I should feed the dog. She was probably starving. I got up and filled a dish with dog food. How much food would a dog of this size need . . .
“Bug?”
“Yeah.”
Yeah what? Yeah, you can visit, or yeah, I’m still here and thinking about it?
I set the dish down and the dog dove into it. Apparently, she needed all the food.
Bug still hadn’t said anything. “When would be a good time?”
“Now would be okay.”
“Are you at Rogan’s?”
“Kind of.”
“What do you mean ‘kind of’?”
There was another pause.
Bug sighed. “I’m at the old HQ across the street.”
Wait, what? “Across the street from me?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be right there.”
I grabbed my phone and went to the door. The black dog licked her empty bowl, picked up her rubber hamburger, and followed me.
“I’m going to call you Shadow.”
Shadow wagged her tail.
I walked into bright sunshine, and Shadow and I crossed the street to the old industrial building. Three years ago, when Nevada and Rogan were in the middle of trying to save Houston, my paranoid brother-in-law bought all the buildings around the warehouse in an effort to make us safe. We had since bought some of them back from him, but this one was still his. It housed a secondary HQ, and when Nevada and Rogan came to visit us, they stayed in the apartment on the top floor.
The metal door was unlocked. I crossed the empty bottom floor, which once served as the motor pool for Rogan’s private army, climbed the metal staircase, heroically trying not to wince and failing, and emerged on the second floor. A massive computer station dominated the space, a gathering of servers and workstations, connected to nine large monitors arranged in a three-by-three grid on a wire cage. Behind the screens lay a small living space, with two couches on the right and a kitchen on the left. A tower of pizza boxes flanked by a brigade of empty Mello Yello bottles filled the kitchen island.
In front of the screens, perched in a rolling chair, sat Bug. Thin and wiry, Bug was never still, so much so that he seemed to almost vibrate, as if his body was struggling to contain the nervous energy within. Bug had enlisted in the Air Force as soon as he turned eighteen, and while he was in, the military offered him a deal: they would pay him an outrageous bonus and in return he would allow them to augment him. A specialist mage had reached into the arcane realm, pulled out a swarm of magical insects, and implanted them into Bug.
Nobody understood how swarms worked or the exact nature of their implantation. Most people didn’t survive the procedure. Those who did gained an ability to process visual information and sometimes computer code at superhuman speeds. They burned bright and died fast. The normal life expectancy for a swarmer was about two years. That’s why the military offered them a truckload of money. It was essentially a delayed suicide.
Somehow Bug survived. When Nevada first met him, he was an obsessed, manic wreck. Rogan was able to steady him through a cocktail of carefully curated medication and a stable environment, and usually he could almost pass for a normal person.
Right now, there was nothing normal about him. His brown hair stuck out at odd angles. His rumpled T-shirt, decorated with pizza stains of various shapes and ages, hung on his slight frame. His movements were quick and jittery, the agitation rolling off him in spasmodic waves.
“How long have you been here?”
Bug glanced at the kitchen island. “Four days.”
“Did you have to count the pizza boxes?”
“Yes.”
He had been here since Rogan and Nevada left for New York before traveling on to Spain for the funeral.
“Why didn’t you stay on base?”
Rogan’s estate contained a fully functional compound, complete with a barracks, commissary, gym, and everything else a small army would need to stay sharp. He used to just run everything from his enormous house, but after getting married, he and Nevada wanted privacy.
“There’s nobody on base,” Bug said. “It’s the holidays. With the Major gone, there’s only a skeleton crew protecting the house. I got lonely. And your security sucks. I’ve been here for half a week and they didn’t notice. People deliver pizza to the door downstairs and nobody asked why.”
For a second, I didn’t know what I wanted more, to hug Bug or to scream in Abarca’s face.