“I cannot wait to see if this works!” Layme exclaimed, flopping comfortably backwards onto Zink's bed. The two of them had been simultaneously working on the blanket bounce for over an hour, Zink guiding her through the process as he understood it. She had expected him to take the role of instructor, but she had been glad to discover he was willing to work with her as a kind of tentative partner. When there came gaps in his knowledge or ideas, he would listen to her suggestions. Finally it seemed like maybe their program would work. There were no obvious blank spots, and if there were glitches, they wouldn't know until they tested it.
Zink chuckled. “It works,” he said.
Layme turned in a flash to look at him. “How do you know?” she demanded.
“I set it to run in here right after we saved it. Check your local registry.” The local registry was a list of all the call numbers in range of whatever network—micro or macro—the person who accessed the reg was signed in on. Layme pulled it up with a few mid-air gestures, and at first she could only gape at it. Zink must have set up a local in his room, because there were only two people on it. She assumed they were Zink and herself, but there was no knowing for sure; instead of displaying their six digit short codes or their twenty-digit full call numbers, the reg simply said xx1 and xx2.
“Jag. Zink, you're a genius!” On impulse, she sat up again so she could reach over and hug him. He seemed surprised, and he hugged back after a moment, but awkwardly. Layme hardly noticed. “Would the voice filter work with it?”
“Do you have the gen files uploaded for it? The voice blends?”
“Yeah, the file paths are already plugged in. I think it's pretty much done, and if we can tie it to the blanket for the local, I won't have to try to get it to snare people. The blanket hack will do it for me.”
“Good deal,” Zink said, but his feed was glowing in his eyes again, and his voice was distracted. He was already working on piggybacking her voice filter onto his—no, their—fluff hack.
Good deal is right, Layme thought, amazed. He's probably saving me another two or three days of work by piggybacking this. Maybe longer, she mused; it would have taken her a long time to figure out how to blanketize the filter from scratch. It might have been faster now that she had watched him prog his call-fluff... but then again, maybe not. Zink wielded a knowledge of programming and the inner-workings of a soft drive that she had never seen before. There were tricks he used that she never would have thought to try, and some of his code seemed to deal directly with the hardware he was trying to affect—the things broadcasting call signals and the things viewing them. She found herself wishing that she had ignored Milo's request—his demand, that little voice whispered—that she not work with Zink too closely. If she had been able to observe him earlier, she might have been able to keep Spelter out of her drive a little better.
“There!” Zink exclaimed, barely five minutes after he had started. “It should be hooked up. Want me to try it out?” Layme made the gestures that turned her sound feed and jaw chip on, then flashed a thumbs up. “How does this sound?” Zink asked tentatively, and Layme pumped a fist in triumph. His voice came through her traguses as a melded recording of Milo, Ell, another member of Zink's team named Roth, and Zink himself, all recorded and blended into one voice.
“Great!” Layme replied, and made another gesture of triumph. He had worked a loophole into his fluff-hack so that even with call numbers blocked, the filter program could still differentiate between gender. Her own voice came back through her feed as a mix of Rye, Shylo, Tessa, and her own voice. If everyone at the masque came with an audio pickup and a sound feeder, every guest's voice would come through to each other as the mixture voices, further obscuring identities.
“Zink, you are a jagging genius,” she declared, and she found herself looking around habitually for a glass to pick up and toast him with. Of course, since they were sitting in his room, there were none, and Layme felt a flare of annoyance at herself. Was alc really on her mind that much?
“My thanks, fellow proggie,” Zink said gravely, giving her a small nod. Layme felt the smile she'd been wearing trying to slide from her face.
“Why call me that?” she asked. “I don't prog that often. Just for stuff like this. That's just Tech trag, really. Hardly makes me a programmer.”
Zink only shrugged again. “You seem experienced,” he said. “Even before today, when I looked at the hacks you were doing to the req system. You just seem... practiced, I guess. Like you know your way around a drive.”
“Everyone knows their way around a drive,” she protested, unable to shake the defensive feeling that had lit upon her nerves at hearing the word “proggie” directed at her. “It's kind of how our lives work.”
“Maybe so,” Zink agreed, genial as always, “but you seem to know more than the average tweak. Hey,” he protested, holding up his hands in a calm down, step back sort of gesture. Layme felt her face flush; maybe her defensiveness had been more evident in her expression than she'd realized. “That's not a bad thing. Having control over your world is important.” He grinned then, and she thought that she'd never seen him smile quite so... honestly. That didn't make sense, not really, but it had a ring of truth in her mind anyway. “I'm a self-proclaimed proggie myself, and damn proud of it.”
“Call yourself what you want. But I'm not a prog, alright? Jag, I'm not even a tech-spec.”
Zink nodded, still smiling. “I forgot, you're staying general. Great minds think alike.”
Layme let herself relax a little, and she smiled. “Thanks.” The two of them sat in silence for a minute before she asked, “Do you ever regret it?”
“What, staying general?” Zink asked. She nodded. “No,” he said. No hesitation.
“Why not?” she asked, laying back and staring at the eye-catcher on his ceiling. It showed the Milky Way rotating around the center of the ceiling to mimic the Earth's rotation, sped up to time-and-a-half.
Zink thought about that for a moment before he answered. “It keeps me out of their box,” he said finally. “Like... Here, when you find out someone's a Chem spec, what do you think of?”
“Alc,” Layme answered promptly.
“Right,” he agreed. “How about an Ec-spec?” Short for economics specification. He pronounced ec to rhyme with speck.
“Govlie,” she said, again not having to think of her answer.
“Right!” he exclaimed, and for the first time she felt like she was seeing Zink, and not the iced-out half-character he liked to present. She had to bring a hand to her mouth to stifle a giggle at hearing him sound so enthusiastic. “Whenever you hear someone's spec, right away you have this... this preconception of who they are and what they can do.”
“And you don't want that for yourself?” Layme guessed, but even while she said it, she felt like she was wrong. At least partly wrong. As if he had read her mind, she saw Zink shaking his head out of the corner of her eye.
“I don't care what people think of me. No,” he corrected immediately, “that's not right. I don't care what Dragons think of me. But if you and I can make those leaps, don't you think other people are making them too?”
Layme shrugged. “I'm sure all the Dragons think this way.”
“Not Dragons, Layme,” he insisted, and she heard the tone of his voice suggesting that she had missed some vital point.
“Zink, I think maybe I—”
“Forget it,” he said suddenly, waving a hand in midair as if to diffuse the unspoken words of the conversation.
“But I want to understand!” she protested, irked. It had been a long time since she had had a conversation like this, one so full of a sense of intelligence and importance. She and Milo, well... these days, they didn't have conversations quite as often.
“You will eventually,” Zink said dismissively, waving his hand again in that same brushing-away gesture. “For now, don't frizz about it, alright?”
“Sure,” she said, but even to her own ears it sounded like a sigh. Everyone seemed determined to keep her in the dark these days, or at least convince her to stay in the shadows. “I'm ice, I swear.”
Zink laughed, a short sound that was half sniff and half snort. “I believe you,” he said, and Layme couldn't tell whether he was being sarcastic or not. “In the mean time, go make up with your boyfriend.”
“We're not—” she said, and then Zink was shaking his head again. She had meant to say, We're not fighting, but the words, born of impulse and something that might have been shame, die in her throat.
“Lie to me if you want, Layme,” Zink said, and she noticed the grave, overly-serious tone in his voice again, like he was older than his years, or maybe he knew something she didn't. “Lie to me if you want, but don't lie to yourself.”
She opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it and bit back whatever quick retort might have spilled out. “Alright,” she agreed.
Zink sat up first and gave himself a miniature shake, his green hair falling in a layered fringe across his forehead. I hope his future girl sees him like this, Layme thought suddenly. Inspired and distracted and just entirely himself.
“Thanks for progging with me,” he said, and that half-lazy, half-smug grin was making its way back onto his face.
“Hey, no problem. I learned more from you in an hour than I learned by myself in like three years!”
“I thought you said you weren't a proggie,” Zink pointed out, and Layme decided to treat it like the joke it probably was; if she was so paranoid that Zink could be her enemy, she was in bad shape. She settled for flipping him the double bird and laughing as she left the room, his door sliding open by motion sensor and preserving the fake impact of the gesture. Once she was in the hallway and the door slid shut behind her, however, she felt a weight settle in her chest. Now came the unpleasant part: finding Milo and trying to fix things. Again. She would probably end up apologizing for things she wasn't sorry for and agreeing to things she would never follow through with, and the two of them would end the half-discussion, half-charade with sex that was becoming less exciting and more like an expectation. Or a duty.
“Trag, when did you get so bitter?” she muttered to herself, and she was not exactly surprised to find that she didn't really find the question to be a joke. With another sigh that only seemed to add to the weight of low-key dread winding itself around her shoulders, she turned her blip notifications back on and waited to see if she had missed any from Milo as she made her way up the stairs. Whether she ended up at his room or hers, both of them were a few floors above Zink's. She waited until she reached the floor of her room, but no missed blips, sent from Milo or otherwise, came in to her feed, so she continued her climb until she reached Milo's door. She was not entirely surprised to see the eye-catcher on it had changed from a slowly pulsing spiral, calm and almost sleep-inducing, to a pair of light-ribbons that bounced around the perimeter like caged animals. Milo's changes in technology always seemed to reflect his mood. With one more sigh—this one to brace herself—Layme pressed her thumb to the access panel by the door. Inside, she knew a notification came through either Milo's found piece, or the room's notification feed. She bit her lip, and the thirty seconds—maybe even less—that it took for him to answer the blip seemed like forever. Finally, though, his voice issue, small and distant, from the door panel.
“Yeah, whaddyou want?” he said, and his words seemed oddly stretched and blended together at the edges. She wondered what he'd been drinking this time.
“It's me,” she said, and for a moment she wondered what she would do—what she would feel—if he decided he didn't want to see her. She didn't have the luxury of meditating on that thought, though. A second later, the door to Milo's room slid open, just like always, and she came in. He was sprawled out on his bed, a gaming glove on one hand and what looked like a simple beat-the-clock game up on his wall. Her eyes flicked to his nightstand, taking stock: one empty glass, check; one mostly-empty bottle, also check. She wondered again what it was.
She turned her attention back to Milo, who was looking at her with a blank expression, like he was waiting for something. Unsure of what he wanted, Layme only widened her eyes questioningly and said nothing. Finally he seemed to break out of his trance, and he straightened up from his sprawl so he was closer to sitting than laying down. Layme stayed standing where she was, three feet in from the door, and about the same distance from the edge of his bed. She didn't want to say anything, not until she knew where his mind was.
“Where've you been?” he asked at last, his eyes narrowing as if accusing her. Behind the slitted lids, however, his eyes themselves looked confused.
“I was working on some masque stuff,” she replied, not quite hesitantly. But close. Close. Until she knew what he was on, she would step carefully. Sure, the use of a standard base meant eliminating category drunks, but every drink also hit its target with the intended effects. If he was on Smooth or Mellows, she might be fine. If he was on something else, he might end up more prone to being angry.
“With who?”
“Zink... and his team,” she lied. The words seemed to catch behind her teeth, as if they didn't want to participate in the deception. She hoped the pause was small enough for him not to notice.
“Don't fucking lie to me,” he said, and it was the word he used that made her realize there was no chance he was on Mellows. He only used the old slang when he was truly upset.
“I'm sorry, Milo,” she said. She wondered how many times she had apologized like this in the past two months. She also wondered how many times she had meant it.
“Why would you go off with that tweak anyway?” Milo asked. “What good is he?”
“He's good for plenty,” Layme said hotly, realizing as she said it that Milo would probably misinterpret the remark. Her luck was good, though—he didn't seem to hear. She saw that the anger was already draining from his face. In its place was a cross between resignation and sadness, like this was something he expected.
“I should never have told you not to work with him, should I?” he asked after a momentary pause.
“No,” Layme agreed softly.
“The tweak scares me, Lay,” he said, and it was the disjointed quality of Milo's comments that helped her place what he must have been drinking. Sliders were good when you had too much in your mind. They had a sort of intentional ADHD effect, sending the mind in different directions every so often. As an emotional regulator, though, they did nothing. Whatever emotions she was getting from Milo they were real. Fragmentary and disconnected from each other, maybe, but entirely his.
Unable to resist the sadness she saw in his expression, Layme moved to sit by Milo at the side of his bed. “Why?” she asked, twining her fingers with his automatically. Milo only shook his head, either unable or unwilling to explain. “I'm not going to leave you for Zink, Milo,” she told him, unable to think of another reason Zink Ehrman—two years younger, six inches shorter, and twice as skinny—would frighten Milo Tohls.
“From your lips to God's ears,” Milo muttered, a phrase he said he had learned from his grandmother. It seemed to mean don't believe everything you hear, or, like now, don't make any promises.
“The pulse is in two weeks,” Layme reminded him. “After we're done with it, you won't have to deal with Zink any more if you don't want to. And once we get to the masquerade it'll be worth it, anyway.”
It was Milo's turn to sigh. Layme leaned over and kissed him, and as he surrendered and kissed him back, the small, bitter voice in her head spoke up again.
So it's just how you thought it was going to go. You're both going to ignore it, and you'll jag him and fall asleep, and when you both wake up, you'll pretend nothing ever happened. Until it comes up again. Until you fight with him over alc or progging or Zink or specs. Then it'll happen all over again, and neither of you will talk about it. Then what, Layme? What do you do then?
But Milo was still kissing her, and she didn't have enough space in her mind to doubt herself while wanting him, so she chose him.
It was an odd, frantic sort of dance then. He was still Sliding, and his attention switched almost as soon as she grew accustomed to whatever he was doing. It was over fast, and it left her feeling jumpy and uncomfortable. Milo seemed to have no such trouble. He got out of bed only long enough to find a bottle of Mellow and pour them both a glass, and he made his way through two and was starting on a third as they lay in blank silence. She thought that to him, it must seem comfortable and quiet. To her, it felt almost like a sense of impending disaster. The same feeling that had driven her out of his room in the middle of the night began to make its way up her spine, prickling and jabbing, spreading sickly-hot tendrils of guilt into her stomach and tightening the muscles in her shoulders. She drew in a deep breath to say something—anything!—about it to Milo; it was too big now, much too big to try and ignore or hide,. But as she did, she heard him give a small, rasping snore. She looked over at him, and the words she had meant to say died in her throat. He was asleep, mostly empty glass dangling loosely in his hand and threatening to spill the last mouthful of green-apple Mellow onto the cool blue stronglite of the floor. Drawing in another shaky breath, Layme reached over and took the glass from him, finishing off the last gulp on her own. What could it hurt?
She thought about leaving again, going back up to her room, or even blipping Zink and jumping into another project, but in the end she couldn't bring herself to do it. She lay beside Milo instead, not curling up with him or even making an effort to hold his hand, but laying still and staring up at the ceiling. She thought maybe that prickling in her spine would leave if she didn't aggravate it. If she could just stop thinking about it...
She lay there without slipping in to sleep as she usually would have, and when Milo swam up from his doze, she made some excuse that she didn't remember after she had said it, and she left again, deciding that maybe her own room would make her feel less like a stranger in her own skin all of a sudden. She ended up on her own bed.
She realized that she was staring at the slow color-changing squares on her ceiling, but she was thinking of Zink's, and the Milky Way turning slowly above her head like time. No matter what, the Earth moved along its path through space. It never questioned itself, only moved implacably on its course among the stars. It passed them without caring what they were called or how brightly they burned, or how many light-years away they might be.
It just keeps moving, she thought vaguely. Maybe I should, too. Maybe my problem is that I'm staying in the same place for too long.
Still feeling restless, she called up her room's settings on her cons and found the ceiling eye-catcher options. When she had set it to the same visualization as Zink's, she felt a little better. Still, even looking up at the slow path the constellations made across the imaginary sky, Layme found she could not escape into sleep like she was so used to doing.
She was left alone with her misplaced feelings of discomfort, and the growing sense that something was about to change. After all, things only lasted in great strain until they finally broke.
She had a feeling that whatever was making her feel this way was under that strain, and it was going to break wide open.
Soon.
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