“Your turn, Otto,” William said.
A long skein of emojis snaked through the interior, symbols that did not yet exist: a microwave with a doll inside, a half-open curtain, a coiled rope, a faun with the head of a woman.
“Um,” Daniel said.
“I don’t know if I should drink for this or not,” Christina said, holding up a finger so that the emoji stream rushed across her skin.
The game had evolved considerably since Otto had joined. The car’s “never have I ever” contributions were impossible to figure out, and the game had become more about interpreting whatever Otto was trying to say.
“I’ve seen the Venus flytrap before,” Daniel said. “Two turns ago.”
Melissa had settled on a strategy of slow withdrawal from the conversation in the car, the game, everything. She sipped her water while everyone else drank beer. Plan A was to mutter something about needing to get some air and slip out at a stoplight. Plan B was to wait until they stopped for food and take a solo walk. To her relief, Otto seemed to understand what she was going for, doing his part by distracting everyone with strange dispatches from the depths of his inscrutable brain. She didn’t have to worry about him sabotaging her expedition with a dramatic Epheme revelation—he was totally on her side.
“I feel like we’re looking at layers of symbolism here,” Daniel said, his eyes tracing the journey of a tricycle with snakes for tires.
“These are literally floating symbols,” Christina said. “So…maybe?”
Outside, the city rose from the desert like an irrigated garden of concrete and stucco. Buildings at the city center sprouted high and glittery. Neighborhoods carpeted the flatlands with light, sprawling out to end in ragged edges that teased the pitch-black desert. Behind them, the mountain range they’d passed loomed, hazy and forbidding, to meet the night sky in an EKG line of craggy peaks painted martian red by the moon.
Otto overlaid information on the windows; the words Sandia Mountains floated in the darkness.
Christina tossed a frozen-food bag at Daniel. “You need to pea yourself.” He slapped the bag against his swollen face.
Albuquerque’s outskirts came up fast, and before Melissa knew it, their tires had traded smooth desert highway for cracked blacktop. Double wide trailers crouched in streetlights’ fringes, chicken-wire dog runs glinting in Otto’s headlights, canine eyes shining. Meanwhile the car was no longer waiting for its turn in the game. Stray emojis burst from floating processions to inscribe the food court–scented air with 3-D tributaries. Bright circuitous streams wound through the interior. Swarms of mood sprites attended strands of pulsating emojis like orbiting confetti.
Melissa checked her phone, tilting the screen to avoid reflecting the parade of impaled knights, seven-legged insects, and misspelled tattoos. When she’d called him from outside the hotel in Nashville, Ash had given her the address of the house he was flipping: 1843 Windmere Street. She mapped directions. They were eight minutes away.
She replayed her whirlwind conversation with Ash. His voice had been confident and reassuring. There was a trace of the crunchy California vibe she’d expected from the headshot she’d seen on the start-up investor board.
My business partner’s coming in from Los Angeles, this awesome lady by the name of Serena Klein. I encourage you to look her up—I think you’ll be excited. I know she’s really looking forward to meeting you when you come by the house.
Melissa had done a quick search for Serena Klein as soon as Ash hung up. Standing among Nashville’s Broadway tourists, she’d explored the woman’s astonishing investment history, from providing seed money to the Loud Science YouTube channel (8,754,983 fans) to backing the BabyFinder app, which synced with a chip that lodged snugly and harmlessly in an infant’s belly button. It turned out that certain wealthy families were terrified of kidnappings and paid handsomely for the nearly microscopic noninvasive tracking devices. Serena Klein had made a fortune. And now she wanted to divert a tiny bit of that fortune into *DIYfashion365*.
Ash Granger had turned out to be the perfect networking connection.
Across from her, Daniel was nearly obscured by a waterfall of emojis. He leaned forward, and the hand holding the frozen peas emerged like a stone in a shallow river. Emojis changed course to outline his face, and then he was staring at Melissa, framed in a mane of winking, tumbling holograms that moved of their own accord, tiny ghostly GIFs trapped in their endless looping lives.
His lips moved. She thought he might have mouthed I’m sorry, but she couldn’t be sure. The deluge had taken on substance, and the floor was littered with emojis.
They were piling up like autumn leaves.
A black rose decayed before Melissa’s eyes, its petals turning brittle and falling into her lap. She swatted them away from the screen of her phone and they swirled off in some invisible jet stream.
Six blocks from Windmere Street.
The music’s volume swelled; some thrashy smudge of white noise that Christina probably listened to as a sleep aid. Daniel was completely obscured by a curtain patterned with radiant smileys contorted in infinite expressions.
Five blocks to go.
Anguish, joy, despair, shame, lust—along with hundreds of variations on subtler human emotions, as if Otto were showing off, displaying what he’d learned. There was secondhand cringing, nostalgia for things you couldn’t quite remember, the feeling of a tongue stuck to the icy metal of the chairlift. William and Christina were a single shimmering organism beneath a blanket of emojis that reshaped itself according to their movements.
Four blocks.
Otto was delivering her to Windmere Street and creating a diversion to hide her escape. He was fixer and brains and muscle and tech genius all rolled into one.
A ragged line of punctuation marks whip-cracked in front of her face, scattering commas and forward slashes like shrapnel. Her phone was coated in semicolons like magnetic shavings. When she brushed them away, they stuck to stray parentheses to form winking faces and pirouetted off, borne on the backs of mood sprites.
Three blocks.
Surrounded by so much crackling communication,
