Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 132437 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 662(@200wpm)___ 530(@250wpm)___ 441(@300wpm)
Popping her lids, she glared off to the north. The goddamn humans and their data servers. Over the last few decades, an entire city of buildings housing AI engines and the aggregators of information that fed the models had grown up around the s’Hisbe and the tonal disruption was the kind of thing that you didn’t notice until you did.
And then you could hear nothing else.
Noise pollution wasn’t just jet airplanes and highway traffic. This shit was like the whole world had tinnitus.
Grabbing her earbuds from her pocket, she shoved them into her head, and waited for the noise-canceling to kick in—
Ah, silence. Manufactured or not, it was better than the hmmmmmmmmm.
Just as she was about to dematerialize, she had one more thought about that male who’d stepped free of the trees down by the river and not stopped talking at her: Even before she’d shot him, there’d definitely been blood on his clothes. Was that stretch of forest some kind of community dumping ground for dead bodies?
And here she thought she’d been all smart and strategical, as the saying went.
By some grace of the stars—or more like habit, really—Denne managed to go molecular and travel through the cold to Sal’s. As she re-formed in the shadows just outside of the parking lot’s lights, she wondered what the hell she was going to do about that BMW—
It was gone.
“Fuck.”
The word was repeating in her head as she let herself in the restaurant’s back door and peered cautiously into her plain-Jane office. But come on, like the consequences of her actions last night was some kind of trespasser she could avoid if she were just sneaky enough?
Nothing was out of place or unusual. The desk with the laptop and phone was where she’d left it, her office chair, too. There wasn’t much else in the little room, except for the beat-up bulletin board and its single faded, off-kilter New Yorker cartoon that had been pinned on the cork fifty years ago.
She glanced down the hall toward the kitchen. The brisk chatter of the cooking staff and the scents of onion and garlic being sautéed in pans were nightly staples in her life now, and she tried to imagine not coming here anymore. The pang of nostalgia was a surprise.
“Maybe paperwork will cure that,” she muttered as she went around and sat in her chair.
The door in from the parking lot immediately opened again, and as soon as she heard the stomping of the boots, she knew who it was.
“You’re going to wear that mat out,” she said over the thumping.
Willie popped his head around the corner and smiled. “Hi, honey. I’m home. Are we doing better tonight?”
No. “Yes, but we were fine yesterday. Hey, could you ask Marco to come down here for a sec?”
“Sure.” The man leaned against the concrete jamb. “But first, I have to confess something.”
She plugged her elbows into the top of the desk and thought, Finally, someone else’s problems. “Tell me everything—wait, let me guess. You fired your florist—I know it’s not the chef because you’re having Marco do the food.”
Willie fiddled with the black bow tie at his skinny neck. “So this is my last night working before the wedding.”
“You want to leave early again? It’s fine, I can cover—but I told you not to pull shifts this week—”
“So I’m not going to have a chance to say this in person after tonight.” He hesitated. Then offered her an apologetic version of his smile. “But Nick and I really want you to be there on Saturday.”
Ducking the man’s eyes, she focused on a liquor order write-up that’d been put on her laptop, and absently noted that there were two more bottles of vodka than usual on the list. Oh, right. There had been that poker convention in town so—
“You could just come to the ceremony.” When she glanced up, Willie shrugged with plaintive optimism. “Obviously, you’re going to pass on the reception. But you could, like, pop in, give us a hug, and blow out of there. And listen, we truly don’t blame you about the reception—even though you’re going to miss Marco’s dinner, which is a sin. We’re talking twenty minutes—thirty, tops. And then you come to us, tell us you love us and you’ve never seen more beautiful flowers, and you’re off.”
Tilting back in her squeaky chair, she rubbed her eyes as she tried to pick which of the standard no-can-do’s she typically used.
He waited until she dropped her fists into her lap: “I mean, I know you’re a vampire and everything, but you don’t have to worry about the sun this time of year.”
Her heart stopped. What the fuck. Had Marco somehow figured something out last night—
Willie swiped the air and giggled. “Joking about the vampire part, even though you’ve always turned down our brunch invitations. I’m trying to keep things light.” He got serious again. “Because I don’t want you to see how important it is to me for you to be there. For Nick, too.”