by M. J. Scott
"Can't you put off hiring her? Tell her you're all full up until the next game needs testing?" My grip tightened on my takeout cup, squishing it slightly. I hated myself for asking—Nat would kill me if she ever found out.
Damon shook his head. "Truth is we need testers. With things held up, once we sort this problem, we're going to need more of them than ever to complete everything in our usual timeframe."
Damn. I tried to think of another argument. Nothing. "So wait until we've fixed the problem, and then hire her."
"She has to complete our training before she can move onto testing, so she needs to start soon. Now. Don't worry, all the training is done on an earlier version. No one has had any problems after playing it."
Well, I'd tried. But his tone didn't exactly suggest there was any wriggle room. "Was there anything else?"
"Not at the moment. Keep me updated." He reached for a pile of datachips on his desk and slotted one into his screen.
"As soon as I know anything, you'll know," I promised as I stood.
He looked back up at me, eyes serious. "Don't push too hard. You're still healing from the surgery."
"You're not paying me to take it easy."
"No, but I'm not paying you to blow out your interface either."
Blow out my . . . ? I squinted at the tangle of gold and silver embedded in my wrist. "Can that even happen?"
One sharp nod. "So I'm told. We've never had it happen here. Don't be the first."
That was one order I was happy to follow. Now that I had the chip, even though I'd barely scratched the surface of what it could do, I didn't want to blow it up by being stupid.
"Yes, boss." I flicked him a salute and headed back to my cubicle.
"Hey, Maggie." Eli and Benji were hanging out by one of the testing chairs, scarfing bagels spread with something that smelled strongly of onions from a platter balanced on the chair’s arm.
I joined them. "Mind if I have one of those?" I needed to line my stomach so I could keep up the caffeine today. And there was no way they could eat all the food still on the platter between them.
"Sure," Eli said.
I reached for a bagel and my chip glinted in the light.
Benji's face lit up. He hadn't seen me yesterday. "You got a chip? Chill." Today his hair was blue and the face paint orange and red. It clashed. "Less wobbles with a chip." He jerked his head toward the chair. "You wanna try it out?"
Tempting. The game had been pretty damn good without a chip, so it would have to be amazing with one. But then I remembered the wobbles, my head twinging in pained recollection. And I remembered Damon's warning not to overdo things. "I think I'd better leave it a few more days."
Benji shrugged. "Best to get back on the horse when you take a header."
"Only if you need to keep riding," I shot back. "I don't really game much."
Eli actually dropped his bagel. Both of them stared at me like I'd just uttered something blasphemous.
Benji recovered first, blue hair flying around his face as he shook his head sadly. "Snap, Eli. We gotta work on her. She needs to learn the ride."
Eli nodded. "True. But she's right. Fix the horse first. Then we can worry about her piloting. Slick her right down."
Gamer jargon. Just what I didn't need.
"Eli's right," I said, hoping to kill the conversation. "So if you'll excuse me, I have a bug to hunt."
"Gonna need a very small swat," Benji muttered. "We've been looking hard."
I gave him my best pacifying smile. "I know. You guys do good work. It might not be a bug, per se."
"Then what?"
"I'll know that when I see it." I picked up my bagel and carried it back to my work station. Once I was settled, I clicked my chip into place on the dock.
:CONTACT:
I tried not to feel too relieved as Eli and Benji went away and nice straightforward code flowed up to surround me.
By midmorning, my headache started to creep back, an ever-tightening band of iron clamping my head from temple to temple. I decided another hit of caffeine—particularly when Eli had mentioned that some of the bigger cafeterias had real coffee—couldn't hurt.
But when I found the place, I spotted Nat at one of the tables talking to a guy just as cute and blond as she was. Damn. If she was back so quickly, they must've already offered her a test slot.
I pasted a smile on my face as I reached their table. "Do you come here often?" I said, hoping a joke would cover my lack of enthusiasm.
Nat's answering beam made me feel like a rat—a bona fide plague-carrying rat.
"I will be from now on," she said proudly. "Maggie, this is Ajax. He heads one of the testing teams. My team.” She beamed. “Ajax, this is Maggie. She's consulting here on some secret project for your boss."
I held out my hand. "Nice to meet you."
His handshake was strong. "You too. You're working on the wings issue?" He tilted his head at Nat slightly.
Wings. Right. Angels, as in Archangel. I guess as a head tester, he would know about the problems. But I wasn't going to confirm or deny without Damon's approval. "I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you."
Nat snorted. "Sheesh. He works here, Mags."
I shrugged an apology.
Ajax smiled. "The D-man got your signature on one of those NDAs, huh?"
I nodded, then slanted a grin at Nat. "Have you signed one yet?"
"I'm doing paperwork with HR next," Nat said. "They wanted Ajax to give me a tour before I start my training."
"You survived the experience, I see. She didn't start drooling over the gear or anything, did she?" I eyed Ajax with consideration. Knowing Nat, the gaming rigs weren't the only things at risk of being drooled on.
Nat blushed. "Maggie!"
Aha. Score one for me. She definitely thought Ajax was cute. Nat was kickass in VR but tended toward stumbly around real-life guys she had the hots for. This could be entertaining.
"No more than usual for a newbie," Ajax said with a smile that suggested he thought Nat was pretty chill herself. "Only minor flooding."
I laughed. "I was headed to the coffee bar. Can I get you guys anything?"
Ajax looked at his watch. "I have a meeting. But, Nat, you have time to hang here with Maggie. You can find your way back to HR, right?"
I watched Nat look from me to him. Then she shook her head. "I'm not sure. Is it on your way?"
He looked pleased. "Sure."
"Rain check?" Nat said to me with a tiny smile. I got her “sorry, I'm going with the hottie” message pretty clearly. After sixteen years of friendship, we didn't need the words.
I tried not to smirk as I waved her after Ajax.
The coffee loosened my headache a bit. Enough that I could contemplate looking at a screen again without wincing at least. I returned to my cubicle, where I spent another frustrating day fruitlessly scanning through code, not seeing anything that made my spidey-sense tingle.
Even more frustrating was the fact that I had to keep taking breaks every few hours because of my head. The pain was beginning to bug me. I didn't know whether it was some strange adjustment process to using the chip or a bigger problem. The doctor’s ream of instructions hadn’t included anything about headaches. A sensible person would ask, of course but frankly, I didn’t want to find out.
By the time I logged off for the day, I was just as exhausted as the day before. So, of course, I arrived home to find Nat wearing her favorite club gear and boiling over with excitement after her first day of training at Righteous. Apparently it had gone well.
"Get changed, we're going out," she said, doing a little boogie to one of her ancient tunes in the middle of the living room. Her silica-silk dress let off tiny firework bursts of light with each hip shake.
My head throbbed at the thought of going anywhere near a club. I needed quiet and sleep. "Nat, I really—"
"Rule One," she said before I could finish.
"But—"
"No buts. This is defini
tely a Rule One occasion."
I pulled a face. "When we made up Rule One, we were thirteen."
She did another shimmy. "And it's worked well since then. Go on, get changed."
Going out was the last thing I wanted to do, but I couldn't fight Rule One. It had gotten us through heartbreaks, car accidents, all-night cramming sessions, and numerous other disasters. Rule One meant “drop everything and be my best friend.” Once it was invoked, there was no other choice but to go along with whatever the other person wanted.
Looked like I was heading out.
"No gaming," I said, watching Nat dance. "I'm still supposed to take it easy with the chip."
"Sure," she agreed. "I've played today anyway. They showed me Archangel." She raised her arms over her head like wings. "Talk about chill. Tonight I want to celebrate. Dancing. And Jammers."
Jammers were worse than Insomniacs. Perfect. The thought of booze made my head hurt even more. "I was a moron when I was thirteen," I muttered, but went to change.
I was wrong about the Jammers. Maybe it was the vodka, or the red lightning rum, but after Thai food and several cocktails strong enough to kill a horse, my head felt just fine.
"I told you this would be fun," Nat said to me as we pushed our way through to the bar at our third club of the evening.
I grinned. "Your round, I believe." Someone trod on my foot as we finally reached the bar, but in my current state, it didn't really hurt.
She nodded and pointed to the rear of the club. "Go look for a table."
The crowd didn't make it any easier to retreat than it had been to advance. As I dove through a gap between groups, I caught a whiff of incense and had to fight off an instinctive shudder, suddenly regretting that we hadn’t chosen a game club. Part of the reason I hung out with Nat and her friends at places like Decker's was I rarely had to come across a witch.
No witches meant no reminders of Sara. Or magic.
The smell caught my throat, and my mother's face, intent over a glass bowl full of dark liquid, rose in my mind.
I shoved the memory back and moved away from the scent, heading for the back of the room where there were less people. With a bit of quick footwork, I nabbed the last open table.
Luckily, Nat appeared with the drinks almost as soon as I sat down.
I downed half of mine in a gulp. "It's packed here. Are you sure you don't want to go to Decker's?" I couldn't smell anything other than too many different perfumes and too many bodies close together in this part of the club, but I couldn't stop myself scanning the crowd, wondering where the witch might be. Of course, it might’ve just been a drunken clubgoer who liked incense, but that particular blend had been familiar. Not the sort of thing that was easy to find.
Nat shook her head, clinking glasses with me. "You said no gaming."
"Yeah, but Rule One, remember? Your pick."
"I'm good." She smiled as she looked around the room. "This will be fun."
I smiled weakly. "If that's what you want."
She peered at me over the glass. "You okay?"
"Just tired." I'd mostly kept my feelings about magic to myself. Nat knew I didn't talk about my mother, but like me, she lived her life with tech, so the subject of magic rarely came up.
"Dr. Nat prescribes more Jammers. Then you'll sleep like a baby." Her gaze grew more intense for a moment. "How is the sleep lately?"
"I'm doing okay."
"Nightmares?" Nat had schlepped with me through multiple rounds of sleep therapy, normal therapy, hypnosis, and anything else the doctors thought might help chase away the monsters that stalked my nights. She knew most of it hadn't worked. She just held my hand on the really bad nights and never complained if I spent half the night pacing the apartment or slept half the day. For some reason, the nightmares came less during the day.
"Nothing out of the ordinary." In fact, better than normal, but I wasn't banking on that lasting.
"Sure?" She reached across the table and squeezed my arm.
I put my hand over hers. "Sure. Now what were you saying about drinks?"
In the morning, I regretted the Jammers. But at least I had an excuse for taking painkillers.
Eli and Benji took one look at me when I arrived and left me alone. Benji came back briefly to silently put a couple of cans of Afterburn on my desk. It didn't help much.
Wednesday and Thursday passed in a blur of repetition. Read code. Get headache. Take drugs. Read more code. Go home. Listen to Nat chatter about testing and Ajax and plans for her team’s next bout. Get some broken sleep. In between, I got to drag my butt up to Damon's office and give him status reports that boiled down to “I got nothing.”
Fun times.
Friday morning started in much the same way. Cat called down to my desk before I'd even finished logging on to say that Damon wanted to see me.
I hated to admit it, but as annoying as it was to report that I didn't have anything to tell him, I did look forward to the time I spent with the man.
He was easy to talk to when he wasn't playing his big boss man role. He did interested and attentive well. And he was smart. His brain and the way it worked fascinated me. His success hadn't been luck; it had been talent and hard work. I'd always been a bit of a sucker for smart.
And, as my hormones kept reminding me, he was exceedingly easy on the eye.
Not that I was going to let him know I thought so.
Nope.
I still had some sense.
Maybe, I amended as he turned to me with one of those brain-melting grins when I walked into his office.
"Morning, Maggie," he said. His smile went down a couple of watts in voltage as he studied my face. "You look tired. I told you not to push yourself."
"I'm not, I promise." Liar, liar. "Some idiot called my apartment at five this morning. Wrong number. But I couldn't get back to sleep."
He didn't look convinced. "Take an hour or so in one of the nap pods if you need to catch up."
The thought of crawling back to bed was nearly irresistible. But just changing location wasn't necessarily going to help me sleep, and I had no desire to risk having one of my nightmares—toned down though they'd been recently—and waking screaming in the middle of Righteous. That was pretty much guaranteed to get back to Damon.
I was trying to prove I was fine, not weird. So no on-the-job naps for me. Just more of his excellent coffee. "I will if I need to." I nodded at the silver jug on the tray near his desk. "Is that coffee?"
He shook his head. "Juice. A blend Ellen told me about. Good for energy levels. Lots of veggies and vitamins. Want some?" His voice held a challenge.
Veggie juice? Even Nat had given up trying to make me drink veggie juice. Was Damon another health nut?
For a moment I hoped it might be true. It would make him far more resistible. Then I remembered him chowing down on a roast beef sandwich and a donut the day I'd had the wobbles. I was pretty sure he was squarely in the omnivore camp like me.
So this was some sort of test. "Thanks, but I already ate." My stomach rumbled in protest at the lie and my lack of breakfast.
"You should try it." He poured a glass. Dark greenish brown and sludgy, it looked like it was made from compost, not vegetables. Possibly rancid compost.
I tried not to shudder when he held it out. "Honestly, I couldn't deprive you."
"Oh, there's plenty for both of us." His arm didn't move.
I arched an eyebrow. "Then you first."
He lifted the glass and drained it without a flicker of expression, then poured a fresh one and passed it to me.
I tried not to look too appalled. "Can I get it to go?"
He perched on the edge of his desk, arms folded. "You have somewhere more important to be than your employer's office?"
I would have if I drank that stuff. Like the bathroom. Throwing up.
I looked down at the glass and sighed. "Really, I've eaten already."
"Drink or go visit Doc Chen."
That I definitely
didn't want to do. Any test Ellen ran on me would show the painkillers I'd been downing, and then I'd have to admit why I was taking them. Not a pretty scenario. Uglier, in fact, than the green sludge.
He had me. And part of me couldn't help being impressed at just how easily he'd won. Smart. Sexy. Competent. Funny. Maybe it was just as well that he was trying to force-feed me green sludge; otherwise, I'd forget why I was trying so hard not to like him too much.
"This is harassment," I muttered, then started drinking.
After surviving the sludge and convincing Damon I really was fine, I made it back downstairs with a quick detour to a cafeteria for yet another caffeine fix and something to take the taste of the sludge away.
"Maggie D," Benji greeted me as I came through the doors juggling coffee and pastries. "You up for a run with the angel later?"
I smiled noncommittally and kept walking. I'd been avoiding the guys' attempts to get me hooked back into the game all week, but I was running out of excuses and willpower. As much as I reminded myself that curiosity killed the cat, I really wanted to try again.
"Yeah, Maggie." Eli blocked my path, with Trisha, the third programmer on our team, not far behind him. "You still haven't tried your chip on something that can really show you what it can do. Aren't you curious?"
I backed toward my cubicle, shaking my head. "Right now I'm more curious about what I'm being paid to do."
Eli pulled a face. "It's Friday. Friday afternoon, we usually try out new stuff with the testers anyway. It's kind of a tradition."
"But we don't have new stuff," I pointed out.
"You have a new chip," he countered. "And there are some new testers. Your friend Nat will be there, I'm sure." His cheeks reddened. I'd introduced him to Nat at lunch on Wednesday, and he seemed a bit smitten. Unfortunately, Nat seemed seriously smitten with Ajax.
"Let me see how things go this morning," I said with a shrug.
Behind Eli, Trista said, "Yeah, Eli, give her a break. She's probably worried about getting the wobbles in front of everyone again."
