The Birthday Scheme

Tracey, thirty-four and single, a pharmacist with a spreadsheet for a soul, stands at the bottom of the fire escape at a quarter past five in the morning, because on her thirty-fifth birthday the only gift she wants is a clean view of the back of the building that ruined her family.

The heat is already wrong for dawn. The desert city sits under a lid of hot air that the radio keeps calling a record, and the metal rungs of the fire promise to burn her palms even at this hour, so she pulls her sleeves down over her hands and starts climbing, slow and careful, the way she does everything. She has been planning this for fourteen months, counting from the day the chain bought the lease out from under her mother's independent pharmacy and turned the store where she learned to count pills into a beige showroom with a self-checkout kiosk.

At the top she hauls herself onto the gravel roof of the strip mall, crouches behind the stub of an old ventilation housing, and takes out the burner phone. It is a cheap thing with a cracked screen and no internet, and on it she has forty-one photographs of the rival pharmacy's rear service area, taken over three months from three different angles, plus one spreadsheet she typed in with a stylus while wearing gloves, because she is meticulous and a little paranoid and she knows it.

The layout is simple, which is what makes it good. The pharmacy's back wall has two HVAC units, and the larger one feeds the server closet where the chain keeps its local inventory records before they sync to corporate every night. The sync runs at two a.m., she has confirmed this twice, and between the sync and the audit team's arrival in six weeks there is a window where bad data in means bad data on the auditor's screen. She does not intend to touch anything. She intends to let the system be itself, just at a slightly wrong temperature for one weekend, long enough for the cooling fault logs to look like a hardware failure and the backup restore to pull from a snapshot she has already arranged to be quietly stale. It is elegant. It is deniable. It is, she tells herself for the hundredth time, not even sabotage, really, it is just letting a badly maintained building tell the truth about the company that owns it.

She checks the vent positions against the photos one more time, marks the shadow line of the parapet where the maintenance path runs, and allows herself one small birthday satisfaction, sitting back on her heels in the gray light with the whole plan spread out in her head like a prescription she has already counted twice.

Then the fire escape rattles.

Tracey's whole body locks. The rattle comes in a rhythm she knows too well, a person climbing, casual, unhurried, and she has maybe ten seconds and nowhere to go, because the roof she picked has one exit and she is sitting in the middle of it. She shoves the phone into her jacket and looks around desperately and settles for standing up and pretending, in the way of all bad liars everywhere, that she is just a woman enjoying a rooftop at dawn in a hundred-and-ten-degree heatwave.

The head that comes over the parapet belongs to a tall woman in her thirties, dark hair pinned up, gray pencil shirt gone soft at the collar, a lanyard stuffed in her pocket. The woman gets a knee up, then the rest of her, and stops dead when she sees Tracey.

"Oh, hell," the woman says, hand on her chest, "you scared me, I thought I was the only lunatic who comes up here."

Tracey says nothing, because her mouth has gone dry and her brain is running escape math instead of sentences.

The woman recovers first and looks around the roof, then back at her, wary now too, because a stranger on a restricted rooftop at five in the morning is not a normal thing and they are both clearly aware of it. "Sorry, are you, um. Are you with the building? I didn't think anyone else had this key."

"I don't have a key," Tracey says, which is true, she climbed, and she hears immediately how that sounds.

"Right. Neither do I, technically. Fire escapes are not actually locked, which seems like a flaw." The woman shifts her weight, looking at Tracey's jacket, at her crouched spot by the vent housing, at the general picture of guilt. "I'm Belinda. I work in the pharmacy, the big one, on the east side. I come up here to smoke because the break room has a camera and my manager has opinions about smoke breaks, which, whatever, it's ninety degrees before sunrise, so honestly I think we're both having bad mornings."

Tracey, thirty-five now, careful, trained to read people across a counter all day, does the arithmetic fast. The east side pharmacy. The chain. Her target. Of all the rooftops in this sprawling beige city, the universe has dropped the enemy's own employee onto her roof on the exact morning she chose for final reconnaissance, and Tracey does not believe in the universe being cute, but she does believe in bad luck, and this is a lot of it.

"Tracey," she says finally, and keeps her voice flat and bored, a customer service voice, the voice she uses for people who argue about coupon expiration dates. "I work in the mall too. The other pharmacy."

Belinda's eyebrows go up, and something complicated crosses her face, recognition of the rival, maybe, or just the awkwardness of two people who are professional competitors standing on a shared roof in the dark. "Oh. Westside Independent? I thought they closed."

"New owner, same sign," Tracey says, and hates how much of herself leaks into that sentence.

Belinda gets out her cigarettes with fingers that are slightly unsteady, and Tracey watches her light one and take a long drag and sag a little against the parapet, and the hostility in the moment thins, just a little, because misery on hot rooftops recognizes itself.

"God, sorry, that's rude, you don't smoke, I should ask." Belinda waves the cigarette. "You want me to not do this near you?"

"I don't care," Tracey says, and then, because silence is suspicious and she needs this woman gone, "Rough audit season?"

It is the wrong thing to say and she knows it the second it leaves her mouth, but Belinda laughs, a short sharp sound with no humor in it.

"Audit. Yeah. You have no idea. I'm the consultant they flew in for the efficiency report, and my regional director wants it flawless, like, flawless flawless, because the quarterly audit is in six weeks and this location's numbers are apparently a mess and somehow that's my problem now." She takes another drag, staring out at the parking lot below, empty and huge and already shimmering. "Three years at this company and every time something breaks it lands on the trans girl in consulting, because if it goes wrong they can blame me and if it goes right it was obviously the director's leadership. Sorry. You don't need my whole sad career at five in the morning."

Tracey goes very still, because Belinda has just said too much and also not noticed she said it, and one fact lands in Tracey's head like a dropped pill bottle. Stale snapshot, hardware failure, flawless report due in six weeks, a consultant with everything to lose and no trust in her own chain. Every part of Tracey's plan is suddenly standing on the roof next to her, smoking, sweating through a gray shirt, offering her a piece of the disaster for free.

"Why are you up here at five a.m., anyway?" Belinda asks. "Rooftop at dawn is a bad sign, by the way. I did that last year. It means something's about to go very wrong or very right."

Tracey looks at her, at the tired eyes and the shaking cigarette and the lanyard with the chain's logo on it, and gives the only honest answer she has left.

"It's my birthday."

"Happy birthday." Belinda blinks. "Is it going very wrong or very right?"

"Both, maybe."

"Story of my life," Belinda says, and stubs out the cigarette on the parapet, and does not leave, and Tracey does not tell her to.

Two days later Tracey is back on the roof at dawn, and she tells herself it is routine reconnaissance, a final check of the vent positions against her photos, and not that she stood in her kitchen at four thirty weighing whether Belinda would be up there and hating herself for weighing it. She climbs the same fire escape with her sleeves pulled over her hands, because the metal does not care that the sun is still below the horizon, and she steps over the parapet into air like a warm bath, and she listens for a lighter, for footsteps, for anything, and hears only the two HVAC units humming behind her on the east wall, the big one feeding the server closet, ticking over in the dark like a patient heart.

Belinda is there anyway, sitting on the gravel with her back against the parapet, hair down this time, and Tracey's stomach does something she refuses to name. "Roof stalker," Belinda says without looking up, and Tracey laughs before she can stop herself, an actual laugh, ugly and surprised in the quiet. "Occupational habit. I like high places. Sue me."

"Pharmacists and heights, there's a joke in there somewhere," Belinda says, and scoots over to make room against the parapet, which is an invitation, Tracey reasons, and not a trap, and she sits down an arm's length away because an arm's length is safe and also not far enough.

The sun comes up over the mountains in a smear of orange that neither of them watches, because they are watching each other sideways in the way people do when they have decided not to. "So tell me about Westside Independent," Belinda says, flicking ash into the wind. "Is the new owner as bad as the chain says, or is that just what chains say?" And here is the moment Tracey has prepared for, two days of it, a cover story built like a prescription, dose exact, no interactions, and she delivers it in her customer service voice. "Independent owner, independent problems. We do fine. Regulars, mostly. Old guys who want to complain about their copays to a human being." Every word is true except the ones that matter, and she hates the taste of them, and Belinda nods along like it is nothing, like Tracey is just a woman who counts pills four blocks away and not the person who is going to burn her employer down in six weeks.

"Sounds nice, actually," Belinda says, and her voice goes quiet in a way Tracey recognizes, the way people talk about things they have lost. "I started in an independent, before all this. Little place in Phoenix, my first job out of school, the pharmacist knew everyone's name and their dog's name. Then the chain bought the building and I got offered a consultant track and I took it, because rent, because health insurance, because a hundred reasons that all sound like courage and feel like the opposite." She flicks the lighter on, off, on, off, a little metal heartbeat. "Three years ago I moved here after my transition, basically, and I keep waiting to feel like I made the right trade and it hasn't happened yet."

Tracey thinks about her mother's pharmacy, the one with the green awning and the hand lettered window sign, the counter where she learned to count pills at her mother's elbow, and how it is a beige showroom now with a self-checkout kiosk where the counseling chair used to be, and fourteen months of a carefully laminated plan sits in a burner phone in her pocket and she says none of it. "Loyalty's expensive," is what she says instead, watching the parking lot. "Cheap people stay loyal and rich people get bought out. That's the whole economy."

"That's bleak," Belinda says, laughing. "You should write greeting cards."

"I'm a delight at parties," Tracey says, and Belinda grins at her, a real grin, and Tracey looks away first because looking at it is dangerous.

* * *

Three days after that it is 112 degrees by noon and the city is a griddle, and Tracey comes around the back of the strip mall at seven in the evening because the sun has dropped behind the west buildings and the fire escape steel is finally touchable. She is halfway up the first flight, sleeves over her hands, when she hears it, a sound she knows from a thousand shifts, the sound of a person trying to cry quietly and failing at the breathing part.

Belinda is sitting on the third landing with her knees pulled up, phone face down on the concrete beside her, and she is not trying at all anymore. Tracey stops on the stairs and stands there like an idiot for a full ten seconds, and then, because she is bad at walking away from people in trouble, always has been, her mother's daughter down to the bone, she climbs the last few steps and sits down on the landing without asking permission, one step below Belinda, which puts them almost at eye level.

"Rough audit season," Tracey says, and Belinda laughs wetly and wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "You have got to stop saying that like it's a normal phrase."

"It's a normal phrase for you, apparently." Belinda picks up the phone and looks at the screen and puts it down again. "Director called me at six. Twice. The efficiency report is due Friday and he says if I miss one more deadline it goes in my file, and he said it in that voice, you know the voice, the one where they're smiling while they do it, and then he said, and I quote, we can't afford to carry passengers this quarter." She sniffs, furious at herself for sniffing. "Passengers. Like I'm luggage. Like I haven't done every deliverable this team has shipped in a year and gotten a thank you note and a parking discount."

Tracey does not say the thing burning in her chest, which is that the file he wants to put her in is about to be ash anyway, that in six weeks this man's audit will be a smoking crater and Belinda should run now while the running is good. Instead she says, "He sounds like someone who peaked at regional director," and Belinda barks a laugh that turns into another sob halfway out, and Tracey does the impulsive thing, the thing her plan would forbid if her plan had a clause