Free Strongest Conjuration by Skyler White Page A

bother me a bit, not two months before all-of-us-but-mostly-Phil-get-naked-in-front-of-everyone day.”
    â€œWho’s calling it that?” Ramon had always halfcloaked his laugh in a modest cough; in Sarah’s throat, it sounded half-undressed.
    â€œMe, mostly.” Phil shrugged oneshouldered, chopping steadily. “But almost everyone agreed we needed you out of stub and integrated by the twenty-fourth.”
    â€œAlmost everyone?” Ramon raised sculpted eyebrows.
    â€œPretty much.” I fed Phil a generous hunk of cheddar on a melba toast. “The Incrementalists going public has a lot of people really excited.”
    â€œAnd I was seen as rather a wet blanket?” Ramon studied the scarlet lip print on his wine glass. “I never opposed this course of action,” he said. “But I find enthusiasm in our ranks, as in law enforcement, troubling.”
    â€œWe should only do what we don’t like to?” I teased. “Not a recipe for job satisfaction.”
    â€œSatisfaction is for finished work,” Ramon said. “Its anticipation is self-indulgent. Incrementalists should undertake only what we begin reluctantly.”
    â€œI’m reluctant,” Phil said.
    â€œYou’re nervous. It’s not the same. In 1856 you were reluctant.”
    Phil met Ramon’s eyes and threw peppers in the hot pan.
    I could graze for what meddlework Phil had undertaken reluctantly more than a hundred years ago, but I would never share their memory of it. Celeste had seen to that. “Want to tell me the story?” I asked.
    â€œLater,” Phil promised.
    â€œIt’s not important,” Ramon said.
    I guessed it probably wasn’t, and went into the kitchen to be closer to Phil. I threw away garlic skins and pepper stems, a raven in the wake of his culinary war. “You’d think an Incrementalist would clean as he goes,” I marveled in mock wonder, “but no.”
    Ramon smiled. “Some Incrementalists do.”
    â€œRight,” I said. “Say ‘all Incrementalists breathe,’ and Oskar would suffocate trying not to.”
    â€œA potentially useful stratagem.” Ramon sat back in his chair. He studied his hands, tilting his red-painted fingernails in the light. “What do you do with your vestigial claws?” he asked, waggling them at me.
    â€œThey’re the ultimate skeuomorphs, aren’t they?” I raised my hands don’t-shoot style, but rotated to look at my own nails. “I keep them short so I’m not tempted to paint them.”
    Ramon frowned.
    â€œI tend to get experimental with color,” I explained. “But I forget about them, the polish chips and peels, and then there’s a client meeting. Inevitably. And me with nails like scabbed knees.”
    â€œSkeuomorph?”
    â€œIt’s a design term.” I began reuniting spice bottles with their MIA lids. “Things like rivets on blue jeans or, more mindlessly, the freezer
above
the fridge. When a new iteration retains as decoration a once functional element. UI designers borrowed the term for the way we’ll appropriate the look or sound of real-world things to suggest ways of interacting with electronic ones. Call data packets
files
, and users will know to put them in
folders
or
trash cans
just like they know, intuitively, that clicking the little house icon will take them back where they began.”
    Ramon nodded and turned to Phil. “Did those who opposed spiking my stub into Sarah Waverly’s body do so on those grounds?”
    â€œWhat grounds?” Phil looked up from the sink where he was filling the pasta pot.
    â€œOn the grounds that breasts on my body would be like wings on a chicken?”
    â€œDelicious deep-fried with hot sauce?”
    Ramon sighed. “Skeuomorphic,” he said.
    â€œSomething like that.” Phil hoisted the filled pot onto the stove. “We debated whether your mind