I found the shed to the right of the thorny bed of bushes. It was a rotted-out mess. The door nearly came off when I opened it, and dozens of crickets jumped whenever I moved something. How did these women decide what got attention and what didn’t? Was it money? Time? Materials?

The tool bench was tidy but dirty with disuse. Some of the metal jar tops screwed into the ceiling had glass jars of nails threaded in; some were just circles waiting to be used. This had been someone’s special place. They’d kept pictures of boats, model planes, vintage cola signs, and wooden boxes that probably held treasures I had the curiosity but not the courage to open.

A hole in the roof had let water in, rusting everything. A hoe with the grey handle. A sledgehammer with the handle half broken off. A pair of pliers screamed in a permanent open state.

I found a box of old scrapers crusted in plaster. I found three containers of joint compound. I could only get one open. After working past an inch of dried crust, I found a pocket still wet enough to use.

Back upstairs, I scraped off the mushroom and plastered over the crack, laying the compound on as smoothly as I could. It stuck and shifted on the cracking plaster, and I ended up with a larger patch than I wanted. Eradicating the mushroom meant ripping out the mycelium, which was probably in the wood on two of the walls and the bedroom adjacent. No one had time for that.

“Taylor?” Harper’s voice came from the open French doors.

I checked my watch, but it was gone. Once I was on the balcony, the breeze cooled the moisture on my skin. The sun came in at an angle, and I was a little hungry.

Harper looked up from ground level, shielding her eyes from the sun. Her hair was in a loose ponytail at the back of her neck.

“What are you doing?” she called.

“I’m not leaving until you give me what you took, and the mushrooms were making me crazy. They grow behind the walls. It’s… unnerving.”

“Unnerving?”

I gripped the railing. Are you doing this or not? “Come up here, Harper.”

I’d decided. I was doing this.

I pointed toward the doors on the other side of the balcony that led to the room I’d slept in the night before. I did not say please, and I did not ask a question. One of us was in charge, and it wasn’t her. Even if she had the keys to my life on the little ring in her head, this wasn’t working if she was the one calling the shots.

I washed my hands in the mycelium-free bathroom by my room. No time for a shower.

The stairs creaked. A pressure grew behind my balls because I knew what was coming.

She stood at the end of the hall, hand draped on the bannister. Branches of hair had escaped her ponytail and dropped to either cheek. I pointed at a spot on the floor in front of me. She scratched a spot on her neck, which was unremarkable except for her hand. It looked as if it had been rinsed in light blue paint and scrubbed. The tinge was in the corners of the nails and the deep lines in her wrist.

“Come into my room and close the door,” I said.

“You’re all sweaty.”

“You want to do this or not?”

If I had been trying to scare her, I’d failed. She practically skipped into the room.

“Close the door,” I commanded again. She did it. “I want to set the rules right off.”

“Okay.”

“You won’t tell me why you want this or why you went to all the trouble, but if you’re trying to trap me into marriage or some shit—”

She laughed derisively. “Yeah. No.”

My feelings were not hurt.

Nope.

Not one bit.

“Condoms.” I put up a finger. “Every time.”

“Yes.”

I put up a second finger. “Don’t come to me with emotional attachment. I’m not interested.”

“Me neither.”

My third finger made a W. “This has to be done in nine days. If it’s not, I’m leaving, and I’ll just deal with the consequences.”

“It won’t take longer than that. I told you. I’m a really good student.”

“All right. Let’s get this show on the road.”

I dug my thumb into my other palm absently, thinking this might not be a bad way to spend a few days. QI4 would be back, Deepak would spin it into a learning experience; we’d work on manufacturing our own goddamn monitors and BIOS. I could just go back to the way things were. That alone was enough to give me serious wood.

“Take your clothes off, Harper.”

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