“What is wrong?”
At once, Cinn burst out of his chair, book in hand. “This book is fucking stupid! I can’t even read the first fucking sentence!”
He threw the book onto the table, where it bounced. Calmly, Julien reached over and opened it.
“Motes exhibit a characteristic oscillation between spectral frequencies, akin to the ethereal dance of cosmic energies.”
“Exactly! What does that even mean? I was expecting practical information, not this… this… poetic nonsense!”
Julien blinked at him.
“I’mnotstupid. But all these books Noir sets for me are stupidly written in ways that don’t even make sense… and the text is so bloody small that the letters keep jumbling about.”
Cinn collapsed back onto the chair, pressing his forehead to the table. Julien was silent, so silent he eventually forced himself to sit back up. He found that Julien was scrutinising him carefully, fingertips pressed together in an arch.
Abruptly, Julien stood, and said, “Stay here.” Then left the room for an eternity, in which Cinn sulked, lightly kicking the table legs.
When Julien returned, he carried a thin, rectangular object, like a giant bookmark, translucent yellow in colour with a thin blue line across it. He picked up the book to return it back to Cinn, leaning over behind him to open it on the table, the smell of the fancy coffeejustdetectable on his warm breath.
Julien placed his… thing…. on the first page, and instantaneously the text under the overlay magnified, and even seemed to magnetise to the blue line, preventing the words from jumping around. There were subtletweaks to the font as well—larger spaces between words and the bottom of the letters looked a bit thicker.
Cinn removed the overlay, then placed it back onto the book again. Then he openly gaped at Julien.
“Okay, wow.”
“Helpful?”
“What… is it?”
“Béatrice was diagnosed with dyslexia when she was twelve. I made it for her quite a few years back. It utilises a blend of lumenmotes and stabilimotes to trick your vision. You can have it now. Were you ever tested for dyslexia?”
“I don’t think so?”
They’d mentioned it a few times to him in juvie, when he complained about finding the lessons hard, but nothing was ever done about it. Julien rested his hand on Cinn’s shoulder. He fought the urge to rest his own on top of Julien’s.
“Sounds like your school teachers were the stupid ones then, not you.”
“Well, to be fair, I didn’t go all that much.”
“Do you want me to ask Eleanor to tell Noir that he needs to teach you this stuff himself, not give you ‘stupid’ books to read?”
Cinn eyed the book in question. “I’ll try again. With your thingy. Thanks.”
With a squeeze, Julien released his shoulder. Then, curiously, he tugged lightly on Cinn’s beanie hat, an almost absent-minded, affectionate gesture.
“Oh shit, before I forget, can I use your phone to ring Tyler quickly?”
A few days after he’d provided Julien with Bradley’s bank details, Julien gave him the receipt for the transaction. Cinn had called Tyler to confirm the money had gone into his friend’s account, and Tyler babbled grateful sobs down the phone to him.
Cinn was elated until Tyler had asked when he was coming home.
And so his routine of ringing him every few days had started.
Asking him how he was, how his day had been.
Of course, Tyler knew what Cinn was really asking: how are you, and did you use today?
Julien’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly and for a moment it seemed like he wasn’t going to reply, but then he gestured to the corner, where a bright red desk phone lay waiting on a marble pedestal.
