Page 27 of Coldwire
He sends me a request for a tip. I decline the pop-up in my display, thensend him back an emoji with my face rendered over it holding a middle finger.
The door closes behind him. With that resounding thud, our spectators are shut out, only the long administrative corridors ahead bearing witness when I turn to Kieren and say:
“So you know that I was acquainted with our person of interest, right?”
His brow scrunches, then smooths in a flash. I watch him carefully.
“Were you?” he returns, casual. “I might have heard something about that.”
Which means he’s been filled in.
“Before you ask,” I warn, “I know no more than you. There’s nothing useful I can offer for information.”
Kieren keeps his gaze ahead. “Good thing we’re being sent in to obtain new findings, then.”
He’s uncharacteristically calm for a matter I thought he’d want to pry into. If we were walking into a joint posting where Kieren was the one who knew the missing man, I’d be asking him every question under the sun. Even if Kieren couldn’t answer any of them, I’d at least be following protocol to exhaust my options.
“Right,” I say. I make no move to hide my frown. Kieren gestures ahead to our destination, letting me proceed first.
Headmaster Murray’s office is busy when we step in. NileCorp has sent a whole team by the looks of it, three milling around the room on their handhelds and two with goggles over their eyes. I’m tech-literate enough that I can log in and out of StrangeLoom, type my credentials where I need, and on occasion, troubleshoot any loading problems. I’m not tech-literate enough to understand how they inject us into Medaluo’s server without Medaluo noticing.
I suppose when NileCorp owns the entire infrastructure, there’s a lot it can get away with.
“Hey, nerds.”
Kieren’s twin sister is splayed on their father’s chair, her feet kicked up on the desk. I don’t hang out with Hailey often—it’s too intimidating for Rayna, and I’m hanging out with Rayna first and foremost. Still, Hailey is waving at me as enthusiastically as she greets Kieren when she sits up.
Headmaster Murray stands at the other side of the office, staring off into space in a way that indicates he’s typing into his display.
“Hey,” Kieren says. “Did we miss anything?”
“They can’t exactly start without you,” Hailey replies. “It’s been very anticlimactic so far.”
Her head droops back onto the seat. Hailey Murray reminds me somewhat of a rag doll, and it’s entirely incongruous with the rest of her sharp energy. She tells great jokes, and she has a knack for breaking the tension in any situation. She’s perceptive enough that she’s always the first to spot ninth graders hovering around our lunch table at the start of the year, and she’ll hurry to wave them over to sit. But the world will be underwater before I see her hold good posture for any longer than a few seconds.
“What did you expect?” Kieren asks. “A circle of fire opening up from the floor?”
“That’s probably a daily occurrence in this office,” Hailey replies.
Headmaster Murray offers no retort. He’s still typing. In that awkward silence, Kieren and Hailey exchange a glance, then both roll their eyes in complete mimicry.
Envy froths up my throat, forces me to look away. I used to wish so badly that I had a sister, someone to keep me company in a shared bedroom so we could gossip in the dark and whisper secrets through the night. Instead, I was left awake with only the sound of my own thoughts, with my incessant, obsessive fixations about what I’d done wrong that day, ruminating on and on and on until I eventually fell asleep out of sheer mental exhaustion. I wanted a sister for the company, but maybe I just wanted the alternate world where the sister I could have had hadn’t died. In that world, I wasn’t a replacement child, just a second one. And maybethere, I wouldn’t have this crushing, sickly weight in my chest all the time.
I open my display. My cache must have cleared overnight, so when I click into my conversation tab with Rayna, our old messages are archived and not in direct view. Identity check time.
LIA: beaver
Rayna’s already awake—shockingly. I get an instant series of responses.
RAYNA: ew
RAYNA: good morning, cadet!
RAYNA: pufferfish
LIA: i’ve actually heard that’s quite good
Our identity check is opening with an animal we would be willing to eat. We still haven’t run out of examples. It works well because we’ve been getting increasingly outlandish with our answers, and so either one of us would feel it instantly if the scale shifted. Scammers these days are too sophisticated—they’re scraping data sold from the feed and filching from the thousands upon thousands of catalogs that NileCorp stores of our activity upcountry. NileCorp knows everything about us, and as a by-product, if the company gets a rogue employee who wants a side hustle selling information to someone’s AI company, there’s virtually no way to distinguish between your actual best friend and a bot who has analyzed her every verbal choice.
