“Whatever,” I mutter. “I’m not acting like a hormonal teenager.”
“You’ve been in a shitty mood ever since Warner locked up your fascist girlfriend for espionage, murder, and conspiracy to commit murder—”
“I’m in a shitty mood because he stripped me of all my security clearances!” I shout, rising to my feet. I drop the remaining test tubes in the sand. “I can’t leave The Waffle without a permit. I can’t reenter without an extra layer of screening. I have to flash my ID everywhere I go even though everyone’s known me since I was a child.” I gesture to the samples arrayed before me, rigid with anger. “I can’t even dothissimple job without you breathing down my neck. It’s humiliating—”
“You messed up, kid,” Kenji says. “You don’t get to complain.”
I laugh bitterly. “Great. Thanks.” I drop back down to my knees and swipe the samples from the ground. Sand clings to my fingers, making me irrationally furious.
Kenji stalks over, looming above me.
“You think things are bad now?” he says. “You think your life sucks because you’ve been demoted? You have no idea how much worse things could get. Keep this up and Warner will punt you so far down the food chain you’ll end up working the information booth in the city center,handing out pamphlets in a hot dog costume.”
A ghost crab scuttles by, startling me, making me angrier. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“The hell he wouldn’t,” says Kenji. “You have no idea what that man would do. He’s so mad at you right now I’m surprised he hasn’t kicked you out of his house.”
Now I roll my eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Kenji says, pointing at my face. “This, right here—this is your entire problem. You think this is a joke.”
“I don’t think this is a joke,” I say, fury forcing me upright again. A breeze unfurls across the beach, clinking the glass samples against one another. “My entire problem is that everyonethinksI think this is a joke—”
“Look, I don’t have time for this. I’m trying to save your life right now. Get your shit together. Warner isn’t the only one pissed at you. We were all counting on you. We all thought you were smart enough—”
“If you thought I was smart enough, you would’ve listened to me when I had something to say. No one takes me seriously. No one respects my thoughts or my theories or my instincts—”
“Clearly, we can’t trust your judgment.”
“That’s bullshit!”
“I gave you one job,” Kenji says, rounding on me. “A simple, straightforward job. I told you to get the mercenary to supermax because I couldn’t—because she’d lodged a knife in my leg—and you had the singular, first-class audacity toshow up holding her hand with cartoon hearts popping out of your fucking eyes—”
“I wasn’t holding her hand!”
“No,” says Kenji calmly, unsheathing a rare, focused anger. “You’re right, you weren’t holding her hand—you were carrying her in your arms like she was some kind of wounded princess—as if she hadn’t been recently discovered beside the eviscerated remains of a fellow patient and the slaughtered bodies of our friends—”
“It’s not that simple—”
“It’s exactly that simple,” he says, raising his voice. “While I was getting my wounds healed you thought you’d take your girlfriend on a romantic stroll between murder and prison. You gave Samuel shit for putting cuffs on her, as if she deserved better. You stood guard over her like she was some kind of vulnerable innocent, talked to Warner like he was beneath you—”
“That’s not—” I drag my hands down my face. “Look, it wasn’t like that.”
“James, I love you, but fuck you if you think you can talk to me like I’m an idiot. If it wasn’t like that, then what was it? There are cameras in the tunnels, dumbass. You’re lucky there was no audio on that security footage, because if there were words to set to a melody, one of us would’ve already mixed it into a shitty song just to ruin your life. You think this is humiliating?” he says, nodding at me, then the test tubes. “This is us going easy on you.”
I blow out a breath, squeezing my eyes shut. Heat movesup my neck, singes the crests of my cheeks.
Kenji chucks something at my face without warning, and I react instinctively, catching the small plastic packet before realizing what it is.
“Eat something,” he says, irritated. “I’m going to do you a favor and assume you’re being an asshole because your blood sugar is low.”
As I turn it over in my hands, I feel my head catch fire.
Gummy bears.
3
Warner
