Christina tapped them directly. Small palette menus opened on the screen next to their silhouettes. She scrolled.
“I can display them as emojis.”
“Make Daniel the hamburger.”
“Done. And William’s the pizza. Now I just have to figure out how we can lock on to our targets.”
“Imagine if our parents could hear this conversation. They’d be like, Hello, are you even speaking English?”
Christina swept a finger across the map’s on-screen measurement systems. She toggled through a variety of toolbars that framed the margins of the map to show kilometers and miles, meters and feet.
“My parents don’t speak English anyway,” she said, “so they wouldn’t know.”
Melissa fidgeted awkwardly with her watch. “Oh!” she said. “Right. I mean, that’s cool, I just—”
“I’m totally messing with you,” Christina said. “They were both born here.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched Melissa stare at her as if she were about to say something, then shake her head and turn to the windshield. Christina sensed that something intangible had been offered, some overture of friendliness, and she’d just slapped it away.
“I heard you on that rooftop,” she said, trying to recover. “When you were yelling at Daniel—”
“I wasn’t yelling.”
“When you were raising your voice in his general direction. What did you mean about William not being fine?”
One of the menu options filled the streets with bright hash marks that diminished to vanishing points. That was frustratingly close to the overlay she wanted, but not quite right.
“You and Daniel, I swear to God,” Melissa said. “Do you think a normal person sees a random water tower and thinks, ‘Hey, it’s really dark out and I have no idea what’s in there. I think I’m gonna jump in and see.’”
Something about her tone raised Christina’s hackles. As if she, Melissa Faber, were the arbiter of acceptable behavior. The girl who was obsessed with the most shallow aspect of human existence: what kind of clothes people wore. The girl who was Epheme-chatting with a grown man and firing off coy little selfies behind her boyfriend’s back.
“The whole reason we’re friends is because he’s not normal,” Christina said. “I don’t get along with ‘normal’ people.”
“So you think running in front of traffic back at the Derby was a cool thing he did because he doesn’t operate like the rest of us mindless sheep? I remember how nervous you were that day.”
“He’s just being William,” Christina said.
“If he were my best friend, I would’ve told him to stop just being William a long time ago.”
“Wow, that’s perfect. You really are the fixer.”
“It seriously makes me feel batshit crazy to talk about this, like here’s this guy who just did something insane and I’m the only one who notices or cares.”
Melissa paused. Christina focused on the windshield and toggled madly through viewing options, clamping down on the desire to blurt out Let’s talk about Ash, Melissa. The mere thought of doing such a fiercely confrontational thing, of blowing her cover for the sake of inflicting a cheap hurt, made her supremely conscious of her laptop sitting on the bench in its soft case just a few feet behind her. For a moment she could feel the fine invisible threads of her spying radiating from Kimmie, gossamer strands of data that linked her sleeping computer to Melissa’s phone, snaking through Otto’s menus to worm into ARACHNE, and she felt the sum total of all she had done like cranial pressure, the harbinger of a migraine. The web was becoming unwieldy.
“I had this one friend, Leigh, who used to do this thing,” Melissa continued, “where she’d be all pale and shaky and say things like, ‘Oh, no, I’m not really hungry, I had half a yogurt before, so I’m good,’ things that were so obviously meant for us to react like, ‘Jesus, Leigh, you have to eat something, you have a problem,’ but it took us six months to say anything about it. Six. Months. By then she was down to like ninety pounds. We had to have an intervention. Her real dad flew in from Portland.”
A single loud CRACK reverberated across the town. White tendrils rained from a star-bright point in the night sky, a weeping willow that hazed away into smoke.
Christina’s hands moved of their own accord, scrolling through menus that had nothing to do with the problem at hand, the targeting display, which she still hadn’t solved. Her overlays were increasingly useless, tiled wallpapers of hentai GIFs—what the hell did I just do?—while the LIDAR map came alive, orange infantry scattering, green cavalry patrolling the streets.
And here she sat paralyzed.
Melissa raised her voice. “Otto, we need a way to target moving objects through the windshield. Can you make the screen into something that helps us do that?”
Instantly, the windshield transformed. Christina pulled her hands back from the glass as crosshairs overlaid the map, a series of concentric circles in the center. The margins hummed with activity: range finders, wind gauges, and a little box labeled KILLS set to 0000.
“I don’t know why you didn’t just ask in the first place,” Melissa said.
“I didn’t think of it,” Christina muttered. “Why didn’t Otto just do it in the first place?” She held her hand just above her head, so her hair prickled her palm. Then she pressed down hard and dug in with her nails.
Focus up, soldier.
“Pizza and hamburger on the move,” Melissa said. “You good?”
“Roger that.” Christina rocked her head from side to side, cracking her neck. “Let’s do this.”
Melissa spoke into her watch. “Text Otto: Go.”
Hey, it’s a couple of laser fags!
William had been ten years old the last time he played laser tag. Tommy had taken him to Central Michigan’s largest indoor game center, You’re It. The name of the place was head-slappingly dumb. Nobody yelled “You’re it!” in laser tag. But despite getting a basic element of the game wrong, the owners of You’re It had created an amazing labyrinth of neon tunnels, moving platforms, and trapdoors that dropped players into pits of
