Episode 9: The Offer at Six

The Sixty-First Floor, with Ines Calder

Previously: Ines told Dov the truth about the folder, the debt, and Alden Voss, and he took it the way he took most things, quietly and with a question ready for later. The team came down off the sixty-second floor to find the lobby of the Hargrove Building full of men in orange vests who had not been there that morning.

A banner had gone up across the main doors since they had come in, the kind printed overnight and hung crooked, announcing a demolition permit and a time: six o’clock. Ines checked her watch out of habit more than need, because she already knew it was closer to five than she wanted. A man in a gray suit stood near the security desk, not wearing a vest, reading a clipboard like it owed him money.

It was Alden Voss, and he looked exactly like a man who forges nothing himself and never has to. He saw Ines before she saw him properly, and he smiled the particular smile of someone who has been expecting you for longer than you have been expecting them. “I was wondering how long the sixty-first floor would hold your attention,” he said, and did not bother raising his voice over the noise of the vests.

“You’re tearing down a building with people still living on it,” Ines said.

“I’m tearing down a floor that was never on the deed,” Voss said. “The people on sixty-one will be somewhere else by six, one way or another, and so will you, if you’re smart about it.” He held out a business card that had nothing on it but a phone number and the word DIRECTOR.

“I have a seat for you,” he said. “Not at the Tally Office. Above it. You clear the debt, you get a title, and you never have to explain to anyone why Hargrove’s basement doesn’t match its blueprints.”

Ines did not take the card, not yet, and behind her she could hear Hatch doing the math on how many minutes were left before six and not liking the answer any better than she did. Dov had gone very still in the way he did when he was waiting to see which Ines was about to answer, the one who took jobs or the one who walked out of them. Voss kept the card held out between two fingers, patient in the specific way of a man who has never once had to chase anybody.

The Vote

Does Ines take the seat Voss is offering?

Vote in the LinkedIn poll, and Episode 10 gets written from whatever wins.

Accept the seat: She takes the card and the title that comes with it.

Refuse outright: She tells Voss what he can do with his director title.

Stall for time: She asks for until six to think it over, and means it.

Name her own price: She offers to clear the debt a different way, on terms Voss didn’t set.