“We’ll extrapolate. Movie theaters, malls, the application’s endless, really.” Lucy realized her statement that was simply meant to convince Delia was actually true. She’d been thinking cities, sure, but college campuses, amusement parks, even that town fair thing Delia had fried cornholes or corndogs or whatever at for the past two summers. “This could actually work.”

“Maybe,” Maddie said. “But not without me.” She scraped her chair against the floor.

“Wait. Just wait.” Delia wrung her hands, eyes fixed on the table. “I never thought I’d get to a place like this. If this is what we’re doing, then so be it. I’ll code the crap out of it.”

Maddie stayed in her seat, and relief began to regulate Lucy’s hammering heart.

“But, Lucy?” Delia’s voice was weak and strong at the same time.

“Yes?”

Finally, she lifted her head. “You put an ‘i’ in ‘team’ again, and I won’t just let Maddie go. I’ll follow her.”

*   *   *

Eight hours later, and the only thing working was the shimmering effect at the edges of Lit’s launch screen. It looked killer, Lucy had to hand it to Maddie. But it had taken her all day. The other teams were way ahead of them; she’d seen Ryan trying out the skeleton apps of at least a half dozen teams. He’d been at the table of Delia’s cute coworker and the girl with the perfect skin three times. Apparently Ryan didn’t share Lucy’s contempt for bringing a guitar to a hackathon. He’d strummed what she’d only realized was the theme to Jaws after the girl corrected his notes. Lucy had looked her up: Emma Santos, a solid Pulse 5. One level higher than Lucy.

Not for long.

Maddie was a perfectionist. Obvious despite her silence. Apparently she’d used up all her words to condemn Lucy at the start of the day for forcing her to scrap the designs she’d sketched last night. The only word she had left was “no.”

“No,” when Lucy suggested a tiara icon for “dressy.”

“No,” when Lucy suggested a bicycle icon for “no parking.”

“No,” when Lucy suggested a faucet icon for “watered-down drinks.”

No, no, no, no, no.

“Yes!” Gavin shouted, smacking the hands of his teammates for the sixteenth time. Sixteen in eight hours.

And all her team had managed to smack was one another. At least that was what it felt like.

“Delia,” Lucy said. “Are you really sure you should be using Python?”

“Do you think I shouldn’t?”

“Um, yeah, isn’t that what I said six hours ago?”

“And four, and three, and oh, ten minutes ago,” Maddie said. “Speed isn’t everything.”

“It’s a hackathon. Hack. Hack implies speed.”

“Really? I thought it was your middle name.”

Lucy’s jaw clenched just as Ryan circled to their table.

“Girls, how we doing?” he said.