Discord's Apple

She almost used her father’s line: Fine, okay. Just like Frank’s daughter. But Bruce was her friend—she should have been talking to him all along. She should have called him, instead of him calling her all the time.

“Not good. He isn’t getting treatment, he’s in pain, and there’s nothing I can do. He won’t talk, he’s pretending like nothing’s wrong—” Her voice cracked, and she shut her mouth to keep from breaking into a full-blown sob.

“Evie, I’m sorry. If there’s anything—”

“I know, I know. Thanks, Bruce. I think I just need to keep working. Keep busy.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. So tell me, what’s the President done now?”

“Well. Russia came up with proof that China’s been funding the rebels. So the E.U. is siding with Russia and India. The U.S. is still waffling. Britain is waffling, and the E.U. is threatening sanctions on them for siding with the U.S.”

“And we’ve got a whole storyline with the U.S. and Russia being friends. That’ll never fly.”

“This whole mess is playing like someone’s idea of a fucked-up war game. It’s just so unreasonable.”

“Is it ever reasonable?” Evie said. She knew what he meant, though. She couldn’t help but conjure this image of stern generals and power-mad heads of states standing around tables with tactical displays, shuffling around troops and weapons, with no thought to the people on the ground—the real lives their decisions impacted. “Do we wait and see what happens?”

Bruce said, “We could be waiting for ages. I say we just keep going with what we have—the new stuff that you just sent—and play it by ear.”

“Do you want me to keep e-mailing scripts?”

“You know—I haven’t been working much. You can if you want. Definitely keep writing. Write anything. We’ll do something with it, at some point.” He sounded tired.

“How are things there?”

“Citywide curfew, but that’s nothing new. Callie finally got out of West Hollywood. It’s not too bad.”

“Hang in there.”

“You, too. Call me if you need anything.”

She needed to reverse time and live in last month, before her life had run away from her.

She made ham-and-cheese sandwiches, but her heart and appetite weren’t really in it. Eating would give her and Alex something to do while they stared at each other. She brought two plates with the sandwiches into the living room.

She had her work spread all over the coffee table: her laptop, powered down; pages of handwritten notes she’d collected when ideas hit her late at night, in bed, in the car, and the like; and a few back issues of Eagle Eye Commandos she used as reference.

Alex, sitting on the armchair, was reading one of these.

The faces staring back at her on the front cover belonged to Tracker and Talon. He was about to fall off a cliff; she was holding on to him, grimacing. Eagle Eye Commandos number 42. She wanted to snatch it out of his hands and hide it away, apologize for it. It wasn’t that she wasn’t proud of her work. It was—well, sometimes she felt guilty for being proud of it. It wasn’t exactly high literature.

“What do you think?” she asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He smirked. “I like how the flying bullets leave trails.”

She set down the plates, slumped onto the sofa, and smirked right back at him.

He said, “You write as E. L. Walker. Why don’t you use your full name?”

“Thirteen-year-old boys wouldn’t take the book seriously if they knew a girl wrote it.”

“But—” He opened to a page featuring Tracker. At Evie’s insistence, Bruce didn’t draw her in the stereotypical comic book manner of portraying women in skintight clothing, antigravity breasts and all. She wore functional black fatigues, had a reasonably normal athletic figure, and most of the time—splicing wire in the middle of a jungle, for example—looked downright scruffy. “—this is you, isn’t it? This isn’t about thirteen-year-old boys’ fantasies. It’s about thirteen-year-old girls’ fantasies.”

In another life, a parallel universe, Evie had enlisted in the military. Army, air force, whatever. She didn’t know what she would have done as a private or an airman. Administration, probably. Mostly, she’d wanted to have a bit of an adventure—basic training, for instance—and it seemed an easy way to go about it. Never mind that adventures weren’t supposed to be easy. College and independence diverted her. To this day, she wondered if she could have hacked it, and wondered if she should have tried, just to see.

When she didn’t answer, he turned back to the book, flipping pages without reading. “The presence of a nominally talented, self-sufficient woman hasn’t seemed to hinder sales.”