Prudence Chung was in trouble.
Prudence was always in trouble, of some sort or another, no matter how smart or well-behaved or perfect she tried to be. Her parents wanted a son; failing that, a nice smart serious girl who’d study hard, become a doctor, marry well, produce the delayed gratification of male grandbabies. Her detours into pure biophysics research science and lesbianism were not well-received.
She met Zale Chorister at a charity gala. They exchanged half a dozen meaningless words of polite occasion mingling platitude, Zale’s eyes mercilessly cold.
Prudence was surprised when Zale’s people reached out to her people to establish when Prudence was available for a discreet dinner date. Not surprised at all when their third date ended in the entryway of one of Zale’s properties, Zale’s hands around Pru’s throat, eyes coolly empty of anything except analytical confirmation: yes, as I knew, Prudence Chung will submit to this.
For their fourth date, Zale Chorister slapped Prudence hard enough she tasted blood and god; Prudence whose faith had withered, death-by-numbers, on the vine of why would anything benevolent make a world that polices normativity, then deliberately fill it with disappointments? Pru rediscovered god, and god was as merciless and cruel as she’d always suspected, and their name was Zale.
Pru’s god squatted above her on the tile floor of Pru’s own bathroom, and Pru weepingly accepted her will to piss on Pru’s face, empty of anything except relief: finally, belonging. Finally, worship. Finally, in her own skull: silence.
Zale Chorister’s ideas for Prudence — her public ones — involved a regimented length of carefully orchestrated public dating. A drip-feed of stage-managed PR. An eventual wedding. None of this was, at any point, presented as anything other the iron fait accompli of Zale Chorister’s will, and Prudence did her part and bent before the wind, didn’t even presume to say yes. It was, after all, already and quite without her, Prudence herself irrelevant to the process of decision, decided.
The contracts Zale Chorister made her sign, however, scrupulously exact about how ruined she’d be if she ever tarnished Zale Chorister’s good name, gave her the slightest hesitation. A doubt; because Prudence Chung is always in trouble.
There had been a rote, dutiful comphet boyfriend, in college. And he took ever-so-slightly salacious photos. If he still had them, then one day they might mature from tawdry memory to investment, to the possibility of tabloid cash for dirt, starkly illuminated and juiced in value by proximity to Zale Chorister’s good name. Or leverage for blackmail, mortgaged against that potential.
Prudence might simply tell Zale, but — she shakes with cold at the mere idea, at being treated like a stupid child for her stupid child mistakes. Perhaps for once Prudence Chung can clean up her own mess.
She fumblingly attempts to hire an operative.
They meet in in inconspicuous public place, a shabby dockside hangout with a bare sprinkling of patrons, all visibly engaged in, and minding their own, dubious business.
“I’m—”
“It’s bad form to tell me your name, Ms. Chung,” the operative says, kind but firm. “You’re the client.” She looks over Prudence as if to measure her words’ reception, and puts her hand out to shake. “Vic.”
Vic is wearing a suede skirt and long, long boots; an angular smart-fabric jacket, designer label, which had been white-hot cutting-edge fashion, twelve Paris Fashion Weeks ago. Under the jacket, she has a plain white tee, scoop necked, cheaply thin enough for Prudence to see the darker colour of her nipples through it. The straps of a shoulder holster play coy peekaboo as she moves.
Prudence explains to her what the problem is. Who.
“Leave that with me,” Vic says.
Their second meeting, Vic flicks through a dossier of pictures on a cheap smartphone; screenshots of various things, authenticating that she’s cased the correct target.
There’s an old photograph of Prudence, tactfully chosen from the more titillating possibilities, proving that they still exist.
Vic says there’s no evidence that the photos have been accessed in years. Walks through the options: surgical deletion, or an untraceable calamity that nukes the target’s entire cloud storage, obscuring the point of the attack should anyone ever suspect it was one.
Prudence sits, gripping the phone too tightly, feeling slightly sick. She can’t answer; she can’t clearly formulate one.
“Listen,” Vic says kindly, after a longish pause, “you’re paying me, either way. I can use my best professional judgement what meets your needs best?” and Prudence nods in automatic gratitude.
Perhaps it’s the offer to do Pru’s thinking for her. Perhaps it’s that, for once in her life, it is an offer not a diktat; or that it’s presented kindly.
She goes home and cries into her pillow, touching herself, imagining her cheeks uncaringly chafed between thigh-high boots. She comes frighteningly hard.
A third meeting, just to confirm that the job took place, is perhaps not strictly necessary. She over-dresses for it; an over-the-top cocktail gown. Perfume. Fuck-me shoes and fuck-me lipstick and fuck-this-down-my-teary-face mascara, and Vic takes a single look at her and reads her desperation like a mile-high food allergy label warning that she contains trouble, and was manufactured in a facility handling trouble.
“It’s done,” Vic says, playing with her mocktail, looking Prudence over, meltingly thorough.
“Is Vic short for something?” Prudence asks, for something to say, and Vic smiles too angularly to be entirely good-humoured.
“Victory,” she says, like it’s an inside joke that Prudence is expected to understand as such, but never understand.
Prudence sits silent for nearly a minute, then chokes out, painful: “Can I kiss you?” because really, there’s no preamble that won’t stink of exactly what she means, and of stalling tactic to avoid it for a few seconds more.
Vic takes out a phone. Identical, but — Prudence thinks — not the same one. An endless stream of disposable electronics, defying forensic fingerprinting, resisting correlation.
“Do you know who this is?” she says gently, showing Prudence a picture. A man, heavily cybernetically enhanced. Crewcut, scowling in a cultivated mystique-of-machismo way. Military, perhaps. She shakes her head.
“Same line of work as me,” Vic says, putting the phone away. “But more expensive. On permanent retainer, through a deniable series of interesting accounting tricks, to one Zale Chorister.”
Prudence thinks she might throw up. Vic sees it, softens her face, touches Pru’s arm.
“She knows,” Vic says. “You have to assume she knew the second you thought about hiring me; she has people to know that kind of thing for her. She knows, she knows why, and if she objected I’d already have shown up, just sufficiently identifiable to you, and just horribly enough to make the news where you’d see it, face down in the fucking harbour.”
Panic is the scrabbling of a small trapped animal in the base of her skull.
“It’s fine,” Vic says softly, and pats her arm.
“I don’t think Zale likes me very much,” Prudence says, horrified by the weak and sickly sound of previously unacknowledged truth drooling viscous from her mouth. “I don’t — I don’t think I like them very much, either,” and Vic takes a very deep breath.
“I don’t have the capacity to fix that,” she says, the simple and inalienable truth that Zale Chorister is far above them on a money-metricated scale of social Darwinism, an apex predator.
Prudence excuses herself to the bathroom. Tries to compose herself before exiting the stall. Bursts into instant silent tears when Vic is hovering outside it.
“I can only make things worse for you,” Vic says warningly; though Pru thinks, perhaps, it’s not Prudence she’s reiterating that truth to. She pushes Prudence back against the sinks, up onto the counter; spreads her thighs. Kisses her softer than Pru knows how to handle.
Prudence sobs and sobs into her mouth for a while, for one reason or another.
Prudence Chung finds a man in her apartment, waiting in the living room, sitting on the couch, manspread as though he owns it. She recognises him, despite his further augmentation, from a picture on a disposable phone in Vic’s hand.
“If you have any further security needs,” he tells Prudence, heavy with meanings, “they’ll be met in-house.”
He leaves her with a business card; one of the heavy, textured ones for Zale Chorister’s personal staff, with only an embossed ZC monogram and a contact number; and Prudence, who’s in trouble, with no avenues left to solve it, sits on her own very couch, made a platform now from which to be threatened into line by her very own wife-to-be, her new possessor, and can’t even find it in her dried-up heart to cry any more.
