Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used to feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”

Back at Murs Julia did something she hadn’t done since she’d gotten there in June. She went online.

None of them had been on Free Trader Beowulf in ages. It took them a while to crack the new log-in routine, which changed every couple of months. They raced each other, alone in their bedrooms but yelling trash talk back and forth. (Except for Failstaff, who was too much the gentle giant to talk trash, which may have contributed to his eventual victory. Asmo quit early and futzed around hacking the router instead, so she could kick Pouncy offline at will.) Once she was in Julia didn’t announce her presence—you didn’t have to, you could slip in without the system pinging everybody—because she didn’t want a blizzard of IMs from Free Traders wanting to catch up after her long absence. For a couple of hours she just lurked, cruising through old threads, and new ones that had sprung up while she was offline. There had been some turnover in the membership—there were a couple of new fish, and a couple of old fish were gone, or in hiding.

It seemed like years since she’d been there. She felt so much older now. You could customize the Free Trader interface any number of ways, but Julia had always gone for a bare-bones look, ASCII characters only, approximating the look and feel of an olde-timey Unix shell. Her eyes filled with tears just looking at everybody’s user names, picked out in green-on-black text. So much had changed since then, since she’d been living a life of quiet desperation in a mundane universe, racking up hours at the IT shop and killing time till she could take off for Stanford. So much that couldn’t be changed back. But not much had changed here.

Pouncy, Asmo, and Failstaff were running a private thread just like back in the day. She checked in.

[ViciousCirce has joined this thread!]
PouncySilverkitten: hey VC!
Asmodeus: hey
Failstaff: hey
ViciousCirce: hey

Electric silence for a minute. And then:

Asmodeus: so. big damn show tomorrow huh?
ViciousCirce: maybe

Failstaff: don’t come much bigger
Asmodeus: waddaya mean maybe?
ViciousCirce: big show if OLU shows up
Asmodeus: why wouldn’t she?
ViciousCirce: . . .

ViciousCirce: she might not exist? the summoning might fail? she might be on the rag? there are 10K reasons why not. just saying.