Page 99 of Nefarious
“Do I look like a saint to you?”
“Yes.”
She laughed quietly, then tilted her head with a little shake. “You do think highly of yourself, don’t you?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not just flawed like the rest of us, you’re an arch-villain. You’re not just searching for answers, you’re lost, damned, irredeemable.”
“Are you here to bring me religion, Noelle? Absolve me of my sins?”
“I’m here to tell you that the fact you know you have flaws is in itself evidence you’re not as contemptible as some. You’re not nearly as corrupt as you think you are. Do you think Val will accept any blame in this?”
That was a laugh. “No. She’ll go down swinging.”
“She did. Or so I heard. She’s trying to bring a countersuit against the company, against me.”
Dane hadn’t followed the news. He’d buried himself in innocuous games and willed himself to stay alive another day. That was the best he could manage. “So you’re saying there’s relative evil?”
“You’re not evil, Dane. You’re a bit of a scoundrel, but I know you. I’ve seen your true nature, and you’re not a total miscreant. Without a corrupting influence, you even focus your talents on good works.”
“You can’t place my decisions on Val. We’re two separate people. We each carry our own blame.”
“And unlike her, you’re kind. You help people.”
“For every act of kindness you could uncover, I’ve done something worse. And you should know I faked all that charity Morty Becker documented for you.”
“I’m not talking about that. You forget I worked next to you at R&M. You had so much passion for developing new technologies, and not for your own gain. It was one of the things that I loved about you even then—all that dorky enthusiasm. You were so enamored with simplifying trading so average people could understand it. You had all the wonder of a child discovering the world. I’m going to guess since you’ve been here, you haven’t spent your days lying on the beach. Tell me what you’re working on?”
He smiled. She’d made him sound like a half-decent man. He brushed his eyelid with the back of his hand. He’d never seen himself the way she’d just described him. Hadshe?
So he laid out the idea that had him excited for the first time in years. “It’s kind of a role-playing adventure, but simple. I’ve noticed some of the most popular games are almost retro in their feel. I’d want it to be open-sourced so anybody could contribute and change it. I’ve been lining up local artists and coders to start work on a prototype.”
“You’ve only been here a few weeks. You’re already giving work to the locals?”
“I mean, yeah?” He scratched the back of his neck, feeling an odd sense of pride and humility all at once. “I’ve mostly been buried in game theory. It’s likely I’ll burn all my time and money on a total flop, but I have a lot of both. At least I’m spreading it around.”
“And that makes you feel good? Giving other people honest work? Helping the economy?”
“It’s the least I can do, Noelle. But it doesn’t erase years of leeching off people like an emotional vampire.”
“Before I came looking for you, do you know what I did?”
“Had your memory wiped?”
“Funny, but quite the contrary. After I got that bizarre email from you that Saturday, when I couldn’t reach you, I wandered around, lost, trying to understand what had happened. I ended up at Kitty Monroe’s, and we talked about you. You know, before—when you were pretending you wanted to date me—I’d reached out to some of the board at R&M to ask them to send me dirt about you. It was Geraldo’s idea.”
Dane’s blood went cold at the memory of her emails. “Noelle—”
“I know. I shouldn’t have snooped, but see? We’ve all got dirt on our hands.”
He could have laughed at her trying to come down to his level, as if to prove that every sin could be overlooked if everyone was a little bad. “Noelle, I already know about all that. I fucking read your emails.”
She froze and blinked. “Oh, right. The guy in IT mentioned that. Anyway . . .” Her hand swanned as if waving away a pillar of smoke, like she could dismiss an ethical breach with a flourish. “When I went to see her, the way she spoke of you was nothing like the things she’d written.”
“Of course not. I’d coerced Kitty and every single one of those people to put in a good word for me, Noelle. It was all lies.”
“Really?” She didn’t look scandalized. In fact her grimace made her look underwhelmed. “It’s funny. When Kitty first wrote me, I didn’t question her account because it rang so true. It fit the imageyoucultivated. The bad boy with the heart of gold. Sound right?”
