Always/Never

Chapter 11 / Cellphone From the Future

Opal Technology was Marin Convington's company, but it wasn't the first she'd founded—it was just the first program that hadn't crashed. After all, the difference between a crashed program and a program was only one word.

She'd created another one a few years prior. This idea, she called Cape. It was a fairly basic concept: most heroes used some combination of mapping apps and trackers for pre-press releases to figure out how to best use their abilities. So she figured, why not assign another human to that job? She didn't have a whole lot of funding, but she did have connections to two news channels, who were willing to share their breaking information in exchange for a cut of her profits.

It wasn't, however, a very successful idea at first. Marin never manifested. None of her employees knew what their clientele needed, so the idea sat in the background of her life, shedding money and snail-crawling its way to bankruptcy.

Luckily for Marin, one of her many other startup companies, Opal Technology, was about to be acquired by Horizon, a larger conglomerate. Said conglomerate also had no idea how much money one woman needed to be swayed, and so the deal was done.

I flipped the page with a sigh. There was a high possibility nobody before Accha—and now me—had taken this book off the shelf for a while.

Its connection to handlers was minimal, but it was there, so I kept reading. Maybe it would detail what Marin's initial concept for Cape was, and with any luck, some of her quotes might help Accha's case.

I was even willing to accept a generic one-liner if it meant I could quote the founder to Parkland to make him sweat. Something pretty-sounding, like, Employees at Cape must assist their heroes, especially in the rise of complicated situations.

My eyes jumped to the end of the page, and every couple of paragraphs, I checked how much longer the chapter lasted.

Only fourteen more pages, and then I'm on chapter five.

Judging by the expression on Accha's face, she hadn't gleaned much from the manual. She sighed, tucking her hair behind her ear, muttering under her breath in Portuguese.

I finished learning about Marin's life story and flipped to the next chapter. This time, the first few pages had photos. I would have missed them if I hadn't been paying attention—the printing of the ink job made them a grainy splotch in the middle of the book.

The first showed Marin, probably somewhere around my age, in the pose that every millionaire seemed to hone before they shot to fame. Outside a house that would have fit right in Dalford, she stood, almost regal, juxtaposed against the washed-out white of the sky and the grey of the tiny sedan in the driveway. Her eyes seemed to convey, You too can be like me, if you try hard enough, if you want it badly enough.

I squinted at the second photo. She was a bit older, next to a building that must have been Opal Technology's office. The caption read: Marin Covington and spouse, Tanner.

And spouse.

And spouse?

He didn't speak about his first wife often. Anything I knew about her was mostly guesswork on my part, a collection of small mentions he breezed past like they weren't that exciting. It wasn't like I hadn't tried to figure it out, but now it all made sense. I couldn't find anything on her because he'd taken her last name.

My fingers stopped over the page. It was such a Tanner thing to do that I didn't know why I hadn't considered that before.

"Accha," I said. "Anything?"

"Not really." She glanced at me from across the table, eyes narrowing as if she could tell I was waiting for her to ask what I had uncovered. "Is that a photograph?"