Free PLAY by Piper Lawson Page B

“Anything else?”
    I forced my attention back to the papers. “Yeah. I’ll have the leads back to you in a week.”
    “How about tomorrow?”
    My jaw dropped. “Seriously?” I thought of everything I had to do at Alliance tomorrow. “You know I don’t work for you, right?”
    “Yeah. But what you will remember from the documents I sent Alliance is that we’re planning to launch in six months.” He waited, I nodded. “I want to do it in four.”
    “What? Why?”
    He flashed teeth. “Because the biggest studio in the world is launching their latest project in five. They’ve already announced it.”
    “If you launch later…”
    “The world is playing their game instead of mine.”
    I resisted the urge to groan. “I’ll do what I can.”
     

     
    It was two days, not one, before I had reviewed three prospects in detail and identified two new ones. Doing that meant staying up until four am only to get up for my day job at seven.
    I’d naively expected a gaming company to be more…easygoing. Grown men and women working at things that were the rest of the world’s play. Still, it seemed like everyone in Titan put in more hours than I did at Titan and Alliance combined. I was learning they were every bit as talented as any other professionals, plus they threw everything they had, everything they were , into their work.
    “Don’t chalk this up to laziness, but what do you do in your downtime?” I asked Riley one night. I sipped the last of the watermelon slushie I’d brought from Alliance while Riley got Red Bull number two—three?—from the fridge.
    He grinned. “You’re funny, Payton. I like that. Seriously, though, the coders usually take a month or two off between games. Until then, they work in sprints, practically around the clock, until something’s ready for Max to review. Why, you starting to regret your offer to help?”
    “I just don’t get why Max wanted my help. All he seems to do is shoot down my ideas,” I complained. So far, he wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t even discuss any of the options I’d come up with. I was getting seriously frustrated.
    We emerged from the kitchen, and the man in question was sitting across the Pit with a circle of developers. They occupied a melange of task chairs, beanbag chairs and the a chaise lounge. Max watched as one of them—Zane, I think—wrote something on the table in the middle. Max shook his head, took the pen from Zane, and scrawled out something else. Jimmy, who I remembered because he looked like a biker, erased what Max had written and wrote something new.
    Everyone stared at the table. Finally Max nodded, and Jimmy beamed.
    I felt a stab of envy. Of course Max could collaborate with his own people but not with me.
    “What does he even do when he’s not telling me my ideas are crap?” I asked grumpily.
    “A bit of everything. Approves developments, new ideas. Sometimes he even codes. I saw him get lost in the Pit for three weeks once. I don’t think he got up to take a piss,” Riley mused as we watched them together, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “Fun fact: most people think Oasis was Max’s first game, but he actually spun off three more under a different name. His first release made him more than two hundred grand.”
    “Impressive.”
    “Yeah, especially for a fifteen-year-old.”
    Damn.
    I led the way back to Riley’s office. Someone had been nice enough to pull one of the work stations inside, so I had a little nook in the corner that was quieter than the open-concept space outside.
    “So he doesn’t have any hobbies? Personal life?”
    “If you ask him, he’ll say his work is play. But everyone needs time to decompress. The truth is, Max plays like the rest of us, maybe more. He just keeps a Chinese wall up.”
    “Is that what Stack’s for?” I asked.
    Riley surprised me by blushing. “It was my idea, actually. Our fearless leader is pretty high strung. If he doesn’t blow off steam, he