James 35 #2
“You never offer.”
My anger surges. “You two are sitting on my couch eating my chips and you’re giving me crap about my girlfriend in my own house?”
“Oh, shit, she’s your girlfriend?” Kenji coughs out, choking again. Adam whacks him on the back. Kenji takes a sip of water, then clears his throat. “Congrats, man. Quick question: Does your girlfriend have any idea she’s your girlfriend?”
Everyone stares at me.
My heart skips badly. “When Rosabelle wakes up, she and I are going to have a serious conversation.”
“Well, at least you’ve got a plan.” Kenji coughs a few more times. His eyes are watering. “I’ll make sure to be nowhere near here when she kills you.”
“She’s not going to kill me.”
“Hey, how many times has she stabbed you?” Adam asks, frowning as he reaches for a chip. “I can’t remember anymore. Was it twice? Or three times?”
“Don’t forget that she shot him, too,” adds Nazeera, popping her head out of the kitchen again.
“She’s not going to shoot me.”
Kenji points a potato chip at me. “She might.”
“Fuck you guys, I’m going upstairs.”
“Take off her shoes!” Kenji says, his voice rising in real panic. “They’re covered in blood!”
“All right, maybe we should cut James some slack,” Nazeera calls from the kitchen. “He said Rosabelle almost died today.”
Adam and Kenji stare blankly at me, both crunching.
“How is that new?” Adam asks. He reaches for another chip. “Isn’t she always dying?”
I finally lose it.
“What the hell is wrong with you guys?” I explode. “A major blast blew out all the front windows of Nazeera’s house and you guys are just sitting around eating snacks and giving me shit? There was a huge security incident on campus—”
“Wait, what?” Kenji sits up straighter, his smile displaced by a flash of terror.
“—and I don’t know why none of you seem to care. It’s not fucking funny—”
“What do you mean there was a major blast?” says Adam, alarmed. “Where?”
“Here,” I say angrily. “I just told you. In The Waffle, not even that long ago—”
Kenji drops a chip back in the bowl, then glances across the house, trying to see Nazeera. He looks back at me. “Are you messing with me right now?”
“Nazeera,” I say, calling over my shoulder. “Am I messing with him right now?”
“Hmm?” She wanders out of the kitchen, distracted, holding a rose in one hand. Strands of dark hair have come loose from her ponytail; she bats them out of her eyes and smiles a little. “What?”
“Your house,” I prompt her.
“What about my house?”
I blow out a breath, irritated. “All the front windows are broken. The cabinets are messed up. Your electricity is out.”
She blinks at me. The rose drops from her limp hand, clipping a side table before hitting the ground. “What?”
“What do you mean, what?” I say, eyes wide with outrage. “You were just there. I literally explained how Rosabelle nearly died, that the shattered glass from the window cut her throat—”
“Whoa,” says Adam, looking panicked. “What?”
“I thought you were talking about something else,” she says, stunned. “There’ve been all kinds of emergencies lately. And I know you had to clear out that warehouse today, the one with all the explosives”—Nazeera frowns—“though I did think it was strange that you took Rosabelle with you.”
Great.
Nazeera’s brain is toast.
I turn back to the guys. “None of you felt an explosion? No one else lost electricity?”
“All the houses in The Waffle are backed up to the shield,” Kenji says cautiously. He sets down the bowl of chips. “It works almost like a backup generator, and a secondary tier of protection. We’re never supposed to lose electricity in here.”
“Well,” I say, “Nazeera’s house has no power.”
Adam holds up his pager. “Alia says everything is normal at the house. She says she has no idea what I’m talking about.”
Nazeera steps into the living room, looking more than a little shell-shocked. Kenji, meanwhile, gets to his feet, then looks at her so hard I swear the temperature in the room goes up a degree.
Something has definitely changed between them.
“Nazeera,” Kenji says quietly. “Why don’t you have power at your house?”
She blinks at him, then at the rest of us, like we might save her. “I don’t—I don’t know.”
“Is your house backed up to the shield?”
Now she looks nervous. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Kenji sounds strangled. He pushes his hands through his hair. “When was the last time you did the maintenance?”
Her eyes widen. “What maintenance?”
“Jesus, woman.” Kenji’s arms fall to his sides. “What are you—Are you trying to kill me?”
“This is fucking adorable,” Adam mutters.
“Guys, I don’t understand,” says Nazeera, looking at us in a panic. “What happened to my house?”
“You really didn’t notice all the glass on the ground?” I ask her. “You didn’t see the unhinged cabinet doors? You didn’t process the fact that all the lights were off, or that you could feel the freezing cold air inside the house?”
She swallows. “It was dark.”
Kenji looks horrified. “Nazeera.”
“You happy, bro?” I say, turning to him. “Look what you did to her. You broke her brain. Look at her.”
Kenji looks at her.
We all look at her.
Nazeera takes a step back. Actually, now that I’m really looking at her, it’s more obvious than ever that something has changed. Her current nervousness notwithstanding, she seems lighter than she has in years. Softer. More beautiful.
A lot stupider.
She touches her head absently, self-consciously, as if she needs to check to make sure it’s still there. “I’m not—My brain is fine—”
“You guys really didn’t feel the blast?” I ask. “The ground was shaking. I saw businesses on Main with their lights out. Some lost a few windows, too.”
“The nonresidential roads and buildings in The Waffle don’t have the secondary shield,” Kenji explains, his voice hard with frustration.
“The tech is too classified to share. It requires regular maintenance to generate the shield within the shield, because you have to seal the perimeters. I always thought it was overkill—the sphere is supposed to be practically invincible—but Warner insisted on working in fail-safes for the family, because we’re the only ones who live here.
” He meets my eyes. “Does he know about this?”
“Who?” I ask. “Warner?”
“Yes.”
“He was there when it happened!”
Kenji takes a tight breath, then unearths his pager from his pocket, giving it a quick scan.
“The comms have been glitching today, but I’m not seeing any alerts,” he says, scrolling through notifications.
“No reports of a blast; no major incidents registered with the police or the hospitals.” He looks up at me. “When did this happen?”
“Maybe an hour ago.”
Kenji looks at Rosabelle. He seems to be processing. “She took a pane of glass to the throat? Really?”
My jaw tenses. “Yes. Really.”
“So first she slits your throat,” Kenji says, “and then the universe slits her throat?”
“Poetic justice,” says Adam.
I go painfully solid. “Don’t,” I say, my voice hard. “Don’t talk about her like that. You don’t even know her.”
Kenji raises his eyebrows. “Damn, we can’t make jokes anymore? Things between you and the serial killer must be getting serious.”
I look at him, my chest tight. “It’s not funny.”
Everyone falls silent.
“James,” Adam says quietly. “C’mon—”
“Don’t,” I say.