Spellhacke- M. K. England Page 0,41
you here to have your ware fixed? I’m the best there is, promise.”
The babysitter cleared her throat delicately. “This shop was recommended to us by a friend of the family, but I see she must have been mistaken. Come, Ania, we won’t be letting a child fix your techwitchery hardware.”
She said “techwitchery hardware” like she’d read the term once in a textbook long ago, the verbal equivalent of holding dirty laundry pinched between two fingers as far from your face as possible. The shop owner, Mr. Ailiano, gave a big belly laugh. “Oh, your friend didn’t steer you wrong, and Dizzy there won’t be doing the fixing, though she is certainly smart as a whip and will probably be better than me before much longer. I’d be happy to take a look at your ware and give you an estimate, free of charge. Let me see, girl. I’ll give it right back, promise.”
Ania removed her ware with gentle grace and placed it in the man’s hand without seeking the approval of her babysitter first. In fact, when she turned around, she had a bit of a smirk on her face. She rolled her eyes and jerked a thumb back at her nanny.
“Ugh,” she mouthed, and I had to cover my face with both hands to hide my giggles. It was the first time I’d laughed all week, and though I normally hated rich people, I found I couldn’t stop myself from chatting with Ania. Before she and her nanny left with her expertly fixed ware, Ania had slipped me a comm code and mimed typing. Message me.
And I did. And we’ve been friends ever since, even through my nasty comments and bloody knuckles, even through Ania’s acceptance into a fancy private school while I was stuck at Kyrkarta Polytechnic, a zombie drone in front of a computer terminal in a classroom with three hundred other kids. Even through Ania’s discovery of my little side hobbies: crawling through locked and abandoned buildings, hacking the accounts of public officials for fun, and stealing maz for Remi to use in their weaving.
We’ve stuck together. A fancy bedroom (even bedrooms, plural) shouldn’t change that. And yet, I feel it more intensely than I ever have before. Ania lives here. Here. And as she leads us into the next room and removes her shoes to place them delicately on a hand-carved shoe rack, a new thought occurs to me. She probably brings her school friends here.
My gaze flits across the room: gaming systems with multiplayer games, a holodeck board game system, more couches that look too pristine to sit my lowly ass on . . . and framed photos of Ania sitting in this very room with two other well-dressed, perfectly styled people our age, wearing the uniform of her private school.
Yep, that stings. But nowhere near as bad as the photo of Ania and a lean, blonde girl in winged eyeliner, wearing matching university sweatshirts and holding up their acceptance letters.
Ania is going off to university with this girl. She’s leaving me in the dust, alone, but she’ll be anything but alone.
She’s my best friend, but I’m apparently not hers.
And why should I be? I’m the girl who gets in fights. I’m the girl who can’t have an emotion without wanting to punch a wall. I’m the girl who screwed up our last job so badly that I killed people.
While I’m having my private meltdown, Jaesin and Remi remove their shoes and set up shop in front of Ania’s wall array, which holds an enormous screen with curved sides. Remi sinks to the couch and scrolls through the collection of games with an open mouth and unblinking eyes, arms limp with exhaustion.
“Oh, you are so going down,” they say to Jaesin, who snatches up one of the wireless controllers and syncs it to his deck and lenses.
“Please. I played this game all the time back at the home and you know it. I dominated in our intrahouse league.”
“That was years ago, and I’ve been playing the deck version for months. You’re gonna eat it so hard.” Their words are strong, but only their eyes and the tips of their fingers move. They’ve gone into full energy conservation mode.
I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from lashing out. We all have our own way of dealing with things, and they apparently need a distraction more than they need to know how we managed to screw up and kill people. Those two are like