“What, what are you doing?” Imogen blinked. “Far said—”
“Let’s both make a deal to be brave. Far’s coming back.” And Eliot with him, presumably. If Priya was going to purchase the equipment they needed to scan the Ancestral Archives without raising suspicion, she had to do it now. “He’s coming back, and I have an errand to run before he does.”
The bazaar of Zone 4 was an organizer’s nightmare, a bargain hunter’s dream. It was the size of a small town, made up of corridors so winding they required interface GPS to navigate, though many window-shoppers chose to get lost in the market’s charm. There was more than a whiff of the Old World about it. Estate salvagers sold whatever they could: pages torn from magazines (back when magazines had pages to tear), keys to doors long rotted, thumbdrives no modern machine could read. Priya’s mother came here every week to sift through these offerings. Her eye for value and relentless bargaining kept her own Zone 2 store well stocked. Priya had spent many afternoons listening to her haggle over stained glass windows and teak furniture. Whether through DNA or osmosis, she, too, had acquired the skill; it would serve her well today.
She walked with throngs of shoppers into the digital district. There were several shops with the tech she needed, touting their wares with loud lights and louder hawkers. Priya perused ten of them before she ventured to make her first bid.
“Five thousand,” she told the shopkeeper. Even the low number was high; operating systems with enough bulk to run something as comprehensive as the Ancestral Archives were stupid expensive. Add the price of software on top of that and it could easily cost every credit on Priya’s palmdrive.
The vendor wrinkled his nose, replied with a line he’d probably recited twenty times that day: “Bah! Are you trying to rob me? This is a top-of-the-line diagnostics machine. Twenty thousand. No budging.”
“Eh.” Priya shrugged, trying to keep her heart off her grease-spotted sleeve. This part—feigning disinterest—was always hardest for her. “Six thousand, maybe. I’m sure I can get a better price next door.”
Again the shopkeeper balked. “Eighteen.”
So the numbers went—high, low, to and fro—accompanied by stubborn grunts and shaking heads. Priya walked off at one point, only to have the vendor wave her down and cut his quote another twenty percent. From there she wiggled him down to eight thousand, Ancestral Archives software included. A decent enough price, though she still winced when the credits were transferred.
The package fit in her purse, but only if her knockoff BeatBix took their rightful place over her ears. Priya wore them through the crowd as she wove back toward the hoverbus stop. Tight hips, bags jostling, adverts splashing her interface, dash, dash, hundreds of strange faces, and then—
A familiar one.
Roshani Parekh stood with her back to the street, examining a vase. Priya stopped, her thoughts spinning through the calendar—of course, it was Sunday. Shopping day. Her mother had been discussing it at dinner last night, several days ago, before the Titanic and Vegas and Eliot. She’d even invited Priya along….
Priya stood, watching her mother watch the vase, hating this distance. She wanted to tap her mom on the shoulder. She wanted to brew her a batch of chai with sunshine-fed spices and sit at the kitchen table, chatting the way they once did. She wanted to describe the treasures she’d seen, the places she’d walked, the boy she loved. Far, especially. She’d wanted to bring him to Saturday dinners too many times to count, but it was unwise. Though he also had a cover job—same as Gram’s, employed by one of Lux’s many non-illegal companies as independent contractors—how could they cover a one-year relationship?
She wanted, she wanted, yet she had to keep moving. Priya’s mother thought she was working a Medic shift today, and if she turned to find her daughter with an eight-thousand-credit diagnostics machine in her bag, there would be questions.
Priya rallied her tangled-garden heart and kept walking.
23
MAGIC E VINO
AS THE CROW FLEW, Lux’s villa was a good ten kilometers away from the TM warehouse. This distance was best conquered by underground magcart, which could make the journey in under two minutes and often did, zipping past the catacombs of Old Rome and the skyscraper pilings of Zone 2. Safety lights flickered every half kilometer, the sole sign of speed. Far counted them through his sunglasses to keep insanity at bay. The tactic only half worked.
The magcart exited into Lux’s wine cellar, where bottles of the mogul’s favorite port were stacked by the score. Far ran a finger along their necks as he passed, the way he did every visit, carving a line through velvet dust. The walks he’d made before were still there, in varying states of waning. Dustfall come again.
He left his mark—bold and unbroken—all the way to the stairs, wiped off the grime on his shirt, and headed up. Eliot followed, a specter he couldn’t shake.
Lux’s villa was the kind of place only reckless money could afford. It had the skeleton of a grand house, though many of its original amenities had been altered to accommodate state-of-the-art everything: auto-dimming windows, hologram platforms, a hovercraft landing pad. Even though there were pollution filters around the windows, the smell of city emissions was unmistakable: home, hazy home. Today Far’s lungs refused it, as if his organs knew the end was nigh and decided to get a head start. Respiratory shutdown. His heart threatened to do the same when they entered the mansion’s main room. Lux sat where he always did—in a high-backed leather chair facing the vista wall. His was an opportunistic view of the skyline, the New Forum’s gold gleaming through his eyes like some strange pupil.
“Run into trouble, Captain McCarthy?”
That’s one name for her. “Not trouble, exactly…”
“Lux.” Nothing about the figure in the chair seemed to intimidate Eliot. Far wasn’t sure if it was sheer bravery or a not-so-blissful ignorance. “Can I call you Lux?”
Hades’s clangers in a hashing bluebox. Far’s too-short life flashed before his eyes, best-of reel bouncing off his sunglasses. Piggyback rides with Burg. A sweltering summer day visit to the Colosseum with his mother. His first kiss with Priya, after their second heist, his back to the old Forum stones; testosterone swam through his veins, and her lips tasted like moon rays made human: silver light secrets.
“Take those things off.” Lux waved the aviators away. “I like to see eye-to-eye.”
Daylight was murder on the retinas, but Far did as instructed.
“Who is this? I do not like surprises, Captain McCarthy.” The words held poison, the slow kind that killed you as soon as you thought you might be fine. “Nor do I like the noticeable lack of a package in your hands.”