Chapter 1: The Anointing

The derrick was a steel god on the Texas skyline, and it demanded blood.

Davidson Ekon swatted a grubby sleeve over his forehead, smearing on sweat and a thin layer of Permian Basin dust into a paste. The July sun was a hard thing, pressing down on the hard hat which fit more securely on his head than did the wedding ring on his left hand. One hundred feet below, the drill bit was churning prehistoric rock, its low, repetitive drone the only song this land ever learned.

"Pressure's mounting on number three, Ekon!" a voice crackled over the radio, tinny and strained.

Davidson was already running, his boots kicking up clouds of dust as he sprinted towards the wellhead. He didn't require the data screen; he felt the rig's vibration shift, a slight change from workday thrum to ominous whine. His men, men whose faces were as weathered as the desert, stood frozen, their movements slowing.

Back it off! Now!" he shouted, his voice above the cacophony of machinery. He shoved through a frozen roughneck, his hands flying across the controls, grabbing the system manually. His heart thumped in his chest, not with fear, but with hot, keen passion. This was where he lived—among the flames of a problem to be solved.

A hiss, a shudder, and the whine faded, reverting to its usual industrial hum. Crisis avoided. The collective gasp of the crew struck the hot air with a rush.

"Thought she was gonna blow," the foreman, Gus, grunted, standing beside him. He held out a canteen of water flavored with warm plastic.

"Not on my watch," replied Davidson, his eyes still scanning the gauges, ensuring all the needles were in the green. His watch. He took pride in it. He'd risen from the ground up, not with an Ivy League education, but calloused hands and a knowledge of the earth's reluctant secrets.

A. A black SUV, appearing extremely odd and extremely expensive, kicked up a cloud on the access road. All heads turned. Vehicles of that sort only arrived at the rig if someone very important was very upset.

The passenger side door swung open. A man in a suit that probably cost more than the truck Davidson owned stepped out, hopping over the dust to guard his shiny feet. He never looked toward the rig, the crew, or the sky. He just looked at Davidson.

"Davidson Ekon?"

"That all depends," Davidson said, not moving from his position. "Are you here to fire me?".

The man almost smiled. “Quite the opposite. My name is Alan Price. I’m the chief of staff for Mr. Joseph Brian. He requests your presence.”

The name hit like a punch. Joseph Brian. Rich, enigmatic proprietor of this rig, this field, and half the hemisphere's oil properties. A man less man than legend. Davidson had heard every tale, every balance sheet, every hearsay about Brian's icy brilliance. He was the ghost of the machine, the unknown mastermind behind the operation.

"Requests my presence for what?" Davidson snarled, his rebellion a cover for the sudden, disquieting rush that passed through him.

"He does not discuss his reasons with me, Mr. Ekon. He simply points, and I make a reservation. The helicopter is ready."

Helicopter. Davidson looked down at his grease-stained coveralls, his grimy hands. "I'm not exactly dressed for a meeting."

"Mr. Brian is concerned about the engineer, not the tailoring," Price said in a manner that brooked no argument. "We can go into details on the flight to New York."

New York. The words unlocked a lock, a key he never knew he possessed. He thought about Melissa, the meatloaf she'd prepare for dinner. Bedtime stories for the kids. The life he'd constructed, as solid as foundations.

He stared at the rig, his god. Then at the open SUV door, a doorway to another world.

“Gus, you’ve got the watch,” he said, his voice quieter now.

He didn’t get to change.

---

The helicopter ride was a blur of noise and vibration, the flat, brown expanse of Texas giving way to the endless, glittering sprawl of New York City. Alan Price spent the flight briefing him, his voice a monotone over the headset.

"Mr. Brian is conducting a series of high-level meetings today. You are going to observe. You are going to stay silent unless you are spoken to. Your opinion is not needed. Your instinct."

The SUV whisked them from the helicopter pad to a midtown skyscraper, a black glass shard thrust into the clouds. The lobby was a shrine of wealth, all marble cold and deliberate movement. People murmured. The air itself was priced.

They walked around the bank of elevators, toward a lone, highly polished brass door. An elevator for private use. Price's hand lay atop a scanner. The doors slid open with a whisper.

The elevator had no buttons. It just went up, a smooth, silent glide that made Davidson's stomach lurch into his throat. He watched the numbers flashing on the digital readout: 50… 60… 70… They never ceased. They just kept rising until they hit the top. The penthouse.

The doors pushed wide, not into an office but into the sky. One wall was an unbroken plate of glass, giving a ghostly, mind-boggling vista of the city spread out like a circuit board. The space itself was huge, sparsely furnished with low-slung leather couches and one giant piece of abstract sculpture that had probably cost more than his town.

And there, his back to them, looking out over his kingdom, stood Joe Brian.

He was taller than Davidson had been led to expect, his wiry body muscular under a suit that seemed newly tailored in charcoal. His hair was a theatric silver, chopped close to his skull in a brutal style. He did not turn as they entered.

"Sir, I have Mr. Ekon," Price said, and vanished, leaving Davidson to stand in the vast, vacant room.

The man turned.

Davidson's initial reaction was that all the photographs he'd ever known were untrue. They captured the money, the power, but they completely lacked the ferocity. Joe Brian's eyes were pale, piercing blue, and they didn't just look at you; they sized you up, put you into place, and categorized you in an instant. His face was a map of calculated decisions, with lines that spoke of concentration, not smiles.

"The pressure differential on the Porter Creek well," Brian replied. His voice was low, silky, and possessed an absolute command that was not dependent upon loudness. "You diagnosed a stuck valve in the blowout preventer. The company man's logs showed a formation kick."

Davidson's mouth was parched. Six months previously, that had occurred. "The logs were in error, sir. The vibration was entirely off for a kick. It was a grind, metal. A jammed valve… grinds."

A flash of something—interesse?—"And you overrode the automated system. Manually. You may have blown the thing you were trying to keep from blowing."

"The automation was reading bad data. I trusted instinct.".

"Ininstinct is a luxury," Brian remarked, moving in closer. He had the glide of a predator, entirely contained. "It's the word that gets applied when people can't explain their own talent. You weren't relying on instinct. You were cross-matching sound returns against pressure readings the main sensors weren't even including. You just don't have the vocabulary for it."

Davidson could only stare. The guy had dissected his train of thought from five states away.

"Why am I here, sir?" The question came out more brusquely than he'd intended.

Brian did not smile, but his face seemed to shift, as if a chess master had noticed a move. "I've got a boardroom full of Harvard MBAs to do a regression analysis. I don't have one single person to listen to a rig blow up. So far."

He wheeled and strolled over to the glass wall, motioning for Davidson to follow along. He pointed with a manicured finger down at the streets. "They're viewing a city. I'm viewing a system. A splurging of money, ambition, and weak human beings. It's not all that different from one of my rigs. It must be cared for at all times. A sense of the vibration."

He finally concentrated his entire attention on Davidson, and its power was suffocating. "I am offering you a chance. Not a job. Not a title. Not a corner office. An education. You will leave that world—" he swept his hand across the room as if pushing aside Davidson's entire life in Texas, "--and you will learn to see the world my way."

The hubris was staggering. The assumption that he just would walk away from it all. The scale of the opportunity.

"My family…" Davidson began, his voice tight.

Will be rewarded in a manner that allows them to thrive in your absence," Brian said, as if stating the most natural thing in the world. "This is not negotiable, Ekon. This is an anointing. The question isn't whether or not you deserve it. The question is whether you have the strength to bear it.".

He walked over to his desk, picked up a heavy, plain envelope, and held out his hand. "Your lesson begins now. Read this. You have ten minutes until the first meeting. Your observations will determine if you get a second."

Davidson reached for the envelope, his mind reeling. The hot Texas sun was a million miles away. He was in the middle of a hurricane, and the person at the storm's center was offering him the chance to learn how to tame the tempest.

He looked from the envelope clutched in his hand to the man who had just commandeered his destiny in the space of a few poor sentences. The path of his life, once a flat dust road, had just forked out with brutal power.

He ripped open the envelope.