9. Truant

Weeks of practice, same as they ever were. Things go well enough. The game is the game. Outside my windowless headroom, the air becomes harsh. I have missed the pleasant season, says Pops (Rahmat, too, in messages I answer days late). I’m not sure a month should qualify as a season. I tell him so, and also that there is nothing I can do about it regardless. The Tough Shells are making history. That he understands, at least. Then there is what he can’t understand. Namely how, since our last game, I have shoved another set of concerns into my overfull days. 

Over the past few weeks, in the late evenings, and sometimes in the early mornings, I go to the well and climb in. I dig for everything that’s not locked up or beyond the brick walls of Naturata. Often there are paywalls or sites requiring permissions I don’t have. My Engimo internet service blocks several others. I suspect my efforts to access all these sites has me flagged by Vaiiya, added to some database of potential radicals. Maybe they’ll even send whatever authorities they can scrounge up in local meatspace for a knock and chat. Fine. The idea of something happening is infinitely more pleasant than this, this perpetual wait where answers are sparse and coated in mud.

“Stealing. Cover.” A single-digit day in November. Barley charges the yellow station oranged by sunset. My turret covers the spot from a nearby vendor stall. I push with her into a combat-torn thoroughfare. While Sonnet covers from the outside, I protect Barley from the inside. I spray warnings at the other team going for a steal. Our fragile truce, forged while wiping the team with a current claim on the cashout, has shattered as easily as it was made. They’re close enough to slide through Barley’s dome shield composed of semisolid light. Which leaves me as the second line. While Barley initiates a six-second-steal, I take shots at the enemy and take shots meant for Barley. I coin. She steals. She coins. Sonnet flashbangs whomever remains and, blinded, they too coin.

As it turns out, there’s surprisingly little to learn about CNS. Here’s the official narrative, corroborated by governments and international news agencies: soon after the attacks, all those involved were found and punished to the full extent of the law in their respective nations. Now, these CNS people weren’t amateurs. Most of them had escape routes and cover identities set up well beforehand. Still, they were found in a matter of days. In several cases, apprehending the suspects involved complex, logistically intensive operations well beyond the means of those conducting them, leading reporters on the fringe to dub the whole event as MultiCo’s “silent war.” Sure, makes a kind of sense. But why wouldn’t they just take the win? Why hide their involvement? For corps, goodwill’s always in short supply. Funding the takedown of terrorists seems like a cheap way to get points. Then again, that’s how it seems to a civilian. Certainly there are layers upon layers of things I don’t know. In any case, that was the end of CNS, officially.

But Sonnet was right. The net hums with rumor. Speculation around the return of CNS hit a five-year peak about two months ago, traffic analytics tell me. Plenty of chatter, none of it substantiated. A name echoes in the swirl: Ariad. A folk figurehead, I gather. The one who got away, they say. CNS embodied. I can find no evidence that this guy actually exists.

So, what possibilities remain? The most obvious ones. A genuine bug, or someone on our side cheating the game, and for those I’ve already run through my options a hundred times, always arriving at a policy of wait-and-see. I don’t love that answer.

Apparently, Sonnet doesn’t like mine either. What I said I forget. He scoffs and tags a box with thirty seconds on the clock. We’re already winning. It’s overkill, which must be why I protested. No paved roads here. The map’s all forest and brutalist compounds. That and the starlit skybox tell me it’s a new match. I take the box with Sonnet. We trigger overtime and watch the chaos we have made. When we win the round, fake cash good for nothing but vanity floods into our game accounts, bumping our lifetime stats up an imperceptible amount. Barley tosses us back in the queue. Games happen fast. Soon we’re done. I surface for a quick supper. Research typically follows. Tonight, for the first time in a long time, exhaustion breaks my habit. Sleep sneaks up, takes me unaware. I wake with a ring of sauced vegetables crusted to the sides of my bowl and a glowing sun outside my window. Panic jolts me conscious. Light means it’s after sunrise, which this time of year is sometime between six-thirty and seven local time. In other words, I could be a full three hours late to training set for nine o’clock SNT.

I’m in the bleed momentarily. Stacked widgets notify me of missed calls from Sonnet. He picks up immediately when I call. Without any other setting selected, we port into the Ready Room. He looks at me wide-eyed.

“Where were you? It’s been hours.”

“Slept in. Sorry.” I try to blink the crust from my eyes. “Won’t happen—well, I’ll save the buttering for Barley.”

“You haven’t heard from her already?” Sonnet rubs his head now. More accurately, he rubs his headset, which detects the contact and translates the motion to a more organic one in Naturata. “I thought you were up to something together.”

“I just logged on. No idea what’s going on with her.”

“OK, whatever, no need to get defensive.”

“I wasn’t—” I was. What am I thinking? My thoughts outpace me.

“When did you talk last?”

“Last night, when we wrapped up training. No meeting with Edmondo or anything, right?”

“Right,” says Sonnet. “Same for me.”

“Maybe she slept in too. Our schedule’s tough.”

“Come on. Barley?”

“No, probably not.” Here it is, the shift I’ve dreaded. She has never been late. Either Barley’s found me out or she’s behind it all. If there are other, less catastrophic possibilities, they don’t cross my mind. “Have you told Edmondo?”

“Not yet. You want to?”

I hesitate. That’s a bell you can’t unring. “Let’s give her more time.”

“Alright.” Sonnet’s fingers twirl in the air, likely navigating his client-side feeds. “This is going to hurt.”

“What?”

He waves a hand in my direction. “Not you. Me. I’m cancelling today’s cast.”

I nearly ask another question, think better of it, say, “Thanks,” instead. We’ve come a long way in the eyes of our higher-ups. Maybe two check-ins a week and we’re good. Neither of us want to offer any cause for change. Best to handle this kind of thing internally.

“Angela has us doing a conference tomorrow at sixteen hundred,” Sonnet says, fingers still contorting in eldritch sign language. “If Barley doesn’t show before then. . .”

“I’ll take the hit, don’t worry. Edmondo’s not gonna do anything to me.”

“Right,” Sonnet fails to hide his relief, “Guess I’ll unplug for a while. Ping me if she comes on?”

“What are you talking about? You cancelled your cast.”

“Yeah, because we both know that’s how they watch. If I’m on stream with you and not Barley, you can bet Edmondo’s finding out. Cancelling is no big deal, though. Plenty of pros do it when we’re trying out stuff we’re not ready for the world to see. This late in the season, no way it’s going to put up any flags.”

“Fine. But we can’t just sit and wait. We need a way to contact her.”

“Don’t have one besides here, do we?”

“Then we look.” Hot breath rises along my cheeks and into my eyes. I do what I can to keep composed.

“What is there to look at? She doesn’t give us anything to go on. Come on, it could be nothing anyway. She might be back any minute.”

A heavy breath leaves me. “I need to look.”

“You do that. Let me know if you find anything, yeah?”

“Sure.” My right hand waves while my left navigates to end the call. I fall out of the Ready Room and into a bright cosmos of knowledge. The feed. Its fuzz of stimulation will caress me into a fruitless binge, I fear, so I filter the noise into something meaningful. If I can find Barley, I can find a way to reach her. She is not Barley to everyone. Her government name must be all over Ranzio’s paperwork, though I can’t think of a good excuse for pulling those files. I dig elsewhere. Scan small-time Mongolian media for anything on homegrown Bank It! contestants. Peruse datashops for personal info on anyone with the “Barley” alias. My head rams wall after wall. Nothing gives. Either she’s careful with her Naturata footprint, or she simply doesn’t have much of one. When Rahmat calls, my system clock says I’ve bled for seven hours straight. I am grateful for the reprieve. She asks when I’ll be free. I tell her I am.

“Still nothing?” she asks from the driver’s seat, and I can hear her, the croaking sac of her frog removed at last. I check my phone and shake my head. Rahmat clicks her tongue. “You said before that she might be related to farmers. It’s a busy season for us, you know. Would she have gone to help?”

“Not without letting us know.” My head’s still shaking. “No, this isn’t like her at all.”

“How do you know? No offense, but you guys don’t actually know each other, like in the real world. A person can change a lot between here and there.”

“Can we just not talk about this?” I ask, kindly as I can manage.

“No problem,” she says. I swallow. The lurch of shifting gears.

“So, how’s work?”

“Starting to slow down some, which is why I called you.”

“Appreciate it, by the way. It’s nice to get out.”

“Yeah, always good to get some fresh air.” The frog hits a bump. We’re on that dirt road again. “Hey, I’m not sure I should—”

Rahmat laughs. “Relax, we’re not going to Krysiak’s.” Sure enough, we pass the roadhouse entrance without slowing down. The place slips from my window to the rearview. “I hope you don’t think I go around drinking all day.” Ah, right, I’m hours ahead. Outside my window, the sun rides high. It’s early afternoon in our slice of meatspace.

“Sorry, I didn’t. . . I thought it was later.”

She shrugs, looks me up and down. I haven’t put myself together very well. My body’s draped in gym clothes and shod in tennis shoes peeling at the soles. Rahmat grins. “Hey, want to catch a train?”

Tall grass tickles my calves. I chase Rahmat through the field, having abandoned the frog near the road. The ground shakes beneath our feet. Brisk air clumps in my lungs, entering in long, ragged drafts. Rahmat slows, and our distance closes. When I catch up, I attempt to even my breath. I can feel the first grit of a cough in my chest. The track rattles in place, a hop away from where we stand. I can see the engine coming, tall and proud and old like a rotting floodstreet cathedral. Something so large should not move so fast.

“Can you run again? It’ll be easier if you move with it,” she says with insulting ease. I put a thumb up and leave the other on my knee. “OK, here it comes. Remember what I said about gripping with both hands. Aim high so your legs don’t go under. Let’s go. . . now.” She springs into motion, and I follow. The train whips by. We are buffeted by displaced air. Rahmat’s lips move. Her arms extend. I copy the motion. A growing stitch in my side nearly doubles me over. She reaches and she shrinks so fast I hurry and reach too.

I am a tree uprooted in a hurricane. Flight is what it feels like, or the fall that ends a dream. My body flaps like a high-strung flag. My hands go pale. No room for blood in the grip. Another hand scrapes one of mine free and tugs me forward, out from the frigid vacuum press. The wind goes mute.

“You did amazing,” Rahmat says. I roll onto my back and collect my bearings. We’re on a cold steel car, sat in a wedge between behemoth shipping crates labeled with Dissun’s setting red sun. Something about the logo niggles my brain.

Fields around us seem to warp as we pass through. The boundaries of things lose definition. I feel lost. Rahmat helps me sit up. We catch our breath. We watch the trees flit by. Soon we are pressed together at the sides. By which of us, I don’t know. Given the air’s icy gnaw, probably both.

“Quinn, I am so happy to know you,” she leans back to look at me, “Not many people in Sparks around our age.”

“No,” I agree. Not many people our age anywhere, relatively speaking. Most folks in our parents’ time could read the writing on the wall. I’m reading it too, as we curve around a hill and the side of a tanker car a few couplings ahead becomes visible. “MC-BO 12980” in large white print designates the car, and beside it a diamond-shaped sign in warning-label red reads “1977 — Class 2.” The train flies west, propelling us deeper into unfamiliar territory. I have to assume Rahmat has a return route in mind.

“Are you still thinking about Barley?” she asks. I have let my face lapse into a mask.

“I guess I am.”

“Don’t.” She puts a hand on mine. “You did everything you can.”

“There’s always more to do.” I just can’t think of what. I look up again at the Dissun-emblazoned cargo. And there it is, my answer, towering over me in mockery. I pull my hand loose from Rahmat’s, needing ten fingers free. “Hope I can get satellite out here,” I say, phone sliding from my pocket. Rahmat crosses her arms. Never mind her for now. I think a little prayer of pleading impulse and send it into the void. I suppose it works. Though we tunnel through rugged forest, my phone connects. The screen illumines our faces, shadowed by great oaks and cliffside.

“Come on, Quinn, now?”

“It’s not Barley’s fault.” I point to a map largely blanketed in varying shades of red with little green oases. “Power outages, see? A university over there keeps a live map of the grid. I should have guessed earlier.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No, but ninety percent of Ulaanbaatar’s down. Some kind of winter storm. Unless she’s a nomad with a renewable rig, it seems pretty likely she’s affected.”

“Wow, yeah, you’re probably right.” Rahmat sounds distant. I wish I was the type to ask what’s wrong. “So, what can you do?”

“How fast can we get back?”

Rahmat’s eyes glaze over. “About an hour,” she says after consulting her chip, “There’s a rail scale coming up in fifteen minutes. We can hop off there and take the next one going back east.”

“Let’s do that,” I decide, “I need to get ahold of some people at Ranzio.”

“Smart,” Rahmat says, but her hooked lip is not so encouraging. She stands and walks the car’s length. I stand and attempt to match her pace before accepting that my tempo is more cautious.

“What’s up?” I shout the question to be heard above the wind. An hour is a long time to let awkward unsaids linger.

“Quinn,” she starts, “you’re really cool, but I don’t think I can do this. I keep trying—”

“Oh.” My face burns despite the cold. “Yeah, no, me either.”

“Really?” When she turns to me, she looks relieved. “It’s not that I don’t like you, it’s just that I think we’re better at being friends.”

“Exactly.”

“And you’re always so busy with your games, which is great, but I can’t. . . I don’t see room for much else.”

I nod. “Can we go back to sitting?”

“I know, it’s so nasty up here, right?” She glances ahead once more before taking a seat beside me. Our sides press, leaving no room for tension. It is warmer this way.

---

I nearly trip over the threshold to my headroom. Once my feed floats around me, I ping Sonnet. No immediate response, so I call directly. He picks up the third time. 

“Google. You find something?”

“Yeah.” I explain my suspicion, send him the map tea-stained in outages.

“Checks out.” He stares through me at the info presumably sprawled across his user interface. “We’re taking this to Edmondo, yeah?”

“That’s what I figured.”

“Tonight?” Sonnet sounds unsure.

“Barley can’t wait.”

“And what’s he going to do, you think?”

“Get her up and running again. Maybe ship a generator or something? I don’t know, but Ranzio will make it right. After last round, I don’t see budget being an issue.”

“Alright,” Sonnet says, “let’s get this over with.”

Edmondo doesn’t pick up right away either. He’s a busy man. I consider calling Angela instead. She might not have the power to act on the news we bring, but she could get it to the right people. Still, something holds me back. Angela performs her role perfectly. She’s a friendly face. And yet, I have trouble trusting someone I do not believe is flesh, someone who may well be an artificial agent trained into sentience for Ranzio’s own purposes, regardless of what the employee databases suggest. Edmondo’s acrimony is a known quantity.

He answers, eventually. His office shows signs of tinkering: a different skyline silhouetted in the window, the wallpaper a brighter shade of lavender. Today he sits behind the desk rather than atop it. His shoulders slump. I nearly feel sorry for the late call, but this is the job, and he gets unthinkably more for it than either of us.

“Good evening, Tough Shells. I see you’re short a member.”

“Barley’s been offline all day. We can’t reach her.” I hope I am right about this. If I am wrong, if there is another reason for her absence and Edmondo knows it. . .

“We think she lost power.” Sonnet steps up to one of the seats opposite Edmondo’s desk, feigns a lean over its studded leather back.

Edmondo interlaces his fingers. “There is a timepiece behind you. Would you mind reading it to me, either of you?”

“22:00,” I say, because Sonnet doesn’t and won’t.

“If I am not mistaken, your regimen begins at 09:00, which, you must understand, begs the obvious question. What story might you spin for me to explain thirteen missing hours?”

“It was my call.” I bite the side of my mouth. Having volunteered for this doesn’t make it any more enjoyable. “Didn’t want to bother you until we had something actionable.”

“I don’t believe that is your call to make.”

“Next time, I’ll go to you first thing,” I say. None of us believe me. He lets the words go unchallenged anyway.

“Very well. Given your schedule, I see this matter must be sorted out within the next eighteen hours at the latest.”

Sonnet cocks his head. “That’s doable, yeah?”

“A moment, if you will.” Edmondo rummages in his desk, rifles through papers blank to my eyes. I exchange glances with Sonnet. He shrugs. “Congratulations, Google,” Edmondo says after a while, “you managed to spend a full day uncovering what I’ve just confirmed in moments. Your teammate is without electricity. Looking at these patterns, I am frankly surprised she has remained punctual this long. Has she mentioned this possibility to either of you before?”

I sigh. “You know Barley.”

“Yes, well, you’re both dismissed. In the future, before calling at this hour, consider that some of us have commitments outside of your little game.”

“What about Barley?” Sonnet asks.

“A jet is being fueled as we speak. The details do not concern you.”

Sonnet’s response dies as Edmondo terminates the meeting. We move to a separate call then, though nothing else important is said. Mainly we decompress and take turns asking questions the other can’t answer. I tell Sonnet I’ll show up on time tomorrow. That night, I set five separate alarms. I’m not taking chances. My dreams are rife with missed deadlines and disaster. I wake exhausted but punctual.

“Business as usual,” a message from Edmondo reads, “Barley will join your conference promo this afternoon.” The recipients are myself and Sonnet. I close the message and link with Sonnet in a Bank It! queue. The game fills our third slot with a random contestant each round. We stick on private comms anyway, shooting out brief in-game barks when direction is necessary.

“How much trouble do you think we’re in?” Sonnet is a silver bullet in freefall, inertia from his launch giving way to his weight. He tumbles parallel to one of Brisbane’s great cylindrical skyscrapers, standing as it stood back in 2027. Seven stories from the ground, his grappling hook punches through a window. His body goes through another one when his slack runs out at the third floor. I take a jump pad to join him. Meanwhile, our teammate pokes at a well-guarded cashout station in a nearby park.

“I would rather not wonder,” I say, landing a body shot and snatching a kill from Sonnet’s clutches. He mumbles and moves on to the next.

“Any chance you’re wrong about Barley? She’s clever, yeah? Resourceful? Then how come she’s not on a generator or a big battery, at least? And why didn’t she say anything? What if this is her choice?”

“Guess we’re about to find out, Sonnet.” An alarm heralds my steal. A second shrill bell dings a thirty-minute reminder, which also flashes a banner notification across my heads-up display. The piercing note does not decelerate my road rage pulse. Mercifully, Sonnet’s questions do not accelerate it either. These are not new worries; they have frothed my field of view since Barley went truant. I have become accustomed to those floaters, benefitted by many years’ experience. Someday the aggregate of anxieties I have pushed to the periphery will rise up and kill me. Not today.

Angela’s invite lights my inbox twenty minutes before our panel. Sonnet and I, idly scanning our post-match summary, port over instantly.

We find ourselves on a stage segmented by several layers of heavy magenta curtain. Angela is here. Barley is not.

“Great to see you both! Has Edmondo explained the situation?”

“No,” I am colder than I would like, “he has not.”

“Oh! Not to worry. Let me clear the air. Your team captain has been relocated.”

“Relocated?” Sonnet’s voice goes high.

“After you reported her absence, Ranzio dispatched a support team to Barley’s home address. The residence was found. . . inadequate for her needs.” Angela smiles sadly. “It was—it would be a shame to see any of you—well, it’s not my place to say. What matters is she’s in a better place now. We have provided an apartment near Ranzio headquarters in Turin, Italy. While she’s here, Barley will have access to the top-notch headrooms in our office spaces. We’ll take good care of her, I promise, and—ah, here she is.”

Barley ports onto the stage. She towers over me in her silver-striped combat boots and padded white-and-purple armor. In her face I see a subtle glint of emotion. That’s new.

“Sonnet. Google.” Her familiar accented monotone.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, “I appreciate your assistance. We will talk after.”

“Aww, love that compassion.” Angela waltzes between us, guiding us into a lineup and silently adjusting our posture. “I wish you could all catch up more, but Barley is right. You’ll all be porting into the conference soon. The stage will look exactly the same, only with people in the seats. You all have a real bond. You don’t need to fake anything. Just let them see what I see. Show them found family. Show them the softness beneath the Tough Shells.”

“I thought we wanted to be taken seriously,” Sonnet murmurs.

“This is serious.” Angela rounds on Sonnet. Evidently, she takes his aside as an affront. “If you go out there all stoic, you’ll look like you’re trying too hard. Everyone sees through stone faces.” She steps back to look us all over. “Are you all ready? Wonderful. You’re on.”

The panel is a flurry. An audience of Bank It! devotees line up to shout questions at us. Some are directed at one Tough Shell in particular, others we take based on whoever’s best equipped to answer. I am surprised at the number of questions aimed at myself or Barley. Sonnet has always been the popular one. His rotcast has only become more prolific this season. Then again, maybe that’s the reason. He’s accessible. Anyone can hop onto his chat and shoot him a question ten hours out of the day. We’re more elusive, Barley especially. Must be value in that. When I’m not the one answering, my eyes are on her, searching for any hint at her real condition. She gives me nothing. She is her same unreadable self.

There is another surprise, besides the flow of attention: the fans. Not just lovers of the game—genuine Tough Shells admirers. Some wear digital merch. Glowing purple earphones, emblems inscribed with our turtleback team logo, branded hoodies, that kind of thing. After introductions, one of our first Q&A volunteers wears silver-lined, Tough Shells-branded wings. Fandom bewilders me. I feel a deep disconnect. I imagine one could find it amusing from the outside, how the contestant Google can have so many staunch adherents, while the Google made of meat feels so alone. It is my own fault, obviously. There are people who know me and care. But none of them can know all of me, only an aspect, a Google or a Quinn, and both would be lacking still, because of the secret I have made my burden, the secret I am not sure is one, the stitch in the bleed where loss should have been.

We agree to meet after the conference. Sonnet brings us back to his riverside nightclub. Again, the sun rises.

“Now it’s only us,” he says, “So?”

“As I said, I appreciate what you have done.” Barley does not sound surprised at the antagonism in Sonnet’s voice. “What do you want to know?”

“The whole thing. Start at the start.”

“A winter storm came. I had no power.”

“Why? No backups, really?” A punctuating snort. “You?”

Barley takes this, too, in stride. “I was not prepared. The outage was. . . unexpected. Will I continue?”

Sonnet falters at her choice of words, says after a moment’s hesitation, “Will you?”

“I will, if I am not stopped again.” A pause to make clear her meaning. “A plane came after the storm. First they attempted repair. That did not last long. Time was short, and the damage was deep.”

“Right, you had to be up and running before the con,” says Sonnet. He looks at Barley, she looks at him, and he closes his lips. Whatever prickly thought he’d begun to tug is left to die on the vine.

“I packed. We left. Landed in Italy before the convention. It is not so cold here.”

“Do they have a nice place for you?” I ask.

“I have seen the headquarters. The building is nice. Safe. The headrooms, like this one, are excessive. The headsets are the same. I do not need all of this to do my job.”

Her chin dimples when she says this. Her cheeks lift and form grooves at her nose. There are many subtleties in her previously inaccessible expression. Of course she does not appreciate the upgrade.

“Angela mentioned an apartment,” Sonnet prods, just a little.

“I have not been,” Barley says, “They told me it is workforce housing. It is enough, I assume.”

“Let us know,” I say, “If it’s not enough, I can. . .” I fall off because I am at the same time opening a notification from Edmondo, one we have all received. The space is quiet while we read it over.

The bulk of Edmondo’s message details our revised schedule, which includes daily check-ins with either him or Angela. He’s also registered us for a punch clock app that will alert him to truancy and tardiness. All in all, not too bad. Something along these lines was inevitable the moment we let Barley’s absence go unreported.

Still, it deflates us all. After that, the conversation goes nowhere. Sonnet needles once or twice more. Barley gives him nothing, and he seems to be satisfied regardless. Because we are behind, I raise the option of training into the night. As expected, no one goes for it. We vote to make up our two lost days with double-length sessions over the weekend instead.

That’s enough for Sonnet. He logs off for a well-earned sleep.

It is not enough for me. I follow after Barley, calling her again the moment our meeting with Sonnet disconnects.

“Please,” I say, “level with me. There’s more you aren’t saying.”

She tries to conceal herself. She does. But the flickering muscles in her face confirm my thoughts. In her new rig, there’s nowhere to hide.

I continue. “If you want to leave Sonnet out, fine. I can’t blame you. Just don’t keep it in. I know how that is.”

“Yes? What do you hide, Google?” Her arms cross, rippling with muscle and sinew.

“Hey, I’m asking you, and I think I’m pretty justified in asking.”

Barley puckers a bit, because she is reasonable enough to recognize this is fair, and ornery enough to hate it anyway.

“I do not discuss myself because my stories are not pleasant. Do you know of winter in the Gobi Desert? The cold can eat a nomad to the bone. Once I shared a room with a man whose legs were burnt to black by the wind. He felt nothing. The others watched and thought they helped. They sang healing songs we save for animal births. I did help. I moved him, and fed him, and I cleaned him, until he went with fever. He asked to be buried in the sky, but we could not take him out in that weather, so he burned. Do you want another story, Google?”

I swallow. Of course, I do not say, I want to hear it all.

“The dune peaks frost over, in the cold. We cannot break the crust, but storms can. They break the frost and carry it. They choke us with dust and cut us with ice. You could call them blizzards or sandstorms. We call them dzuds. We call every disaster a dzud. They come so often now, they are not worth dividing. If I spoke of every hard time, I would have news each day.”

“I’m not asking for that,” I say. Though she’s only got six years on me, she sounds so much older when she talks this way. “Maybe you could only tell us when a storm’s about to knock out your power grid?”

“I thought I could withstand this one.” Barley grits her teeth. “I was wrong. It will not happen again.”

“I would hope not, with Ranzio watching,” I say. She bristles. Barley is a private person. The move must feel like a ruin of her boundaries in that regard.

I meet her eyes. Angela is right. We have become a sort of family. That should preclude secrets, in theory. I don’t doubt there are many secrets still behind those eyes.

“Anything else?” I ask.

“No.” She does not blink. Yet I trust her, if not to tell me everything, then to tell me what matters. She is smart. She possesses a clarity of purpose. “Is there anything you have to say to me?”

I shake my head, keeping my own secrets. I will settle for the answers she has given. Our next game is too soon to waste time generating more friction. Barley disconnects, and there is only me among the vague shapes of this abstract template call space.

I get to bed on time, for once. The next week will be vital. As before, memorizing the stratagems of our opponents and devising new ones for ourselves will cost every waking hour. Barley will lead and I will follow. For now.