It’s Not Magic
“I’m going with you.”
“No. Out of the question.”
“I’m part of this now. I have the right to go.”
Anna shook her head. “It’s not about what you have the right to do. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“I’m already in the middle of this. The police are looking for me. What am I going to do, stay here? What if you get caught? Mayor Tony owes me nothing. What happens to me then? You can’t protect me by leaving me behind. I’m going with you.”
Anna ran her hand through her hair with a sigh. “Okay. Fine. You’re right. I don’t think Dan-boy’s going to like it.”
True to her prediction, Dan-boy folded his arms, face set in a grim scowl. “No. Absolutely not.”
The entire group—Anna, Nadine, Dan-boy, Kev, Jason, and Lena, together with Takeru, Mayor Tony, and two of his crew—crowded into the small room with its plywood walls. Four different kinds of music thumped and pulsed outside. An hour past sunset, the heat still lingered.
Kev put his hand on Dan-boy’s shoulder, but he was only getting warmed up. “She’s not coming. She’s a liability. If shit goes sideways, she’ll screw us all, or worse. I don’t know why you’ve bothered to drag her along with you. You should’ve cut her loose a long time ago. No way is she coming with us.”
Anna shrugged. “Wherever she is, I am. If she doesn’t go, neither do I. You need me. I say she goes with me.”
“You can’t—”
“I can. I am. This is the way it is.”
“Why?”
“I dragged her into this. I’m responsible for her.”
“Fine. You’re responsible for her. Make sure she doesn’t screw up.”
“Do you have a plan?” Tony said.
“Yeah. But you’ll hate it.”
“Ah, mi mala, I haven’t liked anything you’ve done since you arrived at my door with your girlfriend. Why change now?”
“I need wheels. Clean, spoofed transponder, no plates. Something big enough for all of us, plus Marcus if we find him. A van, something like that.”
Tony nodded. “I can find you something. Expensive, but doable. I need the full value up front.”
“Tony. You know I’m good for it.”
“Any other time, mi mala, yes. This time…” He shook his head. “I’m not so sure you’re coming back. You or your friends.”
“Fine. Money up front, then. I also need four, maybe five of your boys, young. Young enough to look like kids getting into trouble, to create a distraction.”
Tony’s eyes narrowed. Chill silence descended on the cramped room, broken only by the cacophony of music outside. “Anna,” he said at last. “Anna, Anna, Anna. You presume on my hospitality. I welcome you and your friends, I take you into my home, and you do what? You take advantage of our friendship?”
“Tony, please.”
“Anna. You trespass on my good nature.”
“I can pay.”
“I don’t want your money. Not for this.”
“It’s not for you,” Anna said. “It’s for them. You know me. You know I have it. Enough to make a real difference in their lives.”
“What good is money if you get them killed?” He shook his head. “No. No, Anna, you presume too much. Tijuana Town is my home. The people here are my family. I look after my own.”
“Let me help.”
One of the boys next to Tony shifted uneasily on his feet. “I dunno, boss. I’ll do it.”
Tony’s mouth set in a grim frown. “No.”
“But boss, I—”
“You see?” Tony said. “This is what you do. You undermine my authority in my own home…”
Anna sighed and spread her hands. “I don’t want to cause problems—”
“Too late for that.”
“—but I need your help. Marcus is family. Family is important.”
Tony regarded her through narrow eyes for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “We agree on that. Family is important. Okay, mi mala, say I will give you my boys. Payment in advance. For everything. What then?”
“I’ve been digging,” Anna said. “Whoever set up this office park is careful and smart. Lots of data going in. Big fiber optics trunks. I found the permits. No way in from the outside, though. Firewalled, top-shelf, good design. I need physical access.” She touched a stud on her computer. A building plan appeared, blueprints overlaying the site map. “The fiber optics come into an underground junction here. Room here with lots of power and AC, has to be the server room. I looked at the street view. There’s a manhole cover right here that leads to a tunnel underneath for cable and data. I need to get down there, splice in myself.”
Dan-boy shook his head. “No way. No way. Guards, cameras, who knows how many drones—”
“Right. That’s where Tony’s boys come in. Here’s what I’m thinking…”
They talked until far into the night. When at last they’d reached consensus, Tony and the others filtered out into the muggy heat. Music thumped through the plywood walls, muted and cacophonic. Insects buzzed and chirped in the night. When at last the others had left, Nadine burrowed beneath a thin sheet, arms wrapped tight around Anna despite the heat. “Do you really think this will work?”
“I don’t know. We have to try.”
“We might get killed.”
“We might.”
I don’t understand,” Nadine said. “Why not—why not just go to the police? Tell them everything. What happened to Marcus, the people at the hospital, everything.”
Anna shook her head. “Oh, darling. I love you. It doesn’t work that way. We’re already wanted terrorists, remember? Besides, we’re little people. The police don’t work for us.”
“But if—”
“No.” Years of bitterness colored Anna’s voice. “We aren’t rich. We don’t have daddy’s money to protect us. This is Los Angeles. If you’re little people, you’re dog food. Nobody in the system will listen to us. Things here aren’t like what you’re used to. Here, they decide if you’re guilty or innocent, then they have the trial. Maybe. If you’re lucky. If not, you disappear from a hospital and there’s no record you were ever there.”
“If you explain to the police, there’s no way they’d allow—”
“You’re naive. I love you, but you’re naive.”
“That’s not fair,” Nadine said.
“No? Tell me something. You ever been arrested?”
“No.”
“Know anyone who’s been arrested?”
“Not really, no.”
“When you’ve had as much experience as I have, you can tell me what the police will or won’t listen to.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“With you?” Anna studied Nadine’s face. “No. But you’re not in Wonderland any more. You’re in a world you know nothing about, and this shit is real.”
Nadine turned away. “Don’t talk down to me.”
Anna gave her an exasperated sigh. “In my world, you’re a babe in the woods.”
“Stop treating me like a child!”
“Stop acting like one!” Anna cried. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If we go to the police, we’ll be disappeared faster than you can say ‘extraordinary rendition.’ There is nothing about this you’re ready for!”
“Then why did you agree I could come?”
“Because I got you into this!” Anna cried. “This is my fault. Every bit of this. I—I wanted to have you. I convinced myself it was possible. I should have known better. Now I’ve ruined your life through my own selfishness.” She turned away.
“I chose to be here!”
“It wasn’t an informed choice, was it? That night we met, I didn’t exactly say, ‘Come home with me, I’ll destroy your life and turn you into a wanted criminal,’ did I?”
Nadine reached out to touch Anna’s shoulder. Anna flinched violently. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I can’t. Not right now. Don’t you get it? I might get you killed tomorrow.”
“Then why did you argue to let me come with you? Why not just do what Dan-boy says and tell me not to go?”
“Because you have the right to be there, if that’s what you want. I dragged you into this. I just wish…I wish I had never met you.”
Nadine rolled away, her heart a lump of stone in her chest. They slept fitfully that night, in the Los Angeles heat, while music in several languages thumped around them.
The sun sat low on the horizon when Anna shook Nadine awake, sending red fingers of light through the scratched Plexiglass window. Nadine mumbled sleepily. “Showtime,” Anna said. “Get dressed and follow me.” She slung her backpack across her back and picked up the duffle bag. “Bring your suitcase and anything you have of value. Anything that might identify you, too. Can’t bring it with us.”
Nadine dressed quickly. Anna led her out across the courtyard. A small group of teenage boys stood in a loose circle, talking in low voices in Spanish. One of them loaded long cans into a battered gray backpack. Glowing yellow triangles with exclamation points hovered over them, warnings from the new software in Nadine’s implant.
Nadine dragged her suitcase behind Anna to the same building where they’d first met Mayor Tony. They slipped through an ill-hung door into a large windowless room paneled in white-painted drywall. A small air conditioner wheezed in one wall. A bare LED overhead flooded the room in harsh blue-white light. Rows of heavy locked cabinets squatted along three of the walls, all painted the same drab institutional green. The air smelled of paper, dust, and fatigue. A low formica table extended across nearly the entire length of the space, chopping it in two.
“Mateo, this is my friend,” Anna said. “She has need of your services.”
The man Anna addressed could have stepped right off the stage of some community college theater group. He was tall, thin to the point of being gaunt, with angular cheekbones, dark skin, and wide, dark eyes. He wore a severely formal suit that had been out of style for at least two centuries and a tall, immaculate top hat. He and Anna exchanged a flurry of words, hers in Spanish, his in a mix of Spanish, French, and some other language Nadine didn’t recognize, then he bowed and tipped his hat to her. “Always pleased to make a new customer,” he said.
“What is it you do, exactly?” Nadine said.
“I safeguard that which is most precious to you.” His voice, soft and mellifluous, carried a hint of an accent Nadine couldn’t place.
“Give him anything you don’t want to lose,” Anna said. “He’ll look after it.”
“Do you trust him?”
Mateo clasped both hands to his heart. “Anything you entrust to my care, I will look after as if it were my very soul.”
“Means yes,” Anna said. She hoisted her duffle bag onto the counter, unzipped it, counted out a sheaf of crisp bills, slid them to Mateo. “Me and her.”
Mateo nodded gravely. He scribbled something on a small slip of cardboard and passed it to her, then placed her bag in a locker which he shut with a combination lock. “And you?” he said to Nadine.
Nadine slung her suitcase onto the battered formica. “Weird to think this is everything I have left in the world.”
He nodded in sympathy. “People often drift ashore in Tijuana Town carrying only that which the world has not yet taken from them. This is it?”
Nadine hesitated, then dug into her pocket and slid him the key Anna had given her. She slipped off her ring and passed it over as well. “Take care of this. My mom gave it to me.”
He bowed. “Très bien. I will look after it, dalaga.”
Back in the early-morning heat, the boys had finished packing their backpacks and now were clustered over a collection of battered electric scooters plugged into an ancient gray charger fed from a wire that descended from one corner of the large warehouse, chatting excitedly in Spanish. Yellow triangles floated in Nadine’s vision, clear and bright. Nadine blinked. “Will I ever get used to that?”
“To what?” Anna said.
“The little triangles.”
“Depends who you hang out with, I imagine. Ah, here we go.” She stepped forward and waved to Dan-boy, who steered a nondescript white electric panel van cautiously in their direction. A logo on the side read “Consolidated Facilities Services” in neatly stenciled letters that looked brand-new. From the passenger seat, Lena blew a kiss in their direction.
Dan-boy pulled the van to a halt in front of them and hopped out. He opened the back of the van, where Jason and Kev waited. A triangle with exclamation points hovered over Jason, a ghost in the machine warning her of the potential for mayhem.
The van had been stripped to bare white metal, no seats, not even a carpet. A hospital stretcher, legs folded beneath it, occupied a third of the rear. “Gift from Takeru,” Anna said to Nadine’s questioning look. “In case we find Marcus.”
One of the boys whistled. They all dragged their scooters to the van and climbed in, jostling for space. “Get in,” Anna said, mouth set in a tight frown.
Nadine climbed up into the van. Anna squeezed in after her and pulled the door shut. The cramped space smelled of cleaning products and sweaty bodies. One of the boys, barely in his teens, leered at Nadine. “¿Te gustan las chicas, hmm?” He brought his hand to his face, fingers spread in a V, and flicked his tongue between them. Anna glared at him without expression until he looked away.
The van moved off. Nadine watched the four boys, none of them over fourteen. Yellow triangles rotated over them, hovering near the left side of one boy’s vest, the pocket of another boy’s baggy jeans. “Anna?”
“Yeah?”
“How does my implant know to put up alerts? It can’t look through clothes, can it?”
Anna shook her head. “No. It’s all pattern matching. Expert system, trained neural network, looks for shapes in clothes, body language, all that.”
“There’s room for that in my implant?”
“Thank your parents. Neuralink’s seriously overengineered. Rich people buy ’em because the specs look good. Not that they understand what the specs even mean. Bigger numbers must be better, right? Including the price tag.” She grinned without mirth.
“So what else can it do?”
“I’ll teach you when we get back. If we get back.”
“You really think we might not?”
“Kind of, yeah.”
Kev laughed. “Tell me why you’re here again?”
Nadine shook her head. “I feel responsible.”
“For Marcus?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna blame someone, blame Dan-boy. It was his idea that started all this.”
“I heard that,” Dan-boy said from the front.
“I know.” Kev leaned forward. In a lower voice, he said, “I hear you got some upgrades in your implant. What does it tell you about me?”
Nadine looked him up and down. He wore baggy cargo pants in a generic beige color, probably straight off the discount rack at Walmart, and a battered and shapeless hoodie that had seen better days, covered with leering Japanese anime faces. “Nothing.”
Kev lifted his leg, causing two of Mayor Tony’s boys to shift and grumble in the cramped space. With the stretcher, the pile of scooters atop it, and the people, the van’s cargo area left little room. Beneath his pant leg, a black nylon holster strapped to his ankle carried a compact revolver. A yellow triangle sprang into existence in Nadine’s vision, hovering just above the handgun. “What did you just learn?”
“You tell me.”
“Tech’s an aid. Don’t let it become a crutch. It’s not magic.” He lowered his pant leg. “It does the best it can. Software’s trained to look for patterns, see? Bulges in fabric. Really good with hip holsters, a bit shit at more concealed stuff. If it tells you someone’s armed, believe it, but if it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean they aren’t. Get it?”
“Got it,” Nadine said. “You got this software too?”
“Ha! I wish. My implant’s not that good.” He tapped his head. “Best software’s still the old Mark I brain.”
Nadine glanced over at Anna, who nodded. “He’s right. Keep it in mind.”
“So why’d you even have Takeru put it in?”
“Because you don’t have the benefit of a lifetime on the street and it’s better than nothing. Mark I brain takes a long time to train. Besides, we were already in there anyway, and the gear you got in your head, it’d be criminal to let it go to waste.” She smirked. “Maybe I wanted something for you to remember me by.”
“I doubt anyone could forget you,” Jason said.
Anna smiled a genuine smile. The van pulled to a bumpy stop. One of Tony’s boys fell against the back of Lena’s seat with a curse. “Showtime,” Dan-boy said.
“You know what to do?” Anna said.
“Ain’t rocket science, chiquita,” the boy who’d been rude to Nadine said. Anna opened the back of the van. The boys pushed out, dragging electric scooters with them. The one who’d spoken made a show of squeezing past Anna, backpack pressing uncomfortably into Nadine. Anna glared at him. He grinned, then pulled up his hood. The other boys crowded around as he pulled cans from his backpack and passed them out.
“Don’t engage,” Anna said. “You’re just looking to draw them off.”
“We got this, chiquita.” He flipped a switch on his scooter and jumped onto the footboard. The thing rocketed off, faster than Nadine would have expected. The other boys followed after, hoods over their faces, laughing and calling to each other in Spanish.
Anna pulled the back doors shut. “Same goes for you,” she told Kev and Jason. “Don’t engage. Just cover our backs, warn us of trouble.”
“Got it.” Jason shrugged out of his hoodie and into a work vest, brilliant Da-Glo colors and reflective tape. A hard hat and dark wraparound sunglasses hid his face. Beside him, Kev did the same.
Kev touched the center of his sunglasses. Words floated in front of Nadine: “117xc34rtz would like to share a stream with you. Accept?”
“Yes,” she said. Instantly, a ghostly, hallucinatory image floated translucent in front of her, like the reflection on a pond: herself, dressed in baggy clothes and a hoodie far too warm for the daytime heat, eyes tired and a little bloodshot, face haggard.
The image centered on her breasts, what little could be seen of them beneath the shapeless, distinctly unflattering clothes. “You getting this?” Kev said.
“Yeah,” Anna said. “Eyes forward, flyboy.”
Kev spread his hands. “Guy can window shop.”
Jason laughed. Anna rolled her eyes. “Jesus. This is why I don’t shag men.”
“S’okay,” Lena sang from up front, “more for me! Hey Anna, we get back, you think maybe—”
“No.”
The van reacquainted itself with the flow of traffic. Horns blared. Autonomous cars swarmed around them. Nadine realized with a jolt of surprise Dan-boy was driving, manual control, not letting the van pilot itself. She looked quizzically at Anna. “No telemetry,” Jason said. “No GPS, no record of where we’re going, no nothing. We aren’t even transmitting VIN and registration. Just like the old days.” He flicked his fingers in the air. “We’re a ghost.”
“That place we stopped just now—“
“Closest place to the industrial park where there’s a dead spot in surveillance,” Anna said. “Bitch to find. Won’t be a record of us dropping off our passengers.”
“You eat?” Jason said.
“Huh?” Nadine realized he was looking at her.
“This morning. Breakfast. You eat? You look hungry.”
“No.”
He fished a protein bar from his discarded hoodie and passed it across to her. “Here.”
“Thanks.” She unwrapped it and chewed automatically without tasting it.
A radio crackled from the front of the van. “Splinter.” The voice rode in on a burst of static. “Donatello here. We ready when you are.”
Dan-boy keyed an old-fashioned microphone. “Donatello, Splinter. Just getting there now. Give us a sec.”
“Right. Give April my love.” Nadine cocked her head. Anna shrugged.
Nadine craned to look forward. Through the van’s windscreen, she saw a generic entrance to a generic industrial park, neatly sculpted shrubbery in a curve swooping around a concrete slab painted eggshell pink, pitted bronze street numbers riveted to its face. A large wooden sign behind it bore a map of the buildings, each neatly labeled. “How many companies here?” Nadine said.
“Officially? Five. One big, four small. Things you’d expect. One installs IP cameras, one does wireless high-broadband telemetry, that kind of stuff.”
“Unofficially?”
“Funny thing, that,” Anna said. “Every tenant is owned by a shell company that’s part of a conglomerate that all has the same parent. Landlord that owns the park, too. Parent company is a subsidiary of a defense contractor out of Texas, place called Terracone Research. Security here’s provided by Black Tiger, same outfit Mayor Tony says snatched Marcus.”
“This is insane.”
“Bit late for cold feet,” Jason observed.
Dan-boy pulled the van up to the curb on the main road into the park and stopped. “Place we’re looking for is a manhole cover on the other side of those bushes,” Anna said. “There’s one camera with a good view of it. We should be parked right in front of it. Drones and other cameras, too. Turtles will take care of those.”
“Turtles?” Nadine said.
“Old cartoon or something, I don’t know. Radio’s scrambled, but it’s still better than using real names.” She turned toward the front. “Let ’em loose.”
Dan-boy spoke into a clunky-looking handheld radio with a stubby black antenna, its plastic case scuffed and battered. “Donatello, Splinter. Go go go.”
The radio crackled. “Gotcha, Splinter, there in a flash.”
It ended up taking a bit longer than a flash. Dan-boy and Lena sat in the front seats, hoodies pulled up, while Nadine huddled with the others in the back. “Aren’t they going to see them on the camera?” Nadine said with a nod toward the front seat.
“Nope. Security film on the windows. Reflects infrared or something, very hard for cameras to see through,” Jason said. “Polarized in weird ways, too.”
“Expensive?”
“It is if you don’t have Mayor Tony’s crew stealing it from a shipment that was supposed to end up at a BMW plant in South Carolina,” Anna said. “Very resourceful man, Mayor Tony.”
“How do you know about it?”
“Who do you think fudged the shipping order at the factory?” Anna flashed her a toothy grin.
“And here we go,” Lena said. As she spoke, Tony’s four boys sped up the driveway and flashed by the van, whooping and hollering in a mix of Spanish and what sounded to Nadine’s ears like Japanese, traveling so fast Nadine marveled that the wheels on the scooters didn’t melt. They all held metal cans in one hand. They separated at the parking lot in front of the largest building, still yelling, pressing the nozzles as they raced along smooth pavement. Bright streamers of DayGlo fluorescent spray paint bloomed on expensive Teslas and Audis in the parking lot. One of the boys hopped his scooter expertly over the curb and raced along the sidewalk, scrawling something Nadine assumed was probably vulgar in Spanish on the windows.
Shouts rose after them. Two men in black uniforms took off on foot in pursuit. Four palm-sized drones swooped from the sky after them. “We good?” Dan-boy said.
“Give it another few seconds,” Lena said, fiddling with a compact device on her lap. A flat screen showed a series of dots superimposed over a green-on-black schematic of the industrial park. “And…we’re good.”
Lena opened the side door and ducked out. Dan-boy crawled across the cabin and went out through her door after her. “Go,” Anna said. “They won’t be able to see us.”
Nadine squeezed between the front seats and out the door. Lena was already ten meters out, making for a large clump of surrealistically well-manicured bushes. “Keep your head down,” Anna hissed. Behind her, Kev and Jason opened the back of the van and hopped out, orange vests bright in the California sun. Kev carried a clipboard. Jason uncoiled a long, thick hose from a well beneath the van’s floor. “Anybody asks,” Anna explained, “they’re cleaning the storm drain. Work order and everything. Paperwork’s on file with the landlord.” She flashed the same toothy grin again.
“Isn’t the landlord owned by the same company that owns that building?”
“Yep. That’s the nice thing about holding companies and shell companies. Left hand never knows what the right hand’s doing.” When they reached the hyper-groomed bushes, Lena had already produced a tool, metal T-handle at one end, hook at the other, that she used to pull aside a manhole cover. As soon as the cover was clear, Dan-boy descended into darkness. Lena followed him down, catlike. Nadine peered over the edge. U-shaped metal rods bedded in a concrete shaft made a ladder going down into the gloom. “Go,” Anna hissed. “Tony’s boys won’t be able to keep them distracted for more than another couple minutes.”
Nadine climbed down, considerably less graceful than Lena. Anna followed after, dragging the manhole cover back more or less as it should be behind her. Without the sun, the only light in the shaft came from small flat-panel LEDs epoxied at irregular intervals to bare concrete.
The shaft didn’t go down far, barely three meters by Nadine’s reckoning. She got to the bottom and found herself in a horizontal tunnel also lit by the same LEDs stuck along the ceiling. A thick pipe about twenty centimeters across made of black PVC ran along the wall, held in place by brackets bolted to the concrete. A second, thinner pipe ran over their heads, feeding the LEDs with power.
“Cameras?” Nadine said.
“Not down here,” Anna said. “Go.”
Nadine stumbled behind Lena, eyes still dazzled from the daylight above. As her vision adjusted, she saw red stenciled markings along the thicker pipe, triangle around a circle with lines radiating from it, “Invisible Laser Radiation” written below in Helvetica bold.
“So, we cut into the fiber optic, something like that?” Nadine said.
“Nope. Housing’s pressurized. Cut into it, pressure drops and sets off an alarm. There’s a patch panel up ahead, probably used for testing when they were installing everything. That’s why we have to be here in person.”
“All of us?”
“You’re the one who wanted to come with.” She squeezed past Dan-boy and Lena. “Junction’s right here.” She stopped at a box of dull gray plastic fastened to the curving wall with large steel bolts just below the fiber optic trunk. An armored conduit snaked from the box into the trunk line. A faded sticker, wrinkled with age, clung to the front of the box. At some point in the past, someone had written a series of numbers on it in ballpoint pen.
Anna set her backpack on the ground and pulled out a compact cordless drill with a small star-shaped bit. “Security screws.” The screwdriver whirred. “Also a switch lets someone know the panel’s been opened.”
“So they’ll know we’re down here?” Nadine said.
“Nope.” Anna set down the screwdriver with a grin and produced a long, thin piece of spring steel and a roll of tape from her backpack. She tore off a piece of tape, stuck it to the wall, then pried the front of the box open just enough to slide the flat steel through the gap. Only when it was in place did she pop the cover off completely. “See? Switch is this little thing right here.” She pointed to a flat black plastic rectangle with a short silver lever on its side. “Just stick a bit of tape over it, and they’ll never know. The better patch panels have a little ridge inside the cover that fits into a notch on the security switch. All photoelectric, take off the cover and the beam is no longer blocked. Big pain in the ass.”
“So why is this one so simple?”
“It’s two dollars cheaper. Company buys a few thousand of these, it adds up. Nobody really expects someone to sneak down here and start popping covers, right? Okay, let’s do what we came here to do.” She took two bundle of aluminum tubes connected by canvas from her pack and, with a deft flick of her wrist, unfolded them into a compact table and a squat camping stool. Her new computer went on the portable table. She plugged one end of a slender black cable into the back of the computer and the other end into a small round depression in the patch panel. A holographic display materialized. Her fingers danced. A small window appeared showing a live video feed of a corrugated plastic pipe sliding down a storm drain. “You look like you’re having fun.”
“You know it,” Kev’s voice said.
“Anything?”
“Not yet. Drones are back. Expect someone to come have a chat with us soon. Got the paperwork right here.”
Anna’s fingers flew over the compact computer. Windows filled with green text on a black background sprang up. Lena peered over Anna’s shoulder. “What is it with you and green on black?”
“What can I say? I’m retro. Let me work.”
“God, you’re hot when you do nerd stuff,” Lena said.
“I’m hot all the time,” Anna said absently.
“Just find Marcus,” Dan-boy snapped.