Read Like a Boss for Free Online

she flipped through a sheaf of papers. She stopped short of bumping into me, and the smile vanished when she saw the Don’t-Mess-With-Me look on my face. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a Co-Op member.”
    She smiled again, and there was something about her perfect skin and perfect teeth that screamed Life Corporate . She had no tattoo on her cheek, however. Otherwise, she could have been me, if I’d have Breached right after business school. “In that case, can I interest you in contributing to the Co-Op Mutual Fund? It’s a way to share our success with the rest of the planet.”
    “Maybe another time,” I said, jiggling my leg. The wrench clanked, and her eyes drifted down to it. She nodded and hustled away as fast as her pumps could carry her.
    I entered the building, the battered steel doors whispering behind me. The interior offices were built around a central atrium filled with all the varieties of heirloom cane, the kind that made rum instead of industrial fuel. A white kid in his twenties sat behind a desk made of burnished metal, its top covered by cheap brochures hawking Co-Op rums and the Co-Op Mutual, a scheme that got suckers to invest in the Co-Op without having any voting rights.
    The kid’s un-inked face stared down at a terminal. Soon, Freeborn like him were going to outnumber Breaches like me, and I had no idea what would happen. Now, however, I had age, authority, and a very heavy wrench.
    I tapped on the desk, and the kid looked up and gave me a smile so sweet my pancreas freaked out. “Good evening, Ms Mehta! How may I help you?” The name plate in front of him said TODD.
    “Is Vikram in?”
    Todd’s smile flickered. I didn’t wait for a response. Around the table, through the atrium, and up the stairs I went, the kid’s feeble pleadings following me. Vikram had the third-best office in the building, the one with an eastern-facing window looking out over the city and the water beyond. The Co-Op Chair, Elisheba McInnerny, got the best office, the one opposite Vikram’s; its windows emptied onto the kampong so the room would fill every morning with the deep green of the cane. The second-best office, the one in between both, went to the member with the best production that month. Tonggow had never won that space, and I hadn’t felt the need to compete for it either.
    I blinked my pai into recording and gave Vikram the courtesy of knocking twice before opening his door. He stood at the eastern window, his back to me. In his left hand he held a crumpled piece of paper. In the other was a bottle with a few centiliters of golden rum swirling around the bottom. He didn’t flinch when I barked his name. He just turned to me, and I shuddered. Deep bags hung under his red, puffy eyes. His Indenture tattoo, a galleon’s steering wheel, stood out on his blotchy skin. Snot dribbled out of his nostrils down into his mustache, where the sunset-orange dye he so loved on his facial hair had run like mascara from hell. The stuff leaked down his chin and neck, staining his otherwise bright white shirt.
    Vikram burst into tears. “Oh, Padma! Thank God you’re here! We are so fucked!”
    I took a moment to drink this in. Also, to make sure I hadn’t been hit on the head.
    No, I was not hallucinating. Vikram Ramaddy, his lower face and shirtfront painted bright orange, stood in front of his window. He cried, but it was the desperate crying of someone who had just been told that the little tummy bug he’d been diagnosed with was actually untreatable cancer that had also spread to his balls. It was the crying of someone at the end of his tether. Seeing how Vikram was the most uptight human I’d ever met, he had to have been in a seriously bad way to fall apart like this.
    I did not smile. “Vikram, what is going on?”
    “The end of days, that’s what.” He nodded and swigged from the bottle. “Oh, God, we’re done. We’re so done.” He swayed his way to his desk, knocking over papers as he