“She touched my tablet,” Silas said sourly, wondering if he could find out who she was that way.
Professor Woo squinted in concern as he pulled a handkerchief from his suit coat pocket and handed it to Silas. “It looks like she touched your forehead, too.”
Silas dabbed at it, relieved the blood had slowed.
Taking up Silas’s tablet, his professor typed in his instructor code and the flexible screen went dark. “You can retake it tomorrow,” he said as he rolled the tablet into a tube and tucked it away.
Annoyed, Silas glanced at the window. There was shouting coming in from beyond it, but he doubted the woman would need to draft again. She was good, exceptionally so, and probably a freshman, since he hadn’t seen her before. “Why?” he said, taking his coat as Professor Woo handed it to him. “Can’t you reset it? It was just a bump.”
But his professor shook his head and gestured at the door. The instructor had returned and was addressing the class, trying to get them settled and explaining how they were going to adjust the time for the interruption.
“I was coming to get you,” Professor Woo said as he put a small hand on Silas’s shoulder and got him moving toward the door. “Professor Milo’s assistant took a bad hit this morning in training and broke his wrist. They need someone to monitor the slick-suits in his finals. Now.”
Professor Milo? Silas’s pace slowed to a halt. The man was a prejudiced prick. “Can’t you get one of my students—?”
Smiling, Professor Woo shook his head and pushed open the door. Echoes from the hallway slipped in. “Busy with finals or gone for the summer, and no one needs extra credit that badly. Just do it, Silas,” the smaller man coaxed. “You never know when you’re going to need a favor. And besides, you might get more data for your thesis if someone drafts.”
The chances of that were pretty good, and, feeling the pinch of avarice, Silas let the testing door shut behind him with a small click. The expansive hallway was open to the courtyard at both ends, and he looked for any activity, seeing nothing. Getting more data would be worth it, and he went still as he remembered that tidy little draft, wishing she’d been wearing a slick-suit at the time so he could have seen her reach. It bothered him that he didn’t know her by sight, but he’d been letting his students do most of the slick-suit fittings lately, and so he didn’t know everyone anymore.
“Fine, I’ll do it,” he said, and Professor Woo brightened, slapping him across the shoulders. “Where are they?”
“Thank you, Silas.” His professor reached into his suit coat’s inner pocket for an envelope. “If you’d said no, I would’ve had to do it, and I don’t know how to fix the suits if there’s a problem.”
Silas took the extended envelope. There were too many eyes and ears in Opti’s academy to risk saying aloud where this year’s drafter/anchor testing was, not when every student vied for any advantage.
“He’d like you there by eleven tonight to set up. You’re a lifesaver,” Professor Woo said. Then, giving Silas a last nod, he turned and strode briskly back to the testing room.
“Lifesaver,” Silas grumbled, not agreeing as he opened the paper. Sighing, he folded it back up and stuffed it away.
God bless it, I’m going to have to wear my good tie.
CHAPTER
TWO
Electronic dance music thumped through the walls. It made the swelling on Silas’s head throb as he sat in the club’s cramped security office. The outdated wood paneling and metal furniture from the ’90s made him loath to touch anything, and he twitched his new Dolce & Gabbana suit coat clear of the cigarette burns and chip crumbs.
“Skinny-man models,” he muttered as his thick fingers skated competently across his tablet. You had four, maybe six years of lanky adolescence, and then it was gone. Why were all the models, and therefore all the suits, stuck there? Real men had shoulders and arms.
Thinking he was talking about the meat market/dance club visible through the club’s grainy monitors, Professor Milo’s secondary assistant chuckled. “Me, I like eating,” the man said, casting envious glances at Silas’s state-of-the-art glass tablet spilling data in a crystalline, unending stream. Silas had justified getting it because of his work, but the truth of it was he just liked having the best.
The semitransparent data phased out, and Silas thunked the tablet against the desk to phase it back in. Even if it doesn’t work all the time.