Page 41 of Travis
“Turn the camera on, Travis.” Hunter said it the way he said everything. Not a request.
I glanced at Sera. She hadn’t moved. She was sitting with her hands in her lap and her eyes on me, and her chair was two inches outside the frame if I angled the camera toward the left monitor. Two inches. Not a margin I loved.
I reached over and adjusted the camera mount. Tilted it three degrees left, framing myself against the server rack and cutting the secondary desk out of the shot. Sera was just outside the edge. Just.
I turned on the camera.
“Jesus Christ,” Beckett said. “What happened to your face?”
The bruise on my jaw. Fading but still visible, green and yellow at the edges. I’d stopped seeing it in the mirror, which was a mistake.
“I hit it on the server rack. Leaned down to check a cable run and caught the edge of the housing on the way up.”
“That’s the most Travis injury I’ve ever heard,” Coop said.
“The man literally hurt himself doing computer work,” Beckett said. “That is peak Hale behavior. You couldn’t injure yourself doing something cool? A bar fight? A bear encounter? Anything?”
“I live underground. My injury options are limited. But I’ll try to be more creative next time.”
“Well, you look like shit,” Beckett said, but the edge under it was concern, not humor. “You’re thinner. Are you eating?”
“I eat.”
“Energy drinks don’t count.”
“He had eggs this morning,” Maude said.
I closed my eyes. In my peripheral vision, I saw Sera press her hand over her mouth.
“Did your computer just snitch on you?” Coop asked.
“Maude is not a snitch. Maude is a system that occasionally overshares.”
“I provided a factual dietary update,” Maude said. “If the truth feels like snitching, perhaps the behavior should change.”
Beckett was laughing. Hunter might have been smiling, which was the Hunter equivalent of laughing. Coop was definitely laughing.
“I like her,” Beckett said. “Maude, what else has he eaten this week?”
“I’m going to decline that question on the grounds that my continued existence depends on Travis not dismantling me.”
“Smart woman,” Coop said.
“Moreno access credentials,” I said. “Send them. I’ll run the scan. Anything else?”
“Not from me,” Hunter said.
“Hey, Trav?” Beckett said.
“What.”
“It’s good to see your face.” A beat. “Even if it looks like you lost a fight with a server rack.”
I turned the camera off. “Bye guys, I’ll talk to you later.”
“Goodbye, hermit.”
The call dropped. The control room went quiet.
