tongue. She’d had her headphones clamped over her ears the entire day, listening to music from her sticker-covered laptop, but they must have started to pinch her ears, because she’d taken them off a few minutes before. She brushed her hair back behind her ears, the tips still red from the pressure of the headphones, and tossed the candy wrapper into the trashcan by her feet, which was about half full.
She hadn’t bothered with real food since she’d come down to Processing. Adel El-Nadi knew this, because he had been waiting for her to head to the commissary for lunch for two days now, so that he could casually join her at her table and strike up a conversation, but it hadn’t happened. He had adjusted his plans today, waiting by the vending machines with a cooling cup of coffee, the same place where he had encountered her regularly last summer. However, Eerie appeared to have brought candy with her this year, and she had hardly left her desk. Which is how he found himself skulking along the balcony above her work area, looking down at her blue hair and debating himself.
Adel came to no conclusions, except that he had an awful headache.
When he had first met Eerie, Adel had been a final-year student at the Academy majoring in computer science and programming language. He was just another intern doing routine maintenance on the massive, constantly mutating body of code that constituted the Etheric Network. Since then, he’d left the Academy and turned down a number of cartel offers to work instead at the Academy’s Processing facility, coding new extensions for the network, cutting-edge field applications and revolutionary new procedures for protocol storage and download. In a single year he’d been promoted twice to network architect, and he now had his own small team — four coders, a tech, and two interns. He’d burned through any number of favors trying to get Eerie assigned to his team. There were only two female interns, after all, and a number of the team leads had fond memories of Eerie’s two previous summers working there. Adel was single-minded when he wanted something, though, he did what he had to do to get her assigned to his team.
Now, he thought bitterly, outside of routine meetings and handing out assignments, he’d barely managed to talk to her. She’d seemed more subdued when she arrived this time, less bouncy and eager than she had been in previous years. For the first time, Adel got the impression that she didn’t want to be there. She wasn’t unfriendly, but she hadn’t given him the giant, enthusiastic hug that he was used to receiving as her normal greeting, and she had barely responded to questions during the orientation sessions. Not only his questions, either, or he would have had an idea where he stood with her and changed tactics. Instead, she was like that with everyone. He wasn’t sure if he was worried about that, glad, or what.
Then, of course, there was the strange offer he had received, from a girl he didn’t really know, making fantastic promises in return for one small favor.
He had earned his headache last night, drinking at a friend’s apartment in Central with a couple of the new interns. It had taken most of the night, and many more drinks that he was accustomed to, because he didn’t want to come right out and ask any questions that would have given his motivations away, but he did eventually get some of the story about Alex Warner, and his on-again-off-again involvement with Eerie. He thought at the time that Eerie was simply making a mistake, but he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been wrong about her from the start. How to talk to her, though, when she didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone?
One of the staffers came walking by on their way to buy a cup of Ramen from one of the machines, giving Adel a friendly nod and a curious look as he walked past. Adel quickly bought a soda from the machine and then retreated to his cramped office. It was dark inside, because he had covered the windows with construction paper and unscrewed the overhead lights so that they wouldn’t compete with any one of the four different displays. He clicked through documents on his desktop aimlessly while he brooded and contemplated the offer.
It had come via a dummy email account the day after Eerie had arrived. The sender claimed to be Emily Muir, a Hegemony girl from the Academy that he didn’t know. Apparently, she was Eerie and Alex Warner’s classmate, and seemed as upset at their relationship as he was. Adel had no idea how she had found him. It would have taken a powerful empath to recognize the crush he had nurtured for the Changeling. The email was concise, detailed, and made a number of intriguing and lurid offers in return for one very simple thing. A false forward, an email purporting to come from the school account of one Alexander Warner. Emily Muir had already helpfully provided the text, and he had done the necessary work two days before. The email had been sitting in his outbox ever since, waiting for him to click a single button.
He wasn’t sure what would happen to Eerie if he sent it, but he was certain it wouldn’t be good. On the other hand, the email he had received promised him some very good things. Moreover, Adel was lonely, and resentful of Alex Warner.
Adel sulked in the dark of his office for an hour, before clicking the ‘Send’ button in a gesture so impulsive that he could only stare at his hand afterward, wondering how it had done such a thing without consulting him. He reread Emily Muir’s email until he didn’t feel anything other than barely suppressed excitement.
Eventually he returned to his assignment, a new head’s-up display for a ballistics protocol that Auditor Aoki used frequently. He spent about twenty minutes conceptually attacking it from different angles, before he decided that he was wasting his time. He reached for the forgotten soda blindly, and his questing fingers managed to knock it over, covering the papers on his desk with neon-green foam and causing Adel to curse to the greatest extent a secular Moroccan upbringing allowed.
“Adel?” Eerie asked, only her head peeking around his doorframe. “Are you okay?”
“Fine!” Adel shouted without meaning to. “Just fine. I just spilled this; ah… what can I do for you, Eerie?”
He made an utterly pointless attempt to make a neat pile of the print outs and documents that he had soaked with bright green soda while Eerie wandered into the darkened office, taking a seat on the only chair that wasn’t covered with a pile of folder-bound technical manuals. Her face was blank, but that told him nothing — from experience, he knew that was the way she usually looked.
“I need to go back to the Academy,” Eerie said seriously, “tonight.”
“Ah… yes?”
“Yes,” Eerie agreed solemnly.
Adel felt the time stretching out disastrously, his smile growing terser as he panicked behind it. He felt a perverse urge to turn his monitor so that Eerie could see what he had done, to show her how false her expectations were. Then he caught the look in her eyes, the obvious eagerness, and he had to choke back his resentment.
Adel put his hands down firmly on the desk, resolved himself, and did his best to look solicitous.
“Eerie,” he said carefully, “is this something I can help you with? Maybe something you would like to talk about?”
Eerie shook her head.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” He felt as if he were running a fever, sweat dripping down his brow and the small of his back. “Because if I could help you, Eerie, then I would like to.”
“Why?” Eerie asked, sounding more curious than usual, leaning forward so she could see him clearly in the dark room. Adel fought the urge to twitch and fidget.
“Because I like you, Eerie,” he admitted, amazed at his own forwardness, and a little afraid, too. “Because, after last time you interned here, I had hoped we might have a chance to get to know each other better…”
“I’m sorry,” Eerie said gently. “I would like to be friends with you, Adel. But I got a very important email. From an important friend. And I have to go now. Maybe we could talk later?”
“I see,” Adel said, stiffly. “Can I ask who you need to see?”
“Alex,” Eerie said softly. “He was supposed to be gone all break, but he came back early. I want to go see him, Adel. Please.”
“Well, if you really think that you must,” Adel said reluctantly, wondering again with a slightly uneasy twinge what exactly it was he was involving himself in. “The Administration won’t be happy, of course, since you are supposed to be with us until the end of break…”
“That can wait,” Eerie said, shaking her head. “I can be in trouble later.”
“Okay,” Adel said, mentally washing his hands of the matter. “Then go, if you think you have to. I won’t tell anyone, so they probably won’t notice until sometime tomorrow.”
If Eerie hadn’t leapt to her feet, right then, so excited that she barely managed to remember to thank him, he might have warned her. At least that is what he told himself. Instead, he felt a perverse satisfaction in hustling her out the door, as she was so eager to see her boyfriend.
