“You’re not planning on murdering me, are you?” I murmur, shuffling into the space beyond the door. It feels large, my voice echoing slightly; the palm pad’s light is too dim to disperse the darkness more than a meter or so in front of me.
Gideon doesn’t reply—I hear only his footsteps, moving away and fading into the quiet. Just before I can start to panic at having been abandoned, a light flickers on in the darkness. Some distance off, a neon sign comes to life—LIVE MUSIC, it says in bright, green and blue letters. Then another light comes on, and another, and another, until they become a cascade of glowing storefronts and streetlamps.
It’s an entire arcade of abandoned shops and restaurants. The floor is polished stone tile, and the fine layer of dust coating everything turns its reflections of the neon lights foggy—like row-house lights reflected in a river.
I spin around to find Gideon beside the entrance, shutting the door of an old-fashioned fuse box. My surprise must be obvious on my face, because when he turns to look at me, his own expression splits into a smug grin. “Nice enough to crash here for a few days?” he teases.
“What is this place?” I breathe.
“It used to be a mall of some sort,” Gideon replies, moving away from the entrance to join me. “It had to have been shut down at least thirty years ago—no hypernet boards, you’ll notice, all retro neon and digital signs. My guess is that they emptied it with the intention of leveling the place and building housing instead, but the developer changed direction, or the company dropped the project, I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s been completely forgotten.”
I hunt for a reply, too stunned by the strangeness of it—an entire part of the city lost in time—to speak coherently. I want to tell him it’s beautiful, because it is, and that it’s sad, too—lonely in the brightness of its signs, calling for customers who will never come, shining light on the marble floor where the only footprints in the dust are ours.
Gideon moves away, letting his pack slide to the ground, and the bag with our supplies as well. He uses one of the blankets to wipe away some of the dust, then piles the other ones on top to make a place to sit. I drift over to join him, still fascinated by the arcade, but too tired not to sink to the floor at his side. In the past two days, the only sleep I’ve gotten was the few hours I spent passed out in Gideon’s den. And he’s had even less.
“I pulled up some schematics from the Daedalus,” he says, retrieving a palm pad from his pack and waking it up. “Engineering, where the rift’s most likely to be, is a few decks down from where the gala’s being held. Security will be tight to keep people from leaving the public areas, but that’s where I come in.”
“You’re going to hack LaRoux Industries security that easily?” I raise an eyebrow at him, but he’s focused on his screen.
“I’ve done it before,” he says absently, as though that’s no great feat. “But that gala’s going to be swarming with people, and I don’t have a few weeks to try to get hired as an IT guy.”
“We’re going to go as guests.” When he lifts his head in surprise, I flash him a smile. “Don’t panic. It’s not that hard to fit in with that crowd. We’ll make nice for a while, drink the champagne and dance and carry on, but at some point LaRoux, and no doubt his daughter, too, will come out and make a bunch of speeches.”
Gideon’s mouth twitches, brows furrowing slightly. “What if LaRoux knows our faces from the security feeds? They’ll recognize us.”
“We’ll slip out as he takes the stage. The museum itself will be locked down—we’ll have plenty of time to make it to Engineering before they open the exhibits to the public.”
Unless I can get a good shot at LaRoux himself before we slip out of the ballroom. I clear my throat. “Let me just run through the etiquette of this sort of event, so you don’t end up accidentally offending half the planetary delegations.”
As we start going over what’ll happen at the party, I can’t help but think of Daniela, the woman who taught me most of what I needed to know in those first few weeks after I left Avon. In her early thirties, she could no longer play the innocent teen—having a younger accomplice got her places she couldn’t go alone. Three months we were together. And when the time came, Dani betrayed me as easily as she’d taken me under her wing, leaving me for the authorities to find when one of our marks clued in that we were after his money.