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“ARE YOU WORKING ON that —ing game?”
“I...I...” I stammered. “You said—”
“I said lay low!”
“That’s what I’m doing!”
“Telling the whole Internet all about it?”
“The whole Internet?” I asked. “Wait, how do you know I was working on it?”
“The —ing app keeps sending me notifications. It won’t shut up about it.”
Ben spoke up from across the room, “Oh, that’s an Early Access option. We should turn that off until it’s stable.”
Cass went really quiet just long enough for me to notice, then she exploded. “Who the — is that? What the — is wrong with you? —!”
“It’s my friend, and you have nothing to worry about.”
“The — I don’t!” she snapped.
“Well, why’d you call?”
“To tell you to quit with the —ing updates. Lay low means lay low!”
“Okay, fine, I get it,” I said. “But it’s good, too. I’ve had time to think about our last raid attempt. About what went wrong.”
“You announced yourself to Hauser, put Trina in more danger, and then left her there.”
“Under a hail of gunfire!” I snapped back. “But that’s my point. I tried going in like it was an FPS—”
“A what?!”
“A first-person shooter. It’s a type of video game—”
“This isn’t a —ing video game, Dave!”
She said it with such scorn, it left me flustered. I took a calming breath and forced a steady tone. “No. I understand that, but I was thinking—”
“I don’t think you were thinking,” she said. “I don’t think you’re —ing thinking at all, or you’d be staying the — off the Internet, minding your —ing business, and cleaning up your —ing mess.”
None of that was fair at all! I gaped.
She shouted one last “—!” and hung up on me. I sat staring at my phone. My heart was racing like I’d done something wrong. I looked up to Ben, and his face was carefully neutral.
“So that’s Cass?” he said. “She seems nice.”