Young Writers Society

“They do.” Jon let out a sigh so long Francesca wondered where he kept the air for it. “But this seems like something that could use a few additional angles, and you shouldn’t have to dip into vacation time just because the circumstances make it hard to do your normal work.”
Because of course the city wouldn’t just pay her for a day she didn’t work due to an emergency. Closing her eyes, Francesca gripped her mattress cover and prayed for patience. “I’ll look into it.” She could just put in the least possible effort and tell Jon that she’d tried.
“Great, thanks. I’ll uh… check in with you again later.”
“Uh-huh.” Francesca hung up before Jon could say anything else. She exhaled, long and heavy, and stared at the blurry, grey, call-ended screen on her phone. Her head pounded, and the skin under her eyelids ached. Without electricity, the building was chilly, and Francesca’s limbs locked up under the covers, resistant to any orders she might give them.
But her brain knew it was one in the morning, and that Tim was probably still awake. She could almost see him, tapping away at his computer or sketching out circles on his artboards, cans of energy drinks littering his blue-lit room. Her brain reminded her that she’d been asleep since six in the evening. She’d gotten enough sleep to start the day.
With a rumbly groan, Francesca unraveled her limbs and crept her fingers up to the edge of the blankets. Somehow, moving them felt as herculean as removing a mountain to fill in a sea, which was something people had once done to the landscape of San Angelo, so perhaps Francesca could get out of bed. She rolled out, toppling from the mattress in a blanket-covered crouch, and dragged herself to her closet, sheets trailing like a royal train.
In the dim light of her phone screen, Francesca flipped through her clothes. She’d never worked from home before. Should she dress in slacks and a blouse, just to set her working hours apart from the rest of the day, or forego any facsimile of professionalism and lounge around in sweats? She was pretty sure Tim wore boxers with a button-up most days. Maybe leggings and a nice shirt would hit the right balance.
Abandoning her closet, she headed for the drawers and texted Tim to see if he was awake. He replied almost immediately, incredulous that she was up too. Francesca didn’t deign to respond, tossing her blankets and phone back onto the bed so she could shiver and shimmy her way into something acceptable for wandering the apartment complex at one in the morning. And then she let herself out into the hallway, steps quiet on the tile floor, and climbed the stairs to Tim’s apartment.
She knocked on the door, feeling strange in the unlit hallway. Usually, Tim was the visitor. He swung by at odd intervals, always bearing alcohol or food or movies, and entirely at ease with himself. Francesca, by comparison, stood in the hall with her arms crossed self-consciously over her chest as she waited for him to let her in. She tapped her foot and fidgeted with her sweater, glaring up at the white popcorn ceiling.
Tim flung the door open a moment later. “Cheska!” A curious smile stretched over his face, and he stepped back to let her through. “This is unusual.”
“My boss wants me to talk to some wizards,” she said, toeing her shoes off in the doorway. “I figured I should catch you before you go to sleep or I’ll be stuck waiting until noon.”
Tim shut the door to his apartment with a soft click and shuffled up behind her, guiding Francesca into his living room with a steady hand at her back. He was dressed as she’d expected, in hideous anime boxers under a pristinely starched, blue button-up. She noted a pair of garish, red socks that climbed halfway up his calves and almost felt her admiration for him fade, and then she saw the charming disarray of his hair, and all was well again.
He brought her to his living room and sat her on his couch–a futon with real, hardwood framing and the nicer upholstery than any futon ought to have–and then retreated to his kitchen to turn on a kettle.
“So?” he called, over the sound of cupboards opening and closing. “What in particular are you supposed to talk to wizards about?”
“Isn’t in obvious?” Francesca was tempted to lie down, but she restrained herself. Besides, the other half of the futon was smothered in paper, all covered in complicated aether conduit circles and theory notes. She picked one up, squinting at it in the dim apartment, and then gave up. She could hardly see. The only light seemed to be from an old-fashioned lamp with a fabric cover, onto which Tim had drawn an aether conduit.
He poked his head out from the kitchen and tilted his head. “I have milk in my fridge. We probably need to use it up.”
Francesca grimaced. “We’re both going to be sick. Why do you even have milk?”
“For mac and cheese,” Tim said. “I could make cocoa with it? I think I have some heatproof markers somewhere.”
“Don’t you have a propane hot pot plate?” Francesca tried this time to look for some scrap paper. She needed more light in this place.
“Ooh! Good idea. I’ll get that out.” He disappeared again, accompanied this time by the clank of moving pots and pans and cardboard boxes, until at last he emerged with the hot pot plate. Francesca watched from the couch as he placed a saucepan over it and whisked in milk and cocoa mix.
“You wanted to ask me about how the city is moving?” Tim prompted, once he settled in with his whisk. He ran his free hand through his hair, and Francesca decided, hell with his circle sketches, she was going to lounge on his couch.
“Yeah,” she said. “My boss said since we don’t have power in the building today that I could just do research. I wasn’t all that close with our professors though, so I figured I’d ask you first.”
Twisting to peer over his shoulder, Tim gave her a concerned frown. “Well, in my professional opinion, it couldn’t possibly be a wizard doing this. No wizard has really accomplished the kind of power needed for this scale.”
“Well unless you count the floods of Mesopotamia referenced in the Bible and… all those other ancient religions,” Francesca countered, “then no aether-loved has achieved this scale of magic either. And those floods could have been entirely natural.”

*sigh*

Tim blinked at her, and then went back to stirring the cocoa. “Maybe it’s a whole bunch of aether-loved.”
“Maybe.” Francesca said, but she doubted it. How would a group of aether-loved combine their mysterious, touchy-feely magic? How would they hand off a block of homes from one person’s area of influence to another? Admittedly, Francesca had no idea how a group of wizards might do the same thing - but wizards at least, with their replicable conduit circles, could standardize their magical practice. “Who on the Belle-Ferre faculty should I start with?”
Tim thought for a moment, and the only sound in the apartment was the quiet scraping of his whisk against the saucepan. “You had Dr. Gotherd, right?”
“History of Aether Practice,” Francesca recalled. “Yeah.” She only barely remembered the class; Dr. Gotherd had not possessed the same kind of charisma as the teaching assistant who’d lectured for her Infrastructure History course. And she’d only gotten into wizardry for the funky circle drawing anyway.
“Well I’d start with him.” Tim turned down the burner and disappeared behind the kitchen wall. “And you could try Dr. Chadha next.”
The name didn’t ring any bells. As Francesca tried to picture Dr. Chadha in her head–from the department website, from meeting them, from anywhere–she slumped into the couch and drooped onto her side. If it weren’t for all of Tim’s conduit circle drafts, she could have just gone back to sleep.
Tim reemerged, two steaming cups in hand, and Francesca felt her heart grow three sizes. And wow, he looked so domestic like this, with his socks and adorably messy hair. The soft light from his one aether-powered lamp cast a halo of gold around his shoulders. Or maybe it was just Francesca’s tired brain being grateful for him bringing her things.
She held her hands out, making slow grabby hands until he handed her a mug, and then Francesca slowly sat back up, just enough to lean against the armrest of the couch. “I don’t think I ever had Dr. Chadha.”
“She teaches advanced sections of aether flow mechanics,” Tim explained, leaning against the far wall and tilting his head fetchingly against it. “Definitely a good resource if you want the latest on aether flow output achievements.”
That sounded more promising. Francesca took a long, slow sip of cocoa, closing her eyes to enjoy the warmth and the heavy, rich chocolate. “You should just write me a list,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll remember any of this in… seven hours, when it’s appropriate to call people.”
Tim rolled his eyes, but a dimpled smirk broke across his face, and Francesca felt the whole world and all its stupid, magical problems fall away. Right now, in Tim’s apartment, she could pretend that nothing was wrong out there. She wasn’t in an unfamiliar neighborhood, surrounded by restaurants and families and stores she didn’t know. She didn’t have work. She didn’t have to remedy the problems of all San Angelo’s people. Tim was familiar and safe, and she needed that now.
“So how’s work been?” she asked him. She gestured vaguely at the pile of papers on his couch.
“Oh, you know,” Tim sighed. “XYZ is the same as ever.”
“New project?” Francesca pressed. She picked up one of the papers and squinted, trying to pick out all the fine details in the low light. This was one of the most complex conduit circles she’d ever seen. It featured three separate series of concentric rings inside of it, with tiny, feathering strokes coming off them, and cirliques of detailing that looked like circuitry boards and vines and geometric bits. She traced a particularly wiggly line with one finger and then set the paper down in her lap.
When she looked back up, she found Tim watching her, his face careful and blank. Then he relaxed into a sheepish smile. His shoulders dropped from his ears, and he brought up his mug to demurely hide his mouth. “Most of that is probably personal stuff,” he said. “I’ve been experimenting.”
“Ooh, the great wizard who sold his soul to Big Tech is out doing research.” But that was good. Francesca respected research. She let her teasing tone fade and grinned into her cocoa. “What about?”
Tim met her eyes with a dazzling grin. “Secret for now. Sorry, Cheska.”

--

At nine o’ clock sharp, Francesca started making her phone calls. Her cell phone felt like a weight in her hand as she picked it up, and her list of contacts burned in her retinas. Even the familiar curve of Tim’s handwriting didn’t make her feel better.
She tapped in the number for Dr. Gotherd first. She didn’t want to. But he was the only person on the list that Francesca had spoken to before, and she’d feel better if she had a moment to get going on the cold calls before bothering strangers. Feeling clammy, she held the speaker to her ear and waited for the dial tone.
Francesca’s brain raced. What would she say? Did Dr. Gotherd even remember her? If he didn’t pick up, her whole day would be ruined. She would wait around for the next ten minutes just thinking and pondering and wasting time before she called the next person on the list.
A click echoed down the line, and the professor picked up.
“Hello? Who’s speaking?”
Francesca braced herself. “Hi! Professor Gotherd? This is Francesca Fang. I was in your class a few years back.”
He huffed and hummed, and Francesca tried to imagine his face, but found her memory lacking. “Ah, yes,” Gotherd said, as though he definitely didn’t remember but was trying desperately to convey he did. “How can I help you?”
“I ah… work for the San Angelo Department of Public Utilities. We’re looking into the”-
“The shifting? Yes. Yes.”
He didn’t have to interrupt.
“Yes, well, I got in touch with Tim”-
“Timothy Huang? I do remember him. What an excellent”-
Francesca gripped a pencil in her hand and tried valiantly to break it. “Dr. Gotherd,” she said, playing his own game, “Tim recommended I reach out to you.

I ate so much pie y'all.

...He said you might know something about large scale magic."
The professor made a disgruntled sound, and Francesca tapped the eraser of her pencil against her desk. She waited. The professor made another noise.
"Sir?"
"Tim sent you to me? About- huh. Well, alright then. He could've explained himself, but I suppose"-
Francesca cleared her throat. If only she had the grip strength to break things without trying. "Dr. Gotherd, please let's get to the point?"
"Oh! Yes. Large-scale magic. Let's see… the very earliest records come out of Mesopotamia, naturally."
Thank goodness for those extra hours of sleep Francesca had fit in between her talk with Tim and now. The more Dr. Gotherd talked, the more Francesca's eyelids drooped. The more he talked, the more she felt like she was eighteen years old again, falling asleep in his class as he went on tangent after tangent. And the more he talked, the more Francesca wanted to tear her hair out.
She could hardly follow what the professor said. In the two seconds it took Francesca to calm down after he went from Mesopotamiam aether-loved to a discussion about deciphering cuneiform, he somehow got on the topic of isolation era Japan. From there, he jumped to the decades of interviews he conducted with various Native American tribes on how magic was reflected in their oral histories. None of it made any sense. If any part of Dr. Gotherd's lecture was relevant, Francesca couldn't tell.
"So," he said, only forty minutes into the call, "was there anything more specific than just large scale magic?"
Francesca blinked, still zoned out. Then her hindbrain realized she'd been asked a question and violently shook her back to the moment. "Uh," Francesca replied. "No. That was very helpful, thank you."
"Excellent, excellent. Well, do call if you have any other questions. I’d love to hear what Tim is up to.”
Ugh. Everyone just loved Tim. “Of course!” Francesca said, trying her very best to be chipper. “Thanks again.” She prayed Dr. Gotherd would hang up now, but he kept going.
“I heard very promising things about the direction of his research and development since he graduated.” Why wouldn’t he just say goodbye and get this over with?
“Yeah!” Francesca said. “He’s sure done… a lot.”
“Since I have you on the phone, actually, would you mind letting him”-
“Thanks so much for all your help!” Francesca cut in. She could not let this go on any longer. “Bye!” And then she hung up. She stared at her phone, willing the call screen to go away, and then breathed out a sigh of relief when the grey background finally faded back to her homescreen– a plate of her mom’s new year dumplings.
Briefly, she wondered how her parents were holding up. They lived pretty far outside the bounds of San Angelo Bay, but maybe they’d been caught up in this too. She considered calling them, just to procrastinate, and then remembered. Francesca’s mom would have called in rapturous outrage by now if they’d been caught in the shuffle. Better not to say anything to them at all.
With a groan, she dumped her phone on her desk and leaned as far back as her chair would allow. The chair rolled out a few inches, and the seat began a painfully slow turn, and Francesca let it happen. Her clock read only nine-forty-five, and already her head hurt. She looked up at the popcorn ceiling, at the faint brown markings, which indicated the cooling system had at one point worked too hard for its own good and allowed condensation to form and then drip into the finished surface, and decided she was going to wait fifteen minutes before her next call.
The time ticked by slowly as Francesca sat with her thoughts. She didn’t want to call Dr. Chadha. She didn’t want to report failure to Jon. She didn’t really want to try at any of this magic business. She didn’t want her life to be continually upended. Huffing at her own contradictory desires, she tapped the aether conduits on her glasses and watched the world light up in aether around her.
Just like yesterday, nothing seemed amiss. The glowing aether particles flowed in and out through her air vent and floated about the room, gliding past her unmade bed, the small collection of framed photos on her bookshelf, and her neatly organized pen holder. If she was being honest with herself, Francesca probably needed to have a stake-out. She could stay up until the stroke of midnight with her aether-sight turned on and watch as the city rearranged itself.
But what if Jon asked her to go into work at one in the morning the next day? What if she didn’t even see anything? Looking at the clock again, she saw the numbers flip to nine-fifty-seven. Ugh.
Hauling herself back upright, Francesca reached for her phone again and tapped off her glasses. She dragged her finger along Tim’s handwriting, reading the string of numbers for Dr. Chadha’s phone, and told herself that no professor could possibly be as awful as Dr. Gotherd. Then she punched in the number and tried to think of a coherent greeting.
Dr. Chadha answered at the last possible minute, right at the moment when Francesca’s brain switched from thinking about greetings to thinking about things to say on voicemail. She nearly dropped the phone when she heard the soft, accented “hello?”
“Uh, yes. Hi.” Oh no. She couldn’t remember what she was going to say. Francesca groped blindly for her pencil and nearly poked a hole in her palm with it.
“Who is this?”
Dr. Chadha sounded angelic. She sounded like she could talk to woodland animals and convince the nations of the world to embrace peace and climate solutions. Francesca immediately felt like she was going to be led astray.
“I’m Francesca Fang,” she said, “with the San Angelo Department of Public Utilities. Timothy Huang suggested I reach out to you for information on”-
“The scrambling, yes.”
Francesca didn’t remember her civil engineering professors being so keen to interrupt all the time. “Yep. That. It doesn’t- I mean. I don’t expect you to have the whole answer,” she said, “but any directions you think the department should look into, or other experts?”
The professor hummed, a musical note that floated into Francesca’s ears like a hypnotic tune. “You said Timothy Huang sent you to me?”

I have three sewing projects scattered around my living room. Maybe more.

The UCBF professors sure liked to spout his name. If only Francesca could find out what exactly he worked on, then maybe she’d understand what they saw in him.
"Well. I suppose if even he's stumped, then you could reach out to the aether R&D team at XYX. I can send you a few lectures as well. See if any of it looks promising."
Thank god for Dr. Chadha. Anything would be better than another hour-long phone call. After bidding the professor goodbye, Francesca waited patiently for an email notification.
When it came, pinging loudly in her silent apartment, Francesca tapped it open and then immediately put her phone back down.
Dr. Chadha had sent four gigabytes worth of reading material. Four! Francesca had received building permit packages smaller than that. And worse, she was on mobile data today. No way did she have the bandwidth (or remaining data usage) to get through those lectures.
And with dawning dread, Francesca realized that if she couldn't spend the rest of the day reading lecture slides, she'd have to keep calling people. She sat very still for a moment, just coming to terms with the horror of it. Her focus blurred in and out, centering on one of the sticky notes above her desk.
She needed another break.
---
Francesca sat slumped over her kitchen table, empty snack bags strewn over her notes from the day’s phone calls, tapping her pencil against a blank page. The XYZ wizards had been useless. The Edison Co. wizards that XYZ had pointed her to had been equally useless. She wasn’t even sure why Dr. Chadha had suggested speaking with them–all they cared about was conduit circles in technology. And by technology, Francesca really meant all facets of life.
XYZ wanted circles imprinted in the hardware of every phone. Edison Co. wanted them in brain chips, which, gross. And also, what would that even do? And Transform Tech, which Francesca had only called because she found the number of an old classmate buried in her cell phone, was looking into just making the entire populace into wizards through… social media trends or something. And maybe those were all avenues for big magic, but Francesca’s brain still rebelled against trusting anything any of those wizards had said, because they all sounded like the same tech bro utopia-believers that were all over Belle-Ferre, and she’d heard enough of that in university.
She made a series of extra fast, extra hard taps on the notepad, and then rolled her face into the wood tabletop, squashing her nose into a discarded cracker wrapper. “Ugh.”
At the very least, Francesca could tell Jon she hadn’t wasted the day. She even had leads! But staying inside on the phone all day left her both drained and restless. How Tim managed to work from home, she had no idea.
She considered taking a walk to scout out a restaurant for dinner when her phone buzzed on the table. Fearing the worst- a call back or Jon or even George -Francesca lifted her head to peer at the screen like an archer over a castle wall.
It wasn’t any of those things. It was Persy. Why was Persy calling? Jumping to pick up the call, Francesca fumbled over the screen until she managed to accept, and then tentatively brought the speaker to her ear.
“Hi? Persy?”
“Francesca!” Persy crowed, in that scratchy-smooth old lady voice of hers. “Are you coming to Wine and Twine?”
Oh gosh. It was Wednesday, wasn’t it? Somehow, the day had slipped Francesca’s mind entirely. She fell back into her chair and stared up at the ceiling, brain split between thinking of how to get to the Second Hill Branch Library and how she’d forgotten the date.
“Uh,” she said, very eloquently.
“Where in the bay are you? Do you need a ride? I can pick you up. The state hasn’t taken away my license yet!”
Running a hand through her hair, Francesca recalled the last time she’d ridden in Persy’s car. She wasn’t keen on a repeat. “Where is the library today?”
Persy let out a peel of riotous laughter, and then something on her end of the line banged. “Shit! Ohhh, where are my scissors? Ugh, I’ll have to tear all of these out now.”
“Persy? Library?”
“Tch, no need to rush me. Now where- Ah! There you are.” Persy hummed a cheerful, off-pitch tune, probably snipping away at something or other, before returning to the subject at hand. “The library is in Enorme today. Right where my dry cleaner used to be!”
Francesca rarely heard anyone talk about Enorme. It was practically subsumed by the surrounding neighborhoods now: City Hall to the north, Packing to the west, and South Docks to the east. But she knew where that was, at least. She’d have one hell of the time getting there on her own.
“I’m all the way over in the eastern part of Gigport today,” Persy rambled on, “right next to the Tian Memorial Bridge. Or is it the Golden Cable Bridge now? I suppose it’s both, now the bridges keep switching places. The Tian Memorial Golden Cable Bridge. What a mouthful. Anyway, where are you?”
If Francesca lied, Persy would know. Somehow she always knew. “Whitby,” she admitted.
“Practically on my way!” If ‘on her way’ meant adding twenty extra minutes to cross two bridges instead of one, sure. But now that Persy had it in her head to come pick Francesca up, there would be no escape.
“I’ll just send you a pin,” Francesca said, defeated.
Well, she could use a few hours of getting wine drunk in the library event room while Persy and the rest of the Wine and Twine regulars critiqued her sewing. And she’d been feeling restless right before Persy called anyway. Straightening her spine, Francesca raised her arms in a long, reaching stretch and gathered up her notes. Then she padded back into her bedroom to put on real clothes and fetch her sewing bag.
She could update Jon from the car.

Or, you know, she could not. Francesca hung on to the assist grip on Persy’s passenger door like her life depended on it. Her sewing bag rocked back and forth at her feet, clunking against the bottom of the glove compartment every time Persy braked, or rounded a corner, or hit the accelerator. Her stomach tossed and turned, howling in complaint at the rough treatment, and Francesca stared out the front window, eyes glazed over, wishing she would just black out.
Persy whipped through an intersection just as the light turned from yellow to red, then immediately crushed the brake pedal to keep from crashing into the car in front of them. “We’ll get there with plenty of time to spare!” she said, cheerily.
It would be plenty of time for Francesca to hurl her guts out, hopefully. “Mhmm,” she managed to reply, before turning to look out the side window instead.
She had thought walking through the mishmash of city blocks was jarring, but driving through it was even worse. Persy had chosen the quickest possible route, which took them on six-lane streets that should have been lined on either side with shopping malls and parking lots, but were now occupied by alternating skyscrapers and subdivisions. Here, the speed limit rose as high as fifty miles per hour, and because the malls’ landscaping and parking lots were no longer here, it meant the cars drove directly next to whatever block-du-jour happened to be nearby.
Francesca watched the front facade of a skyscraper, split between all sorts of tiny, urban storefronts, zip by in the blink of an eye and decided she’d be better off with her face tucked into her elbow.
Except that didn’t do her any good either. Persy ripped through a left turn that shoved Francesca hard against the door, and having her eyes closed only amplified the gut-churning momentum. As much as she admired Persy’s continuing independence, maybe the state did need to take away her driver’s license.
Eventually, the street lifted away from the ground, crossing over the waterfront thoroughfare of Whitby to ramp onto the bridge between the island and San Angelo proper. Here, where there were no traffic lights or intersections or curves, Francesca dared to lift her head and peer back outside.
She’d never crossed between San Angelo and Whitby before. She rarely even crossed the bridge to Gigport, but that one didn’t have the same view. Where the bridge to Gigport was oceanside, and covered in a near-constant cloud of fog, the bridge from Whitby was clear and bright. The shorelines of San Angelo Bay curved in and out in every direction, interrupted on occasion by blinding white beaches and waterfront residences. The massive Gigport shipping hub, usually up north, erupted from the hilly shorelines in the southern reaches of the bay. And in every direction, sparkling blue waves pushed in from the ocean, their glittering peaks hiding the depths below.
Francesca sighed as she watched the scene go by, her grip relaxing on the handle, and leaned back in her seat. This was nice. She should have gotten Tim to drive her across the bridge earlier, before all this mess. As her nausea subsided, Francesca twisted around in her seat, just to keep watching.
And then Persy braked hard, and Francesca’s forehead slammed straight into her headrest. “Ow!”
“Oops!”
Biting back a whimper, Francesca reached for the assist grip and resumed holding on for dear life. If she was lucky, maybe she could stay out until midnight, and she wouldn’t have to spend so long in Persy’s car on the way back home.
---
Persy broke the boxed wine out at five-thirty with a facetious “it’s five o’ clock somewhere,” and already half the Wine and Twine attendees were sloshed.
Francesca could feel her fingers going clumsy already as she gazed into her half-empty plastic wine glass. She held it one hand, tipped just enough to feel dangerous, while she prodded squares of fabric around with the other, placing and replacing them and wondering why nothing looked good.
A hand landed on her table, and she squinted at it.
“Chesssss,” slurred Nadia. Francesca followed the hand up and up and up until she found Nadia’s flushed, angular face staring at her with wide eyes. “Cheska you do… sewers, right?”
Francesca was not in the right headspace for sewage. She could barely remember basic fluid dynamics right now. “Mmm,” she said, looking back down at her fabric. Moving them around like this reminded her of something. She couldn’t place it.
“Why is my block so stinky?” Nadia dropped her chin and elbows to the table and looked up at Francesca with a beseeching pout. It would be cute if she wasn’t wobbling.
Across the room, Arthur-the-spinner straightened over his spinning wheel. His pale, weathered face was strawberry-red, and his yarn looked like it needed to be detangled. “I had a question too!” He looked back down at his yarn and yelped, stopping the wheel to examine his work. “But I forgot it.”
Arthur-the-weaver leaned out from his loom and gave his grandfather a disappointed tsk. They were uncannily similar, especially since Arthur Jr. was in his anime phase and had bleached his hair snow white. “You wanted to ask her about brownfields, Grandpa. Brownfields!”
Trying to push Nadia off her table, Francesca took another gulp of wine. “Stinky brownfields,” she muttered, picking up several brown squares and positioning them with each other.
“Are brownfields stinky?” Nadia asked. “Corn isn’t stinky when it turns brown.” She stared down at Francesca’s fabric squares too, and then reached out and snatched one.
Brownfield sites could be stinky. Francesca didn’t think they were all stinky, or that they stank the same way. She mourned the loss of her brown fabric square and hunted for something else that might look good.
Arthur Sr. huffed over his wheel, still trying to think of his question when Arthur Jr. gave up and stood from his loom. He and Persy were probably the only people still sober, and even Persy was on shaky ground there. It was fine, probably, as long as she was okay to drive when they had to leave.

“I can’t believe the library puts up with this,” Arthur Jr. said. He stalked toward Francesca and Nadia and extricated their wine glasses from their hands. Francesca let it happen, feeling as though she was no longer quite inside her own body. Nadia tipped her head down onto Francesca’s table and whined.
“Junior! How could you?”
“You said before we all got started that you had a baby blanket to finish for your sister’s baby shower in two weeks,” Arthur Jr. told her, gesturing with a series of accusatory points and pokes. “Drink any more any you won’t even be able to start on it.” Then he whirled around and turned on Francesca. She didn’t even have deadlines for her projects. What was he going to say to her?
“And you! You’ve been playing with the same pile of squares for a month. Don’t you ever get anything done?”
Francesca sniffled. Children were so mean. She stroked her precious fabric squares and sighed. “I’m tired. I work full-time.”
Rolling his eyes, Arthur Jr. began rearranging her squares for her. Each piece he picked up and placed with firm precision, the scowl on his face growing ever darker. “I hope I don’t become an adult like you lot,” he mumbled. “You’re all here to building community or whatever, but all I ever see is a bunch of drunks pretending to do work.”
Wow, that hurt. Francesca supposed if she were sober, it might have hurt more, but she mostly felt fuzzy and muted. She watched as Arthur finished with the squares, and then rubbed her shoulders. “What does your grandpa want to know about brownfields?”
“Oh, now you’re going to help?”
Francesca flinched. So she was a little distractable at the moment. She was drunk.
Arthur Jr. threw his hands up in exasperation. “Ugh whatever, fine. Our house got moved to a brownfield site today. Grandpa wants to know if the dirt there is still contaminated with all this bullshit”-
“Junior!” Arthur Sr. interrupted. “No cuss words!”
“Ugh! Bull! Fine! Is that better?”
Francesca found the brown square Nadia had stolen earlier. It sat off to the edge of the table, just out of reach from where she was sitting. Awkwardly, she scooted her chair over to retrieve it.
Logically thinking, if the underground utilities didn’t adjust with the shifting buildings, then the soil itself probably didn’t either. The issue hadn’t been brought up at work yet though, so Francesca couldn’t say for sure. Biting her lip, she stared at the brown fabric and wondered how she should bring it up to Jon.
“Well?” Arthur Jr. prompted. He crossed his arms and crooked his hips to one side, making the chains on his belt clink. Francesca noticed he wore black nail polish.
“We’ve been focused on utilities for emergency services,” Francesca said. “No one has looked yet. I wouldn’t touch the soil if you can help it.”
The city hadbeen scrambled twice already. How many people had already been moved to contaminated lots? Francesca wasn’t even sure she knew which lots were the most dangerous. Arthur’s family home could have been transported to a site with gasoline twenty feet underground, or a site with carbon tetrachloride at the surface. She didn’t know if their house had a basement or not.
Lost in thought, she stared at her fabric squares, and then picked up the brown one and the green square next to it. She found a collection of other greens, enough to fully encircle the brown one, and began the process of sewing them all together into a little three-by-three patchwork block. Arthur Jr. loomed over her, his mouth curled in disbelief.
“You’re sewing now?” He crouched in front of her, shoving Nadia out of the way to squint as Francesca passed the pieces through her machine one after the other. When she stood to take her bits and bobs to the ironing board, he followed, hands in his pockets, straining his neck to peer over her shoulder. “Hey! What are Grandpa and me supposed to do about the dirt”-
“Shhh,” Francesca slurred. Her ironing was heavy and sloppy, and the seam allowances fell crooked and twisty, but she didn’t really care. “I’m tipsy. I have the best ideas when I’m tipsy.”
“Hear, hear!” Nadia cheered from the floor.
“Also, it’s not dirt,” Francesca said, as she carried the pieces back to the machine for a second round of piecing. She glanced up at Arthur Jr. and widened her eyes very seriously. “It’s soil.”
The poor teenager just gave up. With an exaggerated swing of his arms, he spun around to tromp back to his loom, where his grandfather offered a patronizing pat on the shoulder.
Quiet descended back upon the Wine and Twine meeting. The wooden clicks of the wheel and loom formed a solid bassline to the whirr and hum of Francesca’s sewing machine, and Nadia hummed a little tune that was mostly in time with Arthur Jr.’s strict, regimented shuttle passes.
One trip to the ironing board later, Francesca had her little patchwork square. She held it up in front of her face, considering what to do with it, and then reached into her bag for pattern transfer paper. It took her a few minutes of rattling around, shoving loose bobbins to and fro inside the bag, but eventually her fingers closed around the heavy, crackly paper and her box of drafting tools, and she set to work once more.
The moment she pulled out her compass, Nadia’s head resurfaced over the desk. She arched one perfectly plucked eyebrow, raising the little spot on her temple where a beauty spot drew attention to her equally perfect eyeliner, and drummed her fingers on the plastic table top. “Cheska,” she said, pulling out the ‘S’ and missing half of the ‘K’. “What is that?”
“Hmm,” Francesca replied. Her tipsy brain was so very committed to this, but she found she couldn’t quite articulate what she was doing. “A thing. For the scramble.” She twisted the compass to draw a shaky circle on the transfer paper, and then drew three smaller circles inside it to form a curving triangle. Threes were good. They were very strong.

It Crithmis

It needed something more though. With a shrug, she drew two stick figures in the center, and then ferried the patchwork back to her sewing machine. She fiddled with the buttons, switching between stitches, and the remembered belatedly that she needed to change out the presser foot.
Nadia watched in wide-eyed disbelief. "Cheska. You never said wizards sew."
Francesca tapped the pedal on her machine and guided her square of squares in a long, slow circle. A thick, three-strand stitch followed where she led. "They don't," she said, feeling petulant. She wasnt really sure what she was doing anymore, but it didn't matter. She had a pattern in front of her and she was going to trace it.
"Then why are you doing that?” Nadia asked.
Sniffing, Francesca held up her nice, little circle and trimmed off the ends of the thread. Then she positioned the fabric for the smaller circles. “Because,” she said.
“Because why?”
Well, Nadia didn’t have to be annoying about this. Narrowing her eyes, Francesca pressed harder on her sewing machine pedal. “I thought you had things to work on.”
They were both so drunk. Francesca would never say it out loud, but she knew she got even more stubborn than usual when she was wine drunk–not because she was angrier or more set in her own opinions, but because she lost whatever filter kept her from being so short with everyone. Her stitches wobbled a little, and she lifted her foot off the pedal to kick Nadia.
“Hey!”
“Work on your own stuff.”
“Ugh!” Nadia grumbled. She stood up, hand pressed to Francesca’s desk to keep herself from falling over. “Fine. You all win! I’m working on my blanket.” She fumbled along the length of the desk, and then carefully walked back to her own bags, arms out like a tightrope walker.
With Nadia gone, Francesca could finish up. In a haze of wine-aftertaste, she finished her circles, and then spent ten minutes searching through her bobbins and thread for something she could use for the stick figures. Then she realized she would have an easier time finding what she wanted if she upended the whole bag, so she did.
She located an empty bobbin and a nearly-empty spool of silvery white thread for the hair on each figure. Then a deep green for Arthur Sr.’s shirt. Then tan for his khakis. Arthur Jr., in his rebellious teenager ensemble, could be managed in all black thread. Leaving the pile out, Francesca stitched in the little waves of their hair, the sullen set of their eyes, and the long limbs of their frames. Then, when she was all done, she found a scrap to cover the seams on the back and tidy up the patchwork.
Francesca had just turned the tiny patchwork pillowcase right-side-out when she noticed Persy at her shoulder, one hand out. Not sure what else to put there, Francesca handed her the square.
Persy adjusted her glasses with a strange, witchy laugh. “Well, Francesca. I’m not sure what you’ve got here, but I feel like I ought to do something about it.”
Feeling suddenly bleary, Francesca propped her elbows on the table and sat her head in her hands. “Okay?” She glanced over at Nadia, whose crochet hook had stopped moving, and glared.
With one wrinkly, bejeweled hand, Persy flicked the rims of Francesca’s glasses, and the lenses flared to life. The golden particles of aether in the air shivered all around her, frozen, waiting. Francesca had no sense for them on her own, but she saw Arthur Jr. stiffen at his loom, as if he could feel their tension, feel the shift in the atmosphere, like ionized particles moments before a lightning strike. She hadn’t known he was aether-loved.
Persy waved a hand over the patchwork square, one eyebrow piqued in thought. One corner of her mouth rose in a mischievous smirk. And then, like iron filings brought to a magnet, the aether in the air all pivoted. Francesca watched, her stomach crying wooziness, as the glowing dust zipped in toward Persy and the square in a dizzying swirl, and then embedded itself into the threads, the fabric, the seams. The patchwork glowed with a faint, steady pulse, like a million miniscule lightning bugs.
Blinking, Persy handed the square back to Francesca. “Hm. Not sure if that did anything.”
“I don’t know what it was supposed to do anymore,” Francesca said. “But you did something.” She held it up to look closer. Her patchwork looked like pure aether through the magicked lenses of her glasses. Despite the whole thing being made of scrap straight-weave cotton and all-purpose thread, she could have sworn she held sparkling, gold organza embroidered in real golden thread. Like a child with a new toy, she shook the whole piece, just to see if any of the sparkle would fall off.
It didn’t, of course. The aether particles all stayed where they belonged, imbued in the patchwork like they’d been there from the very beginning. Shrugging, Francesca bunched the whole thing up and threw it across the room. It landed noiselessly on top of Arthur Jr.’s loom and immediately got caught in all the bars.
Arthur Jr. scowled. “Why are you throwing things at me now? You can’t be that drunk.”
“I am wasted,” Francesca said seriously. “I haven’t drank like this since college.”
“Ha!” Nadia barked. “I bet you never even drank in college. You didn’t turn twenty-one until you were a senior!”
She was right, but she didn’t have to say it to the teenager. “Absolutely schwasty,” Francesca insisted. “I wouldn’t say schwasty if I was sober.”
A string snapped on Arthur Sr.’s spinning wheel. He made an aborted dog-whine noise and then immediately reached for his wine glass. “I can’t tell if you’re sober enough to play mind games with me, or if you really are drunk enough to say… schwast- uh. Schwasted?”
Francesca remembered all of a sudden that she had bobbins and spools all over one side of her table. She leaned down in her chair to grab her bag, and her fingers closed around air. “Just take the square,” she told the Arthurs.
And then she tried her best to pack up her things.

I'm going to a hockey game tonight so I busted this out real fast hahahaha

Francesca woke up sweating. Her phone screen lit up, blinking with a string of new texts, and the charging symbol was on. Her blankets, piled on after the power went out yesterday, were heavy and gross and damp, sticking to her skin and soaking through her PJs. Her head throbbed with a slight hangover, probably made worse by the dehydration of a sweaty night.
The texts could wait. Bleary and uncoordinated, Francesca threw off her blankets and rolled off the mattress, catching herself with a thud on the floor. She hauled herself to the bathroom and flinched when she flicked on the lights.
“Too bright, too bright.” She considered turning the lights back off, and then realized she wouldn’t be able to see. So instead, she waited, leaning against the doorframe and rubbing her temples until she could open her eyes without searing the inside of her skull. She found her ibuprofen and downed a full glass of water, and then stumbled back to bed.
Still sweaty, still gross. Everything was fine.
After pulling a select few blankets over her shoulders, Francesca reached for her phone. She squinted at the texts, letting the letters swim across her vision until they settled into words, and sighed. They were all from Jon. Had he slept since getting back to the states?
She tapped her way to her GPS to see where she was in relation to the address Jon had sent her and watched as the loading circle looped around and around. She could just fall back to sleep. She could claim ignorance. But then the map loaded, and as luck would have it, Francesca’s apartment building sat only five blocks north of the office today.
They were in what used to be the Chopping District, and the visceral, monkey part of Francesca’s brain immediately went on high alert. She avoided the area when she could, especially in warmer months, when she broke out the sandals. One never knew when they might step in literal human shit, or a pile of needles, or other nasty things.
But then she remembered that few of the original blocks, and probably few of the original inhabitants, were even in Chopping District right now. The likelihood of stepping in something gross was less, just spread over the entire metropolitan. Her monkey brain settled down, and the nice, sweet, caring part of her brain went nuts. She knew precisely the tools that could make Chopping District safer. It wasn’t very nice of her to think only about how dirty the neighborhood was when she knew the root causes were beyond its residents’ control.
Rolling over, Francesca turned off her phone. She was an engineer, not a policy maker. Thinking about that stuff wasn’t her job. Her job today was to go into the office at an unreasonable hour and take calls from angry residents about their utilities.
She heaved herself up onto her elbows and texted Jon. She’d be in at three. And then she had to drag herself back out of bed.
As the headache subsided, she started to feel more alive. Francesca found the presence of mind to pull the sheets off her bed and spread them out over her couch so they would air out. She brushed her teeth without dying. She even remembered to check everything in her fridge to see what had gone bad yesterday.
Garbage bag in hand, Francesca headed out at two-forty-five. She tossed all her rotten food in the apartment bins, holding her nose to keep from throwing up, and ventured out into this strange, new Chopping District.
It looked exactly the same as every other part of town. Skyscrapers swayed next to blocks of overpriced townhouses, which huddled together in fear of the dirty, run-down four-story apartments nearby. The streets themselves-specifically the asphalt bits that didn’t shift each night-had a little more dirt and detritus than other parts of town, but otherwise the area was indistinguishable. Decades of neglect and poor community investment had all been tossed out the window in one night.
Even the homeless population was gone. They were probably stranded across the metropolitan, away from services that had once been centralized here.
Francesca gripped her backpack straps. She wasn’t going to think about this. She wasn’t in charge of anything that could help anyone. She was just some girl.
She passed by a block of shuttered stores from Chinatown that inspired a pang of homesickness, and then one of the oldest skyscrapers in town, which groaned as its foundations fell on new ground. Its curlique arched entryways, usually a few feet below the sidewalk, sat at street level for the first time in decades.
And then she made it to the Department of Public Utilities. The stone building loomed like a haunted cathedral in the dark, and Francesca heard the rumble of the backup generators running in the garbage pick-up driveway. One light was on in a faraway corner of the front facade, and she vaguely recalled that the Secretary of Public Utilities’s office was somewhere in that vicinity.
She checked her phone again as she scurried up the steps, her shoes making hollow taps on the stonework. One of Jon’s texts mentioned a coworker Francesca needed to relieve of duty, so she figured she’d take care of that first. She passed under the heavy, ornate doorways, which were overwrought in good light, but eerily opulent in the dark, and found herself in the carpeted maze of hallways inside.
Two days ago, in the weak light of dawn, the office had seemed quiet, but habitable. Today, it was unsettling. The doorways were visible by only the white sheen at the edges of the metal frames and doorknobs. The darkened lights felt heavy, locked in the invisible weight of the overhead ceiling grid. When Francesca made it to a stairwell, she inadvertently grunted at the sudden, intense emergency lighting.
Her footsteps echoed up the concrete walls as she ascended to the engineers’ floor, which she found just as dark as the floors below.

Partway down the hall, a streak of light sprayed over the carpet, barely escaping the single lit room in view. Francesca sighed. Even in the dark, she was pretty sure that was George’s office.
She knocked on his door when she arrived and poked her head in, finding George slumped over, forehead on his desk. A drone image taken from an active construction site lay open on his computer screen, overlaid on a storm and sewer plan from what she assumed was the original building in that location.
“Everything okay?” she asked. She recognized the building–well, both of them actually. The drawing came from a medical office building that had been completed last month in Oceanview; the department had received the permit drawings almost right when Francesca started working. The photo came from an apartment complex at the western edge of Chopping District.
“I just don’t get it,” George said, face still on the table.
Francesca rolled her eyes. “Do any of us? If even the wizards can’t figure this out, I’m not sure anyone can.”
Looking pitiful, George rolled his head so his face was no longer on the desk. His screen flicked off; he must have been like that for a while. Then he narrowed his eyes at her. “Didn’t you get a wizardry minor?”
Ugh, not this again. “No, I did not,” Francesca said. “I took a few classes and decided it wasn’t for me.”
“Isn’t that guy you hang out with a wizard?”
“I already asked him,” Francesca replied, crossing her arms and leaning against the door frame. “I spent all day yesterday talking to wizards.”
At that, George sat up straight. He wiggled his mouse to get the computer going again and started the process of closing windows and logging out. “So, did you learn anything?”
Francesca waved her hands in dismissal. “Not much. I mostly got lectured on aether theory.” She eyed George’s computer screen and stood up to lean over his shoulder. “Where’d you get that drone image?”
“Oh, this?” He closed out of his overlay and tapped a few keys, and the screen went dark. Smiling, he spun in his chair and leaned over to grab his backpack. “Actually, the city started doing these flyovers yesterday. They aren’t very detailed unless you submit a request for a really specific spot, but there’s a huge one of the whole metropolitan in the city database. I even heard we’re working with XYZ to get it into their maps app.”
Raising an eyebrow, Francesca waited for George to join her at the door. They stepped into the hall, and he flipped the light switch off, leaving them in near total darkness.
“What time do we get the images?” she asked.
“Oh, we get them late,” George answered. “I think yesterday’s came in at like seven?”
Disgusting. If only Francesca didn’t constantly get put on this stupid ass-o-clock shift.
“Well, that was just the first one,” George continued, walking with Francesca to her office. He adjusted the straps on his backpack, pulling until they sat tight over his shoulders and bunched up his dress shirt. “I’m sure they’ll get faster at doing it as this continues. And as we build up more and more data, maybe we’ll figure out more about the shift.”
“It’d suck to be the poor guy who has to look at all those pictures.”
“Aww, I’m sure someone’s already coding some kind of AI to look at the images for us.”
Francesca wasn’t sure that would be any faster or cheaper, or even more effective. “Well, not much we can do until they take more pictures, huh. Hopefully this all ends before then.” She waved George off at her office door and watched for a moment as he descended into the stairwell. Then, with a yawn that stretched her whole face, she slumped into her office and got to work.
---
Francesca, in her infinite wisdom, had forgotten to bring food to work. She rarely cooked. Why would she, mere blocks away from some of the tastiest Chinese food this side of the Pacific? But there were no longer snacks in the breakroom, and she hadn’t gotten her usual morning baked goods because, obviously, she went to work at two in the morning. So for the past four hours, she’d been stuck taking calls in her boring, lonely office while her stomach rebelled and rumbled and roiled in her gut.
It kind of hurt. Suddenly, she remembered that she hadn’t eaten real food since the tacos at that taqueria on Tuesday. She might have scrounged up a bagel once. Other than that, she’d basically only had hot cocoa and wine.
Well, as soon as Jon showed up to relieve her of duty, she could go find something. She’d passed a few shops from Chinatown on her walk. She’d find decent food.
Speaking of Jon. Where the hell was he? Francesca kept checking her phone, waiting for some update. Was he caught in traffic? Delayed train? She thought she’d be able to leave an hour ago. Her foot tapped incessantly on the carpet floor, and her computer hummed from the exertion of opening at least fifty megabytes worth of overhead imagery.
Maybe she should call him. He’d called her and been bothersome enough times. She had just reached out her hand, fingers brushing the sides of her phone case, when an email notification pinged from her computer. She glanced over.
Today’s aerial pictures were here. They’d really sped up since yesterday. Ignoring the phone, Francesca scooted back to her desktop and clicked the email, then through a series of links hopping through various city webpages, and then finally to the login client that let her see the pictures. She huffed as she typed in her password. There was always so much security around everything. What was the point when this same image was going to XYZ Maps anyway?
Eventually, the image loaded. Her computer fan kicked into high gear, whirring so loud it reminded Francesca of a motorboat. The whole picture spread across both of Francesca’s monitors and beyond, and she scrolled around it to see what she could. She found the vast green block of San Angelo Park, normally south of First and Second Hills, way over in central Gigport. The UCBF student union building, which Francesca only noticed because of its distinctive triangular plan, sat in XYZ Tower’s lot.
And then she noticed something unusual.

What week is it

The interior coast of San Angelo Bay looked oddly familiar in this picture–not just in its shoreline, but in the precise patchwork of browns and greys and greens that came from what people built there, from the places where people hadn’t built anything, and from the places where there once had been something.
Squinting, Francesca scooted forward in her seat. She hadn’t spent much time with the images from yesterday, so maybe she was fooling herself. She just had that little itch in her brain that pulled her eyes to certain spots of brown and rifled through years upon years of XYZ Maps’s satellite pictures.
Her nose was almost to the computer screen when a knock at the door shook her out of her concentration. She fell back in her chair, sending its plastic wheels into a groaning roll over the floor, and her mouse shot off somewhere into a corner of her desk. Her hands gripped the armrests, steadying her as she peered over her shoulder to see Jon in her doorway.
He blinked at her with wide eyes. “You okay there?”
Francesca coughed. “Yep. Just fine.”
Jon’s gaze flitted to her array of computer screens, and the muscles in his face twitched in a valiant effort to hide his confusion. Or amusement. Francesca could never really tell with him. “RIght then. Well, you’re free to head home now.”
“Uh-huh,” Francesca said, mind already wandering back to the aerial photos. She kicked her legs out, inching the chair away from her desk, her body on autopilot as she bent to pick up her backpack.
“By the way,” Jon started, still in the doorway. He’d crossed his arms to lean against the frame, his salt-and-pepper hair brushing the metal. “How was your research yesterday?”
Oh shoot. Francesca had forgotten all about that. She shouldn’t have had so much wine at the library. Honestly, she hardly even remembered what had happened at Wine and Twine. “It was fine,” she said, combining a communicative shrug and a hauling-her-backpack-on shrug into one uncomfortable movement. “I actually…”
She trailed off. Winona was one of the only colleagues that Francesca really talked to about Tim. If she had to explain the personal context of this situation to her boss, she’d be mortified. “One of my college buddies is a wizard?” she ended up saying. “I asked him for some contacts, but the professors he suggested kept pointing me right back to him. Uh. I don’t know how to like, ask him again, I guess. After all that.”
“It does get a little weird asking personal acquaintances about work stuff,” Jon said, nodding. “I can call him for you, if you’d like.”
Oh thank god. “Yes. Please. Um. He’s a consultant. He has a website for all his professional stuff? I’ll text you the link.”
“Sounds good.” Jon sent her off with a wave before disappearing into his Fancy Manager Office, and Francesca found herself alone in the dim natural light that managed to reach this part of the building. She gave her office door one last glance–her brain kept pushing her toward vague feelings of deja vu about those aerial pictures–and then reminded herself that her job right now was just to solve civil engineering problems. Her job was sewers. Her job was not solving the mess that was San Angelo Bay right now.
She let out a long breath, as if she could breathe out all the annoying thoughts about wizards and big magic with it, and pivoted to the staircase. She needed to get out of here. If she stayed any longer she’d start trying to solve problems again.
A minute later, she emerged from the stairwell exit into the Department of Public Utilties’ garbage and loading dock and immediately keeled over.
“Oh jesus!” she heaved a breath through her mouth, clapping a hand over her nose, and shot a look at the dumpsters. They were overflowing. The smell rippled off them like a tsunami. There probably hadn’t been garbage service here since Monday. Actually, Francesca wasn’t sure her own apartment building had had garbage service since Monday either. Maybe she should leave the janitors a bouquet just to give their noses a break.
She hurried back to the main street, far away from the stink, and tried to reorient herself without her phone. It had been a straight shot from home this morning, but she couldn’t remember if she needed to turn left or right, and the street looked different in the light of day. There were colors everywhere, and buildings that looked cold and grey at night turned white and bright at noon.
Craning her neck to see past a thin stream of pedestrians, Francesca looked both ways. To the left stood an unfamiliar regiment of apartment buildings and a movie theater. To the right were a mismatched collection of stores from various strip malls in the Bay Area. A faded green sign in Chinese caught her eye, and Francesca’s stomach rumbled. Right direction or not, Francesca needed food, and the comfort of Chinese food would make everything better.
She slipped between a handful of harried-looking businesspeople and past a mussed-up college student with a backpack the size of a horse, moving with an ease she’d never had when she went to lunch when all the buildings were in the right places. She didn’t bump into anyone. She didn’t trip trying to avoid bumping into anyone. The sun hit her whole body, warming her through her blouse in a way she only ever felt when she went to a park and sat in the open on purpose.
The green Chinese sign led her to a tiny hole-in-the-wall joint next to a market of dried goods–the kind of place where the owners piled dry plums and mushrooms directly on the tables. When she opened the door to the restaurant, and the bells on the frame jingled, her brain pulled up a memory of her last visit to China. She remembered stepping into a narrow staircase with dirty tile floors, surrounded by the clashing smells of the musty streets and the spicy cooking upstairs. She remembered her nai-nai calling out to her mom, yelling like she was annoyed, but obviously happy to see them.

It's been a week I guess

It had only been a few days since the first shift, and already this tiny piece of Chinatown made Francesca feel like she was coming home.
She climbed up the stairs, gaze catching on the mural of photographs and red-and-gold decor on the walls. At the top landing, the floor opened into a dumpy little dining room with a small handful of tables and chairs, with a cashier’s counter in one corner and an open wall to the kitchen behind that.
The whole room smelled like black pepper and ginger. It filled Francesca’s nose and suffused her lungs, and she felt her shoulders fall a few inches.
Someone called out from the kitchen in Mandarin, unintelligible over the clattering of metal utensils and the roar of a gas stove.
“Hao,” Francesca called back. She glanced around for a menu and found a loose collection of papers scattered over one of the tables. There was an English one in typo-ridden Times New Roman, which she immediately tossed to the side, and then a series of hand-written pages in Traditional Chinese. These people must have been in the US for a long time; they didn’t seem like they were making Taiwanese food.
She shuffled the papers around a few moments longer, but no amount of shuffling would turn up a menu in Simplified Chinese, so Francesca settled in a chair with the traditional version and tried her best. She recognized enough to know she’d stumbled across a Sichuan restaurant–almost everything here was loaded with peppers–but occasionally she stumbled over characters that denoted amounts of things, or confused herself looking at the characters for “duck” and “chicken.”
A few minutes later, a withered old man waddled out of the kitchen, feet sliding and scraping against the tile floor in a rhythm that immediately made Francesca think of her nai-nai. He stood behind the counter, trembling in that old-person way, his eyes half closed as he looked at her.
He sniffled. “Hai you ne?” His voice was like crackling paper.
Francesca had to hold the menu up to remember the words. She ordered something spicy over noodles, trying to sound natural while also focusing on her pronunciation. She didn’t have to do this often; usually she ordered the same things from the same ten or twelve restaurants. But she made it through, and the old man didn’t give her any weird looks, so she must have said everything okay.
“Deng yi xia,” the old man said, a whispering rumble, and then he shuffled back into the kitchen.
Francesca sat back down. She waited. She listened as the range hoods boomed and a heavy, cast-iron wok banged against an equally tough burner top. Her eyes wandered to the floor drains and the copious dirt surrounding them, and she ran the toe of her shoes along the tiles to see if she could pinpoint the way the floor was sloped.
And then her phone buzzed in her pocket.
She glanced into the kitchen, where the old man was slowly draining a pot of noodles, and then checked the phone screen. Tim was calling her.
Weird. Tim wasn’t a calling-people kind of guy. She called him, not the other way around. Frowning, she picked up, self-conscious about talking on the phone when she was about to get her food.
“Tim?” she said, as soon as the connection clicked. “Is something wrong?”
“I got a call from your boss?”
Oh. Haha. She probably should have warned him about that first. “Uh, yeah. Sorry, I should said something to you first. I just- both Chadha and Gotherd mentioned you? When I was chatting wit them? I didn’t want to talk to you in a professional capacity so… You know.”
She heard a long sigh on the other end. “What made you think I’d know more than them?”
Francesca made eye contact with the old man as he slowly inched his way back to the register, a plastic bag dangling from his gnarled hands. She stood, trying not to let the chair squeal on the floor. “I don’t know?” she told Tim. “Both professors implied you do, in fact, know more than them. I”-
She rushed over to hand the old man her debit card and shot him the most apologetic look she could muster. “Tim, you’d say something if you knew how to solve this, right? Or had leads?”
He was quiet.
Francesca got her card back and fumbled it somehow into her wallet, taking the bag and her food with a grateful smile. It smelled so good. Her nose was already congested from the smell of the spices, and her mouth watered. She scurried out, not looking at the decorations on the wall that had so entranced her before.
“Is it contract stuff?” she asked. “XYZ? One of the other companies you consult for?” Anything but him deliberately hiding something important from her.
“Yes,” Tim said, finally answering. “You know how those tech companies are. Even I can’t get away with talking about things under non-disclosure.”
“Even when the fate of the entire Bay Area is at stake?” Francesca asked, feeling a smile creep onto her face. Now she could return to familiar territory.
Tim laughed a little over the line, and her heart sighed. She hadn’t even noticed her pulse ratcheting up and up and up until it finally calmed back down. “Even when the fate of the national economy is at stake,” he replied.
“Oh, you know, I saw the weirdest thing yesterday,” Francesca said, eager to keep this going. She should have ordered extra portions of noodles to share. “I was… definitely drunk, but I saw Persy do some kind of aether-loved thing with just the weirdest magic circle?”
In the beat of silence that followed, she could imagine Tim raising an eyebrow, his interest piqued. Ever since their run-in at the Silver Sea, he’d been interested in what kind of magic the aether-loved could do.
“Really now? Aether-loved using magic circles.”
“Mhmm. But again, I was drunk.”
“Drunk you always has the best ideas,” Tim said. He was absolutely wrong. Drunk Francesca caused problems for everyone, which was unfortunate since she liked to think she solved problems most of the time, but she’d let him have this. “In fact, I think you might be on to something.”

It clicked while Francesca was on a call with a project engineer. The project engineer was some snot-nosed college grad from the most recent batch of college grads, and she had a voice like a steam whistle. The phone lines hated the frequency so much that Francesca could only pick out every other word–the rest were lost in the electrical fuzz.
“I’m so sorry,” Francesca said, desperate to get off the line. “But you’re probably going to have to use the force majeur clause in your contract.”
“We’ve already been claiming force majeur!” the project engineer cried. Or rather, Francesca thought she had said that. She’d just heard “We - bzzzz - us - bzzzz - farce - bzzz.”
The entire city was in force majeur mode. Welcome to the club. The project engineer wailed something about a faraway client in Canada who really didn’t care that the whole city here in America was going through a nightly upheaval. Francesca thought about the aerial photography of the San Angelo Bay.
She tapped a finger against her mouse, trying to tune out the constant, high-pitched buzzing, and slowly convinced herself to open up yesterday’s aerial photos.
“Look - bzzzt - please - bzzzz - the sup -”
Francesca sighed before the pictures even finished loading up. “Listen. You said this was a water line problem. Is it still happening, or are you just calling about the standing water now?”
For a blessedly long moment, the project engineer was silent. Then, in a tiny voice that didn’t break the electrical line’s frequency limits, she whispered, “It’s stopped.”
“Great,” Francesca replied. Her photos loaded on her computer screen finally. “Then it’s in your hands now. Have a nice day.” She hung up before the kid could say anything else.
Now she could finally get down to business. Francesca settled back into her chair, eyes glued to her screens. On one, she had yesterday’s aerial photos. The second monitor displayed an archival satellite picture from two years ago. And the third was a map of every industrial and brownfield site in San Angelo. She clicked and dragged and clicked and dragged, resizing and reorienting the pictures until she had them all in one file, one atop the other.
The result was disorienting to look at, honestly. The semi-transparent treetops that cluttered up San Angelo Park seemed to ebb between engulfing the scrambled blocks there now, and fading to nothing. Downtown was a blur. The coastal neighborhoods looked like strange, shifting squares that might be one thing in one second, and a different thing the next. Francesca wasn’t one for hallucinogenics, but she felt vaguely like she’d just eaten some.
The only spots that were safe to look at were the ocean and, as she’d suspected, the little orange squares that marked out brownfield sites.
But the Arthurs’ house had moved onto a brownfield site on Wednesday, and when Francesca eventually found the Wednesday aerial photo, it only took one look to know that those contaminated places had moved along with everything else that day.
So, obviously, something had happened.
Her brain went to the drunk quilting. She recalled Persy’s magic. She heard Tim’s voice in in head saying, “I think you might be on to something,” in that deep, interested way of his.
And then she snorted. That was stupid. Francesca was one young civil engineer, not a mastermind who could put forth the next great aether practice breakthrough. Her head turned automatically to Winona’s desk, where usually the other girl would ask what Francesca was laughing about, but her chair was empty.
Francesca’s shoulders drooped, and she hunched over. The office was so quiet. She wondered what Winona would say, if she was here to listen.
Francesca would say something like, “I just imagined myself as the next great wizarding genius.” And then Winona’s eyes would light up, both uplifting and teasing, and she’d spin around in her matching office chair and lean forward to rest her big, billowy sleeves on her knees.
“Oooh, the great Francesca Fang, forty-under-forty for wizardry? What’s your great idea?”
“Combined wizardry and aether-loved magic,” Francesca said aloud, into the empty room.
She fell back into the cushions of her chair, and they squeaked in protest. She tipped her head up to stare at the ceiling and blew a strand of hair from her face. “I’m going insane,” she whispered. Day four of this and she was already missing the company of other people. Francesca didn’t even like other people.
She needed a break. She opened up her old aether conduit- the one that forwarded calls to George -and fiddled with it to send calls to her own cell phone, then made sure it was connected to all the right places in the city hall phone system. Five minutes later, she was sliding her shoes back on her feet and slipping her phone into her pocket to head outside.
Today, Francesca had landed on the kind of luck one saw only in the Game of Life. When she’d been jolted awake at one am to see the glittering San Angelo Bay–and better than that, the white beaches of Belle Ferre–through her apartment window, she’d felt a little spark of joy in her cold, angry heart. When Jon had informed her that the Public Utilities office was also on a Belle Ferre beach, she’d been nearly overcome.
Not that being overcome meant anything. Francesca had been a little happy, was all.
The Department of Public Utilities’ grand staircase led directly onto a winding asphalt path littered with sand particles. Thin beach grass sprouted on either side, and every hundred feet or so, a rickety wooden boardwalk rose over the grass and deposited people onto the beach itself.
When Francesca had been in school, she’d avoided the beaches. Greek Row always took up the space with their parties and broken beer bottles and bonfires, and she’d been more of a lie-down-and-nap beachgoer, so it had never worked out. But this week, with the UCBF Greek system scattered across town, there would be no parties, no drunk college brats, and a whole, sandy beach open to real public enjoyment.
She stood on the end of one boardwalk and pried her shoes off, eyes peeled for any leftover sharp bits hidden in the sand, and then stepped out. Her feet squished down into that soft, gritty goodness. Her toes wiggled. The mid-morning light had been shining for just long enough to heat up the beach, and Francesca smiled as the warm granules shifted around her heels and ankles.

I really want to go to the beach

She had wasted her college years. She could have had four years of beach time, and she’d let a gaggle of wasted peers keep her from enjoying this place. Plenty of other students hung out here despite the Greek system kids. She should have visited more often.
Kicking up sand in her wake, Francesca trudged out to the water. She crossed a set of dog footprints alongside human ones, as well as an amalgamous mass of child prints around a dilapidated sandcastle. In the distance, she could still see the dog and person, running into the horizon.
Her feet pattered on the cool, wet sand, and then a few steps later, she was in the water. It lapped at her ankles, rising and falling as though the entire San Angelo bay was breathing. Francesca looked around again, making sure no one was watching, and then wriggled her whole body, kicking up a cloud underwater and making her feet sink. She smiled down at the water as it settled.
Haha. She had no feet.
Then her phone buzzed in her pocket, ruining the moment.
“Darn it,” she said, accepting the call with a quick slide of her thumb. “Francesca Fang, San Angelo Department of Public Utilities. Can you please tell me who’s speaking?”
“Girl do you not have my number saved?”
Francesca tried very very hard to not sound happy. “Winona. Hi.” Success!
“You don’t do you? I thought we had something!”
Francesca let the calming whisper of the bay take center stage in her mind. There was no good response to this line of questioning.
“Whatever, whatever. It’s not like we’ve been sharing an office for over a year. Anyway, I did have like, a serious thing.”
Sadly, Francesca turned around and headed back to the boardwalk. She’d have to come back after work. Sand clung to her wet feet as she dragged herself out of the water, covering her toes and climbing up her ankles the further she walked. Every grain of sand was a tiny hand trying to pull her back to the bay.
“So I was chatting with the structural engineers for that one project, you know? On Monday?”
Francesca racked her brain. “With the aether conduits on the beams?” Monday had been an entire year ago.
“Yes!” Winona’s voice crackled and buzzed as she shouted. “Anyway, we were talking, and I kind of asked around about, you know, who was their wizard, and what did the circles do, and so on and so forth, and I was supposed to meet the wizard today.”
Oh no. Francesca could see where this was going. “Really?” she said.
“Yeah, keyword being ‘supposed to’.” Winona let out a sigh so loud the phone speakers went fuzzy with the effort of keeping up. “We were gonna meet at the designers’ office, but I’m at like, the very north end of Gigport today, and their office is in Belle Ferre!”
Francesca made it to the boardwalk. Her sandy feet crunched and scraped against the wood as she climbed the steps and sat down to clean up. “You guys can’t reschedule?”
“He’s a wizard! I could barely get this appointment at all, and even if we do reschedule, we might be at opposite corners of the bay again. You’re in Belle Ferre today right? Can’t you go?”
She had duties. Francesca and Winona weren’t even technically on the same team, so they couldn’t cover for each other. “What time?” she asked, wiping a long stripe of sand off the soles of her feet.
“Noon! Working lunch, you know.”
Francesca picked between her toes and let out an unconvinced chuckle. “You just wanted to expense your food, didn’t you?”
“And I would have gotten away with it, too. Alas.”
Well, noon would work. Someone would come to relieve Francesca of duty by then, so she wouldn’t even have to bother Jon about it. She tugged her shoes on, balancing the phone on one shoulder, as she replied. “Fine. I’ll go. Email me the address.”
Winona squealed, bursting Francesca’s eardrums, and she could just see the other girl’s victorious face and ostentatious arm gestures. “Sweet! Thank you thank you. You’re the best.”
“You owe me.”
“I’ll take you to my favorite taqueria as soon as I can,” Win promised. “Cross my heart.”
Francesca’s brain pulled up the tantalizing smell of el pastor at that place she’d visited on Tuesday. She wondered how the stranger who took her there was doing today. How they’d been doing in the past week. Her stomach gurgled low in her gut, crying in fond memory of acidic pineapple and spicy red chili peppers. “I’ll hold you to that,” she said.
“Cool, well. I’ll forward you the meeting info. Thanks Cheska!”
“Uh-huh,” Francesca said. Her socks were full of sand, but she was probably stuck that way for the rest of the day, so she headed back into the office anyway, letting the discomfort keep her from feeling remorse. There would be no after-work beach stroll now. She might never make it back to this beach again.
Before she opened the office doors, Francesca took one last look out at the beach. The white sand sparkled in the morning light, glittering like white gold against a sea of sapphires. She saw the runner and their dog heading back, new tracks in their wake, their bodies in shadow.
She scrolled through her contacts to pull up Jon’s number and hit the call button. The salt air tickled her nose, a siren call, but she resisted. She stepped into the cool, dark stairwell, with its echoey acoustics and exposed fire sprinkler pipes, and waited for the call to connect.
“Francesca?” Jon answered, sounding a little bleary. “Did you need anything?”
“Yeah, uh. I have a meeting with a wizard at noon. Can you make sure I’m off duty by then?” Her footsteps were like heartbeats, thudding in her mind as she climbed back up to the office floor.
“Oh! Oh, good. I’m so glad you’re following up on this some more. I can’t wait to hear what you find out.”
Wow. Jon sounded impressed. Francesca didn’t usually get that kind of response from him. Too bad she hadn’t actually been the one to take initiative. “It was Winona’s idea, actually,” she admitted. She glanced down and noticed a trail of sand left behind from her shoes. “But uh, yeah. I’ll keep you informed.”

... I don't know what happened this week.

So apparently, Winona’s wizard contact was Melvin Grace. Melvin Grace, the bane of Francesca’s existence. Melvin Grace, who she’d never met, but heard about every waking moment during university. Melvin Grace, whose angelic, smiling photograph beamed down upon all lesser mortals from the ‘esteemed alumni’ wall in the UCBF College of Engineering faculty office.
“My goodness!” he said, a dazzling smile lighting up his whole face. “I thought your name sounded familiar. It’s so nice to put a face to the name, Francesca. I heard so much about you from our old professors.”
“Nice to meet you too,” Francesca replied, reaching out to shake his hand out of pure obligation. She tried her best to smile back, and then caught herself grimacing in the office windows. “They spoke highly of you as well.”
Melvin Grace blushed like a ripped, six-foot-tall cherub and rubbed the back of his neck with pretty, perfectly proportioned fingers. “Ah, well. I’m sure I don’t deserve all of it. Here, why don’t we go in? There’s a coffee shop on the first floor of the building.” And then, because he couldn’t be more infuriately elegant, he held the door open.
They ordered coffee. Melvin Grace paid by extending his very long, very pretty arm past Francesca when she went to pull out her wallet, and whatever face he made caused the barista to blush so red Francesca could see it despite his well-tanned skin.
She had hoped never to meet, or speak to, or even see Melvin Grace in the flesh. If Francesca could have one wish from her university experience, actually, it would have been to erase him from existence. And it wasn’t his attitude that made her think so, even though it irked her, a little. It wasn’t his perfect blonde hair or perfect face or perfect anything.
“So,” Melvin said, reaching past her to grab both their drinks when the barista nudged them across the drink counter, “I heard you tied up all the loose ends on my senior thesis.”
Ah. There it was. Francesca’s shoulders tensed as she peered up at him. His perfect, non-threatening smile felt like a thin layer of chiffon fabric over seething, rotten jealousy.
“It was mostly Tim,” Francesca muttered.
“Oh, Fran. You know full well”-
“Francesca,” she corrected.
Melvin’s heavenly brown eyes narrowed, but the smile somehow stayed perfectly in place. “Francesca. My apologies.” He took a long, beautiful sip of his coffee–light roast, black–and gazed contemplatively into the swirls of residual bubbles from the brewing process. “You and I both know Tim only got where he is because of you.”
“No,” Francesca said. “He didn’t. He really is that good. I just… you know. Stood there.”
“He’s ambitious. That isn’t the same as what we have.”
Pursing her lips, Francesca grabbed a stirring stick and a packet of sugar. She ripped the little paper envelope open and shook its contents out like she was killing something inside of it. “And what, exactly, do we have? I came here to help Winona and have a nice conversation about conduit circles in buildings,” she hissed, “not to talk crap about my friend. So we do what I came to do, or I can leave.”
“He really has you under his thumb, doesn’t he?”
Francesca eyed Melvin’s pristine, starched shirt. Her coffee would ruin it completely. She could probably pull off a convincing enough stumble, if she wanted to.
Instead, she sighed and turned to the door. “I’m leaving.”
He almost let her. Francesca felt more than saw as he straightened, tipping his chin up in condescension. And then something caught his eye and he reached out, catching her arm to hold her back.
“Wait. Are those conduit circles in your glasses?”
Damn. THe circles were tiny. How did he even see them? “None of your business,” Francesca spat. “Now let me go!”
His face was suddenly too close to hers. One stupidly nice hand rose up into her periphery, and Francesca flinched back.
“I’ve never seen a pattern like this,” he muttered, looking horribly handsome in his consternation. “What do they do?”
Finally, Francesca wrenched herself away. “What is your problem?” she asked. She felt too loud. She felt eyes on her. Everyone in this office lobby was watching her yell at the most perfect man alive, and she was just some rando substitute. She wasn’t even supposed to be here. “I’m not you, and I’m not your second-coming or whatever people said I was. And you can’t just touch me.”
Instead of admitting defeat, Melvin pinned her with a gaze so heavy and angry that Francesca shuddered just keeping herself upright. She hated him. She hated the entire idea of him. He stood there, all tall and blonde and All-American handsome, looking down his nose at her because she’d failed to live up to the ridiculous expectation he set just by existing a few years earlier than she had.
His stupid, perfect mouth curled in a sneer. “No, you’re not me,” he said, and Francesca bristled at the warm, insidious disappointment in his voice. He was like the grown-up, dude version of a Mean Girl, and his smile taunted her. “You’re just Francesca Fang.”
It was exactly the thing she told herself over and over again, but for some reason, when Melvin said it, Francesca hurt inside. She was just Francesca Fang. She was just a civil engineer. She hadn’t managed to get that second major like Melvin had. She hadn’t even gotten the Wizardry minor. Her heart hurt, and her head hurt thinking about a retort, and her whole body ached with the tight, angry tensing of muscles she rarely used.
Melvin’s stare finally shifted. His smile widened. “You know, if you keep insisting that you’re nothing, people are going to think you’re covering something up.”
Francesca snorted. She took a step toward the doors, ready to be out of here. “What does that even mean?”
“I know you’re capable of magic others are not, Ms. Fang. I don’t know how you pulled it off, because you really aren’t as good as I am. But I know it’s true.”
She didn’t like the tone in his voice. Francesca stood close enough to the doors that they’d automatically slid open, letting in all the outside air, but she did not leave.
“You work for the city, and you have magic no wizard or aether-loved has replicated yet. If anyone could cause the entire San Angelo bay to shift every night, don’t you think you’d be a good suspect? All I have to do is collect decent evidence.”
Horrified, Francesca touched the conduit circles on her glasses. “What? That’s. But I’m just”-
Melvin smiled, his lips cutting a thin line across his face. His cheeks lifted, curling his eyes into smug crescents. “Oh, Fran. We are all just-something.”

Lol I went to a ballroom competition and SLAYED and that's why I'm cutting it so close this week

By some unholy stroke of bad luck, Francesca and Tim had to eat at a Denny’s for Sunday brunch.
There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with Denny’s. It was cheap, and fine, and this particular location had clean floors and well-washed tables and booth cushions that weren’t torn with age. Denny’s tasted as Denny’s always tasted.
But Francesca had managed to avoid going into any Classic American Diner chains since graduating college and moving into San Angelo proper, and now her streak was broken.
She sighed over her milquetoast french toast, eyeing Tim’s still-mediocre-but-also-superior country fried steak, and then slowly drew her gaze up to the man himself. He was dressed down today–appropriately casual for their tragic Denny’s brunch–in a steel grey UCBF hoodie that swam over his torso. His hair clearly had not been combed since yesterday, and it had that slight day-old-hair-oils sheen to it that somehow made the entire tousled effect look one step cooler. She hated it.
“Something on my face?” Tim asked, a bite of gravy-smothered hashbrowns halfway to his mouth.
There was, in fact, a spot of white on his chin. Rolling her eyes, Francesca picked up her napkin and reached across the table, scrubbing him like a disappointed mother cat. Then she sat back down and kept frowning at him.
“You’re still looking at me.” Tim gulped down a few more bites of hashbrown and then met Francesca’s eyes. His lips curved in an amused smile, and his eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “Seriously, Cheska. What’s up?”
Francesca was supposed to ask about Melvin Grace. She was supposed to ask if he and Tim had ever really met in person, or if Tim had just used Grace’s thesis as a starting point for his own. She was supposed to ask why Melvin had such a problem with the two of them. He was obviously an asshole. Nothing he said about Tim’s research or Francesca’s part in it could ever be true.
“Do you have a copy of your thesis anywhere?” she blurted out. “Or is it on Jstor or the department website or something?”
Tim blinked at her, frozen in place with his knife and fork hovering over his steak. A thousand regrets roared to life in Francesca’s head. She was a coward! Melvin was an asshole, so it shouldn’t feel weird to ask about him. And now Tim was just staring at her, and she’d probably weirded him out, and would some higher power just please smite her now?
Then his shoulders relaxed, and Tim resumed cutting his breakfast, a disbelieving smile on his face. “Where’s this coming from? You’ve never been interested in my research before.”
Scrambling for something to say, Francesca pushed a giant wad of french toast into her mouth. The strawberry sauce hit her tongue in a wave of artificial sugar, and the bread itself melted into a soggy heap. She swallowed and waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, you know. Just had some trouble with my office phone redirect. Now that we’re on shifts, I can’t really have it sending calls to other people, so I wanted to change it, but I forgot how we set it up.”
Wow. That lie sounded so smooth. But no matter how easily it slipped from her mouth, Francesca couldn’t stop herself from looking anywhere but at Tim.
Thankfully, Tim would never doubt her. He considered her question for a moment, bringing a hand to his chin, and then his whole face lit up when he remembered. “My thesis should be on the department website still, yes. I got some faculty recognition for it, so they’re not going to take it down any time soon.”
“Nice.”
“I could always fix your conduit circle for you, though,” Tim added, winking.
Well, now that Francesca was a liar, she wasn’t letting him anywhere near her conduit circles. She snatched up her napkin and attacked Tim’s face with it, snickering as she smeared gravy onto one cheek. “No way. That’s public computer infrastructure there.”
Tim just laughed at that, and his bright handsomely scratched tenor filled the restaurant. “Like that’s ever stopped you.”
“Unlike you, I’m a public employee. I wouldn’t try to hack XYZ or something.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, Tim’s entire being turned as pink as the strawberry sauce on Francesca’s toast. Now he was the one who couldn’t meet her eyes. A curling mix between smile and grimace inched across his chin, and he ditched his utensils to rub at his cheeks and his neck and run a few fingers through his messy hair.
Francesca leaned way across the table. “Did you actually?” she whispered.
“No.” It came out as a squeak.
Francesca kept leaning. Her hair dangled dangerously close to the gravy on Tim’s country fried steak.
“I didn’t technically hack XYZ,” Tim hissed. “Look. It was just- I changed the search page doodle one time. Just to see if I could. But I do contract work for them, so I didn’t hack hack it, you know?”
“Ok, fine. You didn’t hack XYZ.” Francesca sat back in her seat and picked at her toast. “You phished them.”
“Oh my god.”
“What?” Francesca asked, pasting on her best blank, no-nonsense face. “You pretended to be someone important and got login credentials that gave you access to things one normally wouldn’t have. That’s straight out of the cyber security training at city hall.”
It was a sad thing to see a grown man pout over being teased, but Tim did it. The pink of his face heightened to a full, rouge blush, and his eyebrows dipped in consternation. “I didn’t pretend! I had a contract with them.”
“Is there any difference?” Try as she might, Francesca couldn’t hold it in. Her serious mask broke, and she shuddered over her french toast in silent laughter. She met Tim’s gaze, feeling wicked and mischievous and capable, and laughed harder.
“Ohhh, I see how it is.” Tim nabbed a strawberry off her plate and swept it into his mouth before she could object. “We’re not having a serious wizardry conversation. You’re just making fun of me.”
Haha, Francesca thought. She could do both. This was definitely both. Now she just had to find Tim’s thesis.