This rather long excerpt comes from the beginning of Collapsing Paradise, which is the most recent addition to the currently four-story-long Paradise series. In this scene, the Paradise staff wakes up to find a book–a real, rare, mysterious book–sitting on the desk in their main office. The book becomes mightily important later. In the mean time, I just like this scene for its interactions between the main characters.
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Elim had meant to go and boot up his screens for the day, but…well, it was a book. A real one, with a deep blue cover and yellowed pages, still edged in what looked like real gold and bound together with ancient glue. Heavy gold and silver thread twined across the spine and cover to form an elaborate flowing pattern of reaching vines and fruit-bearing branches that encircled an archaic symbol in the middle that might have been a representation of a planet. There was no title, at least not on the cover. He hadn’t dared touch the thing, let alone open it.
It was very, very old, and probably invaluable on any number of financial and cultural levels. Finding this just sitting here was like finding a bar of platinum under your pillow, only more surprising. Elim tilted his head from side to side to see the light shimmer off the gold and silver thread. He was so absorbed that he completely failed to notice when someone else entered the room through the main entrance directly behind him.
The figure padded silently across the thick cream-colored carpet, navigated around the semi-circles of dark blue couches in the middle of the circular room, and came to a stop directly behind Elim, all without making a sound.
And then it spoke. “Having fun?”
The Operator startled guiltily and turned to see who’d snuck up on him. Unsurprisingly, he was greeted by the sight of Triyankast, his human coworker and friend, who was grinning mischievously. The expression was a very familiar one to Elim.
Triyankast was handsome in that cliché, flawless, utterly charming kind of way that rarely existed outside of advertisements. The gleaming brown eyes, perfect brown hair and slightly tanned skin, along with a dazzling smile, had the ability to stop a passing female at thirty yards if Tri focused his attention. It was a deceptive trait that he used to his advantage. Those who knew the young man well agreed that his natural mischief and penchant for trouble (not to mention the fact that he’d spent most of his early life as an accomplished thief and conman) far outweighed his physical attractiveness and charisma.
He also had a bad habit of sneaking up on people—especially Elim, whose mercurial eyes still turned magenta when he was unpleasantly surprised, no matter how hard he tried to control the reaction.
“Stop doing that,” the Almarian reprimanded, his eyes already fading to something more like blue. He ruffled his mess of black hair in a gesture that did nothing to cover his embarrassment; the silver streaks amidst his dark curls caught the light like the threads on the book behind him.
“Magenta’s a good color on you,” Tri replied without apology as he joined Elim, leaning on the back of the couch facing the desk. “What are we looking at?”
All annoyance was instantly forgotten. “It’s a book,” Elim breathed reverently, his accent giving the word a cultured kind of weight. “A real one.”
Tri gave a low whistle of appreciation. The former conman merely shrugged in response to his friend’s mockingly raised eyebrow. “Hey, I may not read much, but even I have to respect something worth more than I am in solid gold.”
Elim conceded that with a nod. They both stood silent for a moment, heads turning this way and that in identical postures to the one Tri had found Elim in a moment before. “See the way it shimmers?” Elim murmured.
The other man’s thoughts were on a different track. “It would be impossible to sell illegally,” Tri said absently. Elim turned to stare at him. “What?” he said defensively. “It’s true! Something that unique is impossible to fence off unless you have someone ready to buy it on the other end. Who’s it for?”
Elim narrowed his eyes in a way that said he’d seen right through the other man’s abrupt subject change, but he answered anyway. “It’s for the Boss.” He nodded towards the note resting next to the book. It was just a square of heavy paper, and written on it in loopy letters with thick blue ink was their employer’s name: Ano. Just the one word. No explanation, not even a sign-for receipt.
“Mysterious,” Tri whispered in the voice reserved for secrets and ghost stories. “Secret admirer, I’ll bet you anything.”
“Who has a secret admirer?”
The two men turned to see Jenny enter the lobby from her office. The wall to the right of the main entrance was a smooth curve of glass divided by five evenly spaced glass doors, each leading to the office of a Paradise team member, and farther back into their own small set of rooms. Jenny’s was the second to last, between Becken’s dark office space on one side and Tri’s on the other at the end of the row, nearly opposite the main entrance.
The young woman joined them leaning against the couch. She leaned easily against Tri’s side as his arm went comfortably around her waist. Her brown hair was brushed back into a simple ponytail, and her pale skin was still flushed pink with the remnants of sleep. “Is that a book?”
“Looks like,” Elim confirmed.
They let her have her moment of awe. Eventually she shook herself. “Who’s it for?”
“Ano,” the other two answered in unison.
“We don’t know who dropped it off,” Tri continued, his eyebrows raised dramatically.
Jenny’s blue eyes sparkled mischievously. “Has anyone opened it?”
Tri snorted disbelievingly at the same time Elim replied, “You first!”
She pouted, a little crestfallen, and tilted her head to look up at her boyfriend with pleading eyes. It was something she’d never try with Ano in the room, but with the Boss gone for the moment, it seemed that all was fair in love and books.
“Oh no,” Tri responded instantly, jostling her to disentangle their arms so he could take a step away from her, the counter and the temptation of the book. “No way am I opening that thing without an engraved invitation from a literary deity! Or the Boss.”
“What about me?”
All three junior employees froze guiltily, even though none of them had technically done anything wrong yet. They watched Ano come in through the door of her office, clearly just out of the sonishower in her quarters. She ruffled her short blue hair with her fingers, leaving it fluffed to dry. Her green eyes narrowed as she took in their expressions. Unsurprisingly, she immediately zeroed in on Tri. “What did you do?”
“Nothing!” he held his hands up again and backed up so he stood in the middle of the room, out of touching range of anything. “I have not so much as laid a finger on the priceless object! I have witnesses!”
Ano grinned a little at that, which told them all right away that she wasn’t remotely upset with any of them. “You’re getting rusty,” she told Tri with a sly smile. “That denial was much more convincing the first time I heard it.”
That startled a full-bodied laugh out of Tri, and surprised glances from Elim and Jenny. Getting Ano to talk about the past—or getting Tri or Becken to discuss it either, for that matter—had until this point been an exercise in futility. Laughing at Tri’s former criminal ways was unprecedented. A lot of things had changed since Ano had nearly died last month. Still, the new, sharing-friendly office atmosphere was going to take some getting used to.
Elim felt his shoulders relax considerably as Ano wandered over to the desk. She touched his shoulder as she passed in her normal greeting, and he had to fight to keep the blush off his cheeks, even though she’d done it every day for the last four Cycles.
Ano gave a low whistle of appreciation as she came to the book. The other three instantly gathered round her, looking for information like sharks scouted for unsuspecting fish. Her hand drifted towards the heavy cover seemingly of its volition before she redirected it at the last moment to pick up the note instead. She read it, then turned it over curiously, looking for indicators on the paper. “Who dropped it off?”
“The door doesn’t have a record,” Elim answered. He watched her face carefully as he said it—this wouldn’t be the first time that Ano had managed to get something delivered without telling any of them what it was, or who was responsible for procuring it. The three dozen bronze-plated ND manifolds that had miraculously appeared on the docks three months ago just when Elim had run out of them came to mind.
But today, Ano’s eyebrows raised in surprise at Elim’s news. “No record at all? Becken is going to have a fit.” She caught his eyes and said seriously, “Figure out how they managed to get past the protocols. Regardless of who they were, I don’t like people walking in unannounced.”
He nodded in understanding, and glanced at Tri and Jenny. They were both staring at the book again. For a few moments, they were all quiet, lost in their own personal studies.
Ano looked up from her own intent scrutiny to see the others still grouped around her. “Don’t you all have work to do?” The pitifully curious looks she received at that were enough to soften the hardest resolve. She shook her head in resignation. “This is why I need Becken here.”
“Where is Mr. I-have-to-work, anyway?” Tri wondered. Jenny elbowed him in the side rather indiscreetly. He shrugged unapologetically. “What? I haven’t even seen him in three days. I think he inspected all the 200-level pods completely on his own.”
Ano sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “He’s sleeping. Finally.”
Elim raised his eyebrows. “How did you manage that?” he asked before he realized he probably didn’t want to know.
“Threats of physical violence,” came her deadpan reply. “After this little stunt, I’ll likely never listen to him again when he complains about me not getting enough rest.”
“He was worried about you,” Jenny said softly. “We all were. We kind of…let things go, for a while.”
Ano’s gaze gentled as she gave Jenny a small smile of thanks.
When no one else spoke, Elim cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Still, the rest of us managed to find the time to sleep since you’ve been back.”
“And intelligence like that is why I hired you to begin with,” Ano said brightly. Elim noticed that she was deliberately avoiding giving the impression that she cared about the book at all. Somewhere in the back of his head, warning bells began to sound faintly. Still, he listened when she prodded them, “Now come on, we have work to do. Get moving!”
With a few last curious looks, they finally did as they were told.
