There was a knock on his door. Raine sighed and closed Planet E. He checked the time; it was 9 PM. Who the hell is knocking on my door at this time?

Sighing, he grabbed his crutch and made his way to the door.

“Yes, who is it?” he said. He looked through the doorhole and saw a blonde woman in a blouse.

“Hi, are you Mister Raine Williams?” she asked.

“Yes. What is it?” Her question put him on edge. It reminded him of his mistake earlier that day.

“I’d like to talk.”

“You're a stranger knocking on my door at 9 PM and asking to talk. Do you have any idea how fishy that is?”

“Hmm, I guess that does sound pretty fishy. But it’s in your interest to speak with me. I have a gift.” She raised a can of beer to the doorhole.

Oh come on, as if that bribe will work. But that can of beer looked tempting. He hadn’t had beer in days. “What do you want?”

“Well. . .”

His phone buzzed. Raine frowned and checked the message he’d just gotten. It was from an unknown number.

“I want to make you an offer,” the message said, “for a job that will pay far more than $3,000. And the work is neither illegal nor unethical.”

What the hell? Raine massaged the side of his head.

“Are you interested in talking?” she asked.

This is so goddamn fishy. But he needed money. He wasn’t going to be able to keep working as Sora’s bodyguard. Even if there was a tiny chance that the lady wasn’t full of rubbish, it was worth his time. He had nothing to do anyway.

“Let’s meet downstairs, at the cafe,” he said. “In 30 minutes.”

“How about 20?”

Really? He sighed. “Okay, 20.”

She smiled and waved goodbye. Then she left his view, and he heard fading footsteps.

Raine threw on a jacket and grabbed saucers from the kitchen—his weapons of choice, in case she was lurking in the hallway with a gun in her hands. He waited a minute before carefully opening the door with the saucers in one hand. He stood there with the door half-open for five seconds. All clear? All clear.

He peeked his head out of the doorway and looked left. Then right. Empty.

Okay, that was ridiculous. He put the saucers down on the kitchen counter and left the hotel room. He made his slow, troublesome way to the elevator. And once he reached the ground floor, he made his slow, troublesome way across the lobby, to the cafe.

“Hi,” the blonde woman said with a smile. On her table was a tea latte and a can of beer. Raine glanced at the person sitting beside her, a fit Korean man in a blue sport coat.

Raine nodded to them and took a seat. “So, what’s the offer?”

The Korean man slid the beer to Raine. “5,000 as a signing bonus. The rest of your pay depends entirely on the projects you work on while you’re with us, and how well you do them. The work itself varies, and we can’t tell you the specifics until you sign a non-disclosure agreement. But the job is hard, dangerous, and at times, degrading.”

The man was highly articulate, and his words flowed from one to the next like water.

“A lot of people see this work as a ‘second chance.’ I’m among them. You’ll travel to an entirely different place, a new world, in essence. It’s a place where you can leave behind your mistakes and start afresh, because the odds are that you’ve never met anyone there.”

Raine’s ears perked up at the words ‘second chance.’ But he was skeptical. Then the man said something ridiculous.

“Your bodyguard work was a test. Not by us, but by Levin Hall’s company. He planned on offering you this job for a competitor of ours, though whether they’ll actually do it is still up in the air.” He smiled lightly. “But he’s going to beat around the bush more than us about the job’s nature. He has to. His company isn’t quite as honest as ours.”

Raine smiled incredulously. He pulled the tab on the can of beer and drank. “Okay, so you’re saying you’re trying to get me before your competitor. Great. What’s so special about me?”

“Let’s see.” The Korean man pulled his phone out of a coat pocket. “You won several math olympiads and wrestling tournaments in high school and graduated at 16, after which you wrote a college application essay on overcoming alcoholism.” He glanced at the can of beer in Raine’s hand. “The essay was impressive enough to be published in several newspapers. Then you went to UCLA and graduated with highest honors. While there, you prepped for and took the LSAT for fun and scored in the 99th percentile. Following that, you got a job at Allison Flynn right out of college, and your former coworkers and direct superior described you as a ‘shining star’ when I had someone talk to them recently.”

Huh. Most of what the man had said was on Raine’s personal website, but Raine never said anywhere online that he took the LSAT, or that he entered any wrestling tournaments. “You’re good at getting information on people.”

“I’m good at finding talented people.”

Raine drank again. “What’s your company’s name?”

“The Hopkins Company.”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a private holding company.”

Ah. Makes sense. “Is there information on it online?”

“Yes.” The man pulled a second smartphone out of his jacket and passed it to Raine.

Does a person really need two phones? He turned on the screen. The Wikipedia page for the Hopkins Company was already open. He scrolled down casually.

What the hell? It had 300 million in revenue the previous year and over 14,000 employees. Its subsidiaries were diverse. It owned everything from a hospitality company to a tech startup to a bank.

“This is one strange company,” Raine said. But it’s a real company. “I haven’t gotten your names, by the way.”

“Song Hyun-woo,” the Korean man said.

“I’m June Asher,” the blonde said, smiling.

Asher. Asher. Related to the CEO of Dale? He considered asking for a moment but decided against it. Probably not. It isn’t such a rare last name.

He looked up ‘Song Hyun-woo.’ The images he saw fit the appearance of the person in front of him. Song Hyun-woo had studied computer science at the University of Washington and had gone right to the Hopkins Company afterward.

“Your company sure has a strange hiring process.”

“We’ve had it from day one,” Song Hyun-woo said. “The founders love holding onto company traditions.”

But this makes the process inefficient. Raine pushed his beer aside. “Do you have any statistics? What are the mean and median first-year earnings of Hopkins employees with this job?”

“The data is in the phone as images.”

How well-prepared. Raine opened the phone’s gallery. There were several images of scatter plots and bar charts that he took a close look at. The range of earnings was massive. The median salary was almost three times the US average. Interquartile range of $60,000. What the hell?

Every chart had a footnote stating that pay was given in a foreign currency and had been converted to dollars.

“Like I said, your pay depends heavily on what kind of work you decide to take on, and how well you do it.”

Raine took a moment to think. “Do you have the NDA with you?”

Song Hyun-woo nodded. June pulled a file out of her handbag and put it on the table. Raine skimmed the non-disclosure agreement, which contained nothing unusual, and signed it.

“You’ll fly to the company’s private island in the Pacific and be provided food, housing, and training for free. Almost everyone works in a team, so the work you take on won’t be decided just by you. Sometimes it’s as safe as putting up a fence around farmland; other times it’s as dangerous as hiking a steep mountain to get supplies to a team of people at the top. Sometimes it’s as simple as hacking at a tree; other times it’s as difficult as writing summaries of long and complicated documents in plain English.”

“That’s quite a range of tasks.” He isn’t mentioning the real work. He can’t be. The median earnings shouldn’t be so high with the examples he gave. But damn, free housing and free food sound good.

“We have a shortage of competent people willing and able to work there. Many refuse because of the danger.”

“Aside from your hiking example, I don’t really see why it’s so dangerous.”

“Well, for one, the occasional hurricane hits the island. Two, there are pirates. Three—”

“Wait, pirates?”

“Yes, they occasionally land on the island and try to steal goods,” Song Hyun-woo said casually.

“We have some private military contractors there,” June said. “They usually have things under control. But you’ll be trained to use a firearm and, with some time, have permission to carry it around most places.”

So that’s the danger. That sounds horrifying. “Okay. All this work for what? What’s the company doing there?”

“We can’t go into much detail, even with the NDA,” Song Hyun-woo said. “But it involves international trade.”

On a private island? That’s ridiculous. But they had already answered his biggest questions, and he was fairly confident he wasn’t just being swindled. All that really matters is the money. Here’s hoping the work really is legal.

“Well, I’m interested,” Raine said. “But how long do I have to decide?”

“One week. The next flight to the island will be then.” Song Hyun-woo took out a business card from his wallet. “Here’s my card. Call when you’ve made your decision.”

“I will.” Raine was tempted by that $5,000 signing bonus, but he wanted to first see what Levin offered, if he did offer anything.

“And our offer has one condition: the moment you tell Hall or anyone in his company that we approached you, we’ll withdraw it.”

“Got it.” Raine passed the phone back to Song Hyun-woo and shook hands with them. Then they got up and left.

“Thanks for coming to talk,” June said cheerfully as they went.

Raine wasn’t keen on getting up and making his slow and tiring way back to his hotel room. So for a long while after they left, he just sat there, drinking and thinking.

. . . .

As Raine had expected, Levin visited the next morning. He started with “Are you okay?” and “How are you feeling?” before hitting Raine with the painful talk about how he couldn’t continue his work as Sora’s bodyguard. Levin paid him $300 right there for what he’d already done. The blow was much softer than he’d thought it would be before getting the Hopkins Company’s offer, but it still stung.

“Thanks.” Raine put the money in his wallet and waited for Levin to talk. He was curious to see if Song Hyun-woo was right.

Levin glanced at Raine's leg. “Okay, so I know it sucks that you got shot.”

“It’s goddamn awful.”

“But I have good news for you. The bodyguard work itself was like a test, in a sense.”

Well, shit. Song Hyun-woo wasn’t lying. Raine hid his surprise and wore a feigned look of confusion.

“It’s for a strange but well-paying job, and you passed it. The kidnapping wasn’t part of the test, but your response impressed a lot of people, not just me. So I got approval to give you an offer. It’s dangerous work, but it pays well. I pretty much vanished for about a year after college, right?”

“Yeah.” Levin had been one of the few friends completely out of touch after graduation, and many of their classmates had noticed it and even joked that he must have gone to the Himalayas to do some soul-searching and rid himself of his spendthrifty ways.

“I took the job I’m offering you now. I suffered a year of that shit and made 230,000 dollars.”

Raine’s jaw slacked. “What?”

“Yeah. I’m an outlier, but it isn’t a one-in-a-million outcome. Three people I know made 150,000. One guy made about 250,000. Most get about 70,000. You’ll get 3,000 as a signing bonus. The pay is determined in an unusual way. It depends entirely on the work you take. You aren’t assigned to it by someone, but you choose it with your team.”

The numbers would have amazed Raine if he hadn’t seen those of the Hopkins Company the previous day.

“What’s your company’s name?” Raine asked.

“Jones, Clark, and Company,” Levin said.

Raine looked it up on his laptop. It was another private holding company with hundreds of millions in revenue. It made slightly less money than Hopkins, but the difference was small. Levin continued describing the job and making his pitch for the company. As he spoke, Raine wondered, How do both companies have the same absurd way of hiring people? Or rather, why?

He asked Levin for more details about the work, and got a response like the one he had the previous evening: “Sorry, I can’t tell you.”

With Levin pitching him on the job, Raine was more confident that he could accept Song Hyun-woo’s offer without fearing it was a scam.

He felt terrible that he’d gotten so much help from Levin only to refuse him now. But $3,000 wouldn’t let him pay back all his debt immediately, while the $5,000 signing bonus from Hopkins would. It was clear which one he had to go for.

Levin was soon done talking. He ended with a simple question, “So what do you think?”

"Well, it's a great offer," Raine said. "But is the signing bonus up for negotiation?"

"Uh...what?"

Raine nodded. "I'm in debt by four grand. I'd be able to accept if the signing bonus were just 1,000 higher."

Levin wore a strange expression on his face, like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Well, it's unfortunately not up for negotiation."

"Are you sure?"

"Definitely. It's not up to me."

Shit. "Argh, then I'm sorry Levin." Raine felt like he was puking out his words. “But I can’t take the offer.”

Levin blinked. “Are you sure? It’s a boatload of money you’ll be leaving on the table. With your brains, in just three or four years, you’ll probably end up with as much as if you’d stayed at Allison.”

“I’m really sorry. I can’t accept.”

Levin stared at him for a moment with a frown. Then he let out a groan of frustration. “Fuck, I know you wouldn’t refuse if you didn’t have something better lined up. Someone came ahead of me, right? I’m going to guess it was a Xiyashi recruiter. Even though you didn’t go to Harvard, I can see why they would grab you.”

“Again, I’m really sorry.”

“It’s alright.” Levin sighed. “You win some, you lose some. Plus, Xiyashi will probably be better for you.”

Then their conversation fizzled out. Before the silence stretched for too long, Raine got up and grabbed a bottle of water from the minibar.

“You still like 7-Up?” Raine asked.

“Yeah.”

Raine tossed him a can of soda. Levin pulled the tab and drank. Then he took a look around the room.

“This place is damn nice,” Levin said. “Nothing like where I stayed for my test.”

“How does your company afford to give a five-week stay here to someone who’s just a job candidate, not even an employee?”

“It owns this hotel, and a few others in L.A.” Levin shrugged. “I’m not sure of this, but I think the point is to trick people into at least subconsciously thinking they’ll stay somewhere this nice during the job.”

Raine frowned. “How bad is it? The job, I mean.”

“I can’t go into detail. But it’s painful, emotionally and physically.” Levin finished his drink and crushed the can. “Since you’ll probably go soon, you’ll start in time for one of the most painful events of all.”

Levin sighed. “Steel your heart, Raine. The Expansion is fucking tragic.”