100% Compatibility novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Glitch

Odette calls the 100 a glitch and fires Jacqueline, but Ronan re-runs the file, gets 100 again, and offers a live public proof if she lives in his house.

"Then she'll be at the office at nine," Ronan said to his mother.

His voice was flat and civil.

"We can discuss the glitch with the staff."

Odette's smile did not move.

She looked at his arm, where my hand was still resting, and she turned back to her guests.

Nobody breathed until she was gone.

Maeve was waiting at the curb in her paramedic jacket, leaning on her old Subaru with the hazards on.

I had texted her one word from the coat check: "Help."

She took one look at me and opened the passenger door.

"Who do I run over?" she said.

"Later," I said.

"Is that him?"

She nodded at Ronan, who had followed me out and was standing under the awning with his hands in his pockets.

"That's the other one," I said.

"The one with the hundred."

Maeve looked him up and down.

"Hey, Spreadsheet," she called.

"If she cries tonight, I know where you live."

Ronan said, "Marlborough Street, number nine," and then, after a pause, "I'll be quiet about it."

I slept on Maeve's couch with her cat on my feet.

I did not sleep very much.

At nine the next morning I walked into Farnsworth Match on Newbury Street with my badge around my neck.

I wanted them to have to take it off me.

The coaches' floor was an open room of glass and white orchids, thirty desks, and every head came up when I passed.

On every monitor was a memo.

"Last night's display anomaly was a software fault. All scores shown were invalid. We apologize for any distress."

It was signed O.L.

I stood by my desk and read it twice.

Then I saw Barrett at the coffee station, and Sutton next to him in a cream blazer, handing him a cup.

He saw me and smiled with his whole face.

"Jackie, please," he said.

"I'm sorry it came out the way it did."

"You're sorry about the way," I said.

"Yes."

"Not the fourteen months."

He went pale.

Sutton looked at her cup.

Thirty coaches pretended to type.

I pulled my badge over my head, dropped it into his coffee, and watched it sink.

"That's my notice," I said.

"Don't bother, sweetheart," said Odette's voice behind me.

She had come out of her glass office with a folder in her hand.

"You were terminated at midnight."

"Security will walk you out."

"You can't fire her for having a bad score," said somebody on the floor, small and shaky.

Odette turned her head very slowly.

"I fired her for destroying company property," she said.

"And for being a woman who isn't well."

The floor went still.

Two security guards were already coming down the hall.

Ronan said, "Not yet," from the doorway of the stairwell.

He had a laptop under one arm and no coat.

He looked as though he had not slept either.

"Mother, the engine is my system," he said.

"A fault in it is my problem, and I'm going to look at it with its only witness in the room."

He turned to me.

"Jacqueline. Lab. Now."

The lab was on the fourth floor behind a door that only he and his father had ever had a key to.

It was a small room full of servers humming like bees, with one chair and one standing desk.

He pushed me gently into the chair and set the laptop in front of me.

"Take the test," he said.

"The long one, the whole intake, all three hundred questions."

"I took it at twenty-one," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I'm asking you to take it again."

I did.

It took forty minutes.

He stood behind me and said nothing.

I answered every question about what I fear, what I keep, and who I call at three in the morning.

When I pressed enter, the engine ran against my name and the whole building's database.

The line that came up first did not need any explaining.

KEOGH + FARNSWORTH, R.: 100%.

I stared at it.

I could feel Ronan not breathing behind me.

"It's not a glitch," I said.

"No," he said.

"It was never a glitch."

He walked around the desk, put both hands on it, and looked straight at me.

His eyes were gray and not unkind and very tired.

"The Showcase is in three weeks," he said.

"Four hundred couples, a stage, a live pairing, press in the front row."

"We run it in front of everyone, you and me, and nobody can call it a fault."

"And until then?" I said.

"You've got nothing," he said.

"No job, and by tonight no apartment."

"I'm not offering charity."

"I'm offering a place to stand while you prove what she did."

"Where?" I said.

He straightened, and a muscle moved in his jaw.

"You'll live in my house," he said.

"My mother has people in every building in this city, and she watches every door."

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