Super

Chapter 13: Deeper

Lex's time settled quickly into a routine, despite the fact that she'd only had her job several weeks. She generally worked with Mr. Chen every day during the week, but she'd also been devoting a couple of afternoons a week as well as a number of hours on the weekends to working with Riss. Also, since she'd had the terrible migraine, the doctors had demanded a few hours a week to run tests on her. Additionally she’d continued work reviewing the strategy texts she’d been given, and had begun to pull together some ideas for her paper. On the weekends Lex could leave the building, she usually went out with Casey or with Casey and Serena at least once.

Everything seemed to be going well, but despite all of that, Lex felt uneasy and restless. Her dream world used to be something she could depend on for support and guidance, but now her dreams seemed inaccessible and frightening. She could remember one dream in particular where she stood in a grey mist and then started walking to try to find something, anything, only to see more mist everywhere. Lex had woken up that day with a sneeze, surrounded by the smell of dust, which seemed a constant in her room no matter what she tried to keep it at bay. She’d also felt oppressed by how infrequently she’d been able to get out into the natural world, one outing to Rock Creek Park every two weeks not being really enough. Lex had begun waking up early so she could get to the roof to watch the sunrise and at least see out over the river, but to her frustration she found the roof access inexplicably locked half the time.

After working together with Riss for over a month, the two of them had made it approximately halfway through their building inventory. Lex had pulled a document together outlining the computer security strategy Riss had planned, but since the inventory and the strategy needed to be presented together, she’d held onto it. She’d ordered and received the sniffing tools Riss wanted, and they’d found out as a consequence that a number of seemingly unauthorized outside machines had been accessing the network, which Lex duly noted. She found she liked working with Riss, the two of them comfortably silent for the most part, except when asking for or calling out information, but Lex had managed to draw Riss out a bit on a few occasions, and as a result worried that Riss spent too much time alone.

She thought about it for a while one day, coming up with several ideas that she dismissed, and finally one that she liked, but that she’d need cooperation for. Later that day, when she and Casey were eating dinner, sitting opposite one another at the kitchen island, Lex asked, “Casey, would you mind if I invited Riss to eat with us sometimes?”

Casey happened to be chewing some pasta salad at that moment, but Lex could almost see her friend considering the question, and Casey answered once she’d swallowed her bite of food. “No. I'd like to have a chance to get to know her. Do you think she'll go for it?”

Shrugging, Lex replied, “I don't know. I figure I might be able to get her to agree after a while, though, if I keep asking.”

“Sounds good. I'd look forward to talking with her,” Casey said with a nod.

So the next afternoon, after Riss and Lex had finished their work together for the day and were climbing the stairs from the lower levels, Lex asked Riss if she would like to join the two of them for dinner.

“It's Casey's turn to cook today, and she's much better at it than I am. She said she was going to make her vegan lasagna today. I've only had it once, but I'm dying to eat it again.”

Riss turned to her for a moment, the skepticism clear on her face. “How would you make vegan lasagna?”

Lex shrugged. “I don’t know what the recipe is, but I'm sure you could get it from Casey. All I know is that once I had it, it seemed like all of the other lasagna I'd ever tasted paled in comparison. You'll like it, trust me.”