The phone rang.
Well, that was already a problem. Ideally, the phone should not ring. This model seemed extra loud and accusatory, as if there were a muscular fairy inside turning a hand crank like an air-raid siren. Or maybe a dinner bell. Chaos is ready, come and get it!
John was already having some, a bit of an appetizer. He couldn’t find the phone cord.
Then Erik picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
“Nooo!” John howled, elbow-deep in a desk drawer. “They can’t hear you, it’s not plugged in! Don’t hang it up!”
Erik regarded the body of the phone and hesitantly dropped the receiver towards it, as if he might like to hang up the phone so he could focus his attention on why his friend was so upset. He was only reluctant to do so because he had a vague idea…
John snatched the receiver away and jammed the phone cord into it, then he dropped it back in the cradle to have it out of the way while he plugged in the other end.
“Fuck,” John said, realizing only a few seconds too late.
The phone rang again. The fairy inside was grinding away like it was a real emergency.
John grabbed it, dropped it, caught it by the cord, and hauled it back up. “Heh-hello?”
“Moth twenty-three,” said the voice on the line.
John groaned and smacked a hand to his brow. “Are we really going to do this cloak-and-dagger shit?”
“Yes,” the phone voice replied.
“What if it’s an emergency?” he cried.
“You’re supposed to memorize,” the phone said acidly. “Most of us memorize, Johnny.”
“Oh, fuck off,” John told the phone. He set it back on the table and addressed Erik, “I need to find something, please do not hang this up.”
Erik smiled and saluted him. “I forget things!”
John frowned. “Go… Go stand in the kitchen. Go away. Go to the kitchen. Shoo.”
“Why?” Erik replied, smiling.
“…I saw a mouse. Find it and shoo it out here so Potato can eat it.”
“I can only open the doors and the drawers with the stickers! And the…”
“Then go do that, I need to find something!”
“The mouse?” Erik asked, blinking.
John curled clawed fingers into his hair. “No, not the mouse. You find the mouse. I need to find two things at once, please go look for the mouse in the kitchen while I look for my callsigns in here!”
“Okay. Cool.” Erik saluted again and ambled towards the kitchen, but the gods alone knew how long he’d stay in there and away from the phone.
John left the receiver face-up on the end table and ran back to the desk. He dumped all the drawers on the floor and stirred through the papers. Billie always wrote his callsigns on a coloured sticky-note, because she knew he lost things, but he had other coloured sticky-notes and he couldn’t remember which colour February had been.
It was a pink one, for Valentine’s Day, and she’d drawn a heart around the important part and written, Don’t Lose This! XOXO, beside it.
“Gods, I hate you,” John muttered. He scrambled back to the phone and said, “Meatball fourteen. Are you there? I’m sorry I told you to fuck off! Meatball fourteen!”
“You know,” said the phone, “point is, if you memorize, and you’re in trouble, nobody see you with little slip of paper saying ‘Hey, here are special words you say when in trouble,’ and they do not smack you on head and say, ‘No, tell them you are fine.’”
John’s mouth twisted into a narrow moue of displeasure. “Who is this? Are you new?”
With faint amusement, “It’s Galya, sweetie.”
He sighed and combed a hand back through his hair, shaking his head. “Hi, Galya. Are the kids okay?”
A pause. “Uh, not really okay-type situation, Johnny, you know?”
He nodded against the phone. “Yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s not so bad,” she said. “They are safe here. We are grateful to be together.”
“I don’t mean that,” he said weakly. “I just… I know it doesn’t compare to what you’re going through, but I’m not okay either, okay? Please don’t tease me. I… I’ll just yell at you and then we’ll both feel bad.”
“Okay, rybka,” she said gently. “I’m sorry too. But you are not answering your paper and Mama worries about you.”
“The paper?” He winced and gazed back at the mess on the floor by the desk. “Oh, gods, could you beep me again?”
“Yes. Fingers crossed, eh?”
“Yeah…” He tipped the phone against his shoulder, listening with both ears as hard as he could. He heard Erik clicking through melamine dishes in the kitchen, but he could not detect an expensive piece of magic-enabled paper yelling to be rescued from the trash, or under a pillow, or behind the desk. He sighed again and picked up the phone. “I’m sorry, Galya, I got nothing.”
“Billie will bring you another one,” she said. “She want to come say hi anyway. That’s why I am trying to get hold of you.”
John nodded. “Oh, yeah. Okay. Tell her it’s okay, we’re alone.”
“No problem, rybka. She’ll be there soon.” She paused. He could hear her draw a breath, maybe collecting herself or just trying to think what to say. “I know is not really ‘okay,’ Johnny, but… Someday. We stay alive and get back to ‘okay,’ yeah?”
“Yeah. Thanks.” He shook his head. “I really mean that. Thanks. You’re brave.”
“Unlucky,” she said flatly. “Lucky people don’t need ‘brave.’” Her voice grew a little warmer, “But thanks. When this all over, we have drinks together somewhere, da?”
“Da. Yeah.”
“Close eyes and cover ears, rybka.”
He shut his eyes and turned away from the door, but he didn’t bother with his ears. “Erik, it’s going to be loud for a second, but it’s…”
There was a tearing sound and a bright, purple-tinged flash of light. He had turned away from the door, but they weren’t using the door, and he got a faceful of light anyway. The room was just too small. If you didn’t want to be flash-blinded, you’d need to shut yourself in the bathroom and stuff a towel under the door. It wasn’t worth the effort.
Mashed Potatoes scrambled out from under the card table, running with her tail held high.
“Můj pierogi!” a male voice cried.
Blinking to clear the sparkles from his vision, John made out a familiar purple shape in peasant garb. The beaming man dropped to his knees and spread his arms. The cat leapt into his embrace.
“Aww! Potato-baby! Good girl! Who wants a toy-toy?”
Erik popped up from behind the kitchen counters and waved. “Hi, Greg! Hi, Mattie! Hi, Billie!”
“Heeey,” said a blinking woman with dyed, stoplight-red hair. “Erik.” She smiled at him, but with the delay it came off pained and unnatural. She edged sideways, still smiling at Erik, until she could grab John by the arm and drag him aside. “Why the hell does he remember me?” she hissed.
John straightened, cleared his throat, and plucked Billie’s hand from his arm with two fingers. He picked up the phone from the floor beside the table. “Tell Galya you’re fine and I’m not hiding the Prokovian Secret Police in my bathroom.”
Billie took the phone with a scowl and smiled into the receiver. “Hi, hon. We’re all good here. Yep. See you…” She scowled again, then pursed her lips as if swallowing a pill. “I will not… yell at him. That’s all I can promise. Okay, see you soon.” She blew out a long sigh and hung up the phone.
John put a hand over her mouth before she could open it again and spoke in a low voice, “Now, are you about to tell me I’m not brainwashing my friend up to your standards? My friend who cried and said he understood why we were doing this, but ‘I’m scared and I just wanna go home,’ over a year ago? My human friend who deserves to live and be free just as much as anyone else? Are you about to tell me I need to sit him down and damage him a little more to help with this fucked up enterprise?”
“Well, you already know, so why say it?” she muttered. “Will you at least remove him so we can talk? Please?”
Erik was sitting on the floor next to Matvey and playing with the cat. “C’mon, Tater, don’t you like your mousie?”
The purple man laughed airily. “Oh, it’s that funny fellow who talks the mice out of the walls for her. Our widdle pierogi is spoiled rotten, aren’t you, my dear? But what about…” He put his hand behind his back and came out a moment later with a long white string. “A shoelace!”
Potato batted madly at the crimped end and thumped on her side, trying to kick it.
“That’s better!” said the man. He smiled sheepishly at Erik. “But this nice purple boy asked me to play with the kitties quietly, little greenie baby. I’m so sowwy, but…”
Erik patted him roughly on the head and yelled, “Hi, Mattie! Uh, dobroye outré! Are you having fun in there? Do you have a rollercoaster in your room? I think I have one in my room, but I forget stuff. It’s cool! I don’t have to get better all at once! No big deal!”
The man patted his hand down and pet him on the head, much more gently. “Oh, you poor, silly thing. You try so hard. Well, at least you stopped giving the kitty milk. Oh, Potato.” He lifted the cat and scolded her gently. “I know, but it’s so bad for your tummy…”
John had folded the table, set the chairs aside, and pulled down the bed. “Hey, Erik?” he said. “Could you come over here for a sec? I wanna show you something.”
Erik leaned in and spoke behind his hand, “I,” he declared, not even bothering to whisper, “am going to have yet another nap!” He rolled back to his feet and waved at the man, “Bye, Mattie. Bye, Greg. See you later!”
John peeled back the blankets and indicated a good place to sit. Erik sat and looked up with a smile. John took his left hand out from behind his back and showed Erik the shiny silver teapot, while glaring at Billie the whole time.
Billie staggered back a pace, brushed by the ghost of a memory.
(He’d leaned closer and stared at her. “You’re a girl?” She’d smiled and offered her hand to shake. “Nah. I’m a lesbian, they don’t count.” And he smiled too. “Hey, so, how’s your handwriting?”)
A decade later, she wasn’t sure whether to read his disapproval as, See? I’m being responsible with him, or, Look what you’re making me do!
If John had enough intellect left to be friends with Billie, or to care that he wasn’t anymore, he would’ve told her: IT’S BOTH!
But he was busy.
Erik slumped forward with a contented sigh. “Oh. That’s… nice.”
“Please focus, Erik,” John said.
“Mm-hm,” Erik replied, smiling. His hand drifted up like a strange fish in an aquarium. “Can I have…?”
“No, you’re too tired,” John said firmly.
“Mm.” Erik fell gently sideways and curled up in the bed.
“Give me your eye and I’ll put it away.”
“Uh-huh.” Erik’s hand drifted up again, and this time he pulled his metal eye out of his head and offered it to John.
John accepted and dropped the eye into his shirt pocket. It left an instant oil stain. “Now close the other one and rest here quietly until I come wake you.”
“Mm.”
John pulled the blanket over him and paused with one hand ready to tuck in the corners. “And forget who that mean lady with the ugly red hair…”
“It’s pretty,” Erik protested, frowning.
John was willing to accept this compromise, the hair wasn’t the important part. “The mean lady with the pretty red hair is a stranger, and she’s never been here before, and she’ll never come back, and it makes her paranoid when you remember things, so forget her. Every time.”
“Mm-hm,” Erik said.
John allowed his hand to tuck in the corners, though a bit self-consciously, with Billie watching. “Now get some rest.”
“Mm.”
John leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Hot chocolate? Fealty?”
“You had three days to come up with a cutting remark and that’s it?” Billie replied, arms similarly folded.
He sighed and slumped helplessly. “I’ve been busy. What do you want?”
“I want to give you a few things you need to live,” she replied. She drew a ragged manilla folder out of her inside coat pocket and offered John a glowing white sheet of eight-by-ten unlined paper. When he reached for it, she held it back. “And I want to check in and make sure you’re not going to get the rest of us killed.”
“I make you no promises,” he replied. He reached a hand towards the paper again. “Do you want me to have that? Because if you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”
“We have your sister, you know,” she said, frowning.
He sighed and wandered away. After a moment spent doing social calculus and chair math, he sat in one of the folding chairs. He didn’t want her to sit down and get comfortable, but he supposed she might have the other folding chair, if she wanted it. It was still less-inviting than the armchairs. “Is she all right?” he said. He scoffed. “As if you’d tell me if she wasn’t.”
A square, instant snapshot was deposited in his lap from above. He picked it up and saw a dark-skinned greyscale girl holding a newspaper with yesterday’s date visible on the front page. She smirked and held up a V-sign, the rude way, then tapped the newspaper with her index finger, again and again, in an endless five-second loop.
He shuddered and turned it so he couldn’t see. “You’re sick,” he said faintly.
“It was her idea,” Billie replied. “She feels like a hostage, so she said she was gonna start acting like one. She said if you don’t stop acting like a male chauvinist pig, she’s gonna mail you her least-favourite toe. That’s a direct quote, I saw her for breakfast and it is still very fresh in my mind.” She tapped a finger to her temple.
“I am not acting like a chauvinist pig!” he cried. “I am acting like a big brother whose little sister is only eighteen years old!”
“You can’t protect her from this,” Billie said softly. She sat in the other chair. “She knows what’s going on and she has seen some shit. She’s sick of cleaning up the consequences, she wants to get out there and do some damage.”
John cut a gesture at Erik in the bed. “Don’t you have enough child soldiers?”
“Don’t you have enough people telling you to be something you’re not?” she shot back. “Jenny is not a melodrama nurse, she is a brilliant young lady with no release valve for her fucking justified anger. If you don’t let her go kill some bad guys, she’s gonna strangle one of the good ones to death out of sheer frustration.”
“You realize,” he said, “of course, that that is horrifying. If I were a male chauvinist, I’d lock her in her room until she came to her senses. But I know she’d never stay there, so I’m just telling you: Jenny does not do any damage.”
“She only…”
“No,” he said. “Jenny stays wherever you’ve put her and keeps pretending she’s a melodrama nurse. You and I have both been closeted much longer than her, and it’s no picnic, but it keeps you alive. She can come out as a terrorist after I’m dead. If you hurt her, I’m done, and I’m taking Erik home with me.”
Billie shook her head. “Could you honestly live with yourself?”
“If I can’t, I will not be missed,” he said.
She stood and walked away, leaning on the kitchen counter beside the little sink. “Joshua tapdancing Christoper on a… on a soda cracker…” She dropped her head.
“Bill…?” He almost got up and went after her, but he settled back in the chair with a frown and folded his hands. They weren’t friends anymore. He wasn’t sure what the hell it was that they were, but it wasn’t friends. “Mina,” he said.
“Mina is a girl’s name,” she said thickly. There was a roll of paper towels on the counter. She tore one off.
“You’re still a girl,” he said.
“No, I’m a terrorist.” She blew her nose. “They don’t count. I don’t know what to do.”
He sat for a long time, hands in his lap and eyes downcast. “Well,” he offered her at last, “I don’t know what to say. So now what?”
When she looked up at him, he was smiling. Almost like normal. Almost like old times. She shook her head again, dismissing it. “I-I can’t be here monitoring your mental health, and I can’t send you to a shrink, but you don’t even know how fucked up it is that you said that, and we need you.”
He glanced at Erik. “No. Not me.”
“You are really stupid sometimes,” Billie said.
“Yeah,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You are really stupid sometimes, but you’re not dumb. You started this. It was you, me, and Rob actually, physically writing the lists on the cards, but you started it. You just didn’t have enough hands to do it yourself.
“Yeah, Erik is super important. You know how important he is? We let him have you. And we’re running around like crazy trying to do all this other stuff without you. And… And you’re up here with that poor, frigged-up kid grinding you away like a cheap-ass pencil. And I can’t let you leave.”
She came back from the kitchen and clasped both hands on the back of her chair. “Can I get you someone? Just… Someone to sort the papers and remember the callsigns and cook, and watch the kid when you go to the store…?”
He was already shaking his head.
“John, if we can’t swing it at this hotel, we can find another… It’s not like last year, we have the Cat Network now, and money. We have those things because of you and Erik! We can put you anywhere. A beach on an island someplace where you can both go outside — you deserve it! We’ll find some girl who won’t mind taking care of you and pretend you’re married. Galya likes you, what about…”
“Galya has two irreparably damaged children, and the third one starved to death four months ago, along with her husband!” John cried.
Billie shooed a hand at him. “All right, all right, not Galya. Not Galya specifically. Or a beach necessarily. Just someone to help!”
“There is no helping this black pit of chaos,” John said.
“Stop being stupid,” she replied.
“No.” He left the chairs and knelt among the pile of papers under the desk. “It’s my calling. My purpose in life is not blowing shit up, it is comic relief. You knew that when you decided to help me. Here.” He offered her a coloured sticky-note, a lined yellow one which still had enough adhesive on the back to cling to his index finger. “I’ve got too much to do and I never remember this stuff, so I’ve been writing it down. Go on.”
Billie plucked the note from his hand and found a To-Do list format which had the Prokovian writing on top cancelled with a dark scribble. Above it, he had written in small, cramped capitals: NO NEW ROOM, NO NEW PEOPLE!! The lines below, each with a box inviting a checkmark upon completion, had a list of reasons.
◻It took me THREE MONTHS to get Erik used to this place, he cried every night, and I was scared the whole time he’d die of neglect and exhaustion LIKE AN ABUSED PET HAMSTER.
◻Erik was SICK when we bugged out of Cinovec, and we still had to drug him to keep him out of trouble. He wants to go HOME. He takes every opportunity he can. I have a 38 43 45 item list of dangerous things he can’t do, enforced AT LEAST twice a week with various forms of mind control, AND HE KEEPS COMING UP WITH MORE. If there’s one thing he doesn’t need, it’s more chaos. HE WILL USE IT.
◻David likes me. If he sees me with a new person (male OR female, HE HITS ON BOTH!) he’ll either HATE them, or like them too. NEITHER OF THESE IS A GOOD OPTION.
◻David REQUIRES a nightlife, and a lot of anonymous dark clubs and bars. I have figured out where I can take him safely in this city, OFTEN AT GREAT PERSONAL RISK. If you put me somewhere else, I have to do all that work all over again. I WOULD RATHER DIE, and if you make me do that, I MIGHT.
◻I DO NOT HAVE THE STRENGTH OR TIME TO TRAIN ANOTHER PERSON TO DO WHAT I’M DOING. THIS JOB MAKES NO SENSE!
“And if I can find a pencil,” John said. “I will add: If another human being has to go through what Galya’s family went through, because you took someone from an actual, useful mission so they could waste their time trying to organize my shit, both of us will carry that guilt for the rest of our lives, and I already have enough. Do you have enough yet, Billie?”
She sighed and handed back the note. “We are not done talking about this, but I have too many places to go today.”
“You always have too many places to go,” he replied with a smirk. “So just give up.”
“No,” she said. She turned away… and pulled a plastic bag full of candy-coloured balls from her back pocket. Each one had been labelled in permanent marker: DO NOT EAT. “Do you need more gum? Or a knife? I have a knife…” She was rooting around in her other pockets, still holding out the gumballs, which one should not eat.
John accepted this momentary victory with grace, “No, thank you. We’ve been doing quite well.” He even managed a small smile. “Although, if you can hunt us up another movie theatre, that would be a big help.”
She nodded, and pocketed the inedible candy again. “What about the thing? Did he finish making the thing?”
“Thing” was a hard habit to break, almost a superstition. But if they forgot and said something other than “thing” on the phone, or where someone might hear, they really were going to be in trouble. It was a rational dread.
“Is that it?” she said. She indicated a rectangular object wrapped in a white handkerchief, which John had set aside on the kitchen counter.
He slid in front of her and put up both hands. “It’s still in pieces, Billie, don’t mess it up. He gets annoyed. He thinks he’s doing art.”
“Will it be finished next time?” she asked. “When is he coming back?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, a few days…”
She pulled up his sleeve and counted the tally marks. “Today. You could have him back today, and I could come back and get the thing tomorrow morning, and use it tomorrow afternoon. Don’t lie to me, John. We have too many trains and not enough things.”
He pulled down his sleeve with an offended huff, as if she’d snuck a peek at his underwear. “I’m not lying. I just don’t tell you everything because you don’t have time and you’re supposed to trust me.” He scowled at her. “There are other factors, Erik has been…” He covered his mouth with a hand.
She pulled it down. “What? ‘Erik has been’ what?”
“Nothing. He just doesn’t like…”
She narrowed her eyes. “David. He doesn’t like David, right? He doesn’t like David, so he does whatever he can to piss off the psycho with god powers who is basically running this shitshow, and then David does whatever he can to get back at Erik. Then you have to get in between them and smack them away from each other, and the three of you do a regular Stooges act. And you don’t have to let Moe and Larry go at it, do ya, Curly? But you’d rather upset Erik and put all of us at risk because you’re squeamish.”
He turned away. “You don’t like it either. If you weren’t squeamish, you’d say what you want me to do to my friend.”
She snatched the black bag off the windowsill and strode towards the bed, “Man, I’ll frig him up myself, right now, if you won’t. I’ll send someone by to do it every damn…”
“Don’t!” He grabbed her by the shoulders and pressed her into one of the folding chairs. “He doesn’t need it. I just did the list with him yesterday.” He shook his head. “He has a cycle, Billie.”
She snorted. “You always…”
“I always say it because he does, and I live with him and I know it. You just pop in randomly and surprise him. When something unexpected happens, he perks up trying to understand it. When it stays quiet and the same, he settles down again. I am telling you, we are firmly in Phase Three. He’s noticing the Invisibles, he knows I can’t see them, and he doesn’t quite remember he shouldn’t talk to them. When he starts complaining about the fork on the bathroom window, then it’s time to set him back to Phase One. Not before.”
“It doesn’t hurt him,” she said, with the petulance of a cordon bleu chef who makes a living dropping lobsters into boiling water. “Why do you always act like I’m asking you to…”
“We are hurting him every day we keep him here, away from his family, endangering his life, against his will,” John said. “He isn’t even safe in his own mind. I am not going to let you pretend stealing over a year of that kid’s life and violating him on a daily basis is not hurting him just because he’s not in physical pain.”
“Okay.” She brushed him away and stood. “Then I’m not going to let you pretend what you’re doing isn’t going to get more people hurt like Galya’s family. You can’t shame me for wanting to give you someone to help and then turn around and let Erik screw around with shit people need to live.”
She grabbed his shirt collar and tugged him down to her level, though it wasn’t far. “You two idiots are cranking out a thing a week, plus stamps and forgeries. Nobody else is able to make David work that fast. Erik is dynamite and David likes you. If anything happens to disrupt that, people are gonna die. I don’t like what we’re doing to Erik either, the gods know I don’t, but the moral high ground…”
“‘…is not real estate we can afford,’” John sighed, shaking his head. “We promised he could go home, Billie. I keep promising him he can go home. I only dragged him into this because we all swore as soon as we could do it without him, he could go home. We’re doing it. Aren’t we doing it?”
“No.” She turned away. “We still have more trains than things. We’re not ‘doing it’ until we catch all of them, or make it stop. And then we’ve got to deal with the fucking kids!”
“If that’s the bar we have to clear,” John said, “even if we found another person just like Erik, you still wouldn’t let him go home, because two Eriks are better than one. Either we accept that we’re going to lose some people…”
“People will die,” Billie said firmly. “If you’re going to talk about letting people die, at least have the decency to say it.”
John spoke quickly, hands fisted, “Either we accept that some people will die so Erik can go home, or we keep him here until he dies. I won’t help you do the second one, you understand? People dying because we didn’t help them is not the same as us deliberately stealing the life of an innocent boy. We’ve already almost killed him once — more than once! I will not let us become vampires.”
“I’ll be satisfied with being an efficient vampire,” she replied. She picked the black bag off the folding chair and plopped it into his hands. “If he doesn’t need it, then call David back here today and finish the thing. I’ll check back with you tomorrow morning. And do not lose that damn paper. Stop turning the backlight down, you’re not dumb enough to throw out a piece of paper that glows.”
“No, I’m just dumb enough to leave it lying around,” he said. “Then Erik notices it and plays with it until he figures it out. He has said ‘Hi’ to Central on more than one occasion — do you not already know this?”
She sniffed. “You can’t keep track of everything and neither can I. That’s why it’s a shitshow. Hey, Greg?” She waved at the purple man with the cat. “C’mon. We got more kitties to pet.”
The purple gentleman applauded softly. “Yay, Billie-Willie. Who’s next?”
She drew a billfold of small photographs out of her coat pocket and showed the very first one, a stripey orange beast with one ear and a permanent snarl. “Sunny, Greg. Please. We always go home and pet Sunny first. It’s safest.”
The man clasped his hands. “Aw. My little Alliance babies all act like prey animals. So cute. You have your eyes in front with the nice binocular vision, remember? You are predators!”
“But we don’t have claws so we have to be smart about it,” Billie said. “C’mon. I bet Sunny misses you.”
“And you!” the purple man replied. He put a hand behind his back, not long enough to reach into a pocket, and handed John two candy bars. “For you and your friend! Be good little boys!”
“Always,” John said with a nod.
“See you tomorrow,” Billie said.
“Bye-bye, Sweet Potato!” said the purple man. He and Billie vanished in a blinding flash.
Blinking, John staggered back to the windowsill and set the black bag on it. The teapot was already on the bed. Pawing through the carnage under the desk, he finally found a pad of coloured sticky notes. He wrote, David Valentine, on the topmost.
He sat on the bed and nudged Erik with a hand. “You’re all done resting and it doesn’t matter what the lady and I were talking about.”
“Mm.” Erik dragged himself upright with a smile. “Still sleepy.”
“That’s all right,” John said. “Just pop your eye back in. We’ve got a couple things we need to do.”
“Then can I have a candy bar?” Erik said.
John sighed. “Yes. Now please focus…”
