“Are you being a lying bitch for a reason?!”
According to what Sam had told Mira in the tent earlier, Faust should have already returned to see Esther by this point – but that wasn’t going to be happening now. As far as Faust was concerned, there was no reason for him to be held back by Sam, either.
“It’s not my decision,” Sam confessed.
“So, what?” Faust challenged. “What are you hiding behind?”
Sam pursed his lips. “Nothing. Why would you think I’m hiding something from you?”
“You’re the Director’s second-in-command, dumbass!” Faust retorted. “Why wouldn’t he relay every single detail to you?”
“I feel like we’ve already been through this,” Sam said, grumbling. “It’s the same reason why Rouken wouldn’t tell you everything.”
“He still tells Bertha everything.”
“I bet that’s not true,” Sam challenged.
“I can ask her!”
Sam shook his head. “For all you know, she could have been told to not tell you whether or not she knew everything Rouken did.”
By now it had been over an hour since Sam and Faust made it to the sujourne’s tent. Rouken, Bertha, and Tarren were nowhere to be seen.
“Whatever. That doesn’t matter.” Faust rubbed his eyes as if trying to clean the tears out of them. “Just tell me straight: do I have radiation sickness or not?”
“Probably not – and whatever headache you’re feeling right now is probably just from a bunch of anxiety.”
The two men hunched over in their seats, both of them just within kicking distance of each other: a fact which made Sam slightly cautious, but he took the risk with this boy. His sharp tongue had dulled over the last few minutes, but it was possible the sujourne visitor would find a way to sharpen it back to its fullest potential in due time. Until then, Sam waited, sitting by, wishing he had a drink after all the talking they had done in the past hour.
Sam could practically feel the steam rising from Faust’s face just now, feeling it simmer down, giving him a chance to speak again. “I know how hard it can be to work with the Director,” Sam continued. “And I know he isn’t making things clear, but for all we know, the reason he instructed me to keep you here longer than Esther is likely because he’s more concerned about your well-being than Esther’s.
“It makes sense to me why he’d be more concerned about one of you sujourne than he’d be over a couple women who only got here a few days before you arrived – and who we barely even knew in the first place.” But something about the words Sam put together didn’t entirely add up to him. Given the Director’s strange liking toward the two women, it was just as likely he had let Esther go sooner out of a fondness for her and a chance to see her sooner, but then that didn’t make sense, either – for if Esther truly had developed radiation sickness and was susceptible to undergoing the horrid effects that came with it, there was no reason for the Director to want to be around when she underwent them.
Faust’s brow twitched with the intensity of an unknown, unanswered anxiety resting deep within him, but he could do little more than grunt in immediate response. “If you’re trying flattery, I swear to God.”
“I swear to God it’s not flattery,” Sam said. “You’d know when I’m trying to flatter someone because I suck at it.”
Faust snorted. “What, does it never work on the ladies?”
Sam rolled his eyes. “Very funny.”
“So anyway,” Faust began. “I’m at least glad you’re sticking around my sorry ass, but you really don’t have to put up with me if you don’t want to.”
“Well, actually, first of all: I do need to stay here. Director’s orders.” The deputy let out a nervous chuckle. “But I know you don’t mean what you said earlier, right?”
Nodding, Faust added: “Sorry. I know you said I’d be fine, but I still think I’m gonna be dead by tomorrow.”
“Just relax.” Sam insisted. “Again: you don’t feel bad, right? Nothing out of the ordinary?”
Faust shook his head.
“Then, like I said: relax.”
“How long is the Director expecting me to sit here and do nothing, anyway?”
“I can check with him,” Sam offered. “But if I had to guess, he probably wants you here til dusk.”
Covering his face behind his hands, Faust let out a loud, muffled moan, then quickly sat back up. “Fine. If he’s going to be a dick, then fine.”
Sam hesitated to speak back. “If you’re thinking of some kind of payback—”
“No, nothing like that,” Faust interrupted. “Just forget it.”
With nothing to do but flip his knife in a single hand, Faust kept quiet. Sam pulled out his MDA to read through his messages from that morning. Beyond that, the tent was almost completely quiet, save for the scouts’ hollers and labor – at least until Bertha walked in.
“Yeah, yeah, I already heard about it,” she said immediately upon entering. “But according to the guy who told me, you never touched the material and I should just keep watch over shit until he said to go home.”
Faust cocked a brow at her. “You’re in a good mood, aren’t you?”
She sniffed, reaching into her bag for a cloth, which she proceeded to wipe her face with. “Just been worried to death about you, man.” The words quavered out of her as if she were barely managing to keep herself from crying. Blinking a few times, she looked at Sam with a smile. “Thanks for sticking around, deputy.”
“Just following orders,” Sam chuckled.
—
Coming down here wasn’t safe. Not just the passageway, but the room that the scouts had come to call the “dust archives.” Every time Amity came down to do her work, she did so with a basic cloth mask on – one which she had had to make herself, as Bailey didn’t seem to have anything of the sort with him, nor did any of the other scouts.
In the week she had spent down here, any chance she had to stretch her legs, walk up the ladder to the surface, get some fresh air, or do anything a normal human would do in a normal human setting was was enough to make her feel as if she had been liberated from a decrepit prison. At least by this point, much of the destructive noise had stopped, replaced instead with that of chatter and the foundation for new buildings, albeit the work the scouts had done up to this point had resulted mostly in the most primitive of skeletal structures. To her, it looked like watching engineers make something new when they had been out of practice for the past decade.
Just judging by the positioning of the sun on this clear day, it wouldn’t be long before Bailey paid her his daily visit, returned for his regular smooch. It didn’t seem as if there had been any accidents out in the field, so there was no reason for him to not be headed over right now.
After the last few days of work, Amity needed somebody to vent to. By now her MDA had filled up so much that it felt like every byte of data actually equated to two bytes. The amount of storage left on the device seemed to shrink more and more exponentially with every passing day, and she could not wrap her head around it.
Having walked enough already for the day, Amity proceeded to return to the same manhole everyone regularly took to get back do the passageway. Once down, she passed by a few of the scouts – including Bailey’s regular partner, who stood guard as usual.
“Still no robot invasion, Elliot?” she teased.
“It could still happen and you know it!” he insisted. “Come on, Amity – don’t joke about that kind of thing.”
“Hey, I didn’t say I was joking, did I?”
“Save it for Bailey,” he huffed. “And hey – I think he went into the archive again when you were gone. Without his mask, too.”
Her pupils dilated minutely. “What?” she sneered, already continuing her march toward the archive. “After this many times—!” Within seconds, she pushed herself into a run, startling some of the scouts as she went by them. Once at the door to the archive, she flung it open with a start.
Inside was Bailey, unsurprised to see her, yet masked all the same. “Excited to see me?”
Amity let out a sigh. “I guess you could say that,” she said. “Elliot told me you were going in maskless, the lying little shit.”
Her boyfriend couldn’t help chuckle. “Maybe he saw I didn’t have my mask on when I came in and assumed I never put it on at all.”
It occurred to Amity that she was still maskless. “Oh, right,” she said, reaching into her pocket. Almost instinctively, she held her breath before wrapping the straps of the mask behind her ears – after which she smiled from behind the cloth.
Almost as if to taunt her, Bailey lowered the top of his mask down so that his lips were exposed – at which point he leaned toward his partner. With a light giggle, she did the same and pressed her lips to his. Almost immediately after, they both pulled back and put their masks back on.
“I’m about done for the day,” Bailey started, already setting things on a positive note. “All Theo wants me to do now is stay down here and keep watch of things.” He paused. “And your uncle said I could stay here with you.”
“Nice of him to let you do that,” Amity chuckled.
Just as she spoke, Amity’s MDA beeped at her. She groaned.
Tilting his head, Bailey glanced at the device, undoubtedly intrigued by the flashing green light on its face. “Why is it doing that?” he asked.
“It’s been doing that for the past two days,” Amity explained as she pressed a button to make the light go away. “Something about running low on storage, because now the MDA’s storage keeps shrinking even when I’m not writing on it.”
“Why is it doing that?” Bailey repeated.
“I don’t know!” she said, throwing her arms up. “It’s probably because I haven’t deleted anything from it since I started this job, but have you ever even tried deleting files on these things one by one? I think I’ll need an entire day of work dedicated to just doing that at this rate.”
“You know there’s an option to ‘delete all,’ right?”
At his question, Amity gritted her teeth. “I did know that,” she said, voice low. “But there’s a reason I can’t do that right now.” Right when Bailey looked as though he were about to make a guess, she answered for him. “My old stories are still on this stupid thing.”
Again, his reaction was anything but surprised. “You really haven’t had any time at all to transcribe it?”
“I’ve had some time!” she retorted. “But that’s just it: some. I can’t just copy stuff when I’m eating, and I’d just keep you up all night if I try copying notes when we should be sleeping.”
“Good God,” Bailey mumbled, rolling his eyes. “Isn’t there something Macy can do to hold onto the stories you’ve got?”
“I haven’t asked.”
The two of them were silent for a long time as Bailey kept his eyes still on her. He had become surprisingly good at maintaining eye-contact with her – enough to where it didn’t matter how angry of a face she made at him; it wasn’t going to change anything.
Eventually Amity gave in with: “So, what?”
Bailey was silent.
Again she sighed. “Fine! I’ll go ask. Jesus.”
“I’ll just stick around here.”
Just as she was about to turn and leave, Amity whipped her gaze at Bailey. “Seriously? You can’t come with?” she whined.
“I’ve been told I can do whatever I want, as long as I’m down here and not upstairs.” Right after speaking, Bailey leaned against one of the towers of boxes.
Amity’s voice raised an octave. “Don’t do that!!” she shrieked. “I’m not going to let you stay here if you can’t learn to leave the boxes alone.” She shivered. “Especially after the mess we had to clean up last time.” As if she had sensed some amount of gunk lodged underneath, she ran her thumbnail under one of her fingernails.
“Okay, sorry!” Bailey interjected. “Just do what you need to and I’ll be here, alright?” With that, he handed Amity her device. “You almost forgot this, by the way.”
Grumbling slightly under her breath, she took the device from his hand and left with barely a word.
She was back on the surface in seconds. The MDA caused a bulge in her pocket that almost made her prefer simply carrying it in her death grip as she sulked all the way back to the girls’ tent. Perhaps it was for the best, though, that she was not distracted by a potential device in her hand, lest she run straight into one of the structures the scouts were setting up.
Walking by one of the skeletal buildings, Amity turned her head to the other side of her, noticing a familiar spot. It was the same spot she had originally set her tent before moving in with Bailey. It had been practically untouched since then – only now there was a small black cat sitting where the tent had once been.
Amity eyed the animal suspiciously, but moved on – only to hear it meow at her, making her glance back at it. It started walking toward her, keeping up a brisk pace even as Amity continued her path toward the tents. She simply ignored the feline follower, knowing it was probably just hungry and desperate to get a sardine from anybody it could – though this made her realize that if there were fish in the pond lake, the cat had no reason to beg other people unless it was just lazy.
Many of the nomads were still hesitant to eat anything from the lake – but by this point it didn’t seem like there was any chance of them dying from radioactivity. As far as most of them were concerned, the only reason for potential radioactive hazards would be because somebody deliberately filled the river with a bunch of pollutive machines – machines like the robot body they had found. But now that Faust had shown no signs of radiation sickness, it seemed the odds of dying from such a cause was much less possible than first thought.
Amity shoved a hand in her pocket at the same time she heard the cat meow at her again. Not skipping a beat, she continued to walk forward, but glanced down at the cat with a sneer. “Go away,” she hissed, but still it stayed close by her side as if it had known her its entire life. The more it followed, the more she began to wonder if the animal was there when she had her tent set up in that area and she had simply never noticed or forgotten about it entirely.
Now at the girls’ tents, Esther was greeted to Mira, of all people, who was carrying a large, empty bucket.
“Hello there, Amity,” Mira said with a light smile. “Is everything okay?”
Mira’s presumptuous greeting made Amity’s lip curl. “Yes, it is,” she stated, grabbing the MDA out of her pocket. “I just need to talk to Macy about something important. Nothing you need to stick your nose in.” Though Amity’s words carried a distinct bite of passive-aggression, Mira didn’t bat an eye at it, which only made Amity simmer.
Tilting her head, Mira inclined further about the situation. “Is that your cat?” she asked.
Again Amity looked at the small beast that had been following her for the past few minutes. She sniffed. “It’s yours if you want it.” With that, she walked right past Mira. “Take it, for all I care!” Yet as she continued on, the cat kept following her. “Stupid puss,” she grumbled under her breath.
Realizing none of the girls were outside, Amity walked toward their tent – where she quickly made out the sound of Macy’s lecturing voice speaking above their heads. The woman sighed, listening for a moment to head in, not wanting to interrupt the teacher in the midst of her lecturing. It was only once she got an opening in the conversation when Amity stepped in, making nary a sound as she poked her body through the opening in the fabric.
Macy looked up from her crowd with a smile. “Miss Amity – nice of you to show up,” she said, causing all the other kids to turn their heads around and gasp and smile when they saw what Macy was talking about.
Every time Amity came back, it felt like a reunion, despite how little time had passed since her birthday. She wasn’t much for smiling back, but the attention from the girls, for a reason she couldn’t explain, felt nice enough for her to smile back.
“I was hoping I could get something fixed,” Amity said over the crowd, holding up her MDA as she spoke.
“I see,” Macy replied, then returned her gaze to the crowd at her feet. “Girls, why don’t you all get comfortable and discuss our topic for the day while I get with Amity?” With that, she looked over her shoulder and nodded to Cynthia and Toni – after which she headed over to Amity, motioning all the other girls to let them be.
“What can I help you with, dear?” Macy asked as they exited the tent. “The MDA hasn’t broken, has it?”
“Not necessarily, but I think something in it might break soon,” Amity said with a grimace. “Long story short: this thing’s running out of storage and—” She bit her tongue. “And I never really finished copying my stories, so I never deleted the stuff on it once I was done. So I was wanting to know if there was any way I could save the files – maybe put them somewhere safe and then come back when I get a break away from work.”
Macy nodded. “So you just want to keep them somewhere safe,” she repeated. “I might have a solution, now that you’re officially one of the camp’s MDA aficionados.”
Amity wasn’t sure whether to smile or cringe at her new title. “What’s your solution?”
“I have some storage devices that can hold your documents,” Macy affirmed. “Just let me – wait, what is that?”
Amity whipped around to face the entrance of the tent, witnessing in horror as the cat slipped inside. “Seriously?!” she shrieked.
“Where did that come from?” Macy wondered.
“I don’t know,” Amity admitted. “The stupid thing was following me and wouldn’t go away.”
“Well, we need to get it out of there.” Macy stepped in front of Amity.
“Hey, at least let me help,” Amity insisted. “That thing’s attracted to me, for some reason.”
From inside, they heard a few of the girls scream.
Macy huffed as she went inside, Amity in tow. “It’s just a cat,” she insisted. “Where did it go?”
More than any of the other girls, Cynthia seemed the most deterred by the cat’s presence. “It went in someone’s bed,” she stammered, knees wobbly.
Toni turned her head. “Cynthia, it’ll be fine,” she said, her voice carrying the slightest congestion. “It won’t hurt you.”
As if too distracted by the unseen animal, Cynthia didn’t even look Toni in the face when she spoke again. “You don’t know that!”
Macy bit a knuckle when she realized how disastrous this was likely to become if Cynthia caught a glimpse of the cat. “Cynthia?” she called over. “Why don’t you do something for Amity?”
The mentioned women cocked her head.
“Take her MDA and put the drive in it that you gave me last week,” Macy instructed, then turned to nod at Amity, who handed the device over to the quaking Cynthia. The girl took the device with shivering hands.
“Go on!” Macy motioned – at which point Cynthia hurried out as if the tent were about to erupt in a fiery explosion.
Toni helped keep most of the girls calm as the lot of them searched for the wild animal. For the sake of the tent’s sanctity, Toni treated it more like a game of hide-and-seek than anything else. “Once you find the cat, tag it on the scruff of the neck and grab.” She used one of the girls as an example, pinching the area where her scruff would have been. “Right here. Thank you, Lana.”
“Ouch.”
“Carry the cat by the scruff and you’ll be okay!” Toni declared. “But be quick about it. If you can’t catch it, just chase it out. Got it?”
“Yes, Toni!” With that, the girls disbanded, heading to their individual beds to see if the cat was hiding in there. While not every girl had gathered around to hear Toni’s plan, there were still enough of them listening to make a noticeable difference.
One of the girls whimpered at her bed. “I’m kinda scared, Toni.”
Toni turned her head to see the same girl she had scruffed just a moment ago. “You don’t have a phobia for cats like Cynthia, do you?”
Looking no more than eight years of age, the girl shivered. “No, I’m just scared of cats!”
“That’s what a phobia is, Lana,” Toni explained. “But you don’t have to be scared. Most cats are scared of people, too.”
Before Lana could make a rebuttal, one of the other girls let out a victorious howl. “I got it!”
Toni and the rest of the girls turned their heads to see Shelley holding the cat over her head, her hands gripping its squirming body by the torso, her fingers already slipping as the creature meowled for help.
“Scruff!” Toni shouted.
Too caught up in her victory, Shelley cocked her head. “Huh?”
All the other girls shouted in unison: “Scruff!”
Just when Shelley realized what she was doing wrong, the cat flipped around, batted her a few times in the face, and escaped from her grasp – at which point it dashed between the girls’ feet to hide somewhere else in the tent.
The tent went silent as everyone directed their eyes toward Shelley, who screwed up her face as if she expected the cat to come back and continue batting. Lana was the first to speak. “Did that hurt?” she said, whimpering.
“Nope,” Lana said, then coughed. “There’s cat hair in my face now!”
“Girls!” Toni called to the lot of them. “Keep looking for that cat!”
“It slipped under Sandra’s bed,” Amity pointed out, observing much of the commotion from the other side of the area. As if she had commanded them, the girls looked over at Sandra – only a year Amity’s junior – as she locked her gaze on her bed. In seconds she noticed the movement from underneath her sheets. Sandra’s fingers twitched as she prepared to swoop down at the furtive feline.
Despite all the drama surrounding this animal Amity had inadvertently let in, Amity was much more caught by Toni’s overall attitude. Seeing her in a mostly cold-free state was refreshing on its own, but seeing how she had already started taking on more of a leadership role and had gained the attention of the other girls took a load off Amity’s mind that she thought would never be relieved. The same probably could not be said for Cynthia at this point, but Toni’s growth was certainly impressive.
A collective gasp broke Amity out of her thoughts, making her take a step forward as Sandra pulled a hand out from under her sheets, revealing the black cat once more, now completely still, as she had it by the scruff.
“Nicely done, Sandra,” Macy said, stepping past Amity to see the creature from up-close. “But what do you suppose a little thing like this would want with us, anyhow?”
Immediately all the girls started coming up with answers of their own.
“It’s looking for mice to eat!” “It ran away from home.” “It wants a new family!”
Macy let out a nervous chuckle. “I don’t know about that, dear. Not only do we not have any food to give it, but some of your friends don’t like cats.”
“She’s right,” Amity said. “Plus I think it’ll just wander wherever it wants.”
With at least half of the group in agreement, Macy, Amity, and all the others went outside to put the cat back down, at which point it flicked its tail and brushed its head against one of the girls’ legs. Most of them crouched down to get a closer look at the animal.
By now the cat was the least of Macy’s concerns. “Is Cynthia still not back?” she wondered out loud. “Toni?”
Toni came to attention, remaining almost completely still otherwise. She could see Amity in the corner of her eye, but did not acknowledge her at all. “Do you need something?” she asked, sensing Amity’s eyes as they scanned over her like a judgmental spotlight.
“Check Cynthia for me,” Macy said. “I might not have ever shown her where the drives are, now that I think about it.”
“Yes, Miss Macy.” And just when she felt like Amity’s stare was about to become too much, she started walking to Macy’s tent. She didn’t look back.
When at last she opened the front flap to the tent, Toni was greeted to a startled, red-faced Cynthia.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked, breathless.
“Did you find the thing you needed?” Toni replied.
“I’m still looking for it!” By now Cynthia was almost at the point of screaming. “Miss Macy never told me where it was.”
With that, Toni agreed to help find the drive she needed. “What did she say it looked like?” she asked while walking to the back where a lot of the MDAs were plugged in.
“Like a stick,” Cynthia said. She looked as if she were about to say something else, but she kept herself from speaking any further.
Cynthia and Toni were left to scatter through more of Macy’s belongings than they were probably allowed to go through – until at last Toni opened a drawer on a table that Amity had set her lantern on. Only then did she see two little sticks, one of which she reached and grabbed at random.
“I found it!” Toni said, looking around for the MDA, only to find it on the bed right next to the table. Barely hesitating, she plugged the drive into the bottom of the device and handed it over to Cynthia.
The younger apprentice winced when Toni shoved the MDA in her face. “What are you giving that to me for? Just give it to Amity.” Just then, her expression turned into one of surprise. “Oh…”
“What?” Toni asked, raising an eyebrow, turning the device back around to see what was going on. Substituting the MDA’s normal interface was a large, blinking question mark in a box. “What the—?”
“Toni,” Cynthia began, taking a deep breath, folding her hands as she covered her mouth. “That’s not the right drive.”
Again Toni asked what Cynthia was talking about as she proceeded to take another look at the drive she had plugged in. She noticed the way it split in two, how one part plugged into another.
“That’s the drive we found in your pockets!”
Toni started to glow just as hot as Cynthia had a few minutes ago – almost to the point of shrieking. For what felt like the only time since she last saw Amity, things were starting to fall apart. To add insult to injury: she could distinctly hear some of the girls arguing at the other tent nearby.
“If she doesn’t have a name, I wanna call her Rowena!” “I like Olivia.”
One of the girls snorted. “That’s a boy cat.”
“So, Tom?” “Brandon?”
Amity had had enough of the girls’ bickering, yet Cynthia and Toni were still nowhere to be seen. “Miss Macy?” she began. “I think they’ve taken long enough. May I—?”
Macy took a glance at her tent, then sighed and shook her head. “Go right ahead, dear.”
With a few steps, Amity was greeted to the sound of hushed murmurs before stepping in to see her previous partners huddling around the MDA like they were trying to hide it. “Is it done?” Her question was as blunt as her entrance.
Toni pursed her lips. “Not yet, no.” Cynthia looked to even less willing to speak than Toni: a first, as far as Amity was concerned.
Concerned by their silence, Amity stepped over Toni’s shoulder to see that her MDA’s screen was showing some kind of error and the light that was previously flashing green was now stuck at a constant red. Her pupils dilated, she yanked the device out of Toni’s limp hand and attempted to fix the problem.
No matter which buttons she pressed, it didn’t change anything. “What the hell did you little shits do?!” she hissed. Even holding down the power+A combo didn’t do anything.
“I—” Toni stammered. “I thought that was supposed to save your stuff!”
Every day Amity lived, her memory became worse and worse – and now without a proper way to track everything she had written since childhood, up to half or a third of what she had written was likely lost to the data pool, never to be seen again. The stories she cherished, the stories she wished to read again, even the stories she maybe would have preferred to forget – if they were not a part of her, they were a part of who she once was. Part of her was twisted and ripped out of her.
Breathless, Amity continued holding the power button and A button until the system finally shut itself off. In seconds the screen came back on, stating only the following:
“SYSTEM DATA CORRUPTION”
And again Toni was left silent, giving Cynthia a moment to speak up. “Miss Macy must have never gotten around to cleaning that one.”
“Why did you even give it to her?” Toni snapped. “When did you give it to her?”
“She made me!” Cynthia argued. “When you were sick and had to go do something while the rest of us were taking care of baskets, she saw the drive I was holding onto and made me give it to her! The only reason you don’t remember is because you were spending more time with a hankie covering your face then you did actually talking to anyone.”
Before Cynthia could speak further, she was interrupted by a loud thwap.
Toni reeled forward as Amity smacked the back of her head. It felt as if she had just been punched, but, turning around, her blinking eyes looked to see a red, open palm that went to pull the drive out of the MDA.
“You absolute dumbshit!” Amity screeched, waving the now-split drive in Toni’s face. “What is this?! Tell me you didn’t destroy my data on purpose!”
Taking a step back, Toni struggled to respond, prompting Cynthia to step in. “You know she didn’t –”
Just as quickly as she’d reeled back, Toni stepped forward, the back of her head burning. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said, her voice stoic and unwavering, her face firm as she took in a deep breath. “We all loved you when you were one of us, but now I see what you are!”
“What the hell are you changing the subject for?” Amity sneered, taking a step so close she nearly stomped on her adversary’s toes. At the same time, the drive that was once in her hand fell to the floor. “All because of you, my work is ruined!”
Just when Amity felt she was going to pull her hand back to strike again, the tent flap opened. Her teeth bared, she looked over her shoulder to see Mira, with Macy just in tow.
“What are you girls screaming about?” Mira began.
Macy spoke before anyone could begin to answer Mira’s question. “And Miss Amity – is that any way for a grown woman to behave?”
If Amity’s blood was at a boil before, by now it was almost completely evaporated. “She made—!” Yet just when she realized how much of a scene she was making, she swallowed the rest of her words down and held her pocket device facing up in her open palm. “I don’t think we will need the storage solution anymore,” she said, each word backed with a sting of deliberate restraint.
“Oh, no.” Macy took the MDA in her hands, pressing some of the same buttons Amity had, and to no avail.
Mira looked over, her eyes glued to the display. “I might be able to help you fix that.”
“There’s no need, Miss Mira,” Macy insisted.
“Just take it,” Amity grunted, walking around Macy as she spoke. “Just forget everything. Erase it all; I don’t care. I’ll just be back later when it’s fixed.” And just when it looked like she was gone for good, Amity yelped – but for what reason, the others still in the tent weren’t sure.
Cynthia flinched when she saw a black blur dash into the room, picking up the drive in its jaws. “Cat again!!”
I told you all that things were about to start heating up, and boy is this chapter heated! Come back next time and we’ll see just how far the cat goes with that drive.
The Discord is open, as always.
The Autorise Domain 