AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Pinky swear. Cross my heart.”
“Let’s not hope to die, though. And never mind the thousand needles.” Reggie gave me a fleeting ghost of a smile. “I do a thousand needles every day as it is.”
“No needles. Just freedom. The wind in your hair, the sun through the leaves. Lazy afternoons by a stream with a good book. You and me.”
“Okay,” Reggie said. “I’ll let you sleep. Bye, then. I love you.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
She gave me that shaky, brave smile that broke my heart. After we closed the call, I started crying again. It was so confusing. I had to be strong for Reggie, but paradoxically, I had to be soft for her, too, because everything around her was so fucking hard.
I’d done some hard things in my twenty-six years. Been proud of them, too. But being strong and soft at the same time was the trickiest thing I’d ever attempted.
And by far the most important.
CHAPTER6
Cass
There was no way to sleep after Reggie’s call, so I pulled on my drabbest clothes, got my work laptop, and headed to my workstation, down on the bridge of the benighted airship on its cursed voyage to nowhere. I’d just settled in and taken a bracing swig of my black coffee when I felt a rush of cold air from outside. Someone was coming in from the terrace, pushing a big, rattling cleaning cart.
Jana. At four-thirty AM, Jana was still doing janitorial work, all alone in the dark. She’d been working alone, in the cold, all night long.
She’d said earlier tonight that she didn’t care enough to hate me. Which I supposed meant that she was as close a thing to a friend as I had in this place.
I felt a rush of protective anger for her. She was being bullied and abused, and it was just fucking wrong, on every level. This shit simply could not continue.
Jana looked terrible. Her eyes were red, her face shiny and flushed, as if she had a fever. She stumbled, clutching the cart for balance, eyes straight ahead.
“Jana?” I said.
She jumped, letting out a shriek.
“Sorry,” I offered. “Didn’t mean to scare you. Just wondering what you’re doing up at the ass-crack of dawn. You don’t look so good. Are you getting sick?”
She rubbed her cheek, which looked weirdly swollen. Jana would have been a beautiful woman, but for her clammy, colorless skin, the grayish lips, the puffy eyes. Even her thick, wavy blond hair looked limp and defeated right now.
“Just trying to get this terrace done.” Her voice sounded slurred.
“Here, let me push the cart for you,” I offered. “You look whipped.”
“No! You’re supposed to be working on Glow-worm, and he’ll be furious if he sees you doing my scut work! Don’t even think about it!”
Invisibility Cloak flashed through my mind. I was almost tempted to tell her about it. I knew it would be dumb, but I wanted so badly to help her in some way.
“If I help, we’ll get it done fast, and we can go grab coffee and a pastry from the breakfast bar before anyone else is up,” I suggested. “Nobody could fault us for getting coffee and a Danish. I doubt anyone’s watching right now. And I’ll take the heat, if we get caught.”
“You still don’t get it, do you?” she asked.
“Get what?”
“He watches all the time.” Jana’s voice was low and strangled. “The cameras are always running. He watches it all, processes it all, at super-high velocity, and he doesn’t miss a fucking beat. Not a single goddamn eyelash flicker. Not ever.”
“How? How does he do that?” I asked. “He did that to me last night at dinner! He was talking to the guy next to him the whole time and he still somehow overheard a whispered conversation I was having, six people down the table. It’s scary.”
Jana wheezed with laughter, and her face twisted in pain. “I don’t know how he does it. I don’t think he knows, either, because God knows, he’s tried to teach all of us the trick, with biofeedback, hypnosis, implants, brain surgery, you name it. But we all suck at it, to his enduring disappointment. Don’t you dare touch that garbage bag!”
I stepped back reluctantly. “I don’t see why helping would be so terrible.”
