Earth, Omaha, Nebraska

  Violet Davis-Kobayashi, Data Scientist and CTO of Wellify

  Violet arrived at Wellify’s office a few minutes before lunch. Today, she took the front door, hugging the wall like a spy so no one would spot her through the window.

  Their small headquarters had that open-office-y startup vibe. The CEO refused to change it, even after Violet presented him with scientific proof that open offices hinder collaboration and destroy developer focus.

  Not that he didn’t believe her—Tom took all of her advice seriously these days—but he would sacrifice productivity if it meant visitors swooned over his trendy office space.

  Which almost made it worse.

  Violet’s arsenal was in her messenger bag, along with her laptop. She pulled out two Nerf guns and checked that she’d loaded them. Her team always thought they would pull one over on her, but Vi was the queen of the Nerf-snipe.

  The receptionist was not at her desk when she slipped through the door, so Vi ducked to take cover in front of it. She was positive she snuck in undetected.

  She peeked out to see where her coworkers were. Time almost stood still for a moment, and all she saw were systems, patterns, trajectories.

  Alice hadn’t slept well last night, Jason was in a terrible mood, and Tabby was in a new relationship. Erika was having one of her superstar days. Awesome.

  Something was off about their demeanor, and several must have been out for an early lunch. Or maybe a late coffee.

  Violet didn’t question this ability anymore. This hyper-perception thing—that’s what she’d been calling it in her head—had been happening for months.

  She’d take in information and then just know things. Her Syndrome Q seemed to have done more than make her hypersensitive and exhausted, but this near-precognitive intuition was bizarre.

  Vi certainly hadn’t told anyone.

  About the hyper-perception or the Q. Not really a sharer.

  Stashing her laptop bag under the desk, she flipped up the hood of her favorite Cowboy Bebop hoodie. Let’s jam! Four years of Aikido in Japan and a decade of Jiu-Jitsu in the US enabled her to do showy stunts like the one she was about to do.

  A side roll brought her to her feet to the left of the desk, and then she sprinted for the whiteboard across the room, firing on her team as she moved.

  Tabby. Aiden. Celeste. Jason.

  Hit. Hit. Hit. Hit.

  She ducked behind the whiteboard and heard the room scrambling while she ran along the other side. She had to stay light on her feet.

  Jason’s shout rang out, “Crap—she’s early, guys!”

  Nerf bullets pinged off the other side of the board, and one whizzed past her legs, but she had already darted for her desk.

  “Take cover, people!” someone called out—Celeste, maybe? No time to check.

  Violet strafed sideways, taking advantage of years of footwork drills, and spotted Gigi heading out of the breakroom with her unicorn mug. Violet pegged her with a dart and heard her yelp, “Dangit, Vi—that one went in my coffee. Gross.”

  Once tucked away behind her desk, she reached under it to pull out her battery-operated mega Nerf cannon, nicknamed ‘Vera’—because Firefly, duh—and plopped it on the desktop.

  She pulled the trigger, preparing to rain fire down upon her team, and heard ‘click-click-click-click-click.’

  What the ...?

  “Looking for these?” The new guy, Bastion, called out from the dark conference room behind her ... right before he and three others ran out, peppering her with projectiles.

  Vi yanked her hood further down to shield her face, then held her hands up in surrender. “Yield! I yield—you guys got me. I submit to your superior battle strategy.”

  She stooped to gather ammo with the rest of the team.

  “I hope you guys didn’t waste all morning sitting in the dark,” she joked.

  “Oh, no worries. We set up our laptops in the conference room, and Erika said she’d text us when you got here. Besides, I like working in the dark,” Bastion said.

  “Yeah, I get that,” Vi said, nodding. “It’s a coder thing.”

  Jason piped up, “When Bas told us the plan, we told him he was crazy for touching your stuff, Vi.”

  Violet shrugged. “Eh, it was clever. I’ll allow it.”

  She looked over at Bastion, the new guy. He wore an old-school Zelda shirt, bringing him up a notch in her book. Catching his gaze, she sent him an awkward smile.

  Social interaction was a bitch, and eye contact was her nemesis.

  Being the center of attention made her uncomfortable, but as the CTO, she had to suck it up.

  This daily shootout ritual of theirs counted as team-building, and she’d much rather do this than sit around and endure some corporate bonding crap.

  Trust falls? Hellz, no.

  Violet went to the reception desk to retrieve her laptop bag and checked the time.

  Ten minutes before her one-on-one with the CEO.

  She pulled out her laptop and headed to the break room for a much-needed coffee.

  Soft footsteps sounded as she rummaged through the fridge for her cream. Her martial arts training put her on high alert, though she knew it was just one of the team. She didn’t turn around to check, and a moment later, Jason sidled up next to her.

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  He leaned in, not invading her personal space, but close enough to whisper, “Hey, Vi?”

  “Uh-huh?” She checked behind half a dozen cans of Red Bull and finally located her cream.

  “So what’s up with all these investor types who keep coming around? We looking for VC funding or something? Financial troubles?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Boss hasn’t mentioned anything to me. Partners? Investors? Who knows … but not financial troubles. That much I know.”

  She snagged a spoon from the drawer, and it clattered into her mug. Clink, clink, clink, as she stirred. Bright lights. The whirring of the fridge. Voices in the adjacent room. So many stimuli.

  Jason hadn’t responded, so she forced her attention back to the conversation. “If it makes you feel better, a round of funding would mean stock options for everyone.”

  “Yeah ...?”

  “Hey, try not to worry about it. Just write some kickass code. Ignore the suit parade. They don’t matter—it’s all about the code.”

  Jason grinned. “Yeah, if you’re sure. Thanks, Vi.”

  “No prob. Nice chat, but I gotta run. Time to meet with the boss man.”

  He chuckled. “Gotcha. Hey, can I swing by your desk later? I’m working on a comp of these API libraries and wanted your input.”

  “Sure thing!” she said, backing out of the breakroom. “I’ll be back in like 10, maybe 15? Bring Erika and Gigi along. We can brainstorm.”

  She swung by her desk to grab her laptop before heading to the CEO’s office—the only one with a door that shut, unlike the rest of them stuck in the bullpen—and rapped on the door frame.

  Because even though he had a door, Tom liked to leave it open. Eye roll.

  “Hey, Vi—come on in. Hey, close the door behind you, will you?”

  Well, well, well. Look who decided to use his fancy-schmancy door.

  Tom Alderson, the CEO of Wellify, dressed like a recovering corporate tool who was now trying to pull off ‘Silicon Valley chic.’ Khaki shorts, a fitted polo shirt, and Birkenstocks brought him oh-so-close, but it was all very ‘uncanny valley’—like he was cosplaying as a tech geek.

  The whole thing came off … creepy.

  But he was an okay guy. At least he gave a damn about the app—back when his wife had MS, anyway.

  Now that Microbe X had cured her, the jerk was considering an acquisition by Hope Pharmaceuticals.

  Part of her felt guilty for keeping Jason in the dark, but it wasn’t like she was lying—Tom hadn’t breathed a word to her about the sale. Thanks to Syndrome Q, she just knew.

  Maybe it was the travel magazine she spotted on his desk the other day. Or the way he’d been slowly clearing out his office. Something in the body language during his meeting with those corporate goons from Hope Pharma last week ...

  Violet couldn’t pinpoint how she knew he was thinking about selling out. She just knew.

  The entire situation was shouting the truth at her, even though no one had said a word.

  It reminded her of the early days of the Microbe X debacle, when those first ‘tainted blood samples’ surfaced. A couple of weeks later, reports started popping up about people miraculously recovering from terminal illnesses.

  There hadn’t been much to go on, but the clues spoke to Vi and—though she didn’t know it at the time—to her hyper-perception.

  Amid the chaos, she shorted the hell out of the medical industry—placing huge bets that Big Pharma and private hospitals would go belly up. Though, she could’ve made bank by shorting an index fund, because worldwide stock markets plummeted during the chaos.

  But she’d known the medical industry was about to implode. Targeting ‘Big Medicine’ made her an absolute killing, and she was more than happy to take their investors’ filthy money.

  Vi had amassed a tidy little crypto fortune, all under the radar, thanks to her ... other skills. Skills she rarely used anymore, but getting wealthy at the expense of big pharma had seemed like an appropriate situation to make an exception and dust off her grey hat.

  Then, while everyone else reeled from the financial collapse, Vi sensed the next big shift.

  A month later, she waltzed into Tom’s office, suggesting they add functionality for that bizarre new illness the media dubbed ‘Syndrome Q.’

  Because she knew, somehow, that Microbe X—though the press still called it the ‘cryospore’ back then—was gonna wipe out every disease ... except Syndrome Q.

  He’d been a tough sell, so Violet told him she ran a statistical blah-blah model that predicted blah-blah growth in those with Syndrome Q over blah-blah timeframe.

  ‘I have a hunch,’ would not exactly have flown.

  Fast-forward a few months, and the medical industry was in shambles. Wellify rolled out its Syndrome Q update and was suddenly the sole player in the game.

  That’s when Tom dubbed her ‘the data whisperer,’ because Vi’s foresight had single-handedly saved the company. Now, he had investors and partners crawling all over the office, practically breaking down the doors.

  Which made it all the more infuriating that Tom hadn’t consulted her on this whole Hope Pharma thing. Deep down, he probably suspected she would flat-out tell him it was a terrible idea.

  Which, to be fair, was 100% accurate.

  She rolled the yoga ball out from the corner of the room and plopped down on it, then set her laptop on the edge of Tom’s desk. “Whatcha got for me today, boss?”

  “Hey, Vi! I was wondering if you could put together an estimate on how long it would take to prep our data for—”

  Tom glanced down at his notes. “Third-party real-time integration. And another for a—”

  He checked his notes. Again.

  “—historical data export. How long, how much, how many people?”

  Vi jotted down notes as he spoke. “Yeah, sure, Tom. Mind if I ask why?”

  But she knew why—he was selling them to Hope Pharma, and the vultures wanted to know how quickly they could get their grubby little hands on Wellify’s user data. Maybe he’d take this opportunity to fess up already.

  “Is that important?” Tom sounded legitimately clueless, so Violet swallowed her exasperation and answered.

  “Oh, for sure—the estimate can vary a ton depending on who the data is for. We need to know what data they need, the data models or format they prefer, if they expect us to push the data, or if we should build an API. That sort of thing.”

  He exhaled, looking relieved. “Gotcha. You’ve probably noticed we’ve had some visitors around the office. We’ve had inquiries from universities and research institutions about accessing our data for their Syndrome Q studies. That help?”

  Right. ‘Research institutions.’ Like Hope Pharma.

  Part of her couldn’t shake the feeling that Tom was straight-up lying to her face, even though, rationally, she knew he was only being evasive. Falling back on old corporate toolishness.

  “That’s ... a start. I’ll write it up assuming we’re providing a basic REST API, and they’ll pull the data on their end. When do you need the estimate?”

  “Three days work? Heather will wrap it up in a neat little presentation for you. I don’t want you wasting your time on that. Just get me the numbers.”

  Yeah. So maybe Tom wasn’t all bad. When she was doing time at the tech giants, she always wasted so much time on grunt work.

  It had been an egregious waste of resources.

  Violet had to hand it to him—there was a reason she’d stuck around this long. But she was still peeved he was planning to sell the company without so much as asking for her opinion.

  She’d been the first to join Wellify. The one who had discovered, interviewed, and cultivated the rest of the team. Vi believed in him and his idea back when no one else would give him the time of day.

  The one with the skills to bring his dream to life. It felt like that should count for something, but apparently not.

  This sale would mess everything up. Wellify was making a real difference. They had an epic culture and a fantastic team. Vi despised the idea of all this going away, thanks to something as basic as greed.

  “Sure thing,” she said, typing up the request. “Plenty of time. Anything else?”

  “That’s it—any updates for me?” He slapped his hands on his thighs, a Midwestern signal that the meeting was over.

  “Nope, that’s it for now,” Violet said, standing up and rolling the yoga ball back to its corner. She snagged her laptop and coffee. “Actually, one more thing—I’m gonna round up the dev team in the bullpen tomorrow for some training. Wanted to make sure we won’t have any suits dropping by.”

  “Nope, tomorrow’s all clear. Keep up the great work, Vi.”

  “Yep, yep.”

  “Leave the door open on your way out.”

  Stupid sellout boss with his stupid door that he barely used.

  As she stalked back to her desk, fury simmered in her veins. She was gonna loathe Tom if he sold out.

  Vi’s gut twisted with dread. Something about this whole situation felt off ... really off.

  But her spidey senses were glitching out for once, sending her hyper-perception into a dizzying tailspin. Maybe she was still missing a critical piece of the puzzle.

  Sure, she had a deep-seated hatred for corporate overlords and a secret anarchist streak a mile wide—not that she’d ever let that slip around the office.

  But Violet was sure her political views and bruised ego had nothing to do with the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.

  Funneling all that Syndrome Q user data straight into the greedy clutches of some soulless pharma company was sketchy as hell.

  That much, she just knew.