The company keeps a tight leash on us whenever possible. This party is no exception. They shuttle us to a big hotel, escort us to the ballroom, and shut the doors. Guards with impressive shoulders and amber glasses stand in front of each exit.

Nanotech engineers aren’t partiers. No one goes near the live band and dance floor. The bartenders twiddle their thumbs.

We’re like vultures at the buffet, though. The caterers hustle double-time to keep up.

“Pretty good QSF,” Richmond says, as I return to the food with a big tumbler of gin. Quarterly Social Function. It’s a joke, supposedly making fun of the company, but no one laughs because it’s really about us. What kind of people allow themselves to be herded around to QSFs?

I lean in closer. “Want to liven it up?”

“I told you before, Clutch,” Richmond says. “I don’t drink.”

“I’m not talking about that.” I nod at the exits.

“What, make a run for it? You wouldn’t get past the goons. Even if you managed to push past them, those doors’ll be pixied up. You’d be immobilized before you made it three feet.”

At work, they jack us into all sorts of scenarios of corporate espionage. They’re designed to make you paranoid about all your off-site situations. You do delicate, secret work and everyone wants to extract the details. So when you’re out in the world, never talk about work, always wear your defenses, and immediately exit any situation that seems uncomfortable for any reason. It’s enough to keep most nanotech engineers living shut-in lives. For most of them, parties like this are the apex of cutting loose. Me and a few others don’t fit the mold, or at least I like to think I’m trying.

“Probably,” I say to Richmond with a shrug. “But why not give it a shot.” I start to walk away, toward the exits, then stop and turn.

“What?” Richmond says. He sees my smile.

“I bet,” I say, emphasizing the word, “I can make it farther than you.”

“You’re crazy,” he says, pulling another mini buffalo burger from a platter. But he looks at the exits, each in turn. “How much?”

Richmond is technically my boss but he’s usually down for a little mischief, especially when there’s a wager involved.

That’s how Richmond ends up crumpled on the ground between two guards while I slip into the kitchen behind one of the caterers.

The kitchen is huge. I work my way across that maze, drawing stares and glares, until I spill out into a darkened banquet room.

A speaker pontificates from a podium on the benefits of an unexamined life. I beat it out of there into the halls of the hotel and follow the signs to “cocktail lounge.”

The price is three times what I’ve ever paid for a gin and tonic. The straw has glowing swirling pixies dancing in slow motion. I recognize the pattern, a motion loop I worked on years ago. It’s not even synced to the music, which it really should be at these prices.

The irony isn’t lost on me that I could be having all the free drinks I want at the QSF. I’m smiling, though. I won the bet, and sneaking out feels like skipping school.

The couple at the other end of the bar stand up, her first, then him. A violent rising, quarrel in their postures before their voices surge.

I only make out her last two words: “No more.” This with her back to me. She turns to leave.

And it’s like a truck slamming into me. Those angry eyes, strong jaw determinedly set, lips just barely parted. She meets my gaze for a moment—and then her a-hole boyfriend grabs her arm and yanks her back.

She turns with it, plants a foot just so, raises her free arm and—crack!—hits him so hard with the heel of her hand that he staggers back, falls to one knee. For one camera-flash moment it’s like he’s bowing respectfully to his queen. The she whirls and marches out.

“Get back in your seat,” she says, as she passes me. “Show’s over.”

And she’s gone.

There’s physical pain above my belly. Her face in my mind with every blink. I’ve never been a believer in it but I am struck: is this love at first sight?

The a-hole recovers and chases after her. I note the chiseled fresh haircut, the tailored shirt. He doesn’t catch her, though.

I’m almost done with my second drink when someone slides onto the stool next to mine. I figure it’s security or Richmond so I don’t look right away. If you don’t look, they might not be there, right?

“Nice of you to stand up, though,” she says. When I look over she flashes me a smile that’s a thousand times better than her angry face. “No one else in here even set their drink down. I’m Daisy.”

“I hope it was worth it,” Richmond says, back at work the next day. He doesn’t like it when he’s forced to play the boss. He’s been told to reprimand me. “We had to sit on the shuttles for almost two hours while they searched for you. Where were your tracking nanos?”

“Disabled and removed,” I say. He knows I’m particular about using pixies.

I tell him about Daisy. We had a couple drinks, split a burger, had some laughs. In the end, she gave me her contact info and said, “Let’s do this again. Except the first part.”

Richmond waits for me to finish. He wants to hear about it but needs to complete the reprimanding. “Well, I hope it was worth it,” he says.

“You already said that.”

“I really mean,” he says, “I hope you don’t screw it up.”

“What do you mean?”

“You always screw it up, a few dates in.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Boss.”

He’s right, and I’m thinking of that when we go on a second date.

I pick Daisy up at her house. She bounds out before I can make it up the walk. I’m grateful for that. She lives with her folks in a giant house, even though she’s almost thirty.

Her smile slips a bit while I drive. She’s checking out my car.

“I should really get a new one,” I say.

“No,” she says, “it’s fine.”

I feel the evening slipping away already, with goddamn Richmond’s words haunting the inside of my skull. Like he cursed me. Probably because I won the bet.

She tells me where to drive. First stop is some kind of lounge her friend Sasha owns. Daisy introduces me. They have booze but everyone is drinking tea so I do, too. Sasha comes out from behind the bar and joins us in a circular moon-couch.

“You don’t look like the kind of fly Daisy usually catches,” Sasha says, when Daisy slips off to the bathroom.

Sasha watches me with big brown unblinking wet eyes.

“That’s a good thing,” she says, through a thin smile. “Most of Daisy’s boyfriends are pricks.”

“I’ve only seen the one.”

This draws a bigger smile and she turns her eyes back toward the crowd.

Next stop is a club. It’s loud and dark and full of bodies and perfume and skin writhing with pixies. We squeeze our way to the back to some curtained rooms. It’s quieter beyond the curtains, subdued in an opium den kind of way, though I don’t see drugs. Two handfuls of people sit around a low table on shiny cushions. She quickly runs through names, and they mostly go in my ear and straight out the other. Damir, Chauncy, Vlad, Rez, Roxy-with-a-Z, Jenjen. Like a different language.

We sit for a while. The air is thick and stale and it’s too hot. I can’t follow the conversations—too many simultaneous talkers, too much slang and oddly timed laughter.

This isn’t my crowd. I don’t know what my crowd is, but this isn’t it. One of them is wearing a fez. Again, I feel Daisy slipping away. I can’t fake it through this.

She leans over, lips brushing my ear, and says, “Just a few more minutes and we’ll get out of here, okay?”

I flash her a thumbs up. The heads of her friends turn away, pretending they didn’t see it.

There are a couple more stops like this, where I feel like an accessory. A stray puppy getting shown how the other half lives. Then we’re back in the car.

“What do you think?” Daisy says.

“About?”

“The places, the people.”

“It feels like an education, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be learning.”

She smiles. Even in my peripheral vision, it warms the car and shivers my heart.

“They’ve never met a pixie engineer before. They didn’t know what to expect.”

“Someone who’s good at math?”

But I know what she means. Pixies are flashy. Every year some new fashion incorporates them. Say nano, and that’s what people see first. No one thinks medical, industrial, military. They think of subdural cartoons marching around calves on Spring Break. I don’t do glitz pixies. I do security applications, the kind you can’t talk to civilians about. I am definitely a disappointment to them.

But I’m smiling.

“What is it?” she says.

“I just realized what we were doing tonight.”

“Club-hopping.”

I nod, as if I’d just found out what the phrase meant. But it’s something else.

She’s parading me around, test-driving me. I still feel outclassed but there’d be only one reason for the parade: she likes me, for real, and wants them to like me too.

“You’ll get the hang of it,” she says, and that seals it for me. I’m positively beaming on the inside.

I pull up to her giant house, readying an “I had a really good time” speech. Before I get the parking brake on, her lips hit mine. Long, lingering, wet.

She disengages, touches my forearm with her fingertips. My eyes refocus and find hers.

She says, “How’s Tuesday night for you?”

The third date is where it always goes wrong. It’s my fault, usually. Nanotech engineers aren’t known for our social skills.

I’d routed my fingernails, blasted the pixie dust out of my lungs and nasal cavity, and thrown on a clean shirt and pants. And here Daisy comes, gliding five stories down the brass pole like Mary Poppins doing a slow-motion neon go-go show. Her ears glow. She’s injected them with ear mites, those blue-glowing pixies whose only job is to swirl slowly just beneath the skin. There are more in her neck, weaving a circlet in slow motion. Her color-adjusting backless gown shimmers in its own artificial breeze, pieces of it changing from transparent to racing silver in a constant struggle to keep her private areas from public view. Her shoes look biological; grown, no doubt, from eelskin or manta wing or similar rarity. She looks like she’s standing on two dolphin bellies.

I’m wearing a watch.

Here’s what I think I know about fashion: there’s gaudy, followed by less gaudy, followed by understated, followed by classic, followed by who cares what I look like because fashion is for the lower classes, followed by I am so goddamn rich that I can piece together a brand-new outfit that costs more than the car you’ve arrived in and if it looks simply gaudy then that’s your problem. This last category is what I’m looking at.

And she’s coming down that pole.

While we’d waited for Daisy to get ready, her father had lazily waved in the direction of the pole. “For grand entrances,” he said, snickering. “My wife’s guests seem to like it.”

“It’s impressive, sir.” I haven’t seen Daisy’s mother and he doesn’t say where she is.

“Well, we didn’t want to overpower the room with it. That’s why it’s brass, instead of glow tube or some such nonsense. The designer actually wanted a holographic wrap for it. You’ll never guess what of.”

Giant penis? I couldn’t say that. “Uh, candy cane?”

Her father had laughed a big hearty laugh, the laugh of a man who never has to worry about whether his laundry is clean. “No, but that’s a good idea. He wanted to wrap it in flames. A pillar of fire. Seemed a little decadent to me. A little too Gomorrah-y.”

That’s what he’d said. Gomorrah-y. Like he was daring me to say “Sodom-y.” I’m not very wise in the ways of courtship, but even I knew that was a bad date word. And saying it to your date’s father is like hitting on the minister at a friend’s funeral.

“She sure is taking her sweet-ass time,” her father says currently.

I shake the Sodom-y flashback out of my head. “Pardon?”

“Her time,” he says, jingling two glasses of booze and ice, “she’s taking her time.”

A blind partially paralyzed sloth could crawl down stairs faster than she’s sliding down the pole.

“Yup,” I say, and take one of the glasses. We raise them.

“Just a little to trim the edge off,” he says. “I don’t want you downing too much and then trying to drive our Daisy around.”

I’m in the middle of a hefty chug. I swallow quickly, inhaling an ice cube along with the liquor. “I would never, sir.” He turns back to look at her and I quietly punch my chest to help the ice down.

“Ah, she arrives.”

Daisy lifts one hand and proudly tilts her head up for the final few feet, like a dancer ready for an encore. I feel the urge to put down my glass and start clapping, but her father just stands there, holding his whiskey, smiling patiently. I do the same.

Daisy gently touches down, lets go of the pole, and swishes her way over. Her dress is programmed to make noise, too; it swings back and forth to the sound of crashing surf. I think I even hear a seagull call, but it might be her dolphin shoes squeaking on the marble. She holds her hand out and smiles.

That smile. In a rush, I remember why I’m putting up with these uncomfortable rituals. Her face lights up, and no pixies this time, just flesh and soul beaming, white teeth peeking out behind perfectly unsymmetrical lips, eyebrows and ears pulling back almost imperceptibly over that beautiful smooth scalp. A warm crinkle around the eyes brings it all home.

“Darling,” she says, and even that doesn’t ruin it.

“Hey, Daisy,” I say, and oblige by kissing her hand.

She’s too classy to say anything about my outfit, or lack thereof. Too classy in front of her dad, that is. In the car she lets fly.

“What the fuck, Clutch? I told you this is a party. You wear that to a party?”

“No,” I say, “Depending on the party, sometimes I don’t button the shirt.”

“Shit. We’ve got to make a stop. Swing on by Vlad’s. He’ll set you up with something.”

“Tired of slumming, baby?” I say.

“‘Baby?’ You’re a fucking pixie engineer, Clutch. Why do you do this?”

“Do what?”

“The clothes, the car, the speech.”

“The speech?”

“You talk like a commuter, for Christ’s sake.”

Our first fight. In my dating world, a fight usually ends up with one of us walking out forever. You can’t walk out of a car, though, so maybe that’ll keep the night together. It seems so adult, so married, to be fighting in a car. I surprise myself. I don’t entirely hate it.

We pull up to this swoopy, bubbling, lime-green building that looks like Gaudi vomited it up on mushrooms. It hits me. Vlad—he’s Daisy’s fashionisto pal. I have trouble keeping all her friends straight, but that glistening, fez-wearing peacock—only he could live here.

“We better be buying drugs, Daisy,” I say.

“Get serious. You guys are the same size, and he’s got a never-ending wardrobe.”

“I am not dressing up like a backup dancer.”

She’s already getting out of the car. “Geez, don’t be so prehistoric. We’ll just get you a coat, and maybe some stripes for those trousers.”

I get out of the car, smirking. “Trousers?”

She turns and puts her hands on her hips. She knows she looks good wearing that fake-serious face. I can hear the smile not quite hiding in her voice. “I am not calling those pants.”

“How about slacks?” I find myself walking up to the building with her.

“Get real,” she says. She brushes her hand on my thigh, like flicking away a mosquito. “What are those made out of?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“See? That’s disturbing.”

I suddenly think, Is this how love starts? Then it seems like someone else said it. It echoes in my head, like a bad song I can’t shake. I’m relieved when the cartoonish elevator shimmies its way down the building and stops in front of us.

“You simply cannot wear purple unless you also wear green.”

“I’m not wearing the fucking hat.”

It’s a stare-down: me in the violet crushed velvet coat with tails, eyes smoldering; Vlad in his clown-suit and fez, holding out the if-Robin-Hood-was-a-pimp hat, wet eyelashes fluttering.

“Clothes are like pixies, Mr. Clutch,” he says. “You need a whole lot of them to get the job done.”

“Let me tell you something about pixies,” I say. “One bad unit and the whole batch is ruined.”

“Okay, okay,” Daisy’s voice comes from deep inside Vlad’s walk-in closet. “Don’t come to fisticuffs over it.”

I’m not huge, but Vlad and I both know I’d knock him silly if it came to that. He blows me a kiss and takes the hat away.

Daisy emerges holding a pair of kaleidoscopic pants. The pattern swirls around, eats itself, then starts again with a different color.

“I’m not wearing those either,” I say.

“Why not?” asks Daisy. “They’re total poppers.”

“Yeah,” chimes in Vlad. “Everyone’ll be checking your shit out.”

I fold my arms. “I don’t do pixies.”

Daisy’s genuinely astonished. “What?”

“I don’t buy ’em, I don’t wear ’em, I don’t ingest ’em. I don’t use ’em.”

Vlad shrugs his shoulders and turns his back to me. I’m now officially a terminal case. Daisy doesn’t let it go so easily.

“You make the damned things. How can you not use them?”

“I don’t need ’em, at least not yet. Maybe later, if I need medical nanos, but until then, I’m keeping my body clean.”

She points to her own neck. “This isn’t clean? You guys are always telling us they’re sterile. You think I’d pop a necklace pill if I thought it was unsafe? Shit, I’ve been doing it for years. It is safe, isn’t it, Clutch?”

“Perfectly safe. Don’t sweat it. It looks great.”

“You just wouldn’t do it.”

I shrug. “It’s not for me.”

“God, that’s like . . .” she says, scrunching up her face. “Like a painter who doesn’t go to museums.”

I nod, considering. “You make it sound almost rational.”

She tosses the vivid pants over a chair and picks up two strips of red cloth. She says, “At least put stripes on your trousers.”

I see Vlad’s shoulders shake. “Trousers,” he says softly, snickering.

“Deal,” I say. “As long as you don’t graft them on with pixies.”

Daisy rolls her eyes. “We’ll use glue, for Christ’s sake.”

Dinner is excellent. She pumps me full of liquor and I let myself get drunk. Martinis, wine, sambuca. Now it’s scotch. She’s drinking a ton, too, but not really getting loaded. Still, she doesn’t seem to mind if I indulge, so fuck it. If we survive tonight, maybe Daisy is the real thing.

“I’d like to tell you something,” I say, “but I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. And I don’t want you to think I’m a nerd for saying it. And I don’t want you to go telling all your friends I said it.”

I realize I’m drunker than I realize.

“Anything else?” she asks.

“Yeah, and don’t hold it over me if we fight later in the car.”

“You wanna fight in the car?”

“If we’re gonna fight,” I say, “then, yeah, the car’s the place.”

“Just let me know what we’re going to fight about so I can change gears. See, I was thinking we blow off the party. I was thinking of something else we could do in the car.”

Her devilish look is overwhelming. The rest of the room melts away except for that face.

“You’re adorable,” I say.

She flashes an embarrassed smile. I’m sure it’s something she’s practiced in the mirror, but it’s still stunning.

She looks up through her lashes. “Is that the big secret you wanted to tell me?”

Actually, it is, but I say, “No. I’ll tell you my secrets later.”

“Don’t keep me waiting too long.”

“Fine,” I say, “let’s get out of here.”

“One more drink,” she says, and the waiter appears out of nowhere with two more scotches. She must’ve ordered them before, but I don’t remember.

“Buckle up,” she says, leaning over me and fastening the shoulder strap. She’s stronger than she looks. She must be enhanced. She just about carried me out of the restaurant.

There were pixies in the last drink she gave me. I could tell but I let them go, drinking every drop. I’m not one to sound the alarm at the first sign of crisis.

“Tie me down,” is what I wanted to say as she straps me in. Instead, it comes out in a series of drool bubbles popping through my slack mouth.

“Sexy,” she says, and shuts the car door.

Even in my haze I can tell she’s totally sober. She must’ve had pixies eating her alcohol all night. People do that all the time. Seems like a waste of good booze to me.

She climbs in the driver’s seat and we zoom off.

“Got him,” she announces to no one in particular.

“Good,” the car replies in her father’s voice.

“Just lay back, Clutch. Daisy’s taking you home.”

I manage to roll my head over so she’s in my field of vision. She looks over and smiles.

Beautiful.

She turns her eyes back to the road. She’s driving with purpose, fully manual, and, judging by the concentration in her face and the quick movements of her hands, she’s driving very fast. She’s hiked her skirt up so it doesn’t interfere with her pedal work.

It’s a shame. Those perfect legs.

I think, Jump to it, Cowboy, and try to reach out with my hand. My arm responds by jerking up in the air and brushing her leg. She flinches.

“Easy, Clutch. You don’t want to get us into an accident.”

She puts my hand back on my own leg.

By the time we get back to her house, I’m really out of it. She has to fold me over her shoulder and carry me inside. My nose is on her bare back. She smells great, like sea air and caramel.

Her father meets us at the door. “Wow,” he says. “How much did you give him?”

“How much doesn’t matter with pixies. Don’t you know anything? They’re redundant and networked. If one completes the job, they all stop.” She pushes past him and across the marble. With unveiled scorn she says, “How’d you get this job anyway?”

“Then why is he so out of it?”

“’Cuz he drank like a sailor. He told me he doesn’t use pixies, so all that alcohol is swimming in his bloodstream.”

She dumps me on the couch.

“Doesn’t use—”

“Yeah, I know. Just sit him up, okay?”

Daisy disappears and her father leans in and pushes me upright. I try to flash him a smile. “Jesus, Daize,” he says. “He’s drooling.”

“Just hold him up,” she says from across the room. I hear ice hitting glass. She’s making a drink. I hope it’s not for me.

She reappears, holding a glass in front of my face. It looks and smells like more scotch.

“Here it is, honey,” she says, her voice syrup sweet again. I feel sick. It might be the pixies or the alcohol or it might be the way she shifts between personae.

She drops a pill into the glass and swishes it around to dissolve it. “Clutch, we need to talk. You seem like a straight-up guy, and I know we’ve built some trust during the time we’ve spent together, but I need to know that you’re telling me the truth.” She holds the glass up to the light. “Some of your pixies will insure that.”

“Thone slate,” I say. It’s my slobber mouth version of “Don’t, it’s not too late,” though clearly it is exactly that. Too late.

“Hush,” she says, and brings the glass to my lips. Her father holds my jaw open. I feel the liquid pour in, much of it dribbling down my chin and onto my shirt.

Enough, I think, and my crew goes to work. It doesn’t take long, since they’ve tailed each invader pixie from moment one. All they have to do is neutralize them and send them on their way to my kidneys to be processed. Within seconds, the alcohol haze clears, too. And they’ve stimmed me up for good measure. Not only am I sober, I am way up.

“Now,” she says, “let’s hear pixie secrets.”

“Okay,” I say in a crystal clear voice, “but you better sit down first.”

Cowboy moves fast. He’s already recruited all her pixies and they’re united under his command. Her legs buckle and she plops to the floor. The surprise on her face is genuine. I pause a moment to examine that expression. It’s her real face, still pretty, maybe more pretty, but nothing like the smiles she can turn on. You can see the pain behind it. Maybe I’m seeing the little girl she left behind when she started to fake it.

“Daisy?” says her father, or whoever he is. He’s still holding my chin. I send a copy of Cowboy over to him. He must be even more infested than she because his fingers instantly drop off my face. “What the hell?” he says, looking at his useless hands.

“First secret,” I say. I use the sleeve of the purple coat to wipe the drool and scotch from my chin. “Of course I use pixies. They’re my friends. They do favors for me.”

Daisy’s father is very confused and becoming alarmed. He swivels his torso left and right, watching his slack arms swing out. He lurches toward me.

“You better sit down too, Pops,” I say, and he plops down on the marble. “They protect me, but they’re nice enough to let me have a little fun.”

Daisy speaks. “So, that’s what you’ve been doing, huh, Clutch? Having fun with us?”

I stand up. “Don’t you dare accuse me of anything. You’re the criminals here. I was going to say my pixies let me have a life. They don’t do that for everyone. The company wants everyone I touch to get a little transfer of the truth mites.” I gesture to the glass that she’s still holding. “That way, any harmful folks—like you—are exposed before they can even start their cons. Unfortunately, a dose of truth mites—even a subtle tweak—ruins all human contact.”

Daisy snorts. “Well, you can’t have everyone going around speaking the truth, can you?”

“Exactly. Now how fun would it be if I knew our relationship was going anywhere as soon as I held your hand?”

“That’s why,” comes a voice from behind me, “you’re not supposed to touch them.”

I whirl around. It’s Vlad. He’s come in the front door. He’s wearing the swirling pants I’d declined earlier, a layer of sparkling grease on his bare chest, and the ever-present fez. He sports an ivory cane.

“Constrain,” he says.

The velvet purple coat presses my arms to my sides and squeezes my chest. The tails of the coat wrap around both my legs and grip my thighs tightly. I’m immobile.

Vlad walks over. “I know you didn’t have a choice, Daisy,” he says, “but Jesus, Bob, why did you touch him?”

“He’s a fucking amateur, Vlad. Look at him,” Daisy says. “He’s freaked out because his body doesn’t work. He doesn’t even know what pixies can do.”

Daisy’s father—Bob—looks helplessly up at Vlad. Vlad pokes him in the chest with his cane and Bob topples over.

“Now, Mr. Clutch,” Vlad says, “you know what we want. If pixies can’t make you talk, we can do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Bribery?” I say.

“Don’t be silly. Constrict,” Vlad says.

The coat suddenly feels like a vice. Most of the air is squeezed from my lungs. I think I can hear my ribs creaking.

I really didn’t want to do it. “Defend,” I gasp and think at the same time.

My trousers explode. Half of the material swarms up over the purple coat. Instantly, the constriction stops. The fabric falls away to the floor along with the red stripes Daisy had insisted on gluing to them earlier. The other half of my trousers melt down my legs and zip over to Vlad. They swarm up his legs and cane and onto his face. He drops the cane and screams. They’re in his eyes. Although they’re really too small to feel, when there’re millions of them crawling across your vision, it’s pretty freaky.

“You better sit down too, Vlad.”

He crumples to the floor.

“And shut up, too.”

His scream fades away and dies. His mouth is still open in a howl but his vocal chords are now paralyzed.

“See what you’ve done?” I say, but of course he’s in no condition to look.

Daisy and Bob can see though.

“You’ve exposed my secret anyway. My surprise for Daisy. I did put some thought into my outfit, as you can see. I figured that tonight, if you saw these, it would either be the beginning of something great or the end. Earlier tonight, I was leaning the other way. But I guess you never know till the night is done.”

I’m too romantic, that’s the problem. I turn and walk toward the door, giving them the full view of my third-date underwear. My consolation prize is that I know she’s watching the big silk red heart on my ass jiggle as I walk away. She has to. Cowboy told her pixies not to let her lids close.

Richmond sits in the interview room with me. It’s my choice whether he should leave, but he will want to hear the story anyway and this way I don’t have to repeat it.

“He can stay,” I tell them. “He is my boss, after all.”

I know he’s rolling his eyes next to me.

Across the table are two security people. The woman in charge—Velasquez—is a seasoned pro I’ve worked with. She’d written the report on Cowboy’s prototype, so has lots of questions for me. I run everything down for her, giving all the details except for the underwear.

The other guy is greener. He’s got a crewcut and square jaw. He sits like a building, straight up, unmoving.

Velasquez: “So, the neural commands worked as desired, even with impaired user function?”

Me: “Even while drunk, yes.”

The question freaks me out, though. What if they’d used some other cocktail, something that kept me from forming enough cogent thoughts to activate Cowboy? Ordinarily, it wouldn’t get to that point. There are layers of nano defenses, pixies on pixies, but I’d turned mine off. If I hadn’t been able to activate Cowboy, where would I be now?

She has more questions about the pixies, theirs and mine, but she’s academic about it. I’m not in trouble.

When she’s done, Velasquez closes her tablet and her tone changes. “Cowboy is a horrible name, you know.”

Me: “That’s what you said last year.”

“Single nanos don’t run around rogue. They cooperate, follow programming. That’s their strength. Acting in concert.”

“It’s a metaphor,” I say. Cowboy is more than one unit, of course. “But thanks for telling me how pixies work.”

She stands, slides the tablet into her shoulder bag. “How about . . . Sentinel?”

I shake my head. “I’m saving Sentinel for the trousers,” I say, then switch to voiceover. “‘Sentinel Slacks, keeping you safe while looking dangerous.’”

She smiles. “You don’t look dangerous.”

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Velasquez gestures toward the crewcut.

“This is Reggie. He might have some questions.”

Richmond says, “I’m sorry. Who are you?”

“I’m Reggie,” the guy says, speaking for the first time. Ridiculous resonance.

Richmond raises his eyebrows at Velasquez, who is heading for the door. She holds up her palms. “Hey, I’m done here,” she says. “Reggie’s a covert operative. He’ll need some details on the abduction. He’s going to play you, Clutch, and sting our competitors, apprehend their agents, or feed them bad intel.”

I look at Reggie again. He smiles. Too young, too handsome, too vapid. Posture that’s never hunched at a keyboard.

“I should play myself,” I say.

Velasquez laughs. “You’re—”

“What?”

She looks me up and down. “Too valuable to the corporation.”

“I did alright,” I say. “Admit it.”

“You know what? You did. For someone without any formal training, you did okay.” She levels a gaze at me. “You were also extremely lucky and benefited from your captors’ amateur mistakes.”

“I did alright,” I repeat, sounding stupid even to myself.

She reaches for the door handle.

I’m not going to let it go just like that. I’m here because I didn’t fit the mold. I’m here because I was lucky, yes, but also because I was smart, and I know something about security. I could try to throw some terms at her: field test, proof of concept. Things that might make her think our designs could improve with hands-on experience, with an engineer out there in the world.

I decide to keep it simple.

“Velasquez,” I say, and she looks back. “Look at him, look at me. Which is easier? Teach me what he knows, or teach him what I know.”

She looks at crewcut and back at me. Does it again. Then she pulls open the door and steps to the side, holding it open.

“Reggie,” she says, “can you give us the room, please?”