter said. He didn’t look happy, though.
Kelly sighed. “I promise you, more tech demos are, shall we say, artful than not.”
All this time she’d been worried about confessing that she didn’t know how to get the demo to work, and it never worked in the first place? “You’re saying you want me to fake this.”
“Did I say that?” Kelly raised her eyebrows.
“No, but you implied it pretty heavily!”
Kelly stared her down. She also didn’t look happy, Morgan noted.
“OK.” Morgan took a big breath through her nose. This was a different kind of problem. A problem she could solve, actually. Could have solved days ago, if she’d just swallowed her pride and asked. “Carter, can you change the URL the search button links to so it goes to a static page?”
Carter gave her a quick nod. “Send me the specs.”
“Make sure the initial sign-up page is part of the demo package, too,” Kelly said.
“The sign-up page?” Who cared about the sign-up page? Those all looked the same.
“Brad added it to the list this morning with exclamation marks,” Kelly said, as if that explained everything.
It kind of did. “Brad gets what Brad wants.”
Kelly nodded sharply and left them to it.
“Oh god, how are we going to get this done in four hours?” Morgan looked at Luke in a panic.
“Morgan. Think,” he said.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Magic. Can you get Brad to sign off on a miracle?”
“Already Slacked him,” Luke said.
She rubbed her face. “Why didn’t we simply ask him to approve making the product work?”
“Pretty sure Carter would have noticed that one.”
“Does that matter?” It was a tough balance.
Magic could absolutely make some of their problems go away.
But like they said on that TV show (highly inaccurate regarding demons, yet funny nonetheless) it was like a Molotov cocktail.
If you threw one at your problem, you might or might not solve the problem, but you could absolutely guarantee you would have an entirely different problem.
How much could they change before someone noticed?
And how many mundane bystanders could notice before the Shadow Council caught on?
“Uh oh,” Luke said.
“No,” she said. “I refuse. I forbid any ‘uh ohs’ at this juncture.”
“OK,” Luke said. “How about ‘oh shits’?”
She groaned. “Tell me.”
“Brad wants to pivot again.”
She took another big calming breath. It wasn’t calming her like the YouTube meditation video had promised. She stuck her head out the door. “Kelly? Carter?”
Morgan could see Kelly anticipate, and go dead behind the eyes.
“Brad wants to pivot,” Morgan said in the most neutral voice she could manage.
“Does he.” Kelly knocked on Carter’s glass wall. Carter choked back a reaction. “Let’s go get some details, shall we?”
Kelly led the group next door to Brad’s office. Mercifully, no one questioned the intern’s presence and Morgan once again blessed Luke’s unobtrusiveness field. Or maybe they were all just too worried.
“Brad.” Kelly wore only the most perfunctory of smiles. “Morgan here tells me you have some new thoughts on the product.”
“Just the people I wanted to see! You know the founders’ WhatsApp group I’m in?” Brad gave them a blinding smile without taking his feet off the desk.
Kelly nodded with a hint of weariness that suggested she had heard of the group far more than she had wanted to.
“Scuttlebutt is that quantum is out,” Brad continued. “So we’re going to need to strip that from all our materials. Don’t want to be yesterday’s news.”
“Including the presentation that’s in”—Kelly glanced at her phone—“three and a half hours?”
“Megan knows how to find and replace,” Brad waved away the objection.
“Replace with what, though?” Kelly asked. It was fascinating. Her face hadn’t changed at all, but Morgan could see the cord in her neck starting to stand out.
“Health and wellness is where all the money is at right now,” Brad assured them blithely. “It’s critical to really get employees personally invested.”
“Our product is a quantum-based hiring platform, though,” Carter said. He sounded like he was starting to hyperventilate a little.
“Quantum-based wellness,” Brad said. “It’s just a little jump.”
“We haven’t even been talking about quantum-based wellness for a week,” Carter said in a strangled voice.
“Then you don’t have much to undo!” Brad said. “That’s why we use agile methodologies.”
“That’s not what agile means,” Carter started to say.
“Great, great, can’t wait to see what you folks come up with,” Brad said, finally taking his feet off the desk.
“We haven’t come up with anything,” Carter tried to inject.
“Well, obviously, that’s why you need the big picture guy,” Brad said, physically ushering them out of his office. “Now all you have to do is fill in the little details. Lloyd here can help.”
“My name is Luke,” Luke said.
“Thanks, Leo,” Brad said. He shut the door on all of them.
Kelly rubbed the bridge of her nose. “OK. This is what we’re going to do.
There’s no way to change the demo in time.
Morgan, I need you to find the latest health and wellness studies—we’re going super-high-level.
Again. Focus is on the addressable market, we’ll go light on details on what we’re actually doing. ”
Morgan bit her lip. “What do we do with the Walmart case study?”
“Forget the case study. What are we going to do with the Walmart pilot program? They’re expecting a hiring platform, not a health and wellness platform.” Carter was taking deep breaths through his nose and Morgan wondered if he’d also watched meditation guides on YouTube.
“We’re going to keep moving forward with Walmart, and leave their logo on the slide,” Kelly said. “But kill the case study.”
Luke raised a hand tentatively. “I might be able to f—” he choked on the word ‘fake’. “Fix up something that’s wellnessthemed.”
Carter looked at him with narrowed eyes. Kelly raised an eyebrow. “In three hours.”
“I didn’t say it would work,” he said. “But I, uh—”
“What he’s too modest to say is that he did something similar for school last semester,” Morgan filled in for him. “He was showing it to me the other day. We can slap some new branding on it and make the links on the first screen of the demo go there.”
Kelly looked at them for a long moment. “I want to see what you’ve got in an hour and a half.”
“You got it,” Morgan said. She did not have it. At all. But she’d make do.
“Ronaldo,” Kelly called. “I need you to make a coffee run. Whatever Morgan and Luke want. It’s on my card.”
Morgan was not a big enough person not to revel in the dark look Ronaldo gave them at being forced to run their errands. Although whether adding caffeine on top of the adrenaline was a good idea was an open question.
She waited until the door had closed and everyone had sat back at their respective desks before she leaned her head close to Luke. “Can we really pull this off?”
“Making a fake demo?” He shrugged. “It’s a lot easier than some of the requests that come as part of Deals, for sure.”
“Can you actually fake a demo? Or is that lying?”
His look turned inward. “I can’t fake a demo. But I can make a demo that resembles what Brad is saying he wants as long as someone specifically tells me what it’s supposed to look like. And I’m not the one claiming it works. He can lie as much as he wants.”
“That’s some sophistry, there.”
“That’s how we get Deals done.”
“Think the vampires will notice?”
“I’m less worried about the fact they’re vampires than the fact they’re venture capitalists,” Luke admitted. “If people fake demos all the time, and venture capitalists see lots of demos, won’t they know what it looks like when a demo is faked?”
“Maybe they see so many faked demos, they don’t even care anymore,” she said. It came out more fatalistic than she’d intended.
“This would be funny if we didn’t have to be in the conference room.” Luke said, equally gloomy. He slipped his foot over to rest on hers, behind their bags where no one could see. It helped a little.
Sensing the mood, Rix lay his head on Morgan’s knee. Luke wordlessly handed her the roll of aluminum foil he now kept on her desk, and squeezed her hand. She slipped a sheet under the dog’s head to catch the acid drool before it could burn through her pants and got to work.
* * *
The conference room at Ravenfell was somehow exactly what she had been expecting.