“She’s always known,” Emily said, blushing and looking down, “what would be expected of me. My father has been very clear on what role I would eventually play in helping rebuild the Raleigh Cartel’s fortunes. I don’t know why she’s acting like she would bite your head off if you touched me.”
After a moment’s consideration, he decided that probably wasn’t a veiled invitation.
“I’m not sure,” he said hesitantly. “Therese seems… capable.”
Emily giggled.
“That’s one way to put it,” she said more cheerfully, shelving dishes. “And you’re right. Therese is one of the top Operators in the Hegemony, and certainly the most, how should I say… capable in our cartel. But, if you were to compromise my virtue, I wouldn’t be that concerned with Therese’s reaction.”
“Really?”
Alex braced himself, wondering how much worse it could get.
“No, I’d be more worried about my father,” Emily said, her smile unhappy. “He might collapse in sheer joy and disbelief.”
Alex didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. They finished up the kitchen in silence, and then moved to the living room. Alex was careful to sit down first, on one end of the couch, so that when Emily decided to sit down next to him, rather than leaving a buffer between them, it wasn’t awkward. He took a sip from his wine glass and hoped that it looked like he’d done that before, and ransacked his mind for something to say.
“You must think I’m a mess,” Emily said, sighing and leaning back into the overstuffed leather cushions. “My plan was so much cooler than this.”
“Really? Because this has been pretty cool. I’ve never really been over to anyone’s house before.”
Emily was openly skeptical.
“Never?”
Alex shook his head. On the balance, he figured it could be worse — he didn’t really want to talk about himself, but even more than that, he didn’t want them to sit in silence.
“Well, I mean, I’ve been inside other people’s houses, obviously,” Alex explained, frowning as he tried to remember. “But, I don’t think I’ve ever really been invited over to hang out like this. I’m sure that no one except my grandmother ever cooked me dinner.”
“That sounds sort of lonely,” Emily said, looking at him with what he desperately hoped wasn’t pity. “Though maybe things haven’t gone too well tonight because I’m sort of in uncharted territory myself. I don’t normally do this sort of thing.”
“Can I ask what your plan was?” Alex asked, looking away, cheeks burning.
“Oh. Uh, well, I thought you’d be all over me as soon as we were alone, so I didn’t think I would have to do that much,” Emily said nervously, her cheeks tomato-red. “I guess I didn’t realize how weird this would feel. I’ve known it was coming for years, since I was little. And I worried about it, all sorts of things, really, but now that it’s happening, I can’t even tell if you like me or not.”
“Do you like me at all?”
Alex evaded the question, still unable to look at Emily directly.
“I don’t really know you,” Emily admitted, after a short delay.
“Well, same here.” Alex shrugged in relief. “It isn’t that I don’t like you. I just don’t really get what’s going on, yet, and it seems really important that I figure things out. That, and,” Alex said, instantly regretting having continued on, “I’ve never, that is to say, well, this is all new to me. All of it.”
Emily looked stunned. Alex was fairly certain that she reached for her wine glass to buy herself time, rather than out of thirst.
“Are you being serious?”
She leaned forward when she asked, trying to look him in the eyes. Alex blushed, and wished he’d been able to turn invisible after all.
“Yes,” Alex said, hanging his head.
“All of it?”
Emily’s expression was somewhere between incredulous and pitying.
“My upbringing was not exactly conventional,” Alex said morosely, “and I was not quite as popular at my last school as I appear to be at this one.”
“Can I ask why?”
“Shit,” Alex said softly, rubbing his palms against his jeans, “this is exactly what I didn’t want to talk about out.”
Emily reached over and patted his hand, her expression pained.
“Don’t worry about it,” she urged. “We can talk about something…”
“My family died in a fire,” Alex said quietly, staring at the floor. “The general consensus was that I set it, though I can’t say that I remember doing anything like that. I guess I can’t say that I’m sure I didn’t, either. Anyway, I spent a long time in various institutions, because of that. The overall opinion of me back at home was, well, understandably low.”
Alex waited for a moment, and then when nothing happened, he snuck a look over at Emily. She was lost in thought, absently brushing her hair back behind her ears.
“Should I go?”
He didn’t want to. That had to be obvious in his voice, to say nothing of empathy.
“You knew, right?” Emily asked, speaking slowly, her eyes unfocused. “About me and my situation, I mean? And you came anyway.”
“Sure,” Alex said with a shrug. “I was hungry.”
Emily laughed and slapped his arm playfully.
“It doesn’t really matter to me, what you did or didn’t do before you got here,” Emily said, with what appeared to be sincerity, or a perfect facsimile thereof. “And I’m not planning on asking any more questions that you don’t want to answer. But, I do want something from you, Alex.”
The wariness must have been obvious, because she flinched.
“Oh?”
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s nothing bad. I wondered if you’d consider coming to an arrangement with me. Maybe we could help each other.”
Nineteen
“The quarry seems a bit different than the last time I saw it.”
“Different how?”
“Well, there’s a lot…
“Since this afternoon, roughly three-ish?”
“And then there’s the frost. It’s just like my poor couch.” Rebecca pinched her lower lip and looked at Michael disapprovingly. “Did you freeze the quarry? Why did you freeze the quarry, Michael?”
“I didn’t do it,” Michael protested. “Alex did. Or rather, that was a side effect of what Alex did.”
“Alex blew up that whole rock face?”
Rebecca pointed incredulously at the ruined slope, at a deep crater that exposed the bedrock, covered with a fine layer of gravel and chipped stone.
“No, that was me,” Michael admitted, shoulders slumped. “I showed him the Vacuum Bomb Protocol, to give him an idea of what was possible, given the right control…”
“You were showing off,” Rebecca said, staring grumpily at the quarry wall. “And then what happened?”
“He activated the Absolute Protocol that you implanted. And then he started dumping all the local energy directly out into the Ether. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean? What ‘local energy’?”
“Everything. First thermal, then radiant and electromagnetic as well.”
