Winter is coming? Screw that.
Melissa wasn't about to miss a deadline just because Jack Frost had decided to vomit forth a blizzard of glitter in a city that didn't know what to do with snow. All morning, her programmers had been sticking their heads in the door with a litany of excuses: kids stuck at school, sick moms who needed medicine, that frantic need to stock up on milk and bread that made no sense unless one was a French toast chef. Melissa had smiled and waved them on, knowing it would come down to her, a souped-up Mac, and an entire pot of coffee swiped from the CEO's private kitchen after he'd given her a good-natured hug and abandoned ship. And that was okay. She liked playing the hero and hitting Send moments before the client's clock ticked down, especially when no one believed it could be done.
As it turned out, hitting deadlines was a rare superpower to have.
“Lissa, you want a ride home? It's getting thick out there.” One of the newer programmers fidgeted in her doorway, keys jingling in his hand. He reminded her of a gangly fawn in a plaid shirt, but he could code—and hack— like hell. “I got a big truck with 4WD.”
She looked outside and performed some overly generous mental calculus. “Thanks, Murphy, but I'll be fine. Got to finish the wireframes by two to stay on schedule. I'll get home in time. You go on.”
“Um.” Fidget, fidget. He dropped his keys. The programmers liked her, but the new ones were always slightly terrified to defy her. Even though she was Tinkerbell-sized, she resembled Wonder Woman more than a little, from her black hair, blue eyes, and trademark red lips to the muscles she developed in the company gym. “You sure? Because they're saying the roads are already icing up. You just got a little sedan, right?”
“You know what they say: drive a little sedan, carry a big stick.”
She held up her keychain, which had a repli Mjölnir ca of Thor's Mjölnir on it. Of course, she actually meant that she had full-wheel drive and a manual transmission, but Murphy must've detected a slight euphemism, as the poor kid turned red, spluttered, and gulped audibly.
“Uh, okay. Um, good luck getting home. Might not want to wait until two, though. For real. You could get stuck here. Can't you just work remote?”
Melissa shook her thick, black mane. “I don't work from home. Home is where I relax. My Fortress of Solitude. I'll finish here, and if that means I sleep under my desk, so be it.”
He paused, one hand on the doorframe, turning from red back to pink. “There's a futon in the art department, if it gets that bad. And I have some chips in my desk.”
“You're my hero, Murph,” she said, and he looked like she'd just chucked a bag of gold coins at him.
“Good luck, then.”
With a wave, he disappeared.
“I don't need luck. I have skills,” she muttered to herself, turning back to the huge monitors sprawled over her desk. “Right, Jarvis?” The computer didn't talk back, but it did everything she asked without complaining, so she figured she was one up on Tony Stark.
Murph was the last person to stop by, and Lissa slipped in her earbuds, cranked up her playlist, and lost herself in the work. When she finally hit Send and looked up again with a fierce grin, the window showed only opaque white. She couldn't even see the parking lot down below where her racy vintage Bimmer waited alone in a cloak of snow. Plucking out her earbuds, she was assailed by the weirdest sound ever: utter silence. Outside of the buzz of lights and monitors, Interprog Marketing was as quiet and still as the surface of the moon.
“Cool,” she said, the words over-loud in the silence as she hopped out of her chair and stretched until her back popped. “Time to go hunting.”
Prowling the empty office halls was much like navigating the dungeon of a video game or walking through a zombiepocalypse. Empty desks, dark offices, quiet cubes, a flickering light every now and then. No
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