Page 56 of His Holy Chaos

"I didn't say that," Jude tries, but it's obvious he did, and it's obvious Alfie lives for embarrassing him.

"Oh?" Alfie asks. "Ford, didn't you tell him it's bad behavior to tell lies?"

"I did, indeed," I play along.

"I wonder if he's fishing for punishment. Probably."

"Shut up, Alfie!" Jude exclaims, but he's laughing.

"Don't worry, he'll be dealt with accordingly," I tell Alfie. Alfie has a predatory grace about him.

"Good. That's what I expect."

"Alright, enough socializing," Jude announces, pulling the laptop back to face him. "We have a production environment that's actively hemorrhaging, and Brennan's auth module is probably leaking credentials into the void as we speak. Daddy, go back to your book."

"Don't tell me what to do, brat," I tell him, but there's no bite. I do go back to my book. Alfie calls out:

"Bye, Ford! Please teach him a lesson!"

"I will!" I call back. Jude focuses on Alfie.

"He's gonna kill me!" he complains, as if I'm not right here. Alfie laughs.

"So I did you a favor. You love it."

Jude rolls his eyes, sighing, but they do go back to work.

They're extraordinary together. Not in the way I expected. Not chaotic, not reckless. Incredibly intelligent. Precise. They speak in a shorthand that's half-technical, half-telepathic, finishing each other's diagnostic trains of thought with the same synchronicity I've only ever seen in musicians who've played together for years. Alfie identifies the problem; Jude dismantles it. Alfie maps the system; Jude finds the flaw in the map. They argue, briefly, sharply, about something called a "race condition" that sounds like it should involve horses but apparently involves database transactions, and the argument resolves in under a minute because they arrive at the same conclusion from different directions.

"There," Jude says at eleven forty-seven. "Rolled back. Patched. Deployed to staging. If Brennan touches this again before it's reviewed, I'm going to put his credentials through a shredder."

"I'll hold the shredder," Alfie says. "Good work."

"Good work yourself. You kept it from burning down without me. I'm almost impressed."

"Almost. The highest praise."

They lapse into something quieter after that. Maintenance tasks, monitoring, the digital equivalent of sweeping up after a storm. Their conversation drifts from technical to personal. Alfie mentions a scene he went to over the weekend.

"But no one is as fun as Glynn," Alfie says, sighing.

"You should come to the club this weekend," Jude says. "Ford took me last Saturday. It was good."

A pause. I hear the cat purr through the speakers, a low, mechanical rumble. "Maybe," Alfie says, and the word is loaded with something heavy.

"Callum asked about you."

Another pause. "Did he."

"He did. He looks good. He's restoring a Victorian armoire. He showed me pictures. It's gorgeous."

"I miss everybody. You know that. But it's hard."

"I know," Jude says. He knows.

I hear Alfie exhale. "Fine. Maybe I'll come."

Jude grins. "We're going to have so much fun!"