“Oh. Okay. What did you want?”

“Move your hands. Do stuff.”

Sveta did. The movements of her hands didn’t have the mechanical quality.

“I did that for Ashley Black, and I thought I’d do it for you too. I just wanted to see—I’m going to take your hands…”

Kenzie reached out, grabbed Sveta’s hands, and them moved them around. There was a clear disconnection between where Kenzie’s hands were and the slow, almost dream-like way that the images of Sveta’s hands moved.

“Yeah. I worried about that. It’d look weird if you picked something up or if someone moved the map around. Next time! Here, let me change it. Bend down.”

Sveta obeyed. Again, she looked up at me, while Kenzie used her fingernails to turn the tiny dial at the underside of the clip.

“I have other tattoo maps loaded into my phone, if you’re interested. Um, just off the top of my head, lotus flowers, pink and green, and um, watercolor birds and branches… skulls and roses? Do you feel like a badass? Or I can get rid of the tattoos.”

“It’s skulls and roses or nothing, as I see it,” Ashley Black said, from the other sink.

“This is good,” Sveta said, and her voice was small.

I looked over my shoulder at the Ashleys, raising an eyebrow.

“I know this is a super minor project that probably doesn’t matter much at all, but I was still worried about how it would turn out, because a lot of what I do is I get really good images, but then when I do stuff like projections, I’m trying to find use-sensitive ways of printing those images. It’s like those super old fashioned cameras that would spit out a photo as soon as you took it, but I’m spitting all over you. I had to find videos with a really good coverage of certain body parts, so what I ended up doing was setting up cameras to scan for those and—”

“Kenz,” our Ashley said, interrupting. The interruption might have been rude, but the reality was that Kenzie kind of mandated them when she got going, because she pressed on and she left no gaps.

“Yeah?”

“If you get caught up in this, we’ll spend the entire shopping trip in here, fiddling with your tech.”

“Oh! Oh, shoot, I imagined this taking twenty seconds in my head. How long has it been?”

“Not twenty seconds,” our Ashley replied. “Come on. Let’s leave them to it. I’ve got to figure out what I’m doing with my costume.”

“Let Sveta and I hit one or two stores,” I said. “We’ll loop over and catch up with you? If there’s anything you want a Victoria opinion on, have them hold it at the counter and we’ll go back.”

“Do they do that?”