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“It’s not a crush,” I muttered, opening my clutch and dumping the contents into my work bag. I would organize everything when we got to the office.
Organize my purse, organize my feelings about Holden — there’d be plenty of time for that at work, I assured myself as I hurriedly fed the piglets breakfast and grabbed a frozen burrito from the freezer.
It would all be fine.
24
The moment we got to the office I knew that nothing would be fine for quite a while. My jumbled feelings for Holden were suddenly the least of my problems. The first sign that the server issue was not as minor as Max had made it sound should have been the fact that we’d been called into work on a Sunday. That had happened only one other time, when our server had been hacked and a bunch of customer information had been compromised. But it wasn’t until we walked through a full yet eerily silent office and saw a bleary-eyed Jin with his hair standing straight up that I got the feeling the situation was much, much worse than anticipated.
By the time Jin finished bringing us up to speed, I had never wanted to be wrong about anything more in my life. There would be no time to organize anything. We would all be lucky to find time to eat or sleep. The server had been hacked, and the hackers had deleted a large chunk of files, all of which belonged toDoom Patrol: Revisited. This wouldn’t necessarily have been a big deal — servers went down all the time — but the backup files had somehow been corrupted, as well. We’d lost the code for a big part of the game and would basically have to redo those portions from scratch. Just thinking about the amount of work that needed to be done in such a short period of time was giving me hives. We had to cram months of work into one month.One.
When I reached a certain level of stress, my body’s response was to shut down until the stress ended. It was my own version of fight or flight, except my body chose a third option — death. I forgot to do all the basic things like eating, drinking, and showering. High-stress times were also the only times in my life I ever experienced bad insomnia. Even though I was aware of all this, I hadn’t yet found a way to avoid the inevitable shutdown.
Around three o’clock, the last strategy meeting of the day ended, and the bosses sent us home to prepare for the hellish weeks ahead. I made a quick pit stop at the bathrooms before heading back to our pod, where I found Jin and Max staring at their computers, wearing matching blank expressions.
I slumped into my seat and sighed, rubbing my eyes, and more than likely smearing my mascara in the process. But that was fine; I’d probably just cry it all off later anyway.
“We are so fucked,” Maxine said, breaking the silence. “So,sofucked.”
“Fucked doesn’t even feel like a strong enough word,” Jin responded, his eyes still fastened on the computer. “After today, we live here. Might as well have all our mail forwarded to this address.”
“My brain hurts just thinking about all the coding.” I blinked a few times, bringing the room back into focus. “No one is actually leaving, right? We’re all going to stay here and start working even though they said we should go home.”
Two slow, sad nods of the head were the only responses. Max’s eyes widened suddenly, and she let out a string of curses that made Jin and I both raise our eyebrows into our hairlines.
“I was supposed to go to dinner with Richard tonight.” She resumed cursing as she dug through her purse, finally pulling out her phone. “He text me during the first meeting when I still had stupid hope. I swear to God I will hunt down these hackersTaken-style and they will rue the day they left the safety of their mothers’ wombs if they ruin this for me.”
“I can ruin their credit scores,” Jin volunteered, sounding slightly dazed — either from Max’s impressive and extensive use of curse words, or the dumpster fire of our situation.
“Something tells me those fools aren’t really the monitor-my-credit-score types, but thank you,” Max responded, her fingers flying across the screen.
Watching her send a text reminded me that I hadn’t checked my own phone since this morning. Digging through the mess in my bag, I finally found my phone floating among the receipts and empty wrappers that lived at the bottom of it. I had somehow accumulated thirty-five missed texts in just a few short hours. The majority appeared to be from Sissy.
Sissy: How could you embarrass me like that? You had better be seriously sick or injured, Sutton.
Sissy: Everyone is asking where you went and if you’re okay. What am I supposed to tell them?
Sissy: It’s just like you to make a special evening for ME all about YOU. I see you haven’t grown out of your selfish, childish behavior yet.
Those were just a taste of the messages from last night, and the ones from today were all along the same lines. I didn’t even bother answering. I had bigger problems; drama with Sissy didn’t register.
I had a few texts from Mama that I quickly sent responses to, and one from Daddy that was just a thumbs-up emoji followed by, “I didn’t mean to do that, answer your mother so I can watch the game in peace. Love you.”
Below their names was the one I had been searching for — even if I hadn’t admitted it to myself. My thumbs hovered over the keyboard, but I had the urge for more than just a text exchange. I stood and walked to the small lobby area, making sure it was unoccupied before hittingcall.
“Sutton.”
I felt the knot of anxiety and stress in the pit of my stomach start to unravel at the sound of his voice.
“Hey, I just —” I began, but snapped my mouth shut before I finished that sentence. Holden didn’t need to know that I had called just to hear his voice because I knew it would be soothing to my raw nerves. “I just wanted to say hi.”
“What’s wrong?”
I smiled, resting my forehead against the window and letting the sunshine coming through the clear panes warm me. I should’ve known I couldn’t sneak anything past Holden.
“Someone hacked OmegaVs’s servers and deleted a bunch of files for theDoom Patrol: Revisitedrelease. It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, except that the backup files have all been corrupted. We lost so much work and the game’s release is next month. I don’t know how we’re going to rewrite all the code and the graphics and get it back to the testers in time.” I squeezed my eyes shut, wishing I could shut the world out as easily.
“Damn.” Holden’s rough curse finally came. “What can I do? What can I do to help you?”
