Nicole shouldered the barroom door open and slouched over to the bar itself, dumping her satchel onto the polished surface. “I swear,” she groused to her mom, “this place finally looks like it might get interesting just as I’m getting ready to leave.”

Tamara Delaney regarded her daughter with an extra two decades’ experience to add to the Delaney cynicism. “You’re going away to college,” she said, “not abandoning Bankhaven entirely. And not for another four months.”

Nicole rolled her eyes and turned her head away, mouthing along with the rest of her mom’s objection; by this point she knew it as well as her mom. “You’re just feeling your oats because you’re eighteen and you want town to treat you like an adult, and the only ones who do are Joe Mac and Benton Allen.”

Neither of whom, in Nicole’s opinion, were people any self-respecting woman would want to treat them like an adult. Joe Mac, more properly Joseph McIntyre, was past thirty, looked forty, and in either case shouldn’t have been chasing someone who hadn’t been legally an adult for a full year yet. Benton Allen was the richest boy in town, having been dragged over to Bankhaven by his parents a couple of years ago at sixteen. Having reached his age of majority, he was giving their age group a bad name.

Mac was a lecher, and Nicole mostly wished he’d stopped staring at her (overdeveloped in her opinion) figure - he was why she’d first started wearing baggy shirts, although they had since become part of her look - but Benton had the makings of a major problem. He’d gotten handsy with her once, when they’d been sat nearby on the bleachers at a school game, and had tried a second time just after school finished a day or two later. The second time, she’d decided enough was enough - there was only so much she was prepared to tolerate - and she’d given him a judo throw in the school car park. The other students were still talking about it.

The Allens didn’t court publicity, but in a small town word gets around. Not only was the ranch they’d bought one of the biggest in town but they’d bought the entire mountain it was built on into the bargain, and paid cash on the barrelhead for the lot. Word had it they had supermarket chain money; nothing on the big tech billionaires but more than anyone else in town could dream of having.

“Whatever,” was how Nicole dismissed her mom’s argument. She leaned forward over the counter, opening a fridge kept below it, and pulled a soda out without needing to look.

Tamara plucked a pen from the pocket of the small canvas apron she wore over her hips and updated a tally on a paper pad next to the old cash till, then pocketed the pen again. Like her daughter, she didn’t need to look at what she was doing to complete the action, both of them having done this dance for over eight years now; Nicole coming into the bar after school had been a near-nightly habit since the age of ten. “What makes you think town’s finally getting interesting, anyhow?” her mom asked.

“Someone else moving in.”

“Again?”

Nicole nodded. “Saw the truck pull up at lunch today. Someone’s taken the old Willis place.”

Tamara stopped moving - something that the hard-working bar owner almost never did while she was awake - and gave her daughter her full attention. “A family?”

“Didn’t see. Might be another guy on his own, we’ve had a lot of those lately.”

“You ain’t kidding.” She looked thoughtful. “How many does that make now?”

“I think like fifteen new arrivals.”

“Over what, the last three months?”

“Not even that. Two, tops.”

“And none of them have dropped by Tamara’s for dinner and a drink.” She sighed.

“Maybe you’re not advertising right.” Nicole grinned at the look her mom shot her. “Seriously, though, we haven’t really needed to promote this place for years, so we don’t. Maybe these people don’t know you’re more than just a beer joint.”

“Hm.” She tilted her head slightly. “You have a point.”

Nicole exulted. Her mom never liked admitting when Nicole turned out to know better. Every concession was a compliment, and they could be hard to get from Tamara, who viewed hard work as the only true virtue and believed it could overcome any limitation. You just had to work even harder if it didn’t.

“I think it’s something to do with all that construction work on Maple,” she told her mom. “Because it looks like whatever that is, it’s nearly finished.”

Officially Maple was still in Bankhaven town limits, but it became one of the main roads out of the mountains and down into the more densely populated farming regions that made up most of their rural surroundings, and until the construction work over the last year, it had been all but undeveloped for basically that reason.

The Allens were involved, that much the town knew, through the big company their family owned. It was called Mandatum. Errol Allen, the man who’d moved in two years ago, was some kind of mid-tier functionary. That much everyone knew, but details beyond that were scarce.

The assumption in town had been that the big buildings were going to be a warehouse of some sort as part of a supply chain, and Bankhaven had further concluded that this was a dumb place to site a warehouse - one of the appeals of the town was it was awkward enough to reach that it was possible to more or less ignore the outside world if you wanted - but it was well known that billion-dollar businesses would do dumb things sometimes if it suited the owners, and the place was probably being built to give Errol a chance to feel important.

“Well,” Tamara said, visibly putting a cheerful outlook on with an effort of will, “warehouse boys and girls will definitely want to drink when their shift is over. That’s no kind of job, Nicole.”

She took the hint, opening her bag up and delving inside for her library books. “I know, Mom.” Honestly she figured it was probably good work for anyone who enjoyed hard work and didn’t want to have to solve any super complex problems, but her mom wanted a better career for her than her own, and it was a common remark that the best way to get one was to put in hard work at school, get the right degree, and turn that into a high-paying job.

All of which meant that at the age of eighteen, Nicole already had an understanding of agricultural science many farmers would envy. The big farm businesses would happily take on experts who could push their margins that little bit further, and they’d pay well for the insights. She just needed the college degree so she could prove she knew it. “I’m on it, Mom. Relax.”

Tamara clucked her tongue to chastise her daughter’s dismissive response, then ruffled her auburn pixie cut in approval of the actual work. “At least I don’t have to worry about you getting passed by by the world,” she said. “Not like that Vanessa Carter. I swear, worrying about her is going to be the death of her mom…”

This was another tune she’d heard played too often and for too long. Nicole shrugged her flannel shirt off, hung it on the chair, and started reading, making notes on her phone.

*

A week or so later, when Nicole opened the bar door again, her opening comment called out to her mom was “I don’t think these are warehouse workers.”

“No?”

She shook her head, dropping her satchel by her chair. “I’m pretty sure they’re computer nerds, honestly.”

Tamara chuckled. “Well, I can see how it’d be difficult to confuse the two. That means that’s probably not a warehouse, then.”

“No. Plus I think these folks got relocation fees. And who’s going to pay for warehouse workers to relocate when they can just find some locals who know how to use a forklift?” Nicole shrugged. “It’s not unskilled but you can find people who have the skills anywhere.”

“I wonder what they’re doing, then?” Tamara shrugged, marking on her pad the soda can Nicole had fished out of the fridge below the counter. “You know, if you’re going to keep on piling on the sugar, you’re going to need to do more exercise soon,” she continued.

“Mom, there’s practically no spare fat on me,” Nicole protested. This was not strictly true - like her mother, she was a little hippier than many, and she had inherited what her mom referred to, in unguarded moments, as ‘the treasure chest’, a well-developed bustline that Tamara harnessed to boost tips significantly.

Nicole hid hers away as best she could, instead, even more so since Benton Allen had arrived. However, her mom couldn’t call attention to those curves without leaving herself open to Nicole pointing out where she got them from, and it had been a couple of years since Nicole had first realised this gave her the advantage in this debate.

“Maybe, maybe not,” her mother declared. “You just think about your fitness, m’kay?”

“Sure, Mom.” She smiled easily, pulling her current textbook out of her satchel and settling down to her reading. She set her phone down beside the book so she could more easily take notes, and began to read.

Roddy White made his way back up to the bar. He leaned on the counter just a couple of feet away from Nicole, giving her just enough room to show he wasn’t crowding her, as he always did when he ordered a drink while Nicole was sat there. “Same again, Tamara,” he said.

“Coming right up, Roddy.”

He nodded his approval and, as he waited, he turned his attention to Nicole. “They had a lot of weird power requirements for that place,” he said. It took her a couple of seconds to realise he was speaking to her rather than her mom, and a few moments more to realise he was talking about the new Mandatum facility.

“What’s that?” she asked politely. She was always polite to Roddy; the man needed to get his drinking under control (not that her mom would be happy to hear Nicole voice that opinion to him) but he was an unfailingly decent man, even when he didn’t have work. She remembered vaguely that he’d been employed at the construction site for a couple of months, early on.

“The new place,” he said. Tamara set his beer down on the mat nearest him and he passed her a note. While she sorted out his change he said “They had some very weird power requirements. Wired into the mains but two back-up generators. Heavy duty cables in the walls and up to an industrial outlet on the roof, too.”

Nicole nodded thoughtfully. “Any idea why?”

Roddy shrugged. “Only other place in Bankhaven with a beefy outlet rooftop is the hospital,” he said. “That helipad, with the big spotlights. But I can’t imagine anyone’s commuting in and out by helicopter.”

“Guess not.”

He accepted his change, shrugged again, and made his way back to his seat. Nicole found herself intrigued by the question, but where would she even start if she wanted the answer?

She went back to reading and taking notes and, a little under five minutes later, her phone abruptly shut off.

“Goddammit,” she exclaimed in frustration, realising only afterwards that she’d heard other exclamations all at about the same time. She looked around, as did almost everyone else in the bar.

“Did anyone else’s phone just do something weird?” Winnie Pond asked.

“Mine just shut down,” Nicole answered, amid a confusion of frustrated voices.

“Mine too,” Louise McKenna chimed in. Tamara, pre-emptively rolling her eyes at the uproar, pulled her phone out of her pocket and frowned just moments later.

“Mine won’t turn on,” she said slowly. “What gives?”

“Can’t turn mine on again either,” Nicole said, and then paused and looked around. “Can anyone actually use their phone right now?” she asked. “Or are we all having the same problem?”

Nobody raised a hand to show a working phone. The bar occupants looked slowly to each other, wondering what on earth had happened.

*

Nicole’s phone still hadn’t responded to attempts to make it turn back on when she finished school the following day and started over toward her mom’s bar. She’d taken the battery out, put it back in, tried it with and without the SIM card, and the best that had happened was that the blackness of the screen glowed slightly; it had powered up but was still blacked out.

By then she had discovered that the effect hadn’t been limited just to the bar; it had affected every cellphone, every tablet, and even every smartwatch worn by anyone in Bankhaven and the immediate surroundings. Computers had retained internet access, and landlines still worked - the slowest to think of this had heard call centre employees from their network express bewilderment at how many calls they’d fielded from a small town none of them had ever heard of.

Safe to say it would have featured on TV news if it had spread much further, but as it happened it had likely passed all but unnoticed by the outside world.

Privately, Nicole was embarrassed at how frustrated it made her. Time and again she’d reached into a pocket, pulled it out, and her fingers had been partway through the unlock process before she realised it wasn’t working. So there was more than a little annoyance underlying her mood as she pushed open the bar door.

“There you are!” her mom called. She picked up a square cardboard box about big enough for four donuts and waved it in the air. “Here.”

“What’s this?” Nicole took the box from her mom and sat down, examining it curiously. It was plain brown cardboard, unmarked except for two white stickers, one with a barcode, one with a five-digit numeric serial number.

“Apology gifts from Mandatum,” Tamara told her cheerfully. “They sent someone round with a pack of waiver forms and boxes. We don’t complain that their broadcast test temporarily messed up our phones, everyone affected gets a brand new M-Phone.

“The guy who stopped by here was giving me a tour. He said they basically looked at the specs of the current Pixel and found ways to match that. It’s supposed to launch nationally in a couple months.”

Nicole opened up the box, taking out a charge cable, phone, and a pair of wireless headphones in a charger case. They smelled of new plastic; they were sleek, efficient looking things. The buttons were picked out in the bright blue of Mandatum. “So you decided to get one?”

“One for me, one for you.” Tamara smiled. “Better a working phone now than a tiny class-action payout maybe years in the future.”

The delay in any return was a powerful factor, Nicole conceded. And her phone, well…

“Might be nice to have something up to date for once,” she said, and immediately regretted it due to the sour twist that her mom’s smile took on. She hadn’t intended it as a criticism; the pair of them did pretty well for themselves and she’d never been left wanting, but Tamara had chosen providing for the future over luxuries almost every time. Nicole hadn’t thought her mom might feel guilt over that until she saw that reaction. “Sorry, Mom. You know I didn’t mean that, right?”

Tamara sighed and nodded. “I know,” she conceded. “Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it, of course.”

Nicole fell silent, but after a few moments she opened up the new phone, pulled out her existing one, and transferred the SIM across. “Does it just work?”

“It did for me,” her mom said. “The camera’s pretty good, too.” She pulled her own new M-Phone out of her pocket and turned it so Nicole could see that the lock screen had a selfie on it, Tamara smiling prettily at the camera, her tight V-neck T-shirt pulled lower than usual so that a hint of satin bra cups showed over it at the top of her cleavage.

Nicole pulled a face. “God, Mom, that’s a bit much, isn’t it?”

“What?” Tamara flipped the phone around so she could examine the offending picture for herself. “Don’t diss the girls, honey,” she said. “The life we’ve made is built half on hard work, half on me making it clear the goods are out here, waiting for someone.”

“Puke,” Nicole answered, aware as she did so that she was being unfair. As much as she hadn’t found anyone in Bankhaven worth exploring her sexuality with, she still felt it from time to time; her mom deserved to enjoy her own. It was just hard to admit that sometimes.

The photo just seemed a little beyond anything her mom typically did, especially as it was for her own lock screen, not to bring in money. She did her best to put it out of mind, concentrating instead on the new phone.

*

Cynics at school (and elsewhere in town) had said the company were probably glad to give out the M-Phones; it was like suddenly getting a free large-scale trial of them just before the big launch. And so it probably was, but in general the attitude was, once people realised they could transfer their photos onto the new devices, pretty positive toward Mandatum, something Benton Allen was making the most of at school.

Nicole wasn’t at all sure how it had happened, but he’d gone from being on the outside of everything, considered too rich to make friends with, to being part of the in clique.

She still fielded the occasional too-long stare from him, especially early Friday afternoon when they were in the same swim class (Nicole loved swimming, but hated swim class; it was the one place that she couldn’t hide her figure, and Benton wasn’t the only one staring) or during lunch, in spite of the fact she went to great lengths not to be part of the in clique, and in spite also of the fact he was getting attention now from Heather Monroe, Vanessa Carter, and even from Ms Roth, the biology teacher.

And on that note, there had to be some reason Ms Roth had switched from loose, calf-length skirts to tight blue leggings.

She wasn’t the only one who’d gone over to leggings, either. About a week earlier, the M-Phones had started displaying ads at intervals, always unskippable. One place advertising was Rocky Wear, one of two small clothing stores in town, owned by Janet Carter.

It was surprising to see a local business already trialling advertising through Mandatum, but far more surprising was what Rocky Wear was advertising. Janet had always been an enthusiastic and vocal fan of sturdy, hardwearing, weather-appropriate clothing, and the only concession her products usually made to aesthetic value was that they were available in a range of colours.

To see ads for figure-hugging shapewear, microskirts, and a whole new line of stockings and lingerie, among other things, had provoked quite a lot of conversation and gossip, and the fact Janet seemed to be using her daughter Vanessa as a clothes-horse for any of the new stock that could be worn out of doors made things even more remarkable, especially as Vanessa had always favoured deep reds and whites for her clothes and everything Rocky Wear was offering now was in a uniform bright blue.

The ads had been the butt of jokes for a couple of days, as well as the gossip, and then Ms Roth had arrived at school one day in leggings which revealed far, far more than they concealed.

They clung in all the right places and were, apparently, tight enough to be real shapewear. To Nicole that just sounded uncomfortable, but Ms Roth, Louise McKenna, and a couple of others had adopted them. Louise had always worn jeans before, but her butt looked bigger and perkier in the bright blue leggings, her thighs somehow seemed both bigger and more shapely.

She was too polite to actually ask Louise, but surely they were uncomfortable. Was it really worth the effort, just to get gawped at more? Louise’s husband was a nice guy, but he was no real prize.

Nicole frowned. She’d often been called out by teachers at school for being judgemental, but she liked to think of her judgements as fair. That had been harsher than she would usually be.

But that wasn’t really why it stood out to her. It just felt…

Well, it felt somehow out of place, as if it had been a thought that wasn’t exactly her own.

She didn’t like that idea much.

Stepping into her mom’s bar, she froze at the door, abruptly uncomfortable. Leaning forward with elbows propped up on the counter, someone unusual was talking to her mom, and they were clearly deep in conversation.

That wouldn’t have been a problem except that the visitor in question was Benton Allen.

Tamara looked up at the movement of the door, as she always did, and smiled warmly at her daughter.

Nicole swallowed, then Benton looked over his shoulder in the direction of her mom’s gaze and saw her too. He waved, airily one-handed. She swallowed again and made herself move, but instead of the usual confident stroll she practically stalked over to the bar.

Benton had turned back to her mom well before she got there. As she closed into earshot she heard him quietly saying “...so Jan Carter was the first one to sign up. The offer isn’t public yet, but I can get you moved forward on the list if…” He broke off as she set her satchel down on the bar. “Hi there, Nic.”

“Nicole,” she said automatically. “Hello, Benton,” she continued, and she meant it to sting.

“Well, I’m not going to get in the way of some quality mother-daughter time,” he said, and straightened up from the bar. “The offer still stands, Tammy. Just get in touch if you want to know more.” And with that, he strutted nonchalantly out of the bar.

“Ugh,” Nicole grumbled. “He walks around like he owns the place.”

Tamara chuckled. “Yeah, but his daddy’s rich enough to be trouble so I’ll smile politely and listen. I think your arrival saved me from having to actually reject his offer though.”

“What was it?”

Tamara leaned in close. “This doesn’t get around,” she said, “because they will absolutely be able to guess who must have talked.”

“Sure.” When mom was this serious about something, Nicole had learned, joking around meant either missing out or having to eat a lot of humble pie before she went ahead. It was easier just to be a sensible adult and agree.

“Apparently Mandatum have bought in to Rocky Wear.”

Nicole’s eyes widened. “The new stock-”

“I don’t think Janet Carter’s blameless,” Tamara said, “but I’ll bet that made it easy for her to pivot. And it explains why she’s got ads running on their phones.” Nicole nodded. “Apparently they’re going to make a similar offer to a lot of the local businesses because Benton’s daddy likes the place. He was offering to move me up the list.” Tamara snorted disdainfully.

“You’re not going to, are you?”

“Got no plans to. It’d probably put me in a more comfortable position, financially, I won’t deny that. But I like running this place my way. And besides…” She was silent for a few moments, lost in thought, during which she tilted her head slowly to one side and laughed. “That’s probably petty of me.”

“What?”

“Well, he kept calling me Tammy. My mother chose my name, and it’s not Tammy. I don’t mind someone shortening their own name, but when someone tries to shorten yours for you, it usually means they think they should get to decide other things for you.”

Nicole nodded ruefully. She collected a can of soda and watched her mom update the tally.

She’d have a lot more spending money if her mom didn’t dock her the price of her cans out of her allowance, she reflected.

“Back to work, my girl,” Tamara told her. “If I have to be the better woman to Janet Carter you for damn sure need to be better than Vanessa.”

*

There was no way, Nicole decided about a week later, no earthly way that Louise McKenna’s curves weren’t bigger now than they had been before. She knew shapewear was meant to help with that sort of thing, but this still felt ridiculous.

It probably did help that Louise was carrying herself differently now. There was - there was no way to watch her walk and not have the word come to mind - a bounce in her step that Nicole couldn’t remember seeing before, one that contributed to the jiggle out the back of her leggings as she walked and the way her chest, now clad in tight lycra, swayed with each step. Nicole wished her own chest was smaller and would have been happy to settle for Louise’s size, but the woman was definitely making the most of what God gave her now.

She had always worn her hair long and it had sort of hung there, just greasy enough to act as one heavy unit, and now she was never seen without it gleaming in sunlight, pulled back tight to a ponytail that swayed just as her chest did, moving in the other direction, like a pendulum and a counterbalance in a clock.

It made no sense to Nicole at all, but her husband Rob just seemed dejected. To Nicole’s perspective, whatever he’d first fallen for Louise over, even if it was her personality alone, it shone brighter and better now. She’d expected him to be walking around with a smile as wide as his head.

That hadn’t been the case. If anything, he looked moody and frustrated.

Nicole was in the queue at the Madison coffee shop when she heard Winnie Pond ask Louise the question she had wanted to ask for herself, but hadn’t quite been willing to. “My God, Louise, you can’t have been hiding that all these years. Is some of that padding?”

“Of course not,” Louise answered, and there was none of the offence in her tone that Nicole might have feared. If anything, that gushing happiness seemed proud someone might think her figure had to be artificial. “What do you take me for?”

“Oh, not like that,” Winnie answered, dismissing the question. “But you’ve definitely changed more than your outfit. You’re going to have to talk me through your diet. If I had a figure like that…”

“I have been changing my diet a little lately,” Louise admitted. “But that’s got nothing to do with anything, I can promise you. This is just the same old Louise as ever.”

Well, Nicole simply didn’t believe that, and to judge by her expression nor did Winnie, but the way Louise had said it, Nicole was forced to conclude that Louise believed it, at least.

By the time she got to the counter, Charlotte Madison had just lifted the old wire rack full of candy bars and set it down behind the counter, out of sight of buying customers. “What’s this all about?” Nicole asked. Charlotte didn’t answer at first, instead lifting a different display rack up and getting it balanced. It was blue plastic, bearing a stylised M, but it was full of fresh pastries, and Nicole’s mouth watered in spite of herself.

Snacking hadn’t been in her plans that afternoon but she found herself suddenly very tempted.

“We’re making some changes to the shop,” Charlotte told her. “Mom and Dad spent hours arguing about it last week.”

Nicole gave her friend a sympathetic smile. A year above her, Charlotte had graduated high school the previous year but college hadn’t been an option and nor had leaving town. She still lived with her parents and was counting the months until she might be able to rent something smaller and live in peace.

It sounded a lot like the Madisons had accepted an offer from Mandatum. Of course, she couldn’t confirm that with her friend without giving away that she knew something she shouldn’t.

Her order collected, she said her goodbyes thoughtfully and headed back out into Bankhaven. Even as keen as she was to get away, she had to admit that a sunny spring day the town was at its best, and as she walked through the streets she noticed that there were even more people out enjoying it than usual.

Most folks working a day job were elsewhere, of course, but there were still plenty of Bankhaven residents out. Walking down the street, two things really stood out for Nicole as she nodded politely to friends of her mom.

One was that more than half of the people sat outside sunning themselves were women, and they included more than a handful of ladies who Nicole would have expected to be absent due to work.

There was no accounting for when people took their days off, but Sheri Agniello loved her husband and loved her kids, and Nicole couldn’t remember Sheri ever taking time off when she wasn’t off on family vacation or too ill to leave the house.

Sheri was also - as many of them were - wearing bright blue, in her case a pair of sapphire high heels that shone in the sunlight and a short, hip-hugging miniskirt. Her legs seemed otherwise bare although Nicole assumed she must be wearing tights, and the blouse she wore was pristine white and sleeveless with a plunging neckline.

None of which was particularly on-brand for Sheri except that she always wore heels, but she wore them for height, not to catch the eye. Something glittery was very unusual.

Curiosity got the better of Nicole, and she crossed the street to speak with Sheri. They knew each other well enough for it to be a comfortable approach; she liked Sheri, except that the woman got into every fad there ever was. “No willpower at all,” as her mom had often said.

“Hi, Sheri,” she said cheerfully. “Finally taken a day off for yourself?”

Sheri blinked slowly. “Oh, hi, Nicole,” she answered. “How’s your mom?”

“She’s good, thanks,” Nicole smiled. “But what’s this? Just giving yourself a treat?”

“Oh!” Sheri put a hand to her lip to hide her demure giggle, just as she always did. “I guess you wouldn’t have heard. I’ve left Simmons Brothers.”

Nicole’s eyes widened. “You’ve left? Wha - did they do something?”

“Oh, no, no, they were great. Same as always.” She heaved a heavy sigh. “Actually, that’s the problem. Same as always, and I wanted something new.”

Which was baffling. If there was any human being on the planet who God had designed to run happily in their rut until the end of time, it was Sheri Agniello. She was still gossiping about the same things that had concerned her back in 2015. “Um. So what are you doing now?”

“Well, I don’t actually have anything lined up yet.”

Even weirder. There were too many kids in that family for the parents not to squeeze the most they could out of every dime as it was. “No?”

“No. But I’ve heard that Mandatum is hiring, so I’m hoping to land an interview.”

She smiled warmly as Nicole tried to find the words to express what she was thinking.