The Meeting

The Voss Dynamics annual shareholder meeting opened, as it did every year, with a highlight reel — twenty-two years of growth condensed into four minutes of triumphant music and Rutger Bayne's face, younger in every frame, ringing bells and cutting ribbons and shaking hands with people who no longer worked there.

Priya sat in the fourth row in a borrowed blazer, four shares' worth of standing in her bag alongside a folder of photocopies, Corwin one seat over in the same chair he hadn't sat in for twenty-two years, invisible to a room that had erased him and would recognize him within seconds of him standing up.

The question period opened at 10:40.

Priya stood first.

"I'd like to raise a floor motion," she said, voice steadier than she felt, "regarding the ownership history disclosed in this company's official records."

A murmur. Rutger, at the podium, went very still in the particular way of a man who has spent twenty-two years waiting for one sentence and finally hears it.

"According to filings sealed in this company's own archive," Priya continued, "a twenty-two percent ownership stake was transferred from co-founder Rutger Bayne to Voss Holding Group nine months before the merger this company describes publicly as a 'friendly, mutual transition.'" She held up the transfer agreement, the room's cameras finding it instantly. "That transfer happened without the knowledge or consent of the company's other co-founder — who was removed from this company days later, in a vote made possible only by shares he didn't know had already changed hands."

The murmur became noise. Somewhere near the back, Corwin stood, and the room's noise dropped into something closer to a held breath, two hundred people recognizing a face from a lobby portrait that hadn't existed in twenty-two years.

At the podium, Rutger didn't deny it. He looked, instead, at Anya Voss in the front row — cool, unmoved, already reaching for her own microphone with the expression of a woman about to cut her losses in the cleanest way available.

"He's not lying," Rutger said finally, into a silence so complete the words carried to the last row without a microphone. "I sold my best friend's future to pay off a debt I was too ashamed to admit I owed her." He looked at Anya. "And she's been collecting interest on it every year since."

Anya's microphone clicked on.

"Careful, Rutger," she said, smiling for the cameras. "I have paperwork too."