made a blunder that not even a twelve-year-old would commit, which only proved
that her brain was being eaten up by worms and that she deserved to be flogged.
But instead of going crazy with rage he had hired her.
Consequently she was mildly irritated with him.
When they had a snack just before she went to bed, he had suddenly asked her if
she was a good hacker.
To her own surprise she replied, “I’m probably the best in Sweden. There may be
two or three others at about my level.”
She did not doubt the accuracy of her reply. Plague had once been better than she
was, but she had passed him long ago.
On the other hand, it felt funny to say the words. She had never done it before. She
had never had an outsider to have this sort of conversation with, and she enjoyed
the fact that he seemed impressed by her talents. Then he had ruined the feeling
by asking another question: how had she taught herself hacking?
What could she say? I’ve always been able to do it. Instead she went to bed without
saying goodnight.
Irritating her yet further, he did not react when she left so abruptly. She lay
listening to him moving about in the kitchen, clearing the table and washing the
dishes. He had always stayed up later than she did, but now he was obviously on
his way to bed too. She heard him in the bathroom, and then he went into his
bedroom and shut the door. After a while she heard the bed creak when he got
into it, not a yard away from her own but on the other side of the wall.
She had been sharing a house with him for a week, and he had not once flirted with
her. He had worked with her, asked her opinion, slapped her on the knuckles
figuratively speaking when she was on the wrong track, and acknowledged that
she was right when she corrected him. Dammit, he had treated her like a human
being.
She got out of bed and stood by the window, restlessly peering into the dark. The
hardest thing for her was to show herself naked to another person for the first time.
She was convinced that her skinny body was repulsive. Her breasts were pathetic.
She had no hips to speak of. She did not have much to offer. Apart from that she
was a quite normal woman, with the same desires and sex drive as every other