Page 19 of Terror Tuesday
So now? The plan is to move forward. No more simulations.
Schooling my face, I grunt. “Classwork.”
Oz releases a chuckle, like he finds my lie amusing. “So, if you’re not coming to the meeting, can I borrow your mask and pretend to be you?”
“Sure,” I say flatly, clicking away at my screen. “Just learn four dialects, memorize five backdoor server routes, and look like a sex-deprived cryptid.”
Apollo chokes on a laugh.
Oz flips me off without looking. “Please. I’d be acharismaticcryptid. A folk legend. They’d write books about me.”
“They write books about you already,” Apollo mutters, stretching his long legs. “They’re just in the mental health section.”
“Jealousy is an ugly color on you.” Oz wiggles his tongue ring at him.
Ignoring him, Apollo looks at me. “Do you ever leave this room? Like, have you touched grass recently?”
I swivel slowly in my chair. “I touchservers, Apollo.”
“Bro.”
“I’ve been out,” I deadpan. “But going outside is overrated. So are people. Present company included.”
Oz grins. “Don’t lie; you like us.”
“I tolerate you.”
“You did that whole fake relationship thing for me last year,” Oz points out, folding his arms behind his head. “That’s love.”
“That wasstrategic. Your stalker was posting about carving your initials into his skin.”
“Yeah, but he washot.”
Apollo groans.
I toss a stress ball at Oz. He catches it with one hand and starts juggling it with his vape. “Anyway, Valen…if you’re not planning a murder, or seducing someone through digital blackmail, whatareyou doing tonight?”
“Working. Watching.”
“Watchingwho?” Oz lifts an eyebrow.
“Don’t,” I warn him with a glare.
Apollo takes the hint and, after picking at a hangnail like he’s performing surgery, changes the subject. “You’ve got, like, twenty-five monitors in here, and somehow, none of them stream sports. Tragic.”
“I stream the end of dynasties,” I mutter.
Oz whistles low. “God, that’s such aValenthing to say. Like, you could just say,‘I like dismantling frat houses,’but no, you gotta be poetic about it.”
Part of me wishes to depart from the truth…that I want to take downmorethan just the houses. I want to destroy the entire thing. But I let it go.
With a quick flip, I shove a protein bar across the desk toward Apollo until it falls off the edge. He catches it mid-air without looking. “You’re a weird little caretaker, you know that?”
“Better than you passing out from not eating again.”
“One time,” he grumbles as he peels it open like it personally offended him. “And we were just freshmen then.”
My grimace drags up the memory anyway—our first-year dorm, hot as hell, the fan broken for a week, both of us half-dead and trying to act invincible. Three years later, I guess not much has changed. We’re just better at pretending.
