Page 22 of The Refusal

He hands me the spliff with a grin before disappearing into the bowels of the apartment. “I have no idea when I last washed,” he shouts at me over his shoulder, and the familiarity of this conversation makes a soft laugh bubble up my throat.

I look at my hand and take an experimental drag, bending double as the smoke hits my lungs. Am I trying to suck in air or exhale as fast as possible? Jesus, my ribs are like iron bands around my chest, eyes starting to stream. Fabian’s head appears in the bathroom doorway.

“Don’t fucking finish it,” he growls before disappearing again, and then the drum of running water starts along with his tuneless whistling.

I squint at the glowing ember in my hand. One inhale had that effect on me? I head down the hallway, walls plastered with all kinds of crazy art various “friends” of Fabian have given him, often in return for IT help. A patterned kilim sits on the dark wood floor. It’s all remarkably clean, but Fabian was never particularly messy or dirty; he just accumulated things. Lots of things. I wander into the fifties kitchen, the bright orange cupboards and food everywhere in such contrast to my own. Setting the spliff down gingerly on a saucer, I busy myself making coffee. He starts singing loudly in the shower some tune I vaguely recognize. Every time I come here, I’m a student again and Fabian’s living the same life we lived in college like he’s stuck in a time warp. But he’s such a lovable nut, and I’m not sure whether it’s being here or the effect of what I’ve just smoked, but—as I add milk to the cup—the worry of the business, Fabian himself, and Jo, all start to fade away.

Coffee in hand, I wander idly into his bedroom and scrutinize what’s on his screens as I sip. Rows of servers blink and hum. A whole wall is covered in boxes of kit. I’m in the middle of working out what program he’s running when he appears bare-chested behind me, rubbing his wet hair with a towel.

“What do you think?”

“Damned if I know. What is it?”

“Password AI. I’m trying to hack into the National Archives. I got chatting to some chick online, and she said they had the most amazing data in there. I thought it’d be easy to go in via the back door but everything’s pretty up to date, so this is my next line of attack.” He frowns at the code as if he could understand the problems with it through sheer force of will.

Fabian can’t be bothered to ask anyone for permission to do anything. He’s got access to a huge variety of national institutions, databases, classified documents, and he works to keep those things open, to have all this information at his fingertips. I could ask him anything and he’d know or be able to find the answer. Crash investigation? He can locate all the confidential reports. And I suspect that I don’t know the half of it. He’s told me in the past that he’s good at covering his tracks, careful not to get on anyone’s radar. I have no real idea how he makes money. Some people seem to pay him to fact-check, but I’m sure he does all sorts of other illegal stuff, too. I scan the screen: black boxes filled with lines of code. At least this one doesn’t soundtooshady.

“What’s tricky about it?” I say.

He sinks into the chair next to me, towel around his waist, long hair dripping water onto the keyboard. I lean forward tracking a loop as his fingers grab the mouse from mine, following the script down the screen.

“I’ve got a problem right there,” he says with a harsh scowl, jabbing his finger at the offending code.

I nudge him. “Get dressed. Give me time to run through it.”

Fabian swivels around, still in the chair, dragging a random T-shirt from the floor and stretching it over his head. He zips backward to the computer adjacent to the one I’m sitting at, signs in, then stands and grabs underwear from a drawer by the bed, pulling them on before tugging on clean jeans from a crumpled pile on a seat. The warmth settles inside me, the keys under my hands, the huge screen in front of me, even Fabian’s long hair shedding water like a wet dog. He plonks himself down beside me on a sharp exhale, and for a blissful minute I’m that guy again, coding next to his friend.

I cuff the back of his head with my hand.

“Wrap something around that ridiculous hair of yours and stop soaking me.”

He laughs, leans over, and shakes his head over me and the keyboard.

“Fucking hell.”

He sits back and clicks over the screen, booting things up, but I quickly realize that he’s working with a bunch of software tools I’ve never seen before.

I nudge his elbow. “Show me what you’re using.”

He grins over at me, starts to explain, and before long we are buried in problems.

Time tracks shadows across the ceiling and eventually Fabian leans back in his chair and rubs his eyes, saying, “Fucking starved.” And the hunger I’ve been studiously ignoring for the past couple of hours ignites in my stomach. I glance out the window at the darkening sky visible above the buildings over the road, before looking at the time on my monitor. Seven p.m.Holy shit, we’ve been coding for about eight hours straight. I widen my eyes at him, and he laughs, scrubbing his hands down his face.

“Pizza?”

I am struggling with some particularly tricky code my mind won’t let go of, so I nod vaguely at him, turning back to the screen. Only half of me hears him ordering the food on his phone. He chuckles, patting me on the shoulder.

“There’s the Janus I used to know.”

I laugh at the warm thickness in his voice.

“Fuck, this is great.” I gesture at the monitor. “How long will it take you to crack this, do you think?” We’ve made solid progress today, but I have no idea how much work he’ll need to do before he’s got something workable.

He shrugs. “How long is a piece of string? Sometimes I get lucky and find a weakness. Other times it takes weeks.”

“That sucks.”

Fabian stretches, laughing. “I’m going to go and play Xbox for a bit—give my head a rest. You want to join me?”

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