“Who owns the school, Mark?” Eric’s razor wasn’t sharp enough; he rinsed it in the sink.

“The school isn’t one thing, and it never was. There’s a parcel of real estate. There are tables, chairs, a stack of smartphones, a couple of tablets. And the intellectual property: the curriculum, the marketing data, but more importantly, the trademarks, the overall concept, the accrued goodwill, the word of mouth, the brand. That’s the important thing. We still control that. Our contracts say so. And the last major asset is the accounts payable: our contracts with the students.”

“And who owns those?” Eric kept his voice calm, low: it was necessary for the close work of dragging a blade across your skin.

“A consortium of investors, mostly in the greater New York area. I’m not sure I’m at liberty to say more than that. But if you heard their names, you’d probably recognize—”

“Jesus Christ.” He nicked himself just below his right nostril.

“Not him.”

A watery droplet of blood ran over Eric’s upper lip and into his mouth. It tasted like soap.

“So as soon as you could, Mark, without explaining it to us, you sold the school to the Illuminati. To a bunch of snake-people.” He leaned in closer to the mirror, trying not to cut himself under his other nostril.

“You don’t want to own companies like these. You want to be a vendor. You want to be a creditor. You consult: you agree to give them whatever bright ideas you have and you get paid for them on long-term contracts. Or you’re their landlord. Better yet, both. If you own equity, stock, whatever, when the whole thing goes belly-up, the value of what you own evaporates. If you’re a creditor, you at least get to participate in the bankruptcy.”

“When the whole thing goes belly-up?”

“You always have to anticipate failure. For-profit education is a volatile sector of the economy. Fads come and go. You have to expect there will be economic downturns, government investi—anyway, things happen.”

“Goddamnit, Mark, are we breaking the law?” Another nick.

“Education laws, lending laws, they change all the time.”

“Of course,” Eric groaned. “And so do tax laws … probably campaign finance laws …”

“You can break the law without knowing it, Eric. Most educational institutions do at one time or another, with no way to predict how much it’s going to cost, and no way to stop the bleeding. Tuition hikes are unpopular. Even if the balance sheet is in the red for a decade, they just have to … keep educating people.”