Five Hours Earlier

Not for the first time that evening, I wondered if I had, in some inexplicable twist of fate or bad grace, stumbled through the Gates of Hell.

Hell was a gilded ballroom in a downtown hotel chain on a Sunday night. Hell was a too tight pair of heels biting my toes and a black dress unearthed from the back of a dusty closet, where it'd hung in exile for more years than I could remember, where it should have remained for more years to come. Hell was an overdone corporate launch party I direly wished to escape.

Leaning into the marble wall at my back, I counted my breaths and let the cold of the stone press into my shoulders and bare arms. The clattering of pots and pans continued, the scent of smoke in the air drifting through the service corridor. Opening my eyes, I watched a caterer sneak inside the hall again with ash still smudged on his heel—and now smudged on the carpet. Sunset crept around the edges of the outer door, the back alley filled with greasy light caught and tainted by Verweald's pollution, and the city seemed to sigh like a lazy lizard in August's petulant heat.

"—spard!"

Go away. My hands curled into fists as I grimaced at the ceiling. Please, just go away.

"Gaspard!"

Martha stormed from the kitchens clipboard first, the flimsy barrier of particle board acting like the prow of a particularly tenacious ship breaking through rising waves. I slumped as she spun about in her flat shoes with her glasses flashing and clipboard raised, her sharp gaze taking in the dim passage before she found me.

"There you are," she snapped. "You were meant to get the list from the caterers and return!"

"They didn't have a list."

"They do now." With that, Martha struck the clipboard as if it held all the answers—and I wagered it did, at least in Martha's opinion. Flat-eyed Martha, who could control the world with tidy lines of black ink and a few scathing comments. "Honestly, was that so hard?"

I swallowed my first cutting retort, then the second, both lodging like bits of glass in my chest. Mouthing off to a supervisor never got anyone anywhere. "I needed a moment to clear my head."

"As if it wasn't clear enough as is." The remark came without venom, without intent, her attention lowered to the papers she rifled through. "Do you have a copy of the itinerary?"

"Martha, does it look like I have anything, itinerary or otherwise?" Frustrated, I held out both hands—small and empty and pale, cheap polish chipping along the nails. "No one's told or given me anything. I wasn't even meant to be here tonight."

"Yeah, I don't know why they called you in." Martha sneered as she snatched up one of the pages and shoved it into my grip. "They could have called anyone else."

Anger curled in my middle, hot and furious—then cooled, fizzling when the effort needed to shout at wretched Martha succumbed to overwhelming listlessness. We stared at one another in the empty corridor, the muddled noise of pans clattering and machines working thick behind the flimsy divide of silent disdain. Hatred came easily to us: Martha Howard, stalwart go-getter chasing the highest climes of the corporate ladder, and Sara Gaspard, a bitter and unmotivated literature major lacking the ambition to get out of bed most mornings. That our paths ever needed to cross seemed another petty torture of Hell designed to test both of us.

Martha jerked into motion. Her arm brushed mine in passing and my eyes flicked away, jaw tight, before I turned to follow her and kept pace. With one quick stroll, we emerged from Verweald Plaza Hotel's service area into the exasperating polish of the main lobby, the hum of voices coming together in dull tones, the great doors to the ballroom propped open, an easel by the entrance bearing the crooked words "IMOR Advances: Magna-Chip Launch."

"Go to your table," Martha sniped, straightening the easel's letters with harried, finicky gestures. "All you have to do is hand out pamphlets. I think even you can manage that much."

Can I? I mused, striding past the infuriating woman without another word. My table, as Martha put it, resided just inside the ballroom's threshold, hemmed in by the wall and the chandelier's glitzy glow, a wobbling plastic surface covered by red linen in a bid to make it respectable. I felt quite like that table; tired and a bit shaky, a stranger shuffling through the extravagant gilt and glamor with a grimace and a fair amount of her own fake pageantry.

Sighing, I took a seat on the foldable chair and tucked loose strands of black hair behind my ear as I spared a glower for the untouched stack of informative leaflets waiting to be passed out. God, I wish I was home.

Home was a one bedroom sanctuary mired in a suburban sea of mundanity; a spot of something familiar in a row of unchanging houses and compact minivans. Nothing remarkable waited there, nothing but a sagging sofa and a red quilt holding the fading smell of mamé's lilac perfume and papé's sweet tobacco. Even so, I hadn't lied to Martha. If not for an impromptu call by a harried, babbling man who identified himself as a coordinator in the HR department, I would have been coiled on my couch at that very moment, disheveled, dressed in an overlarge t-shirt and shorts, arguing on the phone with my sister while the television played muted in the background. My sister had organized some variation of a double date for the evening, so although I wasn't supposed to be here, attending did give me a viable excuse to escape one of Theresa Gaspard's failed forays into matchmaking.

I thumbed through one of the pamphlets with its stock images of technicians and renders of the company's newest product: The Magna-Chip. I had no interest in it. Words on the bent folds of laminated paper blurred into nondescript jargon I had only the barest understanding of: supramolecular and microfabrication and semiconductor injectors. IMOR Advances had carved itself a nice little niche in the otherwise overburdened local market, competing against those conglomerates who rose quite literally above the doddering masses; Klau Incorporated and Khrest Technologies and DPC Innovations were housed in Verweald's megalithic towers while the sniveling novitiates, startups like IMOR Advances and Verweald Electronics and Spark-Craft, huddled in their shadows.

For all I knew of IMOR, I cared little about it. I wanted to say there was a great story behind how I'd come to work there, but none existed. It started with the friend of a friend, who knew somebody who knew somebody else, who placed a call that resulted in me dragging my groggy, unemployed self out of bed three months ago to rush downtown and hand in a freshly printed resume. Not two days later, I sat behind a desk in a glass lobby, answering phones, jotting down appointments, and greeting IMOR's occasional visitors.

I didn't like my job—hated it, really—but dissonance exists between what we wish to do and what we can do, and in that dissonance I'd found myself past the cusp of twenty-five and freshly graduated from UCV, drowning in student loans and tired of eating prepackaged noodles for dinner. My only option had been to chip my ambitions and hopes down into a suitable shape worthy of IMOR's dull mold. Goals of other careers, dreams of literature and wordy intrigue, existed on the horizon—and, as time passed, I'd come to realize that the horizon was not always a tangible destination, and sometimes we must content ourselves with disappointment.

So I smiled, though my face felt brittle like a sheet of cracked glass, and I ignored all of Martha's worthless posturing as I handed out those stupid pamphlets to my coworkers, their guests, and IMOR's competition. I may have been the gloomiest receptionist in existence and I could be bitter all I wanted about being called in last minute, but at least I would be paid for it.

"Hello, welcome. The presentation starts at eight." I said the words over and over to a flood of passing faces, doling out the folded pages, smiling despite the urge to frown, mindful of my inflection and the hardness of my eyes. Invariable, my visitors came in their best clothes, dressed to match the venue, if not the event, trying too damn hard to fit in and falling short in perceptible increments. The clothes wore them more than they wore the clothes. Wealth didn't settle well on those who had only a fleeting familiarity with it, like children trying on their parents' wardrobe, pretending it all fit even as their pants fell around their ankles.

Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is so boring, I thought with my elbows on the table's edge and a dwindling stack of leaflets scattered before me. Somebody left behind a magazine absconded from the main lobby, so I thumbed through the issue and read a piece on Daniel Fairchild: Sexiest Man Alive, snorting at his ambitions for world peace and social equality spouted between remarks pushing his haircare products and a new line of cologne. A copy of the local paper tucked under the magazine read "CITY OF BLOOD: Verweald makes a bid for country's murder capital," like the body count in this godforsaken place was something to be proud of.

I took out my battered and annotated copy of The Inferno from my purse when people stopped arriving.

What a miserable evening. So normal and predictable, though it shouldn't have been. I'd been called into work on a Sunday, for a party, had pulled on my best and only dress, and had driven my chugging car to the most regal hotel in the city, where the valets gave me dubious looks until I held up my name tag and said, "I'm part of the event staff." I glared at Martha across the room as she schmoozed Mr. Strauss, the head of advertising. I bet she loves this.

That's the strange thing about Hell. Dante wrote that venturing there had been a plunge, a sudden secession between here and there separated by stone gates emblazoned with the words "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here." For all his literary merit, however, Dante was mistaken; the way to Hell wasn't precipitous, wasn't sudden or steep or flanked in ironclad pillars. It was gradual, grass to earth to stone to ash, the entrance a sinkhole the unwary never saw until they were six feet under with sand in their lungs and no way out.

Hell was an overcrowded ballroom with a slogan on the wall. IMOR Advances: Tomorrow's Ambitions Today. It was a phone call from an understaffed junior in human resources entreating the company's new receptionist to fill in for a missing coordinator. It was a violet-eyed woman who stepped in front of my table, took one look at the book in my idle hands, and said, "Interesting choice. Lasciate ogne speranze, voi ch'entrate."

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Hell was a miserable evening that would end in blood.

[ORIGINAL DRAFT ONLY]