Page 110 of Deathless
"Alonzo's wife brought empanadas at eleven."
She made a sound that indicated empanadas from Alonzo's wife did not meet her standards but would suffice in an emergency. I kissed her cheek and followed Mila down the hall.
Jasper's workshop was the second bedroom, buried under enough hardware to give a customs agent a stroke. Every clan family in the valley fed data through this room: route schedules, border rotations, encrypted comms with the northern cells. Jasper ran it all from a desk covered in gutted circuit boards and a mug of cold black coffee that qualified as a science experiment.
The man himself sat barefoot in his chair, wearing a t-shirt I was pretty sure belonged to me, reading glasses on, hair pulled back. He had a headset on and spoke rapid Russian to someone on the other end who sounded like they were having a worse day than we were.
Mila walked in, held up her sketchbook drawing, and waited.
Jasper glanced at it. He held up one finger to pause his call, pulled the headset to one side, and looked at the drawing properly.
"The shadows on the south wall are exact," he said. "You nailed the foreshortening on the archway."
Mila lit up for half a second and then schooled it back down, like she was still learning that it was safe to be pleased. "Señora Vega says I draw during math too much."
"Your math scores are perfect. Draw whenever you want." He put the headset back on. "Dinner?"
"An hour," Mila said. "Carmen says she's getting a dog to eat your food if you're late."
"Tell her I'll be there in thirty minutes ."
Mila left. I leaned against the doorframe.
"How's the empire?" I asked.
Jasper finished his call in Russian and pulled the headset off. "Andres found another routing vulnerability in the Bratislava exchange. Third one this month. The kid's a natural."
"You're turning our sheep farmers into hackers."
"I'm turning your sheep farmers into the best-funded, best-informed rural community in southern Europe." He spun his chair to face me. "There's a difference."
"Mhm. And the crypto mining?"
"Profitable." He pushed his glasses up. "Very profitable."
"And the thing I'm not supposed to ask about?"
"Still not supposed to ask about it."
I crossed the room and kissed him. He tasted like cold coffee and the cigarette he'd smoked on the back step an hour ago, and he leaned into me without calculating the angles first.
"Shower," he said against my mouth. "You smell like a construction site."
"You love it."
"I tolerate it. There's a difference."
"There really isn't."
He almost smiled. I caught it, the corner of his mouth, gone before it fully formed.
I showered. We ate at the big table, all four of us. Mila told us about the courtyard drawing, the math situation, and the new girl in her class who also liked charcoal. Mamá served the saffron chicken with roasted peppers and rice.
Halfway through the meal, Jasper reached under the table and put his hand on my knee. He left it there for the rest of dinner.
After, Mamá took Mila to the living room to watch something animated. Mila's taste in films ran toward anything with detailed backgrounds she could study for reference.
Jasper cleared the table. I dried. We moved around each other in the kitchen the way we'd learned to move in the months since Morocco, reading each other's trajectories without having to think about it.
