Page 75 of Static/Cling

He should have known better. Bjorn frowned at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Leif—”

“I’m fine.”

Well, that was a blatant lie. As if Leif thought Bjorn didn’t know him well enough to pick up on it. He pulled himself up taller, his face implacable. “You’re not. You’re exhausted.”

“We have work to do.” His pale lips and the lines cutting in around his mouth, the way his scar stood out pink against thewhiteness of his skin, all suggested he was still recovering from whatever power had accosted him in the stairwell.

“Yeah. We do.” Bjorn rummaged in the backpack with his clothes and pulled out the cuffs. “These are supposed to hold the charge, right? Then release it under some kind of control?”

“That’s the idea.”

Bjorn nodded. “Here’s what we do.” He sat on a nearby chair to unlace his boots.

“What are you doing?”

“I can’t get a good build-up with these on.” He kicked them off, pulled on his flannel and snapped the cuffs around his wrists. It took only a moment to see where the cuffs connected to the wires protruding from the shirt cuffs, so he hooked them up, then proceeded to shuffle over the carpeted floor in his socks.

It was the oddest sensation. Normally, the electricity seemed to settle, just under his skin, lifting the hairs along his arms, making his scalp feel all tingly, making his muscles twitch when it got very bad.

With the cuffs on, it all felt like it was travelling down his arms, but it never made it to his hands. He couldn’t begin to understand how they actually worked, but it seemed like they were, in fact, gathering the static electricity he was producing and keeping it contained.

He continued his electric shuffle, as he called it, which Leif hated, until the cuffs began to spark.

“Now what?” Leif asked.

Carefully, Bjorn unlocked one of the cuffs. He wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe the charge would flash out of it, spread through the room, stop both their hearts, maybe burn his fingers. He wasn’t sure.

It did nothing.

“Hand,” Bjorn ordered, holding his out to Leif.

Leif didn’t even question it. He held out an arm, and Bjorn clasped the cuff around his wrist.

“What are you?—”

“I think that button there releases it,” Bjorn said, pointing to a red button with the word “ouch written on it in black Sharpie.

“You’d think he would have given you a lesson in how they worked,” Leif muttered. “Or labelled the buttons clearly.”

“I think he would have if I hadn’t been such an asshole to him.” He felt bad about that now, and hoped wherever he was, Kassian knew he didn’t feel that way anymore.

“Why are you giving these to me?” Leif asked, doing what he always did, and keeping Bjorn’s brain on task.

“Because I can discharge it myself. I don’t need them. You do.”

“What?”

“You need them to use the charge to fry the servers. I can do it without them, remember?” He trailed his fingers along Leif’s jaw, feeling the raised skin of his scar. Since he used the hand with the bare wrist, he had the tiniest bit of charge to release over Leif’s skin.

“So what?” Leif asked, tone belligerent, showing he already knew what Bjorn planned and didn’t like it, but that Bjorn’s touch was just distracting enough to keep him from losing his mind over it.

“So you can get your tiny, practically invisible self down the hall to the backup servers while I go down to the sub-basement for Kassian and the main servers.”

“No. Absolutely not by yourself. No.”

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