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.Luckily, she hadn’t yet shopped this week, so there was no juice to confuse it with.She used the same thumb technique to cover the cereal with milk (at which point Zippers sat at her feet purring again, hoping at least to get the leftovers).Terri ate the rice puffs, plain since she didn’t want sugar all over her kitchen floor, and very slowly, so that they were soggy by the time she’d finished.Even feeding herself relied on sight! She hadn’t recognized this fact.She maneuvered another bite into her mouth, recalling sogginess as the reason Daci refused to eat cereal, even as a child.Terri had met Baroness Dacianna Von Worthington one September day as the two of them were coming off the school bus.Terri didn’t yet know Daci’s name, so she just smacked the lanky redhead—whose nose was buried in a book even as she exited the bus—with her paperback.“Hey! Wanna trade?”Thus began a friendship that had withstood the cute boys, jealous girls, and too-easy, too-boring, and often irrelevant classes of Santa Barbara Junior High, then Santa Barbara High School, where they sauntered through halls once walked by the likes of Charles Schwab and John Northrop.Dacianna spent her summers in New York—the Hamptons, a place even more surreal than Santa Barbara.College kept them on opposite coasts, and the girls, now women, pursued very different fields.Terri began her career at the Southern Poverty Law Center, while Daci had forsaken her engineering degree to conceive, start, and sell a series of successful, unrelated businesses while earning a Master’s in Global Policy.Now Terri had her own practice, Tehzan, Preston, and Guite: Experts in the Unprecedented.Daci had just taken over Survivanoia, Purveyors of the Post-Apocalypse.Not so different on paper.Not so different at the core.Daci’s signature rapping came, three short, impatient strokes—either Daci or the police.Terri felt her shoulders loosen, her teeth unclench.Zippers lunged to meet Daci at the door and cry for food.“That didn’t feel like forty-five minutes,” Terri told her.“More like forty-five days?”“No, actually.The individual tasks felt like forever, but now that I’m through with that minutiae, it seems like I just got off the phone with you.Weird.”“That could be the Flu talking.Like when you have a high fever? Your sense of time distorts? Let me get you some water.”Terri moved to her leather armchair, felt to make sure it was where she thought it was, and sat down.“Can you feed Zippers?”“Yes.I can see he’s starving.”She heard Daci’s heels click on the kitchen tiles, heard the cat food can pop-top snap open and Zippers purring around his breakfast.Everything sounded closer, clearer, like a TV turned up too loud.She heard the water run, raised her voice over it.“Hey, was there a guy washing my car when you drove in?”“Was there supposed to be?”“Does my car look clean?”“Your car always looks clean.”“Right, but I never take it in.I park it and it’s dirty and I get up the next morning and it’s clean.But I never get out of the house early enough to catch him.I think it’s the guy three doors over.”“The professor?”“Yeah, Salvador.Turns out he’s a cook, too.”“For a living?” Click-clack-click then soft padding whenDaci hit the shag leather carpet.“No, he’s a professor for a living.I meant he’s able to cook well.”“You know those Mexican guys all have three jobs.Never related, you know, si senorita, I teach calculus, and on weekends? I’m a valet.”Terri laughed at her friend’s spot-on Mexican accent.“Usually they fix cars, though, they don’t wash them.”“Right? Good luck finding a mechanic once Flower Flu is done decimating the Hispanic population.” Daci pressed a small tablet into Terri’s hand.The comment, not flip indeed tinged with venom, gave Terri pause.She rolled the pill between her thumb and middle finger.Tiny, like the little red sinus medication pills.Not round, though, angled, like a tiny squared football.Terri squinted at it but it made no impression against the dark blur of her hand.“What color is this?”“Silver, what else?”“Tell me again why these aren’t for sale—or for free—to the public.”“It’s not my decision.I just started there.Give me, like, a minute.”Daci’s seeming lack of frustration sparked Terri’s.“Not ‘just started’.It’s been what, three weeks? A month?”“And I’ve been chasing every lead I have!”Terri flung an open hand at where she supposed Daci stood.“You’re the president of the company.If you say sell the drug, it gets released.”“You know that’s over simplistic.Don’t feign ignorance.It’s not just my company that needs convincing, there are two other corporations involved in a binding, legal agreement.And in all three companies, stockholders, CEOs, COO’s, all these jokers need to nod in unison before anything can get done.I can barely keep up with the alphabet, let alone do the right thing.”“Don’t quote Spike Lee at me, you traitor.” Terri stood, stomped a few steps, then thought better of it and slowed, not wanting to storm into a wall.“You need to do what you took over Survivanoia to do.” To her relief Terri found the bedroom, where she made her way to her clothing butler.“I’m working on it!”“I figured that’d be the first thing out of your mouth once you were at the helm.That’s why you took over in the first place!”A sigh from Daci.“Can we talk about this after you take the pills?”“No! 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