Page 39 of The Refusal

His smile is a small flash of pride, and he pulls himself up, sitting a bit straighter. “Yep, I’ve been working on it for years.” But then he wraps his arms around his thin body, closing his eyes.

“I can’t believe that I’ve done this to Janus,” he whispers.

I reach out and tap his shoulder. “Why are you worried? He was beside himself when he thought you were hacking into his system; he’ll actually be delighted you’ve been trying to work out who it is.”

He sits up again and blinks at me, hand pressed to his chest. Then he shifts his gaze over my head as if to look at some faraway unseen object.

“But … But … I’m responsible for other people being in there,” he says.

“You don’t know they’re there because of you, and you’ve tried to sort it out. He was torn on whether to just talk to you about it. He thought he’d lose your friendship if he went behind your back. Trust me, he won’t be mad. Why aren’t you mad at him?”

Fabian shifts, and his leg bounces as he plays with the leather straps on his wrist. I wonder if he’s ever taken them off: They’re worn and soft like an old, battered shoe.

He laughs. “I could be mad, but I didn’t talk to him either.” He shrugs. “Perhaps we’re equally culpable. I’d feel a lot better if I could tell him something about the hack.”

“Wouldn’t we all?” I mutter.

For a while we sit in silence. I sip my coffee. The shop is filling up with early-morning commuters, and the machine hisses and pops as the barista fills another order. Fabian has curled in on himself and I scan his body: God, he’s so thin. He could pass out at any moment; I’ve never seen anyone so gray.

“Let me get you something to eat.”

He shakes his head at me. “I’ll puke. Drugs.” He gestures down himself like it explains everything. “I keep getting admitted to the ER. Often unconscious,” he mutters the last bit under his breath.

Unconscious.The word echoes around my head. I look at the hair piled on his head, the translucent tattoos over a too-thin frame, the kind of guy I know Kate goes for. My God, isFabianthe guy who she treated weeks ago? If he was …

Fabian squints at me.

“Look, Jo, why don’t you come and work with me on it? Chances are we could find out where this is all coming from … I’ve gathered quite a bit of data on who’s been accessing the system that we could sift through. I could help you with protecting bits of it?”

Ugh. It would be heaven to have his assistance, but … do I trust him? It always takes me a while to trust people, and I don’t want to do anything that might be deemed to be confidential or outside our contract.

“How can I be sure—”

“You can check everything I’ve done.”

I purse my lips and frown at him.

Fabian rolls his eyes at me. “You’re a worrier.”

“I signed a confidentiality agreement.” My voice has a touch of outrage, and he laughs, standing suddenly and grabbing my hand.

“You should appreciate better than anyone that these contracts are a crapshoot. Come on, you can’t reveal anything I don’t know already; I’ve been in his system before, remember?”

24

Fabian

“Look at these,” Jo says, and I swivel around from where I’m pouring through network data on my computer as she crosses the room to me, a wad of paper clasped in her hand.

Jo retired to the sofa several hours ago with printouts. When I asked why she wanted to look at printed data, she said she sometimes missed things looking at a screen all the time, and that she liked to switch it up,use colored pens, and I laughed.

I screw my face up at what she’s showing me.

She’s highlighted various parts of a log file printout with fluorescent markers, and the repetition on the different pages is immediately obvious, but why is this interesting?

I scan over the colors. “Lots of recurrences. Yeah. What are you thinking?”

“As you’d expect across days and months.” She purses her lips and winds a long tendril of red hair that has escaped from the messy bun on her head around a colored marker.

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