Page 112 of The Session

“Why not go to the police?” Mark asked.

“Some of those secrets belong to people who are extremely powerful and have a very long reach,” John explained.

“Okay, well, I’m doing it, but I really don’t know if I’m helping the good guys here,” he said.

“If you ever meet a good guy,” said John, “let me know.”

Ignoble Savage

Mark was mentally soaring through a long, dark cave on the back of a giant bat when he heard the door handle turn.

He’d been using meditation to relax in the interrogation room while trying to imagine how Blaise would play his part. Would he kick in the door and do his impersonation of a TV bad cop? Would he walk in as the good cop with a cup of coffee for Mark and show sympathy?

Mark was absolutely certain that, as someone who had grown up in Summit’s ecosystem of mindfucks, Blaise had far more experience with this kind of situation. Mark wasn’t going to beat him at a game he’d only just begun to learn.

Blaise entered and started laughing immediately. “Well, look who fucked up.”

“Your parents?” Mark said, deadpan.

Blaise looked like he hadn’t slept in days. Mark could spot the bloodshot eyes and signs of stimulants.

“Hilarious. Keep that attitude going, because you’re going to need it.”

“We’ll see,” Mark countered.

“So how much did they tell you so far?”

“I’m not going to go through this with you,” Mark stonewalled.

Blaise took the seat that John had previously occupied. This time there was no red display on the wall behind Mark, nor any armed guard standing threateningly in the corner.

“Dude, I come here as a, well, we’ll call it a frenemy. And I am going to try to help you out of this. The first thing you need to know about Summit is we all fuck up. We all do dumb things. And I’ve told you about some of my mistakes. And congratulations. Welcome to the club. This is your first one. Don’t worry. There will be a chance to make many more.”

“That’s good to know, but I think I’m pretty tired of insisting that no fuckup occurred.”

“I know you’ve been studying for Supernova and you’ve been going through all of Max’s old lectures and stuff. So you know that’s what we call a Fiction-Friction, which is when we both know the same truth but one person won’t admit to it,” Blaise noted.

Mark shrugged. “You should have been my tutor.”

“I would have helped you sail through the bullshit so quickly. Tru has the inside track, but I climbed my way up in all of this,” Blaise informed him. He leaned back in his chair, rapped his knuckles on the metal table, and glanced up at the camera.

“You know, they’ve got all kinds of lie detector shit. They’ve even got some people who are like human lie detectors. I thought it was bullshit, then I met one of them. It’s real. Funny thing is, I don’t know if they told you, they’re all blind. Weird, I know. But we don’t need any of that here. We can solve this problem pretty quickly.”

“I’m not the problem,” Mark told him.

“Not the whole problem, sure, but I’m part of the problem too. I should have warned you about this kind of thing. Somebody like you comes in here, son of the founder, you’re going to be a magnet for trouble. And we should have done more to protect you from that. This is really our fault. I feel a little bit guilty too. I was showing off, introducing you to cheerleaders and fast cars, and I should have been helping a brother out. But now we can fix it,” Blaise assured him.

“This is getting exhausting,” Mark said honestly.

“I’ll tell you what exhausting is. It’s getting on a plane in the middle of the night to fly down here to help out somebody who won’t even let you.”

“I’m sorry. There’s nothing to talk about here.”

“You know if you don’t cooperate,” said Blaise, “you’re out. No more Summit. No more private planes. Hell, they’ll probably make you take the ferry out of here, or whatever they do when they don’t fly you out. I volunteered because I think I understand you, and I can help you get past this as quickly as possible.”

Underneath Blaise’s desperation was a trace of sincerity, Mark thought. The other man might be an incredible actor, but it might be that, in Blaise’s perception of Mark’s situation, he saw a bit of himself. Of course, the desperation was real. Blaise needed Mark to say something to throw the scent off himself.

“I get it,” Blaise continued. “You think you’re untouchable. You think that this is just going to be a thing where you wait them out. But that’s not how it works. I don’t know if you know about the place we’re in right now, but people have died here. And I’m not saying that Summit did that, but I’m saying that the people they work with have done things like that. You don’t bring people to an island in the middle of fucking nowhere with no jurisdiction and no law just to find a quiet space to have a conversation. This is where it gets real, and I don’t think you understand what real means for the insiders at Summit.”