“It was nothing,” Hazel insisted as she and Peter headed up the stairs to his loft. “A Queue car hit a glitch. Probably an unexpected bump in the road.”

“Queue cars expect everything, and they adjust,” Pete corrected.

“Well, the only other explanation is that it aimed itself at me. Are you saying that’s a possibility?” She leveled a skeptical look at him.

Peter crossed his arms and blew out a slow breath. “Where did you say you were?” he queried.

“Lower East Side.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I was forming a flash mob…” Hazel japed. “Is this an interrogation?” She had only trekked over there because of the message for Peter that she had intercepted. If he took her too far into questioning, she would probably trip up.

Instead of answering, Peter seated himself next to her on the little sofa and draped his arm across her shoulders. He had done it a thousand times before, but Hazel had never noticed how thoroughly “claimed” she felt. In the past, she had just felt safe. Pete, though, seemed different at the moment, more focused on her and less distracted by his other manifold interests. Maybe it was nice, or maybe it was a little intimidating.

Peter Donovan ran the world, and Hazel acted as if he were a pal from grade school. As she considered, her chest tightened with anxiety. Something about Rel Martins seemed to set Peter off, as if lines needed to be drawn. As if he had read her mind, Pete turned to face her, pulling her head under his chin so that she leaned against him.

“I can’t lose you,” he murmured, and Hazel’s heart sped. She just had no idea what the words meant, or how to interpret the intimate closeness he had initiated. Little sister? Or something else…

“Well…” She grabbed and squeezed the hand that he had placed on her knee. “You didn’t.” She used the moment to sit herself up and turn toward him. “I’m okay, and I’m safe.”

Lifting her chin, Peter riveted her eyes. “I need you to stay that way,” he insisted. “And I think you should stay on this side of the bridge.”

“Which Bridge?” she demanded, and his eyes sparked.

“Both.” He released her chin, and she stood to her feet.

What was his deal? She was about done with his possessiveness. “Can I borrow one of your bikes?” she wondered. “I’m not much in the mood for a Queue car tonight.”

He crossed his arms over his chest again, glaring at her. “You know you’re a coward, Hazel. You should know instinctively what a bad idea that is. I want you to sleep on my couch tonight,” he commanded. “After your ordeal, you do not need to be wandering the dark streets. It was not a good decision to begin with.”

“I’m fine, Pete.” Incensed, she riled at his characterization. She might think she was a coward – might even say it on occasion – but he should not use it against her. He shouldn’t say the words. A compulsive grasping for her shorn ponytail belied her anxiety. She wanted to leave, but she knew he would make it a huge ordeal if she tried.

“You cut it, Hazel.” Hazel peered down at her hand as if surprised that she had moved it. “I’ll contact Mr. DeSoto on this if I have to,” Peter continued, though he knew he would never do it. “No Queue cars for you, and no bike rides. I won’t let you use one of mine even if you ask. Have some sense.”

I have a sense, and I’m not liking it, she retorted silently. Still, no conflict! That was the general motto Hazel lived by, and conflict with Peter always proved worse than other conflict, since he could outreason her and never gave up his points. By the time she had an argument with Peter, she wanted to go crawl under her bed and bang her head against the underside until her brain emptied of all thought. No one should argue with a merciless man who was always right. Oh, and who runs the world.

Hazel shrugged a sigh and crossed the room to retrieve a controller. “If I’m staying, you’re letting me play for another hour.”

“Of course,” he agreed, one corner of his mouth lifting in a mirthless smile. His eyes did not lose their intensity.

Instead of acknowledging his victory, Hazel turned and crystalized the giant living room window, turning it into a huge video screen. Did he think he was in charge of her? For the first time since she had known him, Peter just seated himself on the couch and watched her play. A few times, she heard a one-sided conversation between him and one of his friends, but mostly he just watched her for the greater part of an hour – it was unnerving. Finally, he yawned and stood to stretch.

“I’m not going to hold you here against your will, Hazel.” He covered the distance between them, reaching for her and rubbing his hands up and down on her arms as if to warm her. “And I won’t program the codes to keep the doors locked, but I am going to set the alarm. If you decide to leave, I’m going to wake up and try to dissuade you because I think it’s a bad idea. You’ve had a rough day – you need to rest.”

“Okay, Pete,” she allowed softly, turning her face up to take in his expression. She chose to ignore the irony of the fact that his agreeing not to lock her in his house felt like a kindness. I guess when you rule the world, it might be… “I won’t go anywhere until the morning,” she agreed.

He grabbed both sides of her face, and for a second, she thought he was going to kiss her. Instead, he just turned her face to the ground and kissed the top of her hair again. “I can’t lose you, Hazel.” Without an explanation, he spun and left the room, leaving Hazel to stare after him in shock. Once he made the hallway, she heard him strike up another conversation with one of his flunkies, but with his strange actions, she couldn’t quite care.

She raised her hands to the top of her head, completely unable to form a thought. What’s his deal? Once Peter had exited the room, Hazel stared at his bedroom door for a solid five minutes, irritation stirring at his domineering attitude. As if to emphasize his intent to control her, when she tried to pull up her game on his screen, the signal was blocked. Was he seriously restricting her access to the Stream? Hazel wandered into the kitchen, intent on finding a workaround to his restriction. Most appliances tapped into a local signal, and with any luck, she could piggyback off the local feed onto the Stream.

Not in Peter Donavon’s house, Hazel soon found out. Apparently, Peter was so paranoid that his appliances accessed a fully isolated signal – no one would monitor how many times Pete did his dishes except Pete himself. Her efforts frustrated, Hazel trudged to the couch and threw herself down, stretching out and pulling the blanket off the back. Her mind spun in shock and annoyance.

What, exactly, did Peter want from her? Though the heady realization that she was indispensable to the “most powerful man in the world” should have spoken privilege, the possibility completely upended Hazel. She cared about Peter, but her concept of their relationship had never entered that realm. He was the pathetic kid she had stumbled on – stumbled over, really – after the Crash.

Only two days after she had found out her father died, after a huge row with her mother where Hazel had stormed out of the house needing to escape reality, she had run straight to a bar and tried to buy a drink. Of course, she had chosen to run to one of only a handful in the city that had determined to maintain normalcy by enforcing age and amount limitations on the clientele. When they kicked her out, Hazel had made her way past the too plentiful bums sleeping on the street near the establishment. She had miscalculated as she left, tripping over a pair of legs attached to a body propped up against the brick at the entrance. She had literally landed in his lap, and when she looked up at him, she realized that he wasn’t a homeless man. He was barely more than a kid, only a few years older than herself.

If she could guess anything about him by looking at him, she would have guessed that he had lost someone, like she had. She had peered up unto those half-shuttered eyes, dark and pained and barely aware. There was no great moment of pity or compassion; she just realized that if she had accomplished what she set out to do a few minutes earlier, she could have looked like that guy in a couple of hours. She did for him what she would want someone to do for her if he found her in a similar state.

She had placed her palm on his cheek as she climbed off of him and sat, cross-legged, beside him. She tapped his face lightly to see if there was any cognizance awakened in him, and he had raised misery to peer in her eyes. Only then had she recognized him – the moody older brother of her best friend, Lex. She couldn’t even remember his name, though she remembered swooning over him a couple of times when he had shown up to retrieve Lex for a gymnastics meet. Back then, even though he had plastered a charming smile on his face, Hazel knew that he had done it reflexively, because that was how he performed for strangers. Really, he had looked straight through Hazel as if she hadn’t existed.

That night, slumping against the side of a building, there had been nothing attractive about Peter Donovan. He seemed not to have showered in days, and the scent of stale alcohol permeated his breath and his clothes. Still, he looked on the outside how Hazel felt on the inside. She had lost Lex, too, and though her dad’s loss eclipsed the ache of losing Lex, Lex still hovered there in her mind. Her mom was suffering as much as Hazel, but Peter’s mom would be lamenting the loss of her favorite son, and Hazel doubted the woman offered much support for her other offspring. Still, Hazel had no idea how much of an effect her decision to show compassion that night would have on her life – on the lives of probably everyone in the world.

Squeezing past her reluctance and awkwardness, she had forced herself to stay and talk to the pathetic Peter Donovan. “I lost Lex, too,” she offered, locking her eyes to his. It was a very strange event for Hazel, no doubt spurred on by her own struggle of the moment, because Hazel was not the type to take a risk and try to take on someone else’s burden or rescue a poor, despondent soul. “Can I get you a coffee?”

With a sodden nod, Peter had moved to stand, and he had leaned on Hazel as they headed a few doors down to the nearest coffee shop. Turned out, Peter was not as drunk as he had seemed – though certainly under the influence. He had just lost his ability to move after drink had dulled the pain of loss that had kept him active.

The conversation in the coffee shop had quickly revealed that they had at least one thing in common besides Lex – computers. Peter, of course, knew information far beyond Hazel’s seventeen-year-old competence, but she was conversant enough to stay with him as he talked, unloading his fury and frustration with the Platform: how he had warned them of the dangers, how he had written to developers and programmers and government officials and anyone who would listen about the probability of something like the Crash. No one had listened. He had explained to her the mechanics of the problem, and she had understood a lot of it – it made sense.

Then she had said the magic words. “You know so much about this. You should just fix it.”

A light had gone on in Peter’s mind, and Hazel could see his intensity string tight as he began to process exactly how he would go about the process of “fixing” the Platform. He had invited her to his little apartment, and though she was probably too young to hang out in the house of a man four years her senior, she had gone. Obsessed with his new agenda, Pete had not paid too much attention to Hazel that night outside of bouncing ideas off of her, and she had fallen asleep on his couch.

Six months later, Pete was well on his way to completing the schematic of the Bridge and the Wire. Even as Hazel’s mother coped with being a single mom, Hazel had just faded away from her old life and invested everything in her new, more independent world with her new friend. Having reached adulthood that fall, she did not need her mother’s permission for anything and had ended up sleeping on Pete’s couch – often curled up next to him – with some regularity.

Sometimes, she doubted her wisdom in that decision. During that first year, her relationship with Peter had intensified and evolved. She had seen him lose it so many times as he tried to work out his solutions, and some moments bordered on terrifying. On more than one occasion, she had made a suggestion or a comment, and he had taken whatever object he held in his hand, hurling it across the room.

When he hit a roadblock in his ideas, he would take her for drives in a Queue car, hacking his way past the automatic controls and weaving like a maniac through otherwise orderly streets. Heaven forbid she should say anything that upset him on one of those drives, or he would add even riskier maneuvers that sent her clutching her armrests in fear. At the time, she had attributed his insanity to those first painful days after the Crash, when Hazel had assumed his rage came from the ache of loss.

Maybe she should have gone back home. But home without her father, home watching her mother’s grief and trying to parent her brother? Peter’s intensity offered her the only distraction that could keep her own grief at bay. And fortunately, once his Bridge and Wire design had gained traction – once he started attending meetings with government officials and businessmen – Pete had seemed suddenly to grow up. His outbursts had regulated, and he had settled into a productive and stable pattern that included Hazel’s companionship.

Ever since, she had counted on her relationship with Pete to provide predictability. He was supposed to be her stability. If he wasn’t – if he was a whirlwind of perplexity – what was the foundation of their relationship?

Sophie was gone, and all Hazel had was Pete.

But Pete had just changed the basis of their relationship, and now Hazel had to deal with a new reality: she didn’t really trust him.

Hazel had known it in her honest moments, but the familiarity of their routine had counteracted the undercurrent of energy that always threatened to burst forth from his psyche. An energy that fueled one of the most brilliant minds in the world. Now that she was questioning herself, what options did she really have? She liked Pete, but despite what he said, her well-being was far down his list of priorities. Maybe he cared what happened to her, but not because of its effect on her. He cared because if she crashed, literally or figuratively, his life would suffer upheaval.

Sighing, Hazel pulled the blanket over her head. Since she didn’t have Sophie, and if she didn’t have Peter, whom would she have? To her consternation, she realized that she really didn’t know anyone else well enough that, if Pete and Sophie failed her, she would have any resources outside herself. She needed someone to answer some of her questions, because her mind could not let go of recent events.

Lifting her handheld, she pulled up the entry on Aurelius Martins. “Rel” Martins worked for the NCB. Wasn’t the purpose of the Bureau to help citizens? Maybe he would be able to check on the SOA site, or maybe he could check on a runaway Queue car. Also, she had seen the look Peter gave the agent – Pete felt a threat from Aurelius Martins. Was the man a threat to Hazel? Or was Pete afraid of something else?

Hazel’s head spun.

First of all, what was the Trifecta, and why was she not invited? Secondly, why had a Queue car spun out of control with no one inside? It had happened a few times, when people inside had decided to take over the control but had no idea how to drive. Hazel would never try it. If a Queue car just spun out from its programming with no one inside, that was a serious issue. Why didn’t Peter seem more bothered by that fact?

Under normal circumstances, Hazel would just plop down on Peter’s sofa and throw out her questions until he got bored with being brilliant enough to know all her answers and insulted her intelligence. With Peter’s strange behavior after the crash? Hazel was beginning to suffer immense trust issues – maybe just spurred by her rebellious tendencies – and she did not like his controlling demeanor. Who did that leave? Tomás DeSoto, Hazel’s dance classmates, or her nameless Trip teammates. Tomás had resources, but he wasn’t exactly easy to approach – he almost rivaled Peter in his importance, and he was busy all the time. The others were just not close enough friends to seek support from.

When the memory flashed before her, Hazel’s breath seemed to ease back into her chest. One problem at a time, she realized. The Queue car - the agent, Rel. In addition to the fact that he would have access to the Queue car information, Hazel found herself wanting to see him again. The look of concern on his face when he had asked her if she would be okay stirred some forgotten need in her for validation. The look that said exactly what Hazel felt about Peter – that he was stepping over some barrier with her, one she was not comfortable with. Not that she would ask Rel Martins about the game or about Peter, but she could ask him about the Queue car. The cars were government regulated; he worked for the government. First thing in the morning, she would sprint out of Peter’s apartment and head straight to the local office of the Bureau.

+++++++++++++

In case I don’t run into you in the RPG before the Partie, I wanted to let you know that you and I aren’t the only ones who have lost teammates recently. Several people have disappeared from the game, and I think it’s really weird. We talked about it, so I hope you’ll think to check the comments on your page. FenderCat is gone, Kinder, Optigon – he’s that uber-cloaked guy from Wildix832’s team, Incandecks, and Prowler14. I’m not at all sure what has happened with any of them, but they have all dropped off in the past week. There may be more. I don’t know what you’re thinking, but something seems strange to me. -Dom.