“We’re leaving after lunch to go to the aquarium,” Alice said.
“That could be fun,” I said, taking another nibble of my croissant.
“You should come with us if you’re not busy,” Alice said. “If you haven’t been before. It’s pretty cool.”
“Maybe I will,” I said, revising my afternoon. “I’ll check with Eli after the meeting. We’re going to go see a van.”
“Ooh, that sounds promising,” Alice said. “I can’t wait till you start rebuilding your van.”
“You want to help?” I asked. I couldn’t quite imagine Alice in her starched crinolines on her hands and knees with a drill.
“No,” she laughed. “Absolutely not. I just want to observe from afar. That seems like more fun. Like a home renovation video, except in real life. I’ll watch you do it. I get all the dopamine and don’t have to do any of the work.”
I laughed. I had an obsession with videos of people redoing their yards. I hated yard work, but I loved a pretty yard, especially since I hadn’t had my own in years. There was nothing like watching a two-minute video where someone else did all the labor and I still got to enjoy the gorgeous outcome, so I knew exactly what Alice meant.
“You can come supervise at every stage,” I said. “I just have to find the right one first.”
“Fingers crossed,” she said. “We’re leaving around twelve thirty if you decide you want to join in.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said as I headed down the hall.
The Sinclairs had said I could grab a desk wherever I wanted. A lot of the computers were open use; I just had to log in with my own code, and my desktop would pop up.
Today I headed for Hacker Central. I grabbed a seat at a cubicle next to Wren. She was hunched over the screen, her teeth buried in her lower lip, eyes narrowed.
“What?” I asked. “Did you find something?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Just trying to figure out?—”
I waited, knowing she could be silent for thirtyseconds or it could be ten minutes. I booted up a computer at my cubicle.
Finally, Wren said, “Someone’s been in here.”
“In where? Your files?”
“Kind of.”
She lapsed back into silence, and I let it go, pulling up my report, digging into the last bits of information I needed to finish it. Time slipped away as I clicked and typed, putting together the picture of someone I was very sure Knox would reject as a client.
Warm hands closed over my shoulders just as I hit save for the final time on my report.
“Ready for a break?”
Eli.
I spun in my chair. “I’m done. Just have to email this to Knox. Crazy question, but what do you think about going to the aquarium?”
“Random,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “But I’m not against it. When?”
“Alice is taking Petra this afternoon. We were going to go look at the van, but I haven’t made an appointment yet.”
“We could go before,” he said. “I’m flexible the rest of the day.”
“I cleared my schedule. Let’s do both,” I said, wishing we weren’t in the middle of our workplace and I could pull him into one of these empty offices. Maybe a midmorning break back at the barracks, I thought, mentally rearranging the day yet again.
“We could head over and see the van, then meet Alice and Petra there,” he said.
I looked up at him. “That might work perfectly.” A slow smile spread across my face. “We can stop by thebarracks first. Do you have to do anything else around here?”
