No one downstairs. The house had two states: full of people or deserted. I poured coffee and tried to think clearly.

Barrington Station.

Couldn’t Google it. Couldn’t locate it on satellite. There was phone on the wall. It was a beige box the size of a bag of coffee with a curly cord. I had no idea what to do with it.

When I picked up the handset, I discovered a clear plastic circle set into the base piece. The spiral cord connected the handset to it.

I had to pause for a second. I’d seen this in movies. Right. Finger. Turn. Wait. No problem. But who to call?

Numbers were scratched on the wall in pen, pencil, a few scratched through the yellow paint to the plaster beneath. Some had names above and some didn’t. It was like a living record of every number ever spoken through that old phone.

Car service. Right. They’d know.

I dialed. How people watched that circle tick around every time they wanted to make a call, I’d never know.

“Matt’s Car Service,” the female voice answered.

“Hi, I’d like a car to Barrington Station.”

“Sure. You know that’s closed, right? Next best bet is Doverton.”

“It’s fine if it’s closed. That’s where I’m going.”

“Where we picking you up?” The dispatcher didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She was just trying to get the job out.

“I’m not sure of the address.” I’d never felt so incompetent. I could practically see her roll her eyes. “The Barrington house. The mansion. It’s on a dirt road off… I’m not sure.”

“I know it. You’ll be in front?”

“Yeah.”

“Fifteen minutes.”

She hung up. I waited.

---

Again, I’d done Harper’s bidding. Again, I’d come like a dog when called.

The cab driver was a Middle Eastern dude with a short beard. Ahmed. He looked to be in his twenties and about five foot five. He pulled over on a nondescript patch of road. A pair of square wooden stakes stuck out of half-buried concrete blocks. The station sign must have been there.

“Barrington Station!” he said.

“Can you wait for me?” I handed him cash.

“I have another pickup.” He handed a card over the front seat with the change. I took the card and left the rest in his hand for a tip. “Call and someone will come.”

“I don’t have a phone with me.”

“You got fifty cents?” He pointed at a payphone ten feet in, a relic from the days when people needed to call a cab from the station.

“It works?”

“I know it does. Trust me. Fifty cents. You need two quarters?”

“No. I have it. Thanks. Hey—” I stopped myself halfway out the door. “What if I wanted to go to the airport?”

He laughed. “Airport? Hundred forty miles?”

“How much would it cost?” I didn’t ask because it mattered but so he’d take me seriously.

“You call dispatch, okay?”

“All right.”

I got out, and the car took off. I was alone in the middle of nowhere. Then I realized she could have left that little note at any time for any reason and I’d chased it like a puppy playing fetch.

The grass was knee-high, and leaves crunched underfoot. The trees were half-covered in red and brown leaves hanging on for dear life.

I walked perpendicular to the road and came to cracked pavement. Following it, a building appeared soon after. Red brick with green shingles, boarded windows, and poured concrete slab, it looked as if it had never been a major station. The archways had decorative stones over them, as if someone, at some time, had given a shit. I passed through the arch, into the station, through to the other side. The slab dropped off into grey gravel that led to rusted tracks.

I went into the station again. The floor was concrete. The walls were painted white under layers of graffiti. A locked door led behind the boarded-up ticket window. I scoured every surface for a message but found nothing.

Outside, I stepped onto the tracks. Facing north, they disappeared around a sharp turn. The fall leaves clicked in the wind, and the grass rustled with the movements of small animals. Rats. Squirrels, maybe. Groundhogs, if they had them out here. The clouds moved across the cyan sky so steadily I could have set my watch to them. Nothing else moved. Nothing else made a sound. I was locked in position, listening for changes as they snapped neatly into the continuity of time.

“It’s amazing what you can do despite the obstacles.” Harper’s voice cut through a daydream I didn’t know I was in the middle of. She came toward me from the north, walking on a track with her arms out for balance.

“You really work too hard to make a point.”

She wore mirrored sunglasses I hadn’t seen before. She dropped off the rail onto the ties. She wore a blue shirt under her open plaid car coat. It was unbuttoned, and her bra was red. The velvet swell of her tits curved into a sweet divot between them. Not too wide, not a straight, dark line. Just right for running my tongue over.

“I figured, since we’re stuck together,” she said, “we’d make the best of it.”

“No. That’s not what you figured.” I overacted in the reflection of her sunglasses. I had to look bigger, but holding my arms out and talking louder didn’t change the optics. “You’re showing me more despair. I get it, okay? This sucks.”

What did I see in her glasses?

A tiny man looking down her shirt.

I hadn’t even realized I was doing it.

“Do you remember Lucy Park?” she asked.

“Sure, I do.”

Lucy Park had been a sweet little Korean girl I’d done a first-year P-set with. She hadn’t had much experience with men before we started it. By the time the quarter was over, she could take my entire cock down to the balls.

“She was a TA in my Calc 2 class. Married. Going for her PhD.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“She said you taught her how to fuck.”

What the—?

The clouds moved at the same speed across the sky.

Calm down.

“We were both adults.”

Had Harper dug something up? Was I going to wish she’d done no more than hack my system? Was she trying to ruin my life even more?

“She said you taught her what men like.”

“I like grown women. I like them wet, and I like it when they want it. So if you’re going to make up a story that I assaulted her, you got the wrong guy.”

The line of her mouth curved a little, stretching the bottom crease. Her face was no more than a half smile and two miniature Taylors in the reflection of her glasses.

Crossing her arms, she unbuttoned the blue shirt. Her red bra was simple, unpadded, with a hook in the front. The thin fabric did nothing to hide her hard nipples.

“I was worried this would be uncomfortable.” She unhooked the bra. “But that was stupid of me.”

“Whoa, whoa.”

My hand was doubled and huge in her lenses. The bra fell away. Her tits were round, velvet, crested with soft pink.

“I have something you want.”

“Seriously?” Confused, irritated, disoriented, yet unable to keep from looking at her tits. The way they were proportioned against the curve of her waist. The shadow the sun cast on her belly. I stepped back, either to get away from her or get a good look at her. I wasn’t sure which.

“You want QI4 back. And I need something from you.”

I’d never been plied with sex before. Sex was casual and fun. She was using it to disorient me, and I didn’t like it. Not one bit.

I advanced on her, taking her breast with my right hand, closing in on the nipple as I took her mouth with my tongue. I was merciless on her tit and her lips, biting and pinching my annoyance. I pushed my cock against her.

When I pulled away, two of me looked back.

I ripped the sunglasses off her and threw them on the ground. Her blue-ringed irises stared back at me. If I looked close enough, I was in the pupils.

Fuck her.

I abused her nipple, twisting until her mouth opened a little.

Pain or pleasure? Both?

“I don’t like being manipulated,” I hissed through teeth that wanted to bite her again. “You didn’t hack me just to fuck me.” Leveraging her hips, I pushed my erection against her.

She shifted so her clit felt me. “Teach me.” Her breath was hot and damp. “Teach me how to do it.”

I let her nipple go and grabbed the whole breast. I wanted to come on it. Paint it with my semen. Run my fingers through it and shove them down her throat. “Why?”

“Each thing you teach me, I’ll release—” She gasped as I moved against her. “I’ll release part of QI4.”

“Tell me why.”

“No.”

I bit her lower lip. That lying little crease. She squeaked in pain, and I made her suffer before letting go.

“You have men here.”

“I don’t want to be fucked like a princess.”

I took her chin in a hand still warm from her breast. “Why? You’ll waste what I teach you on them anyway.”

She pushed me so hard I nearly fell back. Good. She should be mad. She should be as pissed off and horny as I was.

“Now you listen to me.” She bent slightly at the waist, as if she was ready to attack. Her tits went from objects of desire to objects of power. “You’re going to do what I’m asking you to do. You’re going to take as long as you need to. Teach me how to kiss for your boot loader. You’ll get your master boot sector back when I can use my hands. Your object code when I can suck a cock. And the source code is released when I know how to fuck.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I am. I’m out of my fucking mind. I’m nuts from seeing my friends die. From my sister crying all night. From these fucking drugs everyone drives a hundred miles to get. The filth in the water and the air’s fucked my brain so bad I can’t even think straight.”

No. Her shouting, her tension, her growling conviction, told me… no.

Yes, but no. I was sure she was telling the truth about the things she saw, and I was sure she was unhappy and upset about the deterioration around her. But she wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t even sure she was truly as desperate as she wanted me to think she was. Maybe she was three steps from actual crazy desperation and she could see it coming, which would make her smart, shrewd, and very sane. She was what my grandmother would have called “crazy like a whorehouse priest.”

I knew I’d deal with the priest; I’d just never thought I’d be the whore.

I held up my hands, stepping onto the track as if standing a few inches taller would make a difference.

The rail vibrated underfoot.

“What you’re asking? It’s crazy. But you’re not,” I said. “So I need to know why. I need to know what kind of plan I’m playing into.”

“Did you ever need to know a woman’s reasons for fucking you? What’s the difference now? You do what you’d do if we met in some bar in SanJo. I do what I’d do if I was feeling charitable.”

“That’s a real achievement in compartmentalization.”

The rail tremors underfoot sharpened, increasing with the faraway rattle of an engine.

“Trains still running on this line?” I asked.

“Yeah. Freight.”

The tremors increased, and the steady silence was broken by a rumble. She didn’t move her shirt down; it stayed bunched above her tits, tangled in her bra.

“They just pass Barrington?”

“At a hundred miles an hour.”

I stepped off the rail. I wasn’t in the mood to get run down. Standing close to her, she was a few inches taller, but still not taller than me.

“You can hear it,” I said softly. “Same as I can.”

“I know when to get off.”

“Fine.” I turned my back on her.

One step. Two. Was she getting off the rail? Was she really crazy? The rumble got louder, punctuated by clicks and clacks.

Basic stopping distance equals velocity squared over two times the coefficient of friction times the acceleration = unknown variables=tonnage, grade, maintenance, which means even best case, the train needs half a mile to—

Fuck this. When I turned to run toward her, she was still on the track. I grabbed her arm and yanked her away as the train came around the turn. I pulled her to the station as the freight train flew by. Without her sunglasses, I could see the determination in her eyes.

I’d lost a game of chicken. The simplest zero-sum game in the lexicon. Too simple for either of us.

“You just proved exactly nothing,” I said.

“I grew up here. I told you I knew when to move.” She buttoned her shirt without hooking her bra. “But you still felt the need to save me. See? You’re not a total asshole. But that’s me. So let’s pretend this is about you and me. Just us. Not about Barrington or the people in it.”

“I’m not touching you again.”

“Yeah. All right. Sure.” She stepped back, swaggering. “You need a lift back?”

Of course I did, and she knew it. But fuck her. I wasn’t getting into a car with her.

“No.”

“Suit yourself.” She left the station and disappeared into the trees, ass swaying like a lure.

A few seconds later, her Chevy pulled out from the cover of the trees and onto the two-lane blacktop. Then she was gone.