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through.
    “So,” Reed said as I started to cut into the metal with my makeshift blowtorch, “what are you going to do? I mean really. If you don’t take this job you just got offered?”
    “Why wouldn’t I take this job I just got offered?” I asked, sparks flying from the blackened metal, hot, liquid steel sloughing down to the carpet. I extended my other hand and sapped the heat from the metal as it fell, causing it to turn solid before it hit the carpet and caused a fire. It made no noise as it dropped in tiny ovoid pieces onto the soft pile carpeting.
    “Because you’d be crazy to take it,” Reed said, and he sounded certain. “You don’t know who you’d be working for.”
    “And you assume the devil I know—Gerry Harmon, President of the United States and ginormous tool—is better than a devil I don’t?”
    “Why work for a devil at all?” Reed asked, sounding like he was fighting disbelief. “You’d be better off working as a guard at the Federal Reserve.”
    “I’d be bored working as a guard,” I grunted, about half the face of the safe cut off. “I’d feel like I was wasting my life and my talents.”
    “Well, you could potentially live a long time, so wasting a fraction of your life doesn’t seem that unwise to me,” Reed said, “especially since it could potentially be lucrative. You could play meta security consultant to half the major corporations in the world, rack up a bank account that would see you through your entire long life without working another day in it—”
    “I still could do that,” I said, peeling back the front layer of the safe as I went, working the malleable, heated steel like I was folding paper. “It sounds like this job offer would allow all that and more.”
    “Which is why you should be cautious,” Reed said. “Haven’t you ever heard that old saying about fearing the Greeks when they bring gifts?”
    “Sounds kinda racist against the Greeks,” I muttered. “Also, there’s no Trojan horse here …” I paused. “Wait. Is that where the ‘Gift horse in the mouth’ thing comes from, too?”
    “I don’t know,” Reed said, suddenly impatient. “I don’t care. The point is—”
    “It’s all suddenly so clear,” I said, finishing ripping the front of the safe open, “because if they’d looked in the mouth of the Trojan horse, they would have seen all the Greek guys hiding inside—”
    “I think you’ve lost the plot, as the Brits say,” Reed interrupted, sounding a little huffy.
    “Where do you think ‘lost the plot’ comes from?” I asked. “Like, people, chasing after a nefarious scheme and trying to uncover—”
    “Unghhhh,” Reed said, low, at a growl, “why are you doing this?”
    “Because I need to get into this safe, duh—”
    “You’re pushing off this job offer question like it’s no big deal,” Reed said, almost as hot as the safe panel I had just sheared off, “like it’s a perfectly normal thing to come waltzing through your door, when in fact it’s weird. It’s abnormal. It’s bizarre. It’s—”
    “It’s a traaaaaaaaaap?” I asked, setting the sheared front panel of the safe, the heat all drawn off it, aside.
    Reed looked right at me, and I could tell he was unamused. “You don’t seem concerned that it might be.”
    “Probably because I haven’t given it much thought yet,” I said, turning back to the safe. I’d stripped away all but a few centimeters of the steel at the front in order to protect the contents from being flambéed by my fire finger. “I’ve been kinda busy for the last few hours since the offer was made. Also, I haven’t exactly been inundated with job opportunities, and the news of my leaving government service broke like … weeks ago.”
    “You can’t just jump onto the first thing you see,” Reed said. “If they’re offering this now, it’ll still be there a month from now. You need to consider carefully. You need to think it through.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” I