The Prada Paradox by Julie Kenner Page B

of the reasons it hurt so bad when he betrayed me on television. But even now, I know that I can work with him. I might hate him, but I can definitely work with him.

    “You’re right,” I say. “But I still feel…I don’t know. Antsy.”

    She looks at me appraisingly. “Is it the scene? Coming home and finding a stranger in your apartment?”

    “You sound like Mac,” I say. “She said pretty much the same thing earlier today.”

    “Maybe we’re right.”

    “Maybe…” I trail off with a shrug. “At any rate, whatever the reason, Iam nervous about it. So I guess it’s good that Andy’s coming over tonight to rehearse.”

    “To the house?” Her brows rise a bit with the question.

    “Yes,” I say, feigning casualness. I know she’s not fooled, though. Lindy knows me better than anyone, so she knows just how few people I’ve opened myself to since the attack. I’ve had like zero new friends, so inviting Andy over is a big step.

    Blake, actually, is the only new person in the last few years who has squeezed through my walls. And look howthat turned out. I’d opened my heart to him—shared things I’d never shared with anyone else. I’d believed it was for real and for forever. And then he’d gone and twisted the knife.

    Lindy flashes me an understanding smile, then hooks her arm through mine and tugs me along. “Come on, my insecure friend. Let’s go spend money.”

    Since that sounds like a truly fabulous idea, I walk with her in silence for a good ten seconds. But this whole invite-someone-over thing is now on my mind, and after a few moments I can’t take it any longer. I pause in front of Tiffany’s extravagant windows. “I didn’t screw up or anything by inviting him over, did I?”

    She smacks me in the arm with her purse, and that shuts me up. “Oh, honey. He’s a working member of the team. That’s why you invited him over in the first place. He’s not Janus. You know that.”

    “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

    “Besides, Andy probably understands what you’re going through better than anyone. I mean, wasn’t he stalked himself? Isn’t that what you told me?”

    “Sort of,” I said. “He got sucked into the game as a protector.”

    “Explain that to me again? I still don’t get this whole Play.Survive.Win thing.” Considering that she has an IQ high enough to be the gross national product of an emerging nation, I don’t believe her. But I do appreciate what she’s doing. So I humor her and give her the rundown of the game, explaining about the target, protector, and assassin roles.

    “And that’s just the structure,” I continue. “It’s the actual scavenger-hunt part of the game that makes it really cool.”

    “That’s right. I remember from the script you let me read. The target has to follow clues around the city.”

    “Exactly,” I say. “But the really neat part is that each of the clues is based on a profile that the player fills out the first time they play the game. I think some early players lied—I mean, who doesn’t in cyberspace?—but later folks realized that the clues keyed off their interests.”

    “So doctors would have medical lingo, and attorneys would have legal clues to follow?”

    “Exactly,” I say. “And after people started putting down the truth, the game’s popularity grew even more. The guy who invented it became hugely rich. Scary rich.”

    “What’s he doing now? Does he have any ideas about who started playing the game in the real world?”

    “Nope,” I say. “He’s dead.” Archibald Grimaldi had started out a poor, abused kid who’d been failed by the system. He’d climbed out of the muck, though, and made a fortune at a very young age by inventing and marketing PSW. None of that money did him any good in the end, though. He disappeared one night, sucked into the sea. Finis. Game over. For Grimaldi, at least, but not for the millions of players around the globe who kept pumping energy into the PSW machine.

    “How sad,” Lindy says when I tell her all that.

    “I know.