Aftermath: 36 - Chimes at Midnight (2015)

“I’ll buy you beer for the rest of my life,” Lightcap promises him.

Chapter warnings: Realistic depictions of neurological, physical, and bureaucratic trauma. War. Grief. Death. Mental illness. Regular illness.

Text iteration: Midnight.

Additional notes: None.

2015 (Thirty-six – Chimes at Midnight)

“Debaser” becomes “Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide.” 

It’s a terrible thing to have favorites. 

Lightcap has always had favorites. Favorite clothes, favorite books, favorite movies, favorite living scientists, favorite dead scientists, favorite actors, favorite writers, favorite singers, favorite numbers, favorite colors, favorite words, favorite foods, favorite days of the week, favorite months of the year, favorite books in the Bible, favorite stories in the Apocrypha, favorite favorite favorite favorite favorites. Favorite people. She can’t help it. She tries not to let it show.

She does. A bad. Job. At this.

One two three four. She grits her teeth and torques a wrench, looking up at the outer casing she’s prying free for His Majesty over there, who feels the need to stare into the nest of circuitry coiled inside Rig 3.5. He’s communing with it like a protagonist in a William Gibson novel, exuding an aura of Academic Prowess that’s getting all over the floor. He’s not well liked. He’s split K-Science into a For Faction and an Against Faction, and none of the military personnel like him at all. Maybe it’s the hair. Maybe it’s the arrogance. Maybe it’s that there’s something Napoleonic about him, and he makes them nervous. Maybe it’s that he’s annoying as shit. 

Of course, he’s her favorite. Of course he is. Instantly. Five seconds into the first fight he ever picks with her, her soul seals his pattern down.

Geiszler. Who the hell gets himself named “Newton” and styles himself “Newt?” Ugh, talk about trying to divorce the medium from the message. She loves it. He’s complicated. She can tell. She can also tell she doesn’t scare him and that’s maybe her favorite thing about him.

He’s trouble. Right here in River City. With a capital T. 

“Rock ‘N’ Roll Suicide” becomes “Real Wild Child.”

“Mmm hmm,” Geislzer says, like Rig 3.5 just spoke to him, like he’s agreeing with something it said. Something she said. Something she did when she laid down those neuromechanical tracts he thinks he can optimize. What? Lightcap wants to hiss at him. But she doesn’t. That’s what Serge would advise if he were here. Let it ride, Cait, let it ride. She can almost hear him in her head. “Not bad, Lightcap,” Geiszler says. 

Not bad, Lightcap, Lightcap thinks. Not bad comma Lightcap, she thinks again, upping the irony in the numerator and not taking a look at the denominator, whatever it is that’s below that bottom line. Way to advance the field of robotics twenty years in ten months. Way to raise science to a Lovecraftian exponent. “You think you could have done better?” she asks with a pretty powdered poison glaze atop a sticky-sweet tone.

“Yes,” he says, like a Blazingly Arrogant Fuck. “The whole thing has been a little more conventional than I really figured you for—”

Correction. He is not Lightcap’s favorite. He will in fact be lucky to last the week. Because there’s arrogance and then there’s arrogance, and while she can tolerate the former, the latter implies blind stupidity and she’s already opened her mouth and started to inhale in preparation of telling him just that when he says:

“—but Iggy Pop is a nice touch.”

Wellllllllllllllll that was a close one. She takes a whole set of contiguous seconds to reframe her thoughts from Rig to Playlist. Of course Geiszler likes Iggy Pop. He’s got a punk sensibility about him, with maybe a little less intensity and a little more detailing and boots that are cognizant of just how cool they are and are, therefore, not cool, but then paradoxically, become a little bit cool again. Plus there’s the hair.

“A little before my time,” Geiszler continues, a jeweler’s screwdriver between his teeth, “a little bit before your time, but, I’m not sure the musical past really exists. There are things that are new, and things that aren’t new. We’re moving toward a two category system. Mozart and Nirvana and everything else that’s been digitally shelved, and then the stuff transitioning from brain to life to shelf. That’s all there will ever be anymore. Iggy Pop, though. Ten out of ten. I love that guy. I love to love that guy.”

Correction. He is Lightcap’s favorite. But he’s also a pretentious snot.

“Real Wild Child” becomes “Heliolatry” and Lightcap can’t help it. She stops unbolting the panel, levers herself up on one elbow and watches his face. He looks vaguely amused as the song starts, but that’s it. 

She feels a powerful wave of disappointment, which is stupid. The guy’s a Rivers Cuomoesque Hipster Nerd. It’s probably the pinnacle of his cultural achievement to be able to recognize Iggy Pop. Lightcap sighs. One can’t have everything. She hooks the wrench onto the bolt above her and cranks it around. 

“Ah,” Geiszler says at just the right moment, “Wittgenstein. That takes me back. You really don’t have to flatter me so egregiously, Lightcap. I have been known to work for beer alone.” 

“Shut up.” Lightcap nearly has the panel free. “This band is awesome. I doubt you’ve even heard of any of the bands I listen to. I’m sure your musical taste peaks and dies at Green Day.” That assessment is probably technically unfair, and also definitely belied by the appreciation for Iggy Pop the guy just now expressed, but Lightcap has her own front to establish and maintain. There’s no way this asshole’s musical taste is better than hers. She found this band. 

“I am,” Geiszler begins, dry as somebody’s celebratory champagne, “actually embarrassed for you right now, Lightcap. Do you have any idea who fronted this band?”

“Do you?” She levers herself up on one elbow, unable to hide the interest in her voice, barely able to stop the waterfall of the story, the shitty computer that had been Jasper’s, the CD she’d found, the ways and years she’d searched—

“Yes.” Geiszler, exasperated, doesn’t look away from the applied neuromechanics he’s wrist-deep in. “Normally I wouldn’t do this, but you deserve it. Green Day. Is that supposed to be an insult? I happen to like Green Day, okay? Let’s just leave pop punk out of this.”

“You—” Lightcap upshifts into high trash-talking gear, upshifting hard, but the verse ends and Geiszler spits the screwdriver out of his mouth and without even looking at her, like a dick, begins to sing the chorus. At first she just thinks he knows the song really well, but then, after a few words, he starts nailing it. Nailing it, nailing it. Nailing it so hard that he’s doubling the singer to the point she can’t tell them apart. 

At this point it occurs to Lightcap that it might have been Geiszler who fronted The Supercos.

“Nooooo,” she breathes.

But he starts on the verse and she’s sure. He’s not even looking at her, which is too bad for him because she’s pretty sure she doesn’t wear this expression very often, perhaps never, in fact. She propels herself out from under the panel with both hands, stands up, walks over to him, drops into a crouch, and grabs him by his shirt to drag him from beneath her circuit board.

“Ugh,” he says. “Lightcap.”

“You ASSHOLE.” She screams right in his face.

“You just HIT ME WITH A WRENCH,” he shouts right back at her, looking, oops, pretty pissed.

She drops her wrench, which she certainly did not hit him with; she just forgot to set it down before she grabbed his shirt—he’s fine. “You’re fine,” she tells him, dragging him to his feet, dusting him off, grabbing his hand, and pulling him towards the door.

“Yeah.” He rubs his chest and looks amused, aggrieved, suspicious, sympathetic, and anxious all at once. “What are you—”

“Geiszler,” she explains, “I need a break, you need a break, and I owe you a beer. I owe you one beer plus the alcoholic interest on that beer continuously compounded over a period of five years.”

“You—what?” He trips over the doorframe, then catches hold of it and uses it as an anchor, which stops her forward drag. “We’re kind of in the middle of something—”

“But we’re always in the middle of something.” Lightcap lets his hand go, practically, oh God, practically about to cry, “and I love your band.” She hates how pathetic her voice sounds.

They stare at each other.

She did this SO badly. Ugh. She’s the basement garbage of human beingness.  

“Oh.” Geiszler softens, giving up his hold on the door with the air of a guy who’s getting it and who doesn’t want to see her cry. He’s trying to catch his breath. How hard did she hit him with that wrench? Fuck. 

“Please come get a beer with me,” she says, and she hates how sad she sounds, she hates it, because she is sad. She’s so fucking sad. In this moment, her loneliness cuts at her soul like unswept broken glass. Jasper couldn’t love her. Serge had to share her brain to learn how to treat her like a person. Tendo tolerates her. Gottlieb hates her. She tries to harden herself against Geiszler before he can break her heart, because, fuck, all of a sudden he’s this guy who makes music she loves. Fuck him. Fuck him physically nine point eight meters per second per second. Fuck him chemically, six point oh two times ten to the twenty-third. Fuck him biologically, 3 billion base pairs worth. How dare he. 

“A beer?” Geiszler repeats, like a guy who has never been invited out for a beer before, even though that’s certainly not true; Lightcap is sure that people have been buying him alcohol for the majority of his life. Out of necessity. Because he’s ridiculously young. “A beer? One? Do you know how compound interest works, Lightcap?”

“I’ll buy you beer for the rest of my life,” she promises him.

“I won’t hold you to that,” he says, and God, yes, starts to walk in the direction of the exit.

They’re doing this!

She jogs a few steps to catch up, trying not to feel too elated. Because that would be weird.

“So, is this a usual thing for you?” Geiszler shoves his hands in his pockets.

“Not really, no,” Lightcap says. “You’re special, if that’s what you’re asking. Usually I only drink with coworkers when people die. Or at parties. Parties and funerals, basically. Which is not to say I don’t usually drink. Because I do. But you know that already.”

“The routine will save your life,” Geiszler says, and he says it perfectly, each word balanced right on the edge of sincerity and irony, exactly the way she’d said it to him ten days ago. Not even Serge could have said it better. 

“Don’t question it,” she replies, like the chimes at midnight.

He smiles at her. Not a derisive flash of teeth, not a grin of one-upsmanship, but something real and uncertain, like he thinks she’s already divined a secret he hasn’t yet told her. And that, right there, has got to be the thing Gottlieb loves. The apple in the Apple Turnover of Self. Maybe. Maybe not. She shouldn’t jump to conclusions. She’s known him, what? A month? That’s nothing.

She drives. 

She drives through winter-dark streets, and, question after question, she pulls his story from him in the early Alaskan night: how his mom the famous opera singer had met his dad the gifted sound engineer when their tours collided in Cabo San Lucas, how they’d corresponded for years, how they’d met again and again in different cities on different continents, how they’d each been married to other people, how they’d given him up, how he’d been raised by his father’s brother until he was eight. How he’d fit so poorly with German public education in ways she recognizes from her own life. How his mother had carved him an unconventional and flashy path the heart of American academia until he was old enough to carve it himself. How he’d never had a peer group until he’d taught himself guitar and started a band at fifteen. How they’d played casually for years before recording Superconduction. How it had been a hobby, how amateur CDs handed out at open mic nights had turned into a semi-professional recording and a scant and poorly maintained internet presence. How the bassist of the band had died in San Francisco from exposure to Kaiju Blue. How none of the songs on the final EP had ever been played live.  

All this, she gets in little self-contained pieces strung together into a linear narrative he’s maybe never parted with before, because he can’t quite shake the surprised look on his face beneath the shifting, too-cool-for-school façade he’s trying to hold up. He keeps trying to break in, to turn things around in the opposite direction, to ask her about herself until she says, “God, Geiszler, don’t ask me about my childhood, read my biography. Or if you want a short version, read The Economist article about me. No one knows anything about you because no one cares. Except for me. I care a lot. Do you still play? Do you talk to your band? What are the names of the other members. Do they live around here?”

“In Alaska?” Geiszler asks, like he’s struggling to converse with her the way other people learn a foreign language. “No.”

She wants to punch him in the face and give him a hug at the same time. She probably shouldn’t have told him no one cares about him. It’s definitely not true. Dr. Gottlieb seems to think about him 24/7/365. Lightcap can see why he would, especially if he knows about Geiszler’s band, which he obviously does; how could he not? He hates Geiszler’s guitar way too much not to know about his band. She could have found out who Geiszler was, in a Supercos sense, if she had just asked Gottlieb, but she never had, because the only things that Gottlieb listens to are Baroque Era fugues. 

Life is so insane. Monsters come out of the sea, and all along it’s been Gottlieb who’s known about the Supercos guy. 

“People do care about you,” she informs Geiszler.

“Nice recovery, Lightcap,” Geiszler says, all bitter-edged amusement, like it’s taken him this long to realize she’s not the best of communicators, like he’s plotting a topographic map of her skills and deficiencies, like he’s started a file on her to match the file on him she’s had going for days now and he’s already got a comparable map and an efficient algorithm to parse and add new data. This makes her nervous and so she counts off in little sets of four for just a few seconds, because she’s unsettled, he’s unsettled her, making new friends is hard because no one’s taken out their nail files to buff the right edges yet. She doesn’t know what kind of things one doesn’t say to Geiszler and he doesn’t yet know what kind of things one doesn’t say to her. 

But she thinks she’s unsettled him right back. She’s knocked him off whatever invisible high horse he’s been riding for a month—arguing with her at briefings, showing up on her dock, insisting that her rig is shit, that her interface is sloppy, refusing to take the green out of his hair, refusing to defer to the hierarchical conventions the military personnel insist on and that to her secret shame she loves, the way he’s unimpressed with Jasper’s measured take on life and science and life in science, the way he mercilessly provokes Gottlieb with a low-level slow burn that’s started looking really mutual and really bizarre to Lightcap. 

Maybe she should back off. 

She backs off. She spends whole sets of seconds in empty, waiting silence.

And Geiszler says nothing. In fact, he takes this conversational lull to douse himself in pure, hot, superior, molten poise. Then he lets it cool. Then he lets it set. 

Fucking hell shit, Lightcap sings to a wistful inner tune that more than a little bit resembles the opening of one of Geiszler’s own songs. Because she’s done the thing he’s doing a thousand times. A thousand times in a year. A week. A day. He doesn’t trust her intentions; and why should he? Already they’ve had verbal slashfests in the conference room, she’s dragged him into dying Jaegers and made him rescue little girls that don’t speak English, they’ve shouted at each other once a day about Rig 3. But he’d come to find her on her dock. 

He’s the only one who ever shouts back.

Fine. Okay. So she dumps out who she thinks she is into the car between them, gives him a polished version of Lightcap in One Minute that she’s said a hundred times in interviews, letting them pick and choose what they’ll ask her about—her science or her love life, OCD or sexy shoes. She finishes with “I guess it was a dick move to tell you to read my biography, but you have to understand kiddo, I’ve been trying to figure out who the heck you are for about five years and I don’t like me very much.”

“I get that,” he says, and unthaws enough that it’s not weird to walk into a shitty bar with him. This night isn’t going how she pictured; there’s no way for her to get him to see she’s not “half brilliant, half myth” as The New York Times had put it, glazing her in sugarfrost so sparkly they hope to make her a talisman that might stop the end of the world.

She’ll have to tell him the shittiest parts of it. The shittiest parts of all of it. 

Either he’ll understand and they’ll be friends or he won’t and she’ll regret this forever.

So after they’ve slid into a booth across from one another and they’ve ordered draft beers and they’ve argued about circuit diagrams for the obligatory seven minutes or so, Lightcap decides to start explaining it. The whole thing. When she’s ready, she leans forward and lets all her sincerity burn through her face.

“I love you,” is what she leads with. 

Geiszler freezes. 

Hellshit bitch wrenchgremlin, she thinks at herself, fuck it, fuck you, why did you say that? Why did you say that like that. This is terrible. This is a Grade A public relations disaster.

Geiszler can take it though. Not gracefully, because he’s staring at her like a cardsharp at an x-ray vision expo, but he’s not a delicate flower either, thank the LORD from who all blessings flow. He cocks his head, does a passable job controlling his expression, and rests interlaced fingers atop the scored table. 

“I’m gay,” he informs her, managing coolly hot or hotly cool, she’s not sure which. 

And, of course, he is gay, of course; it’s perfect. Thank God. Thank God from whom all blessings flow/Thank god all creatures here below! Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia. Lightcap stares at him, at a rare loss for words only because she’d been half a heartbeat away from explaining that she was not and never would be hitting on him, but now she feels she should say something supportive since he just came out to her, especially since he seems to have done it as a defensive conversational tactic.

Damn. She needs to fix this.

“Great!” She brings both hands down on the table and shelves ongoing thoughts in favor of total support. People have come out to her before and she never quite knows how to respond. Too much enthusiasm is weird. Too little enthusiasm is scary. “Me too!”

“Wait. Really?” Geiszler asks.

“Well, no,” Lightcap is forced to admit. “Sorry. I got overexcited.”

“Okay,” Geiszler says in slow motion. 

This is going really badly! Primarily, it’s going badly because she likes him so much in two separate contexts that were abruptly and dramatically fused and she’s doing a bad job communicating this to him in a way that’s casual and normal.

“Damn it,” Lightcap says. “I could’ve been gay—never mind. In the moment I just wanted you to feel like I didn’t feel like you were any different from me,” she explains. “Or I wasn’t any different from you.”

“That’s kinda nice, Lightcap,” Geiszler says.

“Well that was my intent,” Lightcap replies. “You’re really derailing me here, Geiszler.”

“I’m derailing you?”  He flashes a quick smile that reminds her of a really adorable but yet also terrifying barracuda searching out little conversational fish. 

Okay. This is good. They’re stumbling into friendly sparring. It’s awkward. It’s way more awkward than their fights about Rig 3 because they’re trying to be nice to each other and they’re not great at it.

“Yes.” Lightcap claws back her poise and smiles like they’re already splitting beers and braiding friendship bracelets. “Sometimes I need a few restarts.”

He nods at her like he gets it. Like he really gets it.

And fuckinghellshit man, she probably could fall in love with him, even though he’s too young for her and too short for her because she falls in love easily, it’s just who she is. She drags love behind her through spacetime like crepe paper streamers in the breeze: they snarl around a significant fraction of the humans she meets; they tear easily and hurt her. It’s stupid to be like this. Her brain is stupid but it will follow rules she gives it, so she will make a rule to not fall for Geiszler, it shouldn’t be too hard because he won’t be interested.

But they’ll be friends. She knows they will. They shouldn’t be, because she’s his boss, so she’ll fight it for as long as she can, which will be something like the next twenty seconds, but they’re going to be friends like dental cement and decaying teeth—it’ll hurt going in and it’ll stick for years and if it comes out it’ll be an absolute bitch of a repair job.

 “Let me start over and include some explanatory caveats. I wasn’t hitting on you. I know it kind of came out that way, but I’m your direct superior. I would not do that. I would literally not ever do that to anyone because there was a time I was on the wrong end of that dynamic and it was uniformly awful and that part doesn’t matter, the part that matters is that I wouldn’t ever do that to anyone. Ever. Ever ever.”

“I knew that,” Geiszler says, like a guy who definitely did not know that. 

“What I should have said is, ‘I fuckin love you, man’,” Lightcap amends, clenching a hand and pressing it to her sternum in a guy way, like Serge would do. “You get me. Or, that’s not right, that’s backwards. I get you. I love your band. I love it. I love it so much.”

“Great,” Geiszler says, pitching his voice up and deliberately copying Lightcap’s previous emphatic table slap and enthusiastic tone. “Me too.” As impressions go, it’s not bad.

“Shut up, dick,” Lightcap says, delighted, doing a great job dragging Geiszler straight from the Colleague Zone to the Friend Zone in the span of one evening. “I keep trying to have a moment with you and you keep ruining it with your cool guy irony. Now. Let me buy you beer after beer for the rest of the night while I ask you questions.”

“Only,” Geiszler says, “if you tell me your torrid Supercos groupie story.” 

“That was always the plan, babyface,” Lightcap tells him. “But it’s not so much torrid as it is sad.”

“All stories are sad if you follow them far enough,” Geiszler says, looking a little sad himself.

“I know that, you little demon,” Lightcap whispers, staring into her beer. She has the urge to tell him to take out his phone and record what she says so he can sell it after she dies; but it’s a strange, violent thought that doesn’t belong between friends, so she doesn’t speak it aloud.

“You actually don’t have to tell me anything, Lightcap,” he says. And yes. He is a demon. He’s an adorable monster whisperer. She wants him to live, specifically him, past the ending of the world. She’s decided. Just now.

Please, God, she prays. Let. Just let let let let. Allow. Please.

“I’m sorry I hit you with a wrench, for some definitions of the word ‘hit.’ I’m also sorry I dragged you out of the lab. I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to do that like that. Especially since I’m your boss.”

“If it helps,” Geiszler says, with a quick flash of teeth and a sip of his beer, “I don’t consider you my boss.”

“Ha,” Lightcap says dryly. “Don’t mention that to Hansen, please. I promised him I could keep you in line.”

“Someone needs to keep that guy in line.” Geiszler scans the bar like he’s looking for Hansen. Or for a fight to lose. 

“Hansen’s fine.” Lightcap points out. “Hansen’s great. Smart and reliable. Nothing not to like.” She pauses, then adds slyly, “You’re just jealous he drifted with Gottlieb.”

“Excuse me.” Geiszler tricks himself out with poise before he picks up his beer and sips it like English people sip tea. “But you can fuck right off with that theory.”

“Fucking right off.” Lightcap gives him a mock salute before leaning back in her seat and lifting her ankle to rest on her knee. “But, back to your band. My groupie story. Not all tough times are the same, you know? There’s the dark night of the world and the dark night of the soul. Sometimes they come together.”

“Hmm,” Geiszler says, evaluating. “Maybe. If by ‘dark night of the world’ you mean psychological or physical perturbation by external stressors and by ‘dark night of the soul’ you mean internally generated philosophical or neurochemical unrest then sure.”

“Ugh,” Lightcap says, delighted. “NERD.”

“And who are you?” Geiszler counters. “A long lost Brontë sister? Dark night of the soul. Come on. You were the one who coined the term ‘Ghost Drifting’ weren’t you. Don’t lie.”

“Yeah, I did. And it’s an awesome term, Geiszler. Everyone agrees.” 

“At least have the courtesy to turn your romantic impulses into acronyms. GHOST. Getting High Off Swapping Thoughts”

“Oh yeah,” Lightcap says dryly. “That sounds really professional.”

“Whatever. I was just buying myself time.”

“For what?”

“For this. Generated HyperOptical Synesthetic Transfer.”

“Shit, Geiszler, you little devil hellspawn, Fucking fuck right off and come back immediately; can I have that acronym if I put you on the paper?”

“Um, you can definitely have it, probably for free; I can’t see myself wanting to be associated with a paper on ‘ghost drifting’.” He makes little air quotes as he says it.  

“Stop distracting me. Do you want to hear the groupie story or not?”

“I do.”

“I’ve spent years trying to figure out who you were. Not to keep dragging my past love life into this, but when I broke up with my epic fail of a significant other, the only one I’ve ever had—if we don’t count Serge, and we probably shouldn’t, at least not yet—I ended up with a laptop that wasn’t mine. I’m not sure how it made its way into my stuff, but it had a CD inside it labeled Supercollision. How was I not going to see what was on that?”

“I get it,” Geiszler says with sympathy he can definitely afford.

“I know every song by heart. For years I have been trying to figure out where that CD came from. I actually contacted my ex to ask him but he didn’t know. Said it had probably been left there by one of his students. I almost emailed the entire Schoenfeld Lab but—”

Geiszler chokes on his beer.

Lightcap sighs. Right. Oops.

“Schoenfeld. Jasper Schoenfeld? You? Jasper Schoenfeld and you? Lightcap, he’s—”

“I know,” Lightcap sighs.

“He’s really old,” Geiszler says, appalled, wide green eyes, the eyebrow lift of you-could-do-better and God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth and Jesus Christ he is so young that for just a moment there Lightcap’s bones ache with it, they hurt and hurt deep deep down.

“What?”  Lightcap says. “He’s not old. Shut up. You’re a baby. Everyone seems old to you.”

“He’s old. He—”

“He was my PI,” Lightcap admits.

“Nooooooo.” Geiszler moans into the hands he’s pressed over his face. “Lightcap. No.”

“Weellllllllllll,” Lightcap begins, but stops when Geiszler drops his hands to reveal an expression that’s surprisingly—pissed? 

“That. Dick.” There’s real ire in his voice. Oh no, oh no. It hurts so bad to feel that hard, hasn’t anyone told him? Hasn’t anyone ever fucking told him that, this brilliant little monster? He’s in for worlds and worlds of pain. Enough to fill whatever cute corner of hell he hails from. 

“Newt,” Lightcap begins, “it was complicated.”

“Was it?” he says. “Was it really, Cait-Science?”

“Oooh, I like that nickname. Make it a thing.”

“Consider it done. Look. If I’m gonna be honest, I never liked Schoenfeld. I won’t say I had his number from the moment I met him, but you know what did occur to me? Instantly?”

“What?”

He takes his sweet time, drawing down his beer. Then he points at her like the drama queen he definitely is. “You,” he says, “were the brains and the heart of this whole thing. He’s just the permission slip you drag out whenever The Establishment comes calling.”

Lightcap laughs. She can’t help it and she can’t stop, because it’s such a forehand/backhand compliment/insult parity situation that she can’t with it, she can’t, especially because, “Oh my god,” she manages to get out around her laughter, “you’re so right.” It’s not fair, it ignores swaths of nuance, but at its core, he did nail it. Nailed it down.

Geiszler laughs too, egging her on, and all of a sudden one of the worst periods in Lightcap’s life has been reduced to a footnote, an inside joke, a permission slip pasted on a wall in a room she’s left behind long ago.

The rest of it? All that life to come?

A transcendent blaze of machinery that will, correctly applied, save the world.