Today Tonight Tomorrow

I glare at him. “I don’t think you pressing the button is going to do anything different from me pressing the button.” And I don’t want him to accidentally see my group chat with Kirby and Mara and somehow get the wrong idea. Still, I hand it over. I’ll just grab it back really fast if it turns on.

“It won’t turn on,” he agrees after holding down every button for a more-than-acceptable length of time and thoroughly aggravating me in the process. “Did you charge it?”

“It’s been plugged into my car.” I hold out my palm, since there’s something very strange about my phone, with the geometric patterned case Mara gave me for Hanukkah last year, in Neil’s hands. I try the power button yet again. “I can’t exactly play without my phone.”

“Wait. Wait. We can fix this.” McNair swipes around on his own phone, tapping Sean Yee’s contact photo. “Sean can fix anything. He brought a twelve-year-old MacBook back to life last year.”

“And why would he help me?”

“He’d be helping both of us.” He types out a message I can’t see. “And he got killed pretty quickly earlier, so he doesn’t have skin in the game.” His phone pings. “Sean’s free, and he’s at home. He lives right off I-5, Forty-Third and Latona. It’ll only take us ten minutes to get there.”

“Wasn’t he at the safe zone? With you and Adrian and Cyrus?” This is too weird. McNair’s friend helping me, out of the goodness of his heart?

A smile curves one side of his mouth. “He just came to hang out. Were you… looking out for me?”

“I’m just perceptive.”

“You were looking out for me,” he concludes. “I’m touched.”

HOWL CLUES

A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album

A place that’s red from floor to ceiling

A place you can find Chiroptera

A rainbow crosswalk

Ice cream fit for Sasquatch

The big guy at the center of the universe

Something local, organic, and sustainable

A floppy disk

A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)

A car with a parking ticket

A view from up high

The best pizza in the city (your choice)

A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing

An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)

A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper

4:15 p.m.

“WELCOME TO MY laboratory,” Sean says in a voice that makes him sound like a villain in a spy movie that definitely doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. He ushers us into the tiny basement of his Wallingford bungalow. And wow, it really does look like a laboratory down here. There’s a worktable with four monitors, a rack of tools, and countless wires and electronic gadgets strewn about. The lighting gives everything a vaguely greenish tint.

It’s cold in the basement, and when I rub my bare arms, I remember where I left my sweater: on a chair in the listening booth.

“I hope we’re not interrupting,” I say. “Seriously, thank you so much for doing this. Or for trying to.”