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I spun, finding Kaden had appeared at the other end of the hall.
“Cookie, Billie.” With a tilt of his head, he disappeared into his office.
Cookie was up and following him. She walked around me on her way. “You coming? He called you for a meeting.”
That’swhat that was?
I could go back and listen to them betting over how much of a disaster I was, or sit on my cot and smell bleach. I shrugged, and then followed. It wasn’t as if there were anything else pressing on my schedule.
Cookie was sitting on the arm of a chair, a boot planted on the seat. I didn’t bother sitting at all.
Kaden was leaning back on the ledge of the window with the strange landscape. “Cookie, you need to take Billie with you tonight.”
She glanced about the room, as if there must be a whole other Billie that had walked in behind us or her world no longer made any sense. When she couldn’t locate this new and improved Billie, she glanced at me and squinted. Our eyes met and she broke the connection quickly, as if she might have caught something.
“You mean…” She jerked a thumb at me. “Are you saying this Billie?” she whispered, as if I wasn’t still going to hear her from three feet away.
Kaden looked at her the way I wanted to but couldn’t because I was still attempting to get along. “There isn’tanotherBillie, so yes,thatBillie.”
“But I thought that…You know.” She shrugged.
“That I have no aptitude?” I asked, my voice devoid of sarcasm. Cookie was completely right. Bringing me anywhere was an utter waste of time. Plus, I didn’t want to go.
“I’m aware of how she tested, but I want you to take her anyway.” He was opening up his desk drawers, shuffling through them.
“On assignment?” she asked.
“No. To get ice cream.Of courseon assignment,” he said, not bothering to look up as he kept searching for something that seemed to be more important than us.
“I can’t go anywhere. I’ll be in agony,” I said.
“You’ll be back before it kicks in,” he answered.
I looked at Cookie and then back to Kaden. “I don’t want to go on a job.”
“Then you’ll really have a problem, because this is my outpost and I’m saying I want you to go,” he said.
Cookie looked at me.“I guess you should probably follow me.” She took a few steps toward the door, very slow steps, as if to give me every opportunity to argue against this again.
It wasn’t happening. The way I saw it, the sooner I failed abysmally, the quicker he’d figure out how to send me back home. I wasn’t buying Kaden’s story about not being able to fix this situation for a second.
We made our way out of the outpost, and a bright orange Mustang was waiting for us on the bridge, the traffic flowing around it as if it had its own lane.
She glanced down at my outfit. “We should’ve done something about that before we left. You look…not good. Like someone whowantsto be an accountant. Even your beat-up stuff is boring.”
“That’s probably because I did want to be an accountant. I might’ve already had a job as one if…” I threw my hands up, having no words for what life was now.
“Oh,” she said. “Thankfully, you were saved from that fate. I can’t imagine how hideous that would be. Probably as bad as being a lawyer. How does that even happen to a person?” She wore the expression of someone watching a horror movie that had chainsaws and lots of guts flying around.
“I don’t know. I guess I was confused on the day I decided to take that path in college? And then wandered around confused for another four years?”
She shook her head, clearly not picking up on the sarcasm as she got in the car.
We took off, wheels screaming and the engine roaring like a dinosaur trying to traumatize its prey, which was working. I gripped the car door as if that could save me. After some close calls with a few pedestrians, I closed my eyes.
A few minutes later, the car jerked to the side so fast I slammed into the door.
“Come on. You can open your eyes now. We’re here,” she said, then got out and walked into a boutique shop.
