Free Feedback by Mira Grant Page B

next hour.”
    â€œGood morning to you too.” I rubbed my face with one hand, yawning. “How did we get a deadline?”
    Wordlessly, Audrey turned her tablet so I could see. The chat function was on, and a line of messages ran all the way down the right-hand side of the screen. All of them were from Ben. They had started at seven o’clock, and grew increasingly urgent as time passed. By the time I caught up to the present, he was yelling in all-caps, demanding she pour ice water over my head and questioning her devotion to something called “Sparklemotion,” which was always his go-to when he was really pissed off. My friends are weird.
    â€œOkay, okay, I’ll get up.” I rolled over again, this time so I could swing my feet around to the floor. As usual, my body protested every action. Some Irwins train themselves to wake in an instant, going from cool slumber to battle-readiness without missing a beat. I hate those people. I am a slow, bleary creature when I wake up, like a bear struggling out of hibernation. If I ever woke to zombies in my bedroom, I would be a dead woman.
    It was different in the field. In the field, I was more like an exemplar of my profession, powered by adrenaline and energy drinks, rarely stopping for longer than it took to back up my files and run back into the bush. I just slowed down at home, dropping my guard and allowing myself to catch up on all the sleep I didn’t get when I was working.
    I stood, removing my robe from the floor and slipping it on. Even that seemed like too much effort for this uncaring hour of the morning. Audrey, who had probably been awake well before Ben started messaging her, watched with tolerant amusement. I blew her a kiss and slipped out of the room. Time to take care of the necessities, before my darling husband decided to beat my head in with his laptop.
    The house we shared was technically big enough for eight if we went by the number of bedrooms available, and not by how many people we could stand sharing living space with. Despite that, there were only three bathrooms, which was a large part of what defined our normal cap. It was hard to like
anyone
very much when they were between me and the vital necessity of peeing.
    Ben had the master bedroom, naturally, since it was his house. Audrey and I were down the hall, in the space between the office I shared with Ben and the room we used as Audrey’s art studio. Mat slept on the ground floor, surrounded by rooms filled with buzzing equipment and endless dry-erase boards. The last bedroom was maintained for guests, and had been decorated by Ben’s mother, who’d always insisted the rest of us had no idea what “welcoming” looked like to a normal person. Maybe she was right. I didn’t really know. Her selections had been pleasant and non-offensive and reminded me so much of the institution that I’d never been able to spend more than a few minutes in that room before I had to flee.
    Ben was sitting at the kitchen table when I came down the stairs. He looked up at the sound of footsteps. Then he actually slapped the wood. “Did you take a sleeping pill or something? I was starting to think you were
dead
up there.”
    â€œDon’t be silly, Benny-boy,” I said, walking past him to the fridge. “There would have been screaming if I’d died in the night. You know Audrey doesn’t sleep armed.” A point of loud and frequent dissent between us. I loved her very much. That didn’t mean I slept next to her without a gun close at hand, in case the worst happened. She said she loved me too much to think that way. Some nights I couldn’t sleep for fear that my heart would stop in the night, and I would reanimate and eat her.
    â€œDon’t call me Benny,” grumbled Ben, refocusing on his laptop.
    That wasn’t like him. Well, the objection to the nickname was like him—was exactly like him, in fact—but the