She sighed. “Cooper, we had a deal. That means something to me. You got us here, I’ll get us in to see Epstein.”
“Okay,” he said. “What do we do? Drop by his office and ask for an audience with the King of New Canaan?”
“I told you, only straights call him that.”
“We’re standing in his kingdom right now.” He nodded to a pair of uniforms down in the square. “Those are corporate security guards, and he pays them.”
“That’s right, he does. But there are no sweatshops in the Holdfast.”
Why are you needling her? She was right: He did feel uncomfortable. For years he’d moved through the world with the certainty of power. Here, he was at best a tourist with a fake passport. And at worst, well, he had no illusions about his safety.
That wasn’t what bothered him. He’d expected to feel like a soldier behind enemy lines. Only now that he was here, enemy territory turned out to be a cross between a kibbutz and a campus. It threw him, the feeling that this wasn’t the beating heart of the evil empire.
Far from. What you’ve seen, you like. There was something inspiring about the place, the energy of it, the rational planning and joyful creation. It felt like a place that was building something. Aiming to the future. The rest of the country seemed mired in the past, always longing for a simpler time, even if that simpler time had never existed.
“What’s our next move?”
“Step two is tomorrow. We go to Epstein, as I promised. Step three, we go our separate ways, I find my people and explain the situation.”
“And step one?”
“Step one is you change your clothes and we go drinking. I’m home, and I want to celebrate.”
They started in the bar below her apartment. From the outside it looked like any other, and he played his usual game with himself: country rock on the stereo, neon beer signs behind the bar, scarred wooden tables, the sweaty feel of too-bright sunlight pouring through the front windows, a jaded day-shift bartender with tattoos.
For the first time in a decade, he’d gone one for five.
The place was air-conditioned to just above freezing, and the windows had some kind of polarizing effect that stripped the fury from the sunlight without dimming the outside world. The décor was all smooth lines; the lighting indirect and sourceless, as though the air itself glowed. The music was a sexy, vaguely electronic beat. The bartender was a girl about sixteen years old working on a d-pad, her skin leathery but otherwise unmarked.
At least the tables were wooden and scarred. They looked older than the bartender and probably were. Bought wholesale somewhere, shipped in here.
“Two ciders and two vodkas,” Shannon had said, then turned to him, flashed one of her quirky smiles, and said, “And the same for him.”
At first he’d sipped his drinks, feeling on edge. The second of the icy vodkas had taken care of that, and the cider—distilled here, Shannon told him, apples and pears being two of the handful of things that grew well in Wyoming—was cut with a pleasant bitterness.
“Vitamins,” Shannon said. “Most Bs. We eat a lot of meat here, but vegetables are expensive.” She took one shot right after the other, chased that with one of the ciders. There was a lightness to her that he hadn’t seen before, like she was uncoiling. The security of friendly ground. She laughed and joked and ordered more drinks, and somewhere along the line he’d decided, why not.
“So,” she said. “First impressions.”
“I thought you were very pretty, but a bit explosive.”
“Cute.”
“Thank you.” He took a long pull of the cider. “Honestly? Not what I expected.”
“How’s it different?”