Strike Me Down - Mindy Mejia Page 0,61
arms as the elevator door opened to the stadium press box. Sara waited on the other side holding a laptop and a breakfast shake. Feigning deafness to the argument in progress, she handed me the cup and fell into step behind us.
“It’s our largest, most engaged community—”
“Who live ninety-two percent outside Minneapolis.” I gestured to the world at large, as if anyone out there was capable of helping me in here.
We were among the last to arrive at the meeting. This morning’s tournament update was being held on-site for the Fourth of July exhibition, which was already underway. The rest of the management team stood at the panoramic edge of the press box, talking and pointing at things beyond our view.
“It’s the quickest way to reach the most people.” C.J. hammered her point home. “We have an eighty-eight percent open rate on the subscriber campaigns and the detective said urgency was critical, that eyewitnesses might forget what they saw if—”
“I doubt anyone is going to forget, now, that we had a violent incident at our inaugural Strike Down.”
“An accident. Don’t say incident; it’s evasive and makes people want more information.” She paused at the edge of the room, away from the chatter at the windows. “And it didn’t happen at Strike Down. It happened outside the stadium, which the email—you might note—makes perfectly clear. Relax, Gregg, and let me handle it. We’re out in front of it now. People aren’t getting hearsay through back channels; they’re getting the news direct from us and we appear more committed than ever to protecting our community. The message is that we fight for each other at Strike. We’ll fight for them, too.”
Two more managers filed past us toward the people lining the window. I shook my head and muscled down the warnings still firing in my gut. “God, we could’ve sold tickets just to watch you work.”
She tipped her head and gave a graceful magician’s flourish. “You’re the only one who can afford the seats.”
We joined the rest of the team where the exhibition sprawled into view and the roiling in my intestines momentarily froze. I’d just come through the stadium floor but it looked completely different from up here. Thousands of heads became a sea of pixels, moving and shifting through the rings of vendor booths and demonstration areas. Giant lines snaked out of the concourses by the virtual reality booths, waiting to fight. According to the contractors, vStrike had been operating nonstop since opening night, with never less than a thirty-minute wait. It was our highest-trending hashtag for the last twenty-four hours, surpassing even Logan, and the buzz was only growing, filling the back of my head with a whisper of promise.
On the field, a tightly coiled queue of people waited to meet their favorite athletes, who shook hands and posed for selfies against red carpet backdrops. Swarms of teenagers surrounded the three rings, where Strike Next athletes, paired with trainers, were teaching self-defense basics. The kid in the middle ring doubled over, jerking the trainer over her back and throwing him onto the floor. The onlookers jumped and cheered.
Still, there were bare areas—great patches of grass, undisturbed by the pixels, void and empty. Exhibition day, the penultimate day of the tournament, should have been pure spectacle, a siege of fans and enthusiasts. There shouldn’t have been room to breathe.
“It’s not even noon yet.” C.J. rebuked the thought before I could voice it.
“It’s the Fourth of July. Blue sky, seventy-four degrees. No one’s working and we’ve thrown open the doors of the premier venue to the premier event of the summer. We should’ve seen a surge by now.”
“They’re sleeping in. Fireworks aren’t until ten. Get your mind off the notice.”
The notice was only part of the problem, the tiny fraction of it I could vocalize. I stared at the lower sections of mostly empty seats, where sporadic groups of people lounged, taking a break or having a snack. Above them, the suites lay dark and dormant, including the one Parrish Forensics had bought for opening night. My attention had risen with helium force throughout that night, subconsciously searching for Nora’s husband, my perverse, piss-marking need to see what he looked like, how he acted. I hadn’t noticed Corbett MacDermott at all. I hadn’t realized how much one man’s broken body was going to matter.
It had been twenty-three hours since I’d last seen Nora. Twenty-three hours since I’d kissed her and twenty-three hours since she’d discovered the path to the missing millions.