Freya ordered a chocolate malt, a fried egg double cheeseburger, and steak fries with A.1. Sauce. Lynn Harris raised her eyebrows at Freya’s order as if she thought Freya couldn’t finish all that, but she was very wrong.
Freya spotted Dan peering at her from the kitchen, he looked so happy when he caught her eye. She felt she could just melt into the booth. Everything she’d been worried about seemed irrelevant compared to that smile.
The sun rose outside, streaming through the trees, and glinting off cars in the parking lot. Freya glanced around the diner between bites. There was only one busy table, late-shift nurses from the hospital. The other diners were scattered loaners, a police officer in the far corner, a few solitary truckers staring red-eyed at the dawn.
The conversation with Lynn became serious once they both finished breakfast. Lynn had Freya go over the issue with their internet several times and coached her in the exact wording they should use when they met with Hiidenkirnu’s security people.
Freya mentioned the whiteboard issues at her school, and Lynn thought this was also useful to them. She thought their phones might have gotten infected with some kind of industrial malware.
Freya was a little dubious until Lynn told her about Stuxnet, a cyberweapon developed by the Israelis to attack Iran’s nuclear program in the late oughts. The weapon targeted the industrial logic controllers in Iranian enrichment facilities and made their centrifuges spin too fast and tear themselves apart.
The image of centrifuges whirling out of control and disintegrating stuck in Freya’s mind. She thought about the morning where she’d been burning up, getting off again and again, and her eyes sought out Dan. He was over at the register, ringing someone up. She caught his eye, and he stared back so intensely it was like an electric arc between them. She blushed but didn’t look away. Dan had to break first to hand the credit card back to the customer. Color rose to his cheeks.
It didn’t matter if she was being manipulated. She would pay any price for this. It was everything. Lynn’s words drifted past. All Freya wanted was to be alone with Dan. She glanced down. There was nothing left on her plate but dried yolk and A.1. residue. Lynn had only eaten half of her vegan wrap. Freya wondered if it would be rude to offer to finish it when her phone buzzed in her pocket.
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Her cheeks felt like they were incandescent.
“Excuse me,” Freya said.
* * *
Dan led Freya through the back exit. They walked past the dumpsters that reeked of spent cooking oil, through the parking lot and into the woods behind the diner, where evergreens concealed them.
It all disappeared. There was only him and, in his eyes, there was only her. They fell into each other and shut their eyes in a long embrace that would have gone on forever if only there were time. When they broke, Freya kissed him. A little fire built in her. Dan grew against her, and she pulled him closer.
“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispered, feeling him shudder.
“I couldn’t…” His voice wavered.
Freya gazed at Dan’s face and saw everything had been abandoned. There was no more resistance, no anguish and, as she looked at him, she wondered what else had been lost. The eyes that had been so haunted last night gleamed with hope.
She had a flicker of worry that this was not his decision, and they were only pawns in the Starball’s game. But the thought could not hold. It was battered apart in a storm of joy. They had found each other, and nothing else mattered.
The connection began, and they started to merge, sensations overlapped, and she rode along his stream of thought. Dan wanted to take Freya by the hand and lead her into the parking lot. They would get in his car without bothering to clock out and drive back to her room.
Freya beamed approval. She hadn’t even wanted to wait that long. His eyes widened as he read her desire to be pressed back against the tree with his hands tugging at the waistband of her jeans. She felt Dan twitch against her at the thought. They were heartbeats away from tearing off clothes when the connection subsided.
Her disappointment was mirrored in his face, they had only skimmed a toe across the surface of Unity. But there wasn’t the despair they’d felt at the track. They each had the sense this was only a prelude.
An alarm interrupted them. Dan’s phone chimed his break was nearly over. It seemed impossible the whole exchange had only taken eight minutes.
“We didn’t get to talk,” he said, seemingly surprised by the sound of his own voice as he turned off the alarm. It felt so inefficient to have to use words to communicate. Freya realized she hadn’t told him about Lassa yet.
“Do you still want to come to the concert with me?” she asked, and he nodded easily. At once, Freya knew she hadn’t even needed to ask.
“I do. I’d go anywhere with you,” he said, reaching out to hold her hand. “We can talk about everything on the way there.”
“I’m so happy,” Freya said. She felt the Starball’s heat dissipating in her pocket.