The Auction of NothingThe Excelsior Grand ballroom held four hundred of the worst people money had ever made.The Excelsior's Grand ballroom was nothing short of a place of luxury and it exuded wealth and proper design with construction.The floors were spotless and very white the chandeliers emitted golden lights and the ceiling was made of modern architecture.Every part of the room exuded not just wealth but strength financially as the people who worked there were working and walking in the place. All of them dressed properly and looked very very attractive as they smelt nice also as they looked neat and well prepared.Julian Thorne stood at the podium and drank them in — hedge lords, dynasty widows, two shipping magnates, a foreign minister's bagman, and row upon row of the merely, viciously rich, all of them here to buy fifty years of the city's sins at retail. Behind him, under armored glass, under spotlights, sat the ledger.He had never felt better in his life.The gold scree

Old MoneyThe Concordia Club had refused eleven presidents, two popes' envoys, and every dollar minted after 1950.Its membership committee — nine chairmen of nine families who had owned the country's rails, oil, and senators since before the lightbulb — convened over lunch on the first Thursday of the month, and this first Thursday they had a guest speaker: Julian Thorne, rehabilitated, immaculate, presenting what he called an alignment opportunity."The Vance problem," Julian told the long table, "is not that he's rich. It's that he's fast. Three weeks, gentlemen. Your families took a century each. He took three weeks, and he did it with a machine — and I'm here to offer you the only countervailing machinery in existence."Julian was interested in countering the individual known as Arthur Vance as the time had come in his thinking to unveil a part of himself that he'd never previously unveiled before. His mind had gradually started to scheme and plot on what he was going to do at t

The Last InstructionThe pen weighed nothing and everything.This was nothing short of a symbolic statement which described a lot of attributes about the very pen that lay before him.Arthur stood over the tenth screen — colorless, open-chested on its teak cradle — with his grandfather's letter in one hand and nineteen miles of night between him and a sealed tower full of everyone he loved. Choose the words before you pick up the pen.Fifty-two years of dust hung in the lamplight. Outside the door, forbidden to enter, the blue glow pulsed against the loading dock like a heartbeat.Each moment the blue light continually pulsed like a heartbeat and this showed how the system was alive."Talk me through it," Arthur said. "One more time. What happens when I start writing?"[Every unit in the lattice will feel it, Host. The instruction propagates the moment the first letter completes. The red unit will understand immediately that its succession war is ending — and a dying combat unit does

The Copper BasinThe gift table told the whole story of the Hartwell family's evening before a single toast was raised.Arthur looked around as he smiled at the beautiful people and the Hartwell family members were really involved in the ongoing celebration in the Pavillion.Cartier boxes. A jade horse. An envelope from a shipping family rumored to contain a yacht berth. And at the very end, exiled to the corner like a quarantined object, Arthur's single gift-wrapped box — which the gift registrar had accepted with two fingers, the way one handles evidence.Arthur had presented the wrapped gifts and he was a normal person and they viewed him as the good old cleaner that once swept and mopped the floors in the offices and even more."Probably soap," Bryce announced to his circle of cousins, loudly. "Hotel soap. From whatever hostel he's been—"Bryce loves giving his comedic shots from time to time at Arthur as he continued to observe him with pure hatred. He disdained him from the ver

One Thousand and Ninety-SixVivian Hartwell knelt at 8:14 p.m., in front of two hundred guests, one photographer, and her own mother's birthday cake, and the ballroom was so quiet that everyone heard her knees touch the marble.This was completely unexpected as she'd done something that nobody imagined she would ever do.She grabbed the hem of Arthur's canvas jacket. Her fingers were shaking so hard she could barely hold the fabric.She had experienced something that she'd never experienced before something ethereal in nature. She was seemingly behaving in a genuflecting manner before a former member of cleaning staff."Arthur — Arthur, please, be reasonable, we're family, three years under one roof, that has to mean—""Let go of my clothes." Arthur thundered as his face turned to that of a fierce one.The words came out of him flat and unhurried, and he watched her flinch as they landed — because she knew them. Of course she knew them. She'd been in the next room the morning her daug