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boy?”
    “Depends on how hungry you are. Come back in twenty minutes, please.”
    Sirikit zipped away for food while I stood in front of the Co-Op. I tapped the torque wrench against my thigh, wondering how I would have to play this.
    Swing first, ask questions later , hissed The Fear.
    “Shut up ,” I murmured, blinking up the time. Four fifty-eight. Oy.
    I’d been here every two weeks ever since I first showed up with the deed to the distillery, and every time I’d wanted to claw my eyes out. It wasn’t the members (most of whom were lovely) or the building itself (which had a really nice view from the second story that made me feel like I was on a boat on the edge of a great green ocean). No, it was the meetings.
    One insomniatic night, when I’d had way too much coffee and not nearly enough sex, I tried to bore myself to sleep by recounting how many meetings I’d attended when I was still an Indenture in the glorious Life Corporate. I could access footage from my pai, of course, but I thought the best way to bring my brain back into neutral was to drag them out of my memory. From university to business school to my WalWa gig to becoming Ward Chair, I had probably attended three thousand, two hundred ninety-four meetings. None of them, not even the times when I had to negotiate between the teams that controlled the soap supply and the ones who mucked out the water plant’s shit tanks, were as interminable as the ones I had attended at the Co-Op.
    I had hoped that everyone would be as passionate and mysterious as Estella Tonggow, but they all turned out to be penny-pinching parliamentary procedural nerds. They made motions and counter motions just to discuss where to order pastries, and that was only after the Pastry Subcommittee had determined that it was financially feasible to even have pastries at the Co-Op’s monthly meetings. Members spent more time jockeying for assignments to study groups than they did discussing the actual running of the Co-Op upon which our incomes (and my sanity) depended. What should have taken thirty minutes at the most would stretch on for hours until, out of desperation, I’d make a motion to run through the real meaty items on the agenda. It usually worked, but I had to threaten whoever sat next to me to second the motion or else.
    Now, I’d always had the feeling that there was a second, deeper group that kept things humming along, one that met somewhere tucked away from eavesdropping and the Co-Op’s lengthy by-laws. Tonggow would never confirm, and everyone else would always deny, that this was true, but the fact that the six hundred distilleries scattered across the planet had managed to keep the Co-Op functioning and profitable told me that someone had a steady hand on the tiller and another on a cricket bat. I only had to look and wait and I would get a sign. Maybe Vikram Ramaddy’s visit to my distillery ( my distillery, dammit) was the opening move I’d needed.
    I gave the torque wrench another tap on my leg. Going in swinging was not the right move, as good as it might have felt. I had friends and allies here, people who’d lent me time and expertise when they hadn’t had to. They probably would abandon me if I walked in and smashed everything in my path. I wouldn’t blame them; violence had threatened to tear the Co-Op apart before, and it was no longer tolerated. Mutual benefits meant mutual profits, and that meant everyone had to behave themselves or face expulsion.
    But that didn’t mean I had to play the helpless sucker. If someone with Vikram’s mojo was trying to undermine me, that meant I had to let him know I wouldn’t be intimidated. I leaned to my right and put the wrench through the hammer loop in my cargo trousers. It hung there, just out of immediate reach, but close enough for anyone to see. As far as I knew, implied violence was still okay under the by-laws.
    A young woman in a business suit came out of the building, her face lit with a smile as