Page 15

Feeding her helps. It does not fix the real problem, which is that the small human does not stop.

She works until the light dies and then works by the glow of her laptop and then works by the glow of her phone when the laptop battery quits. Three in the morning, four, I drive past the site on my way home from Judanna's place and the barndominium windows still flicker blue against the dark fields.

A body cannot run on eggs and no sleep. Mine could not. Hers cannot.

So on the fourth night I stop pretending to leave.

I stay past dark. I make noise with the drill so she takes it for trim work. It is not trim work. I track the light as it bleeds out of the sky through the unglazed window openings and count the hours she has stared at a screen without blinking.

At eleven, she is still at the bucket-desk, spine curled into a question mark, jaw slack, cutting the same six seconds of footage over and over because her eyes have quit working and she no longer registers it.

I set down the drill.

I walk to the temporary service panel bolted to the far stud, the ugly gray box that feeds her whole glowing empire, extension cords snaking off it in every direction to lights and laptops and chargers and that little humming router.

I put my hand on the main breaker.

"Oggan?" She does not lift her head. "Are you still here? It's so late, you should go home, I'm just finishing this one..."

I throw the breaker.

The barndominium goes black.

Every light dies at once. The laptop screen drops to its own dim battery glow. The router's little green stars wink out. The router fan spins down. Silence rushes in to fill the space where the electric hum used to live, huge and complete, nothing left but crickets outside and the tick of cooling metal.

Jilly makes an outraged squawk. "NO. No no no. My render, I was in the middle of a render, what happened, did the generator..."

"I turned it off," I say into the dark.

A pause. Her breathing is the only sound.

"You... you what."

"I turned it off." I flip on my headlamp and point it at the floor so it does not blind her. In the spill of it, her face is a pale smudge of shock and dust and dark circles. "It is eleven at night. You have worked nineteen hours. You have eaten two eggs and a cube of cheese. The power stays off until you sleep."

"Turn it back ON, Oggan, I am not kidding, I have a Hearthwell deadline, do you have any idea what Patsy will..."

"Patsy is not here." I cross my arms. The headlamp throws my shadow twenty feet up the exposed rafters, a giant against the dark. "Patsy does not carry your beams. Patsy will not visit the hospital when you fall down in this trailer at three in the morning with your heart going wrong."

She opens her mouth to argue.

Her stomach growls instead. Loud. In the dead silence it echoes like a bark.

She shuts her mouth.

I reach behind me, into the cooler I stashed by the door hours ago for exactly this, and I pull out the flat cardboard box I have kept warm against the truck engine.

Pizza. Large. The greasy, glorious, sponsor-unapproved kind, dripping cheese, no pastel filter in sight.

I set it on the plywood floor between us and flip the lid open. Steam curls up into the headlamp beam.

"Sit," I say. "Eat. Then sleep. The render can wait for morning. The render does not care whether you live or die." I lower myself down cross-legged, which puts me closer to her height and takes some of the giant out of the shadow. "I do care. So it waits."

The last words come out before I can weigh them.

They hang there in the dark, enormous, undeniable, and I would take them back if taking words back were a thing an Orc could do.

Jilly stares at me across the open pizza box, laptop forgotten, the fight draining out of her spine one vertebra at a time.