Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

“Oh, are they serving dinner?”

“Yeah, if you can call it that. Kaysev again. But I have something special…” He rattled something in his pocket, and took out a small can of smoked almonds. “Not even opened.”

“Oh wow, where on earth-”

“Nadir gave it to me. He’d been saving a few things for tonight. He and Dor and Bart are drinking twelve-year-old scotch right now, if I’m not mistaken. I asked him if it was okay if I took mine to go.”

“Oh.” Cass’s mouth watered at the thought of real food, but she hesitated. “I guess someone probably told you by now. That I was drinking again.”

“And that you stopped.”

“It’s been hard.” That was an understatement; a dozen times each day she yearned for the sharp taste of the first swallow, the oblivion that followed.

“Which is why I’m here and the bottle’s not.”

Cass smiled. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Smoke sat down on the upholstered bench, and Cass sat next to him. He popped open the can, but for a moment neither of them moved to eat.

“It’s not going to work out between us, is it?” Smoke finally said quietly.

Tears sprang instantly to Cass’s eyes. “Oh, Smoke…”

He closed his hand over hers and squeezed gently. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I did, Before.”

Cass blinked and looked at him carefully. His face was lined and scarred, and the past months had left a permanent wistfulness that lifted when he smiled, but always settled back into place afterward.

As long as Cass had known him, he had been a man of secrets. He’d told her only that he’d done something that he could never make right, but it was clear that guilt and self-recrimination were never far from his mind. She often found him staring into space, or soaked with sweat from a workout that was never hard enough to drive the memories away. She’d asked him to tell her what was wrong a hundred times, a thousand, but he’d always brushed off the question, saying it was nothing, or not saying anything at all.

And only now, when she’d finally let go of her need to know, was he ready to tell her.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said softly.

“I’m not telling you for your sake. I’m- I need to. For me.”

Cass swallowed. Now that they were on the brink of it, she wasn’t sure she was ready to know. But she owed him this, the freedom he might earn from the telling. It was one gift she could still give him. “All right.”

“I told you what I did Before, right?”

“You were a corporate coach.” The phrase he’d used, on the day they met, as they walked through the streets of Silva, was “career consultant of last resort.”

“Yeah. And I was damn good. You want to know my specialty? Weak guys. Guys who lacked resolve. Guys who were…” Smoke’s expression was pained as he made air quotes around his words: “‘Weak on follow-through.’ ‘Soft leadership.’ ‘Unable to build consensus.’ But those are all just euphemisms, Cass-you want to know what for?”

His self-contempt was as clear as if it was painted on him.

“No balls. Those are all MBA-bullshit ways of saying a guy’s got no stones. And when that happened, they’d bring in the fix-it guy. Me. I charged heaven and earth for my services, but I gave a guarantee-you give me your hopeless case, I give you back a man who can whip it out when he needs to. Six hundred twenty-five bucks an hour, that was my top rate, and there were half a dozen clients in San Francisco who couldn’t get enough of me. Hell, I had a waiting list-seemed like there was no shortage of guys who tended to freeze in the clutch or hide behind the other guys’ skirts.

“What I’d do, I’d get a guy on his own turf. His office, sometimes his house. His club, for the ones who’d made it a little ways up the corporate ladder. See, Cass, they weren’t stupid. They were never stupid. They knew I was there because they were failing, and they wanted to impress me. It was fear, that was what drove most of them, fear that they didn’t measure up, as if my opinion of them mattered at all. But a lot of these guys, their daddies told ’em they weren’t worth shit and they got into the office and all of a sudden the guy in charge can seem damn intimidating. Bring in Ed Schaffer, the guy who listens, and they’d tell me their golf handicap, the women they’d bedded, hell, the car they drove. Take me out and buy me drinks even though their companies were paying me a goddamn fortune. I ate a hell of a lot of rare filet and drank my share of single malt in those days.”

Smoke laughed, a hollow sound that chilled Cass to the core. “I’d listen and drink their booze, and all the time I’m reading them, figuring out where their fear came from. Once I knew that, I had all I needed. I broke them down and built them back up, tore down the fear, taught them to go in for the kill, to man up on the job. ‘There’s a leader inside us all’-that’s what I had printed up on my business cards, Cass, but you know what it really should have said was ‘There’s a scared-shitless fuck inside us all’ and all you get for your six-fifty an hour is learning how to turn that guy into the bully. Go from the stepped-on to the guy who kicks sand into everyone else’s face.

“And the amazing thing was that no one ever figured it out. They loved me. ‘Ed, you’ve changed my life.’ ‘Ed, I feel like I can do anything now.’ I just smiled and bought them a final round and cashed my checks and never told them what they were really feeling was power. I didn’t teach anyone to lead, Cass, I taught ’em to take. To look at the world as their candy store and start turning over the shelves. Hell, I got Christmas cards from guys saying they’d dumped their mousy little girlfriends and finally told their families to fuck off and wasn’t it great, and deep down I knew what I was doing was not something I could be proud of-but I didn’t care. Because I think my biggest client was me. I was never a hopeless case, I wasn’t the class loser or the guy who couldn’t get a date or the one who got stuck in an entry-level job. I was just…unexceptional. But when I hung out my coach sign, it was like telling the world I knew things they didn’t. I liked the mystique. Hell, I used the mystique.”

Cass remembered how Smoke had described his old life: the sports cars, the mountain getaways, the skiing and boating and women. It was hard to imagine the man she knew-so carefully unassuming, so determined to maintain his low profile-in the picture he was painting. But she let him talk.

“SO AROUND THE holidays a couple years back, I get this call from Travis Air Force Base. You might remember, I told you I used to work in that area, in Fairfield, and drink with some of the guys from the base after work. That wasn’t exactly true. They hired me, on a consulting basis, to come in and work with one of their guys who was losing his shit. Big project, top secret, very hush, I had to sign all these papers and I wasn’t allowed to talk about the project itself when I met with him, only about his job in general terms. The brass was in a tough situation because their leadership on the base had been stretched thin-I mean, it’s not hard to figure out why, now.”

In the summer of that year, bioterrorists attacked livestock in the U.S. and Asia; by fall there were reports of dead livestock on every continent. Overseas travel was halted and remote nations began to go dark, and skirmishes escalated and nuclear tensions were on the rise. Banks began to fail and currency was devalued worldwide.

“My guy Charlie-Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Benson, right out of central casting, looked like he’d been painted in his uniform by Norman Rockwell-he had somehow risen to be the number-two guy on the base. Only, the top guy, he got called to Wright-Patterson after the Christmas strike. Charlie was losing his shit because he had personnel problems, discipline problems, protesters every day right outside the gates. They send me in and for a while things are going okay. At first he’s just repeating everything I tell him to say. We take a tough stance, zero tolerance, a civilian guy misses a shift because his wife’s injured in a protest at a bank, we can him. We go out into the protesters one day with tear gas-next day it’s rubber bullets. The shit was hard-core, Cass, and it didn’t even matter because the media had bigger stories than a few tree huggers getting their feelings hurt.