Inhabited - chapter 13 (with images) (Patreon)

The saliva comes first. A thin, sudden flood of it under the tongue, more than her mouth should hold.

She barely gets her eyes open before her stomach turns over. Slow, heavy, everything inside coming loose at once. Underneath that, more immediate: her bladder, full and pressing, a sharp insistence she can't ignore. She kicks free of the sheets, throws the headset off, and gets to the bathroom on legs that aren't fully under her yet.

The tile is cold against her bare feet. She drops onto the toilet without turning on the overhead light, just the gray seep through the frosted window, and the relief is so immediate it goes on longer than it should. She rests her elbows on her knees and breathes. The room smells of damp towels and the faint sweetness of whatever shampoo she keeps in here. Outside, a garbage truck is grinding down the block. She hears it stop, the men working, the hydraulic thud of the hopper. By the time it moves on she's done.

She flushes, reaches for the sink. The water runs cold over her fingers. She looks at herself for a moment in the mirror. Round-cheeked, slightly puffy, the eyes not quite focused. She leaves the bathroom.

Then the stomach turns all the way over.

She hits the doorframe with her shoulder coming back through, drops to her knees, and it comes up fast and burning. Not much. Mostly water and the dregs of whatever she ate the night before. Her hands clamp on the rim of the bowl. The porcelain is shockingly cold against her palms.

She coughs, spits the last of it into the water.

She rests her forehead on her forearm on the rim. Her breathing is ragged, echoing off the tile. The rest of it arrives while she's reaching for a square of toilet paper to wipe her mouth.

Meg Adler. Thirty-two. Park Slope.

Six weeks pregnant.

It doesn't land as shock. It just sits, heavy. The father is Dom. Whatever they had ended weeks ago. She doesn't get the details, only the shape. He doesn't know. Nobody knows. Meg has been carrying it alone.

She sits back on the woven bathmat.

Her breasts hurt. Not like Ruth's. This is different, the ache high on the sides where a bra would sit, her nipples so sensitive that the cotton sleep shirt is an irritation. She can't stop being aware of it, the way you become aware of a tag you can't reach to cut off. She shifts her shoulders and hisses through her teeth.

She traces the grout line between the floor tiles with her finger.

The nausea isn't gone. She can feel it pulled back, low, waiting. She has to get something down before it starts up again.

She stands. Her legs are shaky.

The apartment is small but the kitchen is too big for the rest of it. A butcher-block island, scarred. Copper pans on a rack overhead. Spices in jars on an open shelf, in no order she can read.

Meg is a food journalist. Freelance. Broke. Currently pitching.

She opens the refrigerator. Deli containers, a kimchi going too sour, half a jar of preserved lemons. None of it possible. She finds a large glass bottle of ginger beer in the door. She twists the cap off. The carbonation is completely dead.

She pours it into a small juice glass. She finds water crackers in the pantry behind a bag of arborio rice.

She stands at the butcher block in the quiet apartment. She takes a small bite of the dry cracker. It tastes like nothing, chalk and salt, but after a minute her stomach quiets, a little. She washes it down with the flat, aggressively spicy ginger beer. The liquid burns the back of her throat.

The wave recedes. Background hum.

A sleek silver laptop sits closed on the far edge of the kitchen island, pushed aside next to a ceramic bowl of lemons.

She walks over and flips the lid open. The screen wakes.

A text document is open. A draft.

It's a review of a restaurant in Carroll Gardens. She leans against the heavy wood of the island and reads it.

The prose is good. Too good, for a fennel review. Two paragraphs on the lighting in the corner booth, on being left alone there. Meg has been four times this month. The piece is about the restaurant. It's also about being somebody with nowhere else.

She reads it and understands something about the woman whose skin she's wearing. A raw, vibrating precariousness. A woman waiting in a holding pattern, carrying a six-week secret, trying to figure out what she wants to do with a life that has just split into two possible timelines.

She closes the word processor.

She needs to check the investigation. Brigid at noon. She needs to know if Meg's life offers any access to the NovaSphere architecture.

She opens the file directory. Her hand knows where the journalism folder is. Pitch drafts. Editor contacts. Expense spreadsheets showing a checking account balance that gives her a small, clean fright.

She finds a folder named NS Comm Suppression.

Meg has been circling the tech accountability beat. Trying to land a larger piece.

She clicks in. It's full of screenshots of deleted NovaSphere developer forum threads, mostly ones she'd already seen as Cara. A few PDF downloads of generic press releases regarding firmware updates.

But there's a subfolder called Source.

She opens a plain text file. A name, an email, a few bullet points of notes from what looks like an off-the-record phone call. Meg found someone on the inside. Someone who left the company on bad terms. The notes indicate the source is willing to talk about a coordinated strategy to bury the safety reports regarding the transition white-out.

She sits on a wooden stool at the island, staring at the screen.

She reads Meg's notes. Meg has built a story about corporate behavior. A PR timeline, names of executives, dates the forum posts came down. A narrative about people behaving badly.

She reads past it. The source's transcribed quote mentions a server error log and she's already back inside the protocol, tracing the packet drops, thinking about where in the handshake the cache would refuse to dump. If the sync fails during a high-load render the memory leak cascades. She can almost see the node where the exploit lives.

She copies the source's name and email. She closes the laptop.

The nausea surges, a hot twist just below the ribs. She eats another cracker. Drinks the rest of the flat ginger beer.

She has to meet Brigid.

The protocol is set. Noon, every day, the café in Greenpoint.

The connection arrives like she's known it all morning. The air in the kitchen feels thinner once it's in. Brigid is Meg's older sister.

They are estranged. A cold war.

She doesn't get the transcript. Just the shape. Something true was said, on both sides, and something cruel. They've barely spoken in months. The silence between them is deliberate, and it's maintained.

She goes to the bedroom to get dressed. Standing in front of the closet, she can feel her own pulse behind her eyes.

The drawer where Meg keeps underwear has cotton briefs she pulls on without thinking. The warmth she finds there stops her for a second. There's a slow, constant heat between her thighs, dense, present, like the blood has been rerouted and forgotten to reroute back. She'd registered it earlier and thought it was sweat, or desire, or something she should be managing. It isn't any of those things. It's just there, low and steady, the body busy with something on its own.

She finds a thick, dark green knit sweater. She pauses before pulling it over her head, holding it. The last few mornings she has learned to brace for this part. She pulls it down slowly, and the wool drags across her nipples anyway, and her breath goes in sharp and doesn't come back for a second, a loud, sensitive response. She bypasses a pair of stiff jeans and pulls on soft, wide-leg black pants with a forgiving elastic waist.

She puts on a pair of scuffed leather boots. Grabs a canvas tote.

The walk to the F train takes ten minutes. Park Slope is quiet on a weekday morning — bare trees, sandstone facades, the low rumble of delivery trucks.

She walks past a woman pushing a massive, expensive stroller.

A hollow drops in low in her. It isn't thought. It isn't even emotion yet, not cleanly. Something in her has already reached toward the stroller before her brain caught up, and the reaching is part longing and part refusal, both at full volume, neither resolved.

She looks straight ahead. She walks faster.

The subway is a blur of rattling metal and fluorescent light. She sits on the hard orange plastic bench, knees together, hands flat on her thighs. A man across the car is looking at her, not in any directed way, just the noticing that men do. Some part of her has already clocked him and decided he's nothing. Too tired, dressed for an office, eyes already moving on. The relief of not having to think about him is small but real. The nausea rises and falls with the rocking of the train.

She gets off in Greenpoint.

The walk from the station is short: Manhattan Avenue, then the quieter block one street back. The café that used to be a hardware store. Two steps up to a wood door heavier than it looks.

Brigid is at the last table again. She walks the length of the room toward the back.

The chair scrapes loud against the hardwood when she pulls it out.

Brigid looks up.

The reaction is instantaneous, and it's entirely out of Brigid's control. Brigid's face goes slack before she can do anything with it. Her eyes widen. Her mouth opens slightly. The control she's been holding since she sat down is simply not there. The face of her estranged sister is across from her, and for a second that's all that's happening.

She is looking at Meg.

Brigid's jaw flexes. She recovers, but not all the way.

"Meg," Brigid says. The voice is tight. Guarded.

"Yes."

The silence stretches. Behind the counter, ceramic clacks against ceramic. She doesn't have the words that caused this, only the pressure of them. Everything Meg and Brigid said to each other, and everything they didn't, sitting on the table between them. It's like sitting in a room she doesn't have a key to.

"Are you…" Brigid starts, and stops. She looks down at the table. She traces the rim of her coffee mug with her finger.

"It's me," she says, keeping her voice low, pitching it under the ambient noise. "Still here."

Brigid lets out a slow breath. She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand.

"Right. Okay." Brigid looks back up. Her eyes search the face, looking past the familiar features, trying to find whoever is actually behind them.

"I woke up in her apartment this morning."

Brigid nods sharply. She reaches into her bag and pulls out a small notebook and a pen. She clicks the pen. The sound is a snap.

"What do we have?"

"She's a journalist. She's been looking into the NovaSphere suppression."

"Meg's a food writer."

"She's been pitching tech accountability pieces. She has files." She watches Brigid's face. The tight, controlled expression doesn't waver. "She found a source. An insider who left the company on bad terms. There's an email address and notes."

Brigid stops writing. She looks up. "She found a leak?"

"Yes. Lower-level. Willing to share."

Brigid taps the pen against the paper. "That's a start. Good work."

The business is concluded. The check-in is effectively over.

Brigid puts the cap on the pen. She aligns it perfectly parallel with the edge of the notebook. She doesn't close the notebook. She doesn't stand up.

The espresso machine hisses behind the counter and a wave of hot coffee smell rolls through the room. It hits her low and wrong. Not the morning-coffee smell that belongs in a place like this, but something thick and brackish, the smell of something her body has decided is an enemy. She swallows, pressing her fingertips flat on the marble.

Brigid looks up.

The distance in her eyes is gone. What's there instead is harder to name. Not soft. Not warm. The look of someone who has been trying not to ask.

"How is she," Brigid says.

The voice is quiet. Carefully stripped of any obvious inflection, but the vulnerability is sitting right there underneath.

She looks at Brigid. She thinks about the kitchen in Park Slope. The flat ginger beer on the counter. The draft on the laptop. The four visits to the restaurant in Carroll Gardens. The silence Meg has been keeping.

"She's pregnant," she says. "Six weeks."

Brigid stops moving. Hands still next to the notebook. The silence that follows is absolute.

She doesn't know how long they sit there. At some point Brigid reaches for her pen and sets it down again without using it. A barista calls out an order and someone laughs near the front window.

Then Brigid says, very quietly: "Do you know how long you've been gone?"

She doesn't. She waits.

"About two weeks."

Two weeks. Osei went silent about two weeks ago. The fit settles in without her doing anything about it.

She is the one who finally stands.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Brigid nods once, not looking up.

Outside, the cold air hits her face. She starts walking. She gets half a block and something in her chest caves. The look on Brigid's face when the word pregnant landed is in her somewhere. Her eyes sting. She keeps walking. She blinks, hard, twice. The sting doesn't go away, and then without her doing anything about it her vision goes liquid for a second and she has to stop at the corner and look up at the flat white sky until it clears.

She breathes out slowly. She starts walking again.