As much as Hannah didn’t want to peel herself away from a Mac Hug, they had a job to do.

  Well—she knew that.

  Mac knew that.

  Julia? Trivago.

  Speaking of ancient travel planning methods… WAIT. Julia and I made a binder of contingencies, and it’s buried somewhere in this room! How convenient…

  The Cheer Captain Protocols. A tradition born in large part because of The Big YAAAAAAAA!

  With Mac’s arms still wrapped around her, Hannah turned to Julia. “Julia, do you still have your key and token for… that? We need both our keys to open that safe your husband installed in the floor.”

  “Yeah…” Julia sighed, dreamy as the ditziest female lead in a shoujo-manga-romcom-chick-flick daze. “Isn’t Galen just the BEST?”

  Hannah finally jimmied herself free from the Mac Hug.

  She snapped her fingers at Julia and pointed a finger directly at her chest. “OBJECTION! You told me you HATED his stupid glasses. When you bribed him with a year of Philz Coffee and a date… were you ACTUALLY crushing on him the whole time? My memory’s a little hazy on the details, Mrs. Coutts—it’s been a minute.”

  Julia clapped back, her daydreaming face warping into a nefarious grin as she fished out her keyring from her purse. “Well of course. I needed to keep him off the radar. He was just… really good at making mac and cheese. He had this trick where he always blew three kisses at the pot using the back of his tongue and everything… Never got why he did that, but hey. It worked on me.”

  Hannah blinked rapidly, rubbing her eyes, then blinked again—her eyebrows climbing so high and so fast, they were in danger of getting altitude sickness. “Off the radar? Girl—WHO’S?! He was the chair of the robotics club, short, a snot and tear factory whenever spring rolled around, wore big ol’ Coke bottle lenses, and had the girliest, most immaculate manicured hands I’ve ever seen on a dude…”

  A small-but-crucial belt of logic stopped slipping in the machinations of her mind. “Wait… His hands were always beautiful… Like, he took care of his cuticles with almond oil or something… Beautiful hands… Chotto mate.”

  Then, it hit her. In a lower register, she screamed a whisper: “THAT’S NOT EVEN THE MAIN POINT. JULIA! MAC AND CHEESE?! THREE KISSES AT THE POT WITH THE BACK OF HIS TONGUE?!?! DIABOLICAL PHRASING. CAN YOU CHILL? MY HUSBAND’S TOO INNOCENT FOR THIS.”

  “Well that, and he had a job lined up at BAE Systems after graduation.”

  “Ah, gotcha, that makes total sense now,” Hannah replied, pinching the lit conversational fuze with her wetted fingers.

  Mac tilted his head, childlike innocence and unintentional contempt for the proceedings in his eyes. “Mac and cheese? What, like… he’s a good cook? I really wanna meet him now! I love cooking for Hannah. Good to have someone to talk shop with.”

  It took everything Hannah and Julia had not to soul-scream.

  Taking another moment to recollect herself, Hannah avoided eye contact with Mac as she muttered to herself, “Oh mon Dieu. Cet homme… Je suis MORTE. Mac and cheese… il n’a aucune idée.”

  Julia whispered into Mac’s ear, filling him in on the joke. His ruinous rust-brown eyes widened to the size of black holes as his face pinked in the dim ambiance of the clubhouse.

  “N-no…” he blubbered. “I’ll never be able to make mac and cheese with a straight face ever again…”

  “…It’s all true. Stirring the pot and THAT. They’re virtually the same sound.”

  Sensing the opportunity for more chaos, Julia piled on to Mac and Hannah’s anguish. “Oh—right, Hannah. The answer is yes. It was a win-win-win. Vault for us, coffee for him, and a date for me.” Then, in her best impression of Oprah, she added on a “You get a car! You get a car! And you get a car!”

  “That explains everything and nothing about you,” Mac quipped.

  “Please. I’m the sanest person in this room. Now lemme tell you about the time Hannah—”

  “OOOOKAY! Playtime’s over.”

  Hannah all but timelapsed like she was speed-building her megacastle on Tar’s Minecraft server, nearly ripping up a priceless Turkish double-weave rug from the 1950s by the back wall. She dusted off the metal door of the safe, jammed her key into the captain’s side, and punched in her token code—all in under two seconds, courtesy of her cybernetically enhanced spine.

  Julia giggled. She took her sweet time keying in on the vice-captain’s side and punching in her token code. “Mac. Can you count backwards from three?”

  Mac stopped rubbing his swelling ankle and nodded. He shared a forlorn look with Hannah, the kind only the survivors of Rajiv’s quadruple-cross at the Quantum Promenade could share.

  Hannah locked eyes with Julia, her lip trembling and her breath shaking. “On one.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Mac shed a single tear while giggling. “Three.”

  Remembering the smell of overpriced tonkotsu at Fujiwara Ramen, Hannah threw up a little in her mouth. “Two.”

  She tanked it down. “One.”

  Latch! Hiss! Chunk! Without fanfare, the safe opened, revealing an antique Amazon Kindle.

  Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

  It powered on by itself.

  A tinny voice crackled from the ancient Kindle’s speakers—a sentient BART announcement that had learned malicious noncompliance in the ten-year interim—monotone, rapid-fire, and punctuated by an exhausted sigh every time he heard the Valley Girl accent. “You woke me up. This better be good.”

  ---

  “Rowcols! Lemme in! It’s, like, urgent!” Hannah yelled at the old e-reader housing the daemon accountant who gave up on life even before Hannah pushed his first version onto Git.

  Rowcols was not having it. “Error. Not enough balance… Ms. Sinclair, you owe Mac McGuire more than EVERYTHING YOU OWN. You ruined his entire life. Not even your undying affection for the rest of your life will make you square. For that reason, I’m out fam.” Beep! “Also, your Python and English skills are still garbage.”

  Over her shoulder, still sitting on the medical bench, Mac opened his mouth like her big damn hero—glitching hearts and flowers framing his stupidly CUTE face. (Hannah had given up on fixing her Truthseers long ago. She liked them better this way.) “Ah. C’mon guy. It’s not ruined! It got better after I met her… I think.”

  Rowcols pressed X to doubt. “Elaborate.”

  And so Mac did. “I owe her everything too. Like, in that old kings-and-queens, feudal, marry-for-power-and-resources kinda way. I love her… strategically placed assets and the way she manages them.”

  “Balance added.”

  Hannah smiled, then shook it off, reinterpreting Mac’s words in the worst of faiths.

  CRACK! Nearly breaking her neck, Hannah owled at Mac with a scowl on her face, loading up an instant roast in her windpipe.

  “HMAR!” She unloaded in Arabic, the word flying out before she realized she hadn’t used the language since Cairo, 2042.

  “Balance deducted,” Rowcols stated, in the exact tone of a human bank teller telling her “Have a nice life.”

  Hannah blinked.

  “SHIT!”

  Julia just giggled. That little shit disturber always giggled at her petty failures.

  Mac rolled on, ignoring Hannah’s default state of turmoil. “I was literally talking about resource management. Don't really know how you can take anything else from my previous statement. Honestly, my only note is that it's kinda unprofessional to kiss your coworker every day…”

  As he said that, the first four notes of the “Dies Irae” stung in Hannah’s head.

  He… Doesn’t like kissing every day?

  Realizing the error of his ways in the nick of time, Mac appended more to his thoughts on marriage, likely just freehanded from half-assedly reading Il Principe.

  “NotthatI'mcomplainingpleasedon'ttakethisthewrongwayCheerCaptainyou'resuperhotIliveforyourkisses…” Mac took a breath, steadying his pretense before taking another shot at the correct answer: the one that stuck to party lines. “I mean… I don't mind practicing with you to keep up appearances because you're an excellent kisser... Sorry—lost my train of thought. What was I saying? Right. Re-run it with that in mind. It’ll zero out.”

  I was wondering where he was going with that. Yeah. He’s right. That should balance the books.

  Beep boop! Rowcols paused, deep in a simulation that would have taken an IBM Blue Gene weeks back in the good old days of 2012.

  After a tense minute, Rowcols came back with an answer. “… Oh. You’re right. And I hate it. Access granted. Welcome, Captains Sinclair and Coutts.”

  Rowcols played the Windows XP startup sound as he pulled up the table of contents, per standard operating procedure.

  With her whole soul fighting to maintain thermostasis, Hannah coped by deadpanning a “We’re in. I can’t believe that talking iPad backsassed us.”

  Julia sighed. “You programmed him to only unlock upon confirmation that Mac's been sufficiently bribed, numbnuts.”

  Hannah’s temperatures went nuclear. Her eyes squirmed; her lips did that shivering-Chihuahua thing she prayed Mac would never witness again. Not since she accidentally confessed in their living room. Slowly, she turned back to him in horror.

  Please don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything. Please don’t say anything.

  Mac said something. “Wait… Is that why I’ve been getting small gifts every so often? Like, I kept getting gas coupons, Applebee’s gift cards, $5 Target cards, just stuck into my door. That sorta thing. One time, I even got an extra ticket to a San Jose Giants game. That. Was. SICK. I took my dad that day. We had so much fun getting white-girl wasted on dollar beers.”

  “IT'S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. I JUST NEEDED TO... Uhh... Add another layer of validation from an outside source! Yeah. That.”

  Julia wasted no time setting the record straight. “BullSHIT. You were SO sad through to New Year’s because you blew your last chance to talk to him. You were so sad, the author of your life’s story had to intervene on your behalf ten years later.”

  “You were sad you didn’t get to talk to me after the game? Why?” Mac asked.

  Scratching his perfect stubble and staring off into space, Mac pondered every possibility in that moment before landing on the one Hannah feared the most.

  He continued. “I just find it funny how—”

  “MAC. It’s not that deep. I just had a small crush on you all throughout high school ever since I saw you kicking like a giga dork at the first rivalry week game way back in freshman year.”

  The revelation hit Mac upside the head, a faint blush flanking the edges of his cheeks and firing point-blank, scoring a direct hit on his capillaries. “O-oh… You liked me back then? Well I guess it’s a good thing that we ended up together… UNLESS…?”

  “MAC. PLEASE,” Hannah barked.

  “Not what I meant! I’m not implying that you planned anything! I was just… talking shit.”

  Hannah sighed in relief. “Heart Attack, Babyboy, Davey, you CAN’T do that in front of polite company!”

  “Polite?”

  From the receipt printer jury-rigged to Rowcols’ house, Rowcols produced a CVS-length receipt, summarily executing Hannah’s romantic leverage with a single print command. “Heh.”

  “ROWCOLS!”

  “Don’t you EVER call me an iPad again,” Rowcols turned up his nose at his creator, despite Hannah not programming a nose for him.

  Julia tore the receipt free and GAGGED, her gum falling out of her mouth upon further inspection of Exhibit A. She shared a look with Mac, both having a giggle at Hannah’s sad lore drop.

  Sparks and smoke poured out from Hannah’s ears as the feed from her Truthseers datamoshed. Mortified, she covered her face and apologized to Rowcols. “I’m sorry for calling you an iPad! Just… P-please. No more.”

  “Darn. I hoped that was a surefire one-way ticket to get myself decommissioned. I guess this is what humans call character development,” Rowcols stated flatly.

  Mac hobbled over to Hannah, brought down to her knees by her own creation, and hugged her. “It’s okay, Hannah. Your secret’s safe with us.”

  Hannah just smiled for a second—small, involuntary, and shaken off like she would die if she revealed that she had any further feelings regarding this petty quarrel. “We don’t need to move yet. Did you want another piggyback ride that badly?”

  Kissing her on the cheek from behind, Mac brushed off her teasing and subtext, answering her earnestly. “Yes? I feel like I’m piloting a mecha. It’s fun!”

  Julia cleared her throat. “Are we gonna start reading this or what?”

  “Oh. Right. The plot!” Mac and Hannah answered in unison, standing up and stepping back from the open vault.

  CLICK.

  And so the plot opened up a major hole in the floor of the old cheer clubhouse at Mt. Ham Prep.

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Hannah triaged.

  Julia agreed, all too eager to get some fresh air: Mac and Hannah stunk up the old cheer clubhouse with their just-married air something awful. “Not at all! That’s The Chute.”

  “The,” Mac led on.

  “CHUTE?!” Hannah slammed the point home, finishing Mac’s sentence, her id kicking her ego and superego down the well.