Marine’s eyes tracked slowly from me back over to Asshole.
“I need some stuff.”
“I figured as much. What kind of stuff, love?”
“Yeah, love.” They ignored me.
“Vircore stuff.”
Asshole’s face went serious like Marine’s.
“In the back then.”
He started to slide out of the booth, stopping when I spoke.
“Like… right now?” I waved my burger, holding it out to make my point.
Ally looked at Marine who looked down at her own burger with little puppy dog eyes.
“Fine.” He slid back into the booth.
“This isn’t very good,” I said to Marine. “You were right.”
“Told you,” she said, biting into her burger.
Chapter
FOUR
So I’m not really self-conscious about my name, right? Charles is a perfectly fine name on the face of it. I understand that, you understand that. It’s really just more about being boring. It happened to have happened that telling children they’re special all the time when they’re growing up leaves certain psychological expectations and I wasn’t immune to them. Charles isn’t a special name and I don’t even really actively want to be special as an entity but it gnaws at me when I leave things in their default settings. Everything. Monitors, phones, names, whatever. It’s a sickness probably, but nobody can stop me and if I tell someone my name’s Laze, no one can do anything about it.
Also, it’s Laze like… like laze. To laze about. Not like… what a laser does. I mean, Jesus, can you imagine? Might as well be Ally then. Hiding Aloysius behind a girl name. But then what’s a girl name anymore? Boys used to be called Leslie. And Ashley. I saw a girl online named Charles once. Not short for anything. Just named Charles. See, if I hadn’t preemptively shed my name, I might have worried about myself. I have a strong masculine aura to project. Well, not strong in the… in the beefy, hunky sense of the word. More in the “definitely all about that puss” sort of a way. So the ladies know. Is what I tell myself. And if you doubt it’s working, well you can just ask Ally and Marine since we’re all headed to a very private room. See, out of context that works.
But we were. Headed into a very private room. It was down more stairs than it should have been. Like… six floors into a basement. None of that elevator shit. Not the right part of town for those sorts of fineries. And rightly so since apparently we were about to go get some “Vircore stuff.” Any nicer building would have been watched by drones and cameras and whatever. Sneaky stuff was something you went into the nice parts of town to do, not the other way around.
If I’m being honest the lights flickering seemed a bit much. Asshole seemed to be affecting more of a mysterious guy vibe the deeper we went into his, let’s say what we’re all thinking, super creepy basement. Seriously, old florescent lights don’t exist anymore. The oldest thing you’re looking at is… what? LEDs? Those dim on a half-life and presumably he is doing technology shit down here so the watt or so of extra power likely isn’t browning out. Yeah, puzzle pieces. Asshole has his stupid lights set to flicker and run sort of greenish.
“Why do you make the lights flicker? Do you do rapes? Is this a sex pervert thing?”
Marine swung back at me but my panicked flailing blocked the blow expertly.
Aloy. He could have called himself Aloy. That’s a cool name if… it’s not. But it’s better. I think. I’m talking myself out of it, honestly. I may have jumped the gun on it.
“It’s to keep people out, moron.”
I didn’t feel like we were familiar enough for that sort of disparaging nickname scheme. I’d been calling him Asshole in my head, sure, but whatever. Still, this wasn’t the time for that.
“To keep who out? TV shows about haunted basements? Particularly cowardly middle-schoolers? Just own your pervy sex dungeon, man. No one cares. I mean Marine might care, but you’re going to rape and kill us both so I doubt that really bums you out so much.”
He turned around, motioning past Marine but talking to her. “Is this motherfucker serious, Marine? I get called a lot of shit by better scum than this guy. But never a fucking rapist. It’s over the line.”
“Oh, now you’ve got standards of intellectual discussion. Where was all that when you were buying Halloween decorations to make yourself seem like a mysterious hacker boy?”
“F—” He came back up a step, kind of edging to the side of Marine to go around her. “Fuck you, man. What single fucking thing do you know about any of what I do?”
“I know you were hunching like you were mister fucking Hyde until I called you out on your creepy lights.”
Marine moved to the side and continued on down the stairs.
“Marine, get your friend.” He turned, complaining to her as she walked.
“The lights are weird, Ally. No one’s scared of them.”
For sake of the guy’s dignity, I decided it was probably better if I didn’t say anything else. I might have imagined it, but I felt like I heard a whimper.
We got to the landing at the bottom of the stairs and Ally got to work going through his little security procedure. A half dozen keypads, ten digits per, none of them done in accordance with any meaningful intuitive layout around the door. They beeped open a scanner. His arm went in it slowly, palm down, up to the wrist and then back out slowly. I heard metal sliding in the walls and the door, which looked like all the others, shifted. He pushed it
