II.
“It’s only every once in a while, but it’s a pattern. Everything is doing it.”
“I thought that was just the hard drive doing something?”
“No, it’s not just the stuff with hard drives, it’s the flash stuff, too; it’s all making that noise. Like, dit-dit-doo-dit-dit.”
Lee held an all-glass cellphone up and mouthed the pattern when he heard it.
“It just sounds like machine noises, Lee.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t hear it.”
Lee looked at his sister with the pain of desperation. They had the kind of pretty faces that crumpled easily to worry and she could see it tugging at way from his stomach all the way to every inch of his body.
“I’m sorry, Lee. You should go talk to someone. Don’t be like dad this time. Please listen to me.”
Clementine kissed him on one cheek and slapped him on the other. You’re overreacting, she said with her eyes. Clem placed a bag full of breakfast on the glass coffee table of Lee’s apartment. It nestled neatly into the small clearing in between the piles of laptops, mp3 players, and smartphones that littered his entire apartment on what seemed like every available surface. Lee was one of those people who made his living in an antique way, fixing and flipping stuff by hand, for cash, under the table, at his own whims. He was one of those types made of spun copper thread around bundled corn husks, thin and clever like a lizard.
She didn’t stop worrying about him any less when she was on the transit ride home and tried not to think about how long that bag might stay there if he didn’t remember to eat it. There was something in their blood, her dad used to tell her when she was growing up, maybe too many crushed little stars in the mix that made them prone to loose screws. She wondered how that man was doing, too, and tasted acid in the back of her throat at the thought of going to go check.
“Approaching Valley Station, connections to all lines. Please exit on either side.”
Clementine was not like her brother. She was not spun, but rather cast and sculpted and painted. She knew how to bend chiascuro to her whim and dressed in a formal, elegant way in deep primary colors to signal to other predators that she was not to be bothered in her territory. She was the kind of thing that charged in straight lines and did not wear heels. She had at least one loaded weapon, likely lethal, up her sleeve at all times. No one tried to bump into her when she got off the ride, not even the people buried in their phones.
Clementine frowned the whole six block walk. There was something at the back of her mind, some old scrap of memory rustling around to the beat of that pattern.