They stood in the hall of Anna’s apartment, with her back against the heavy front door. Graham took some steps into the dark of the living room, moving decisively towards one side, the one with the couch. He cleared the whole space in maybe four or five strides.
“You wanna smoke?”
The only reply Anna got was the sound of her couch sliding an inch across the tile. She didn’t have those fancy blackout curtains delivered yet– right now, it was just barely bright enough to see that his eyes were closed, the light a bit bluer through the Venetians. Tiny glowing dots dappled his chest, marching up in a column, bending slightly with the creases of his polo, illuminating the white of his left eye. He sunk into her couch.
“…Jesus, that’s nice.”
“…are you gonna at least take your jacket off?”
“mmmmI’m good. Not after work.”
“You’re just gonna pass out on my couch?”
“I want to. No, I’m just… recalibrating. Gimme a coffee and I’ll be fine.”
“Hmm.”
Graham ended up napping for three hours. With him on the couch, there was nowhere else to sit, so Anna pushed out her table and sat on the carpet, pirating an anime older than herself on the flatscreen. She tossed a blanket over him and sipped his frigid coffee.
For a few minutes, it was quiet, just she and him. Graham breathed real steady– in and out, that cavernous chest moving slowly. If she couldn’t hear him, Anna could imagine him dead, honestly. Apparently she’d been looking long enough to lose the plot of her show. But then again, to be totally fair, it was hard to keep track of anything with subtitles if you stopped reading– no way Anna had stared for too long, right? She only tore her eyes away when gold glowed subtly at the border of her vision. It was Mel’s warm light painting the walls over her kitchen countertops, illuminating the silhouette of this morning’s cereal bowl, demanding her attention. Anna’s nostrils flared.
The next thing she knew she was looking up at a sequence of pipes, water mains, sewers, and powerlines in the ceiling, admiring how Sabretech protruded into the mess of steel and wires. It was the biggest tower in Moroe— one of the only pillars that remained in a single company’s control after all this time, twenty-something years after this whole place was built, and about ten after everyone had given up on the concept of a megacity. You could still get in the elevator and move up all one hundred and eleven floors, all with one payment. Up five or six floors up, a pair of LED headlights on the I-45 painted a section of the wall, a few sets of golden curtains strongly visible in the windows. That must have been the new guy’s office. Anna could picture it strongly– the sound of a car bumping industrial through a paper-thin wall, how the floors must have vibrated when a pickup truck on stilts passed too close. She chuckled to herself. Her phone buzzed on her thigh.
“Anna. It’s four.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah. Where are you?”
She turned her head and elbow quickly, finding a parking lot and Sabre’s entryway, just behind her. Her car was holding her up, elbows pressed against the window. “Uhh. I’m at work?”
“Well, the
“Yeah.” She must’ve– after all, she was standing right next to her car, and the keys were right in her pocket. Something justled around on the other side of the screen. Judging by the sound of a keyboard and the occasional click of a mouse, Anna surmised that she was on a desk right now, likely on speakerphone.
“Are you at the usual lot?”
“I… yes. Yes.”
Keys were mashed behind the phone. Anna shifted it to the other ear, glancing around in the meantime to make sure she wasn’t lying. She cocked her head to read a yellow number 061 painted on the adjacent park. It looked like her spot, although Anna didn't come here enough to have one reserved just for her... this was one of the abandoned private lots, something Sabre had built to be for the office workers when its ambitions were much higher. Nowadays no one minded if you parked here.
“Found you. You want the route?”
“Mm. Yeah. Please.”
“Alright. Hurry back.”
She opened the door to her car, moving her phone off her ear so she could connect it to the soundsystem.
In most spots of the city, it was hard to tell when you had your headlights off. Moroe was never really dark, at least not enough for it to matter, not even at four in the morning. Anna’s wheels wooshed beneath the floor. Only one of her hands gripped the wheel, the other drumming on her thigh, her eyes straight ahead.
“Mel?”
“Yeah?”
“He’s still asleep?”
“Oh, totally. Are you okay? You’re being quiet.”
“I… think I’m just tired.”
“Don’t crash.”
For the remaining few highway minutes, Anna just drove in silence, drumming all five fingers in sequence on the center console. She pulled into the parking garage and took her reserved spot, all the way up on the roof, and got out towards one of four apartment complexes stacked haphazardly around it. Her gaze scaled the floors. The windows housed all kinds of glowing colors, green, red, blue, pink... Anna had this lingering feeling that eyes were on her, as if she might see Graham leaning against one of the glass panes up there, but she couldn’t even see that floor all the way up there from here. Her den was in the tallest tower– up some ten or twenty flights of stairs, high enough up to get some kind of natural light, if someone ever decided to open up her curtains. But right now the night sky lurked beyond a feet thick layer of concrete. Shivering a little, Anna started to climb up the metal staircase in twos, her hair blown past her shoulders by the wind.
Huh?
Wait. Where was her hat? Slowly, her head turned, looking past the connecting walkway and back down at her car, squinting like her eyes might pierce through the steel roof. She couldn’t recall if she’d worn it into Sabre… it was probably still inside.
“Mel?” She had to yell over a passing gust. It smelled like plastic in a campfire. “You got my hat, girl?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s in the kitchen.”
“Whew…”
After leaning into the entry, and clicking the heels of her shoes against the tile long enough to slip them off before she got home, she finally got to take her keys out of her pocket and step in. The lock itself was totally illegal, or at least a hundred and ten percent against the renter’s policy, but Anna flat out refused to leave her entire life under the protection of an electronic lock, no matter how complex or high-tech the firewall was. Her lock was cheap and probably pretty fragile, but house thieves around here didn’t really bother to carry around lockpicks anyway.