“I’m about to commit a crime,” I said.
“Then perhaps I should leave the room.”
Twenty pulled on the collar of her black sweatshirt as if it were hot, which it wasn’t. We sat on the two chairs by the small kitchen table and stared at my laptop screen, which was surrounded by coffee mugs. She looked around.
“I am surprised to see your living space tidy.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was lying in bed around midnight, and I knew I had to fall asleep as soon as possible to be sharp today. You know how it is—when you must fall asleep, you can’t. At two AM, I gave up and tidied everything while coming up with the plan.”
“The plan which involves said crime.”
“Crimes. Plural. Do you know of any legal way to get your hands on tens of thousands of dollars by tomorrow?”
“Shut up and tell me the plan already, idiot.”
I looked at her as if she were an exotic bird that had swooped in from the window and perched up on the chair.
“I don’t like that tone, Twenty, If you keep it up, I’m going to have to demote you to Nineteen, which sounds a lot worse, by the way.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Tell me the plan, or I’m walking out of here.”
“The plan is the following: We have an investor interested in seeing our product in action, but we don’t have the money to fund the manufacturing. While you deal with the lawsuit, I will get my hands on that money.”
“How much do you need?”
“Around eighty thousand dollars. I need it today, or else the prototype will not be ready in time for my meeting with the investor.”
“Who’s this mysterious investor?”
“We’ll get to that. First, the money.”
I opened the web browser on my laptop. 
“What I’m about to do is risky and illegal. If you want to—”
“Show me.” 
Twenty leaned over the table, her face glued to the screen. I opened a file sharing website.
“All right, here’s the deal. NAME_1 owns both Blackwood Advisory, the boutique strategy consulting firm, and Blackwood Investments. They are two separate companies, but you know NAME_1—he’s stingy. To save some money, these companies share an online file system, OneDrive.”
“I know what OneDrive is, thank you. How can they share a file system? Isn’t that illegal?”
“Technically, they don’t share files. With my Investments account, I can’t access the Advisory files, because they are restricted to a different user group within the organization.”
“I don’t see how that relates to eighty thousand dollars.”
We turned our heads at the same time. She wore no make-up, as if she had given up on this whole society thing, but still, with her endearing imperfections and her casual cloth