Page 193 of Ashes of Sin and Stardust

Alice: Hope everything is good on your end... I want to hear about the girls if you’re willing to tell me.

12:30pm

Alice: Dang, you weren’t kidding when you said you’d have a long night. Hope all is well.

Alice: I’m dead to the world, Sir. I’m going to sleep. But you can call me or text me when you can.

2:30am

Reuben: I’m sorry, Alice. Tonight was a shit show. I didn’t even have my phone on me. That flogger looks phenomenal and I’m pissed that Simon has used it on you and I haven’t. We will remedy that immediately. As far as the girls... I’ll update you when I see you again. I try not to text this stuff.

Alice: Damn son, it’s late.

Reuben: Son? And why the hell are you still awake?

Alice: I went to sleep but I woke up like twenty minutes ago.

Reuben: Go back to sleep.

Alice: Can’t. Too horny.

Reuben: Bullshit. If you were horny you would have done something about it. I know what you were doing this morning when I came in to wake you up.

Alice: Fine. I’m the normal amount of horny. But I can’t sleep. My brain is too busy.

My phone lit up with a phone call from him and I answered.

“What’s up?”

“Why is your brain busy?”

“I dunno, I was just thinking about how unfair it is that Pluto had its planet status revoked just because of its size. I think it’s probably going to backfire because Pluto was the Roman god of the underworld, and he might be pissed off that we revoked his planet. Also its biggest moon is almost the same size as the planet itself.”

“Well that’s... really something.”

“I know. Super cool right?”

“Super cool.”

I rolled over on my side and repositioned my phone, trying to get comfortable. “So what happened today?”

He sighed. “We had more than we expected. We got forty-five girls. Not sure what happened. Lindsay is livid because that means her team missed intelligence somewhere and they don’t know where, so IT is trying to figure that out.

“As far as the girls, there’s a huge age range and we are going to send some of the younger ones to our sister organization. Many of them are about what we normally expect, but there are five unreachables. We have three on suicide watch right now. Some of us are taking turns. I’ll be honest, I probably won’t be back tomorrow night.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry, Alice. I know you were probably looking forward to–”

“No, it’s okay. It’s not your fault,” I said, trying to be understanding. “If you need to stay another day, stay another day. If that’s the case, I’m going to stay another day here, I think. Sophie missed me, and I have a bad habit of not texting people when they’re out of sight, so I think I’ll stick around and hang out with her.”

“That sounds like a great idea,” he said around a yawn.

“Okay I’ll let you go, you’re probably exhausted.”

“Hmm. Goodnight, little bug.”

I hesitated. “Um, Reuben?”

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