The Intern in the Mirror

Arden Vale died at sixty-one with a glass of his own brand of whisky in his hand and the taste of almonds where there shouldn't be any.

The last face he saw was Daniel's. The intern. The one who'd fetched his coffee for ten years and never once asked for a raise, who'd smiled that patient, pleasant smile through every tantrum and triumph. Daniel was holding the decanter. Daniel was still smiling.

"You should have retired, sir," Daniel said, kindly, as the floor came up to meet him.

Then Arden woke up, and the ceiling was wrong.

It was a low ceiling. A cheap one, water-stained, the kind that belonged to a studio apartment a man earning a chairman's salary would never see. He sat up. His body moved too easily. No aching knee, no scarred shoulder, none of the sixty-one years he'd paid for.

He went to the mirror over the sink because some animal part of him already knew, and he made himself look anyway.

Daniel looked back.

Young Daniel. Twenty-three, maybe. Soft around the eyes in a way the older one had trained out of himself. Wearing a cheap shirt Arden suddenly remembered (I gave him that shirt, a Christmas bonus, a joke, here, you look cold) and on the desk behind him, a letter.

Vale Industries. Internship Offer. Please report Monday, 9 a.m.

Dated fifteen years ago.

Arden Vale stood in the body of the man who would murder him, fifteen years before the murder, and felt the entire architecture of his revenge collapse and rebuild itself into something far more interesting.

He had spent his last conscious second wanting one thing: to make them pay. The board who'd voted him out. Vivienne, his wife, who'd signed the papers with her grandmother's pen. And Daniel, quiet, smiling Daniel, who it turned out had been the one moving every piece.

But how do you take revenge on Daniel when you are Daniel? When the hands you'd strangle are the hands you wash your face with?

He looked at the offer letter. Monday, 9 a.m. The day he (the day Daniel) first walked into Vale Industries and began, with infinite patience, to become the man who would kill him.

Arden picked up the letter. His young hands didn't shake. That was the body's youth, not his calm. Inside, he was a furnace.

He had two choices. He could refuse the internship, walk away, live a small clean life in this borrowed skin and let the empire and its vipers carry on without him.

Or he could go in Monday morning, sit down at that desk, and learn (from the inside, with a chairman's mind in an intern's smile) exactly how the betrayal was built. Every lever. Every weakness. Every soft throat.

He could become the perfect intern. Patient. Pleasant. Invisible. The way Daniel had been.

And when the time came, fifteen years from now, he would already be standing in the room with the decanter.

Arden Vale smiled at the mirror, and it was Daniel's smile, and for the first time he understood why it had always made his skin crawl.

"Monday," he said. "Nine a.m."

He had an empire to inherit by stealing it from himself.