“You’re going back to—?”
“No, just stupid stuff. The rest is easy.” Or should be, with luck. With the debt paid, it’s just finding Dad a room.
“Want company?” he asks.
“I’ll still be here tomorrow, you have my word.”
“That’s not why I was asking.” He smiles. Half smiles. The way uncertainty catches its edges, it might not be a smile at all.
Oh.
“Go home,” I say.
“Okay.” He slides back a couple steps, and suddenly there is space. Breathing room. I like breathing room. It breathes.
He turns to go.
“I’d be up for dinner,” I say.
He pauses, hair brushing his neck as his head turns. He winks. “Done.”
I am such an idiot.
“It’s a day-to-day thing,” says the guy behind the desk. “We don’t do long terms.”
The boarding tower clerk is the inverse of Decker—short, small-eyed, and muscled. He owns the counter while barely able to see over it. I don’t impress him. The looming giant at my elbow vying for attention doesn’t impress him, either. In fact, the clerk looks about two seconds from bouncing the giant out the door. “No,” he says.
“But Gerry,” says the giant. “I need another night!”
“Get me the reds, Lend.”
“But Gerry—”
“Reds or nothing. Out.” The clerk jerks a thumb over his shoulder, toward the small back entrance that might as well be a revolving door. It rattles and competes with the chatter. The ornate front doors are glass-less, boarded and barred, their carved starscapes half-hidden by scrap.
The giant storms off, and I slide into his spot. “I have reds.”
“I only accept funds from them as is paying,” says the clerk. “And we don’t do long terms. What you doing here, anyway? This is a male establishment.”
“It’s for my dad and he’s not responsible, so—”
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” The clerk squints at me, supremely uninterested in anything coming out of my mouth.
“No,” I say.
“You look familiar.” He leans in a little, ignoring my hair for my face.
I brace for the inevitable.
A skeleton with skin pops up beside the counter and hip-butts me out of the way. The clerk sighs. “What you want, Jo?”
I slip away from the desk and toward a pillar before the clerk figures out how he knows me. The lobby has several pillars, soaring up to third-story heights. This tower was something once—an old sky-rated hotel maybe, or a lordling residential. The walls are wood and inlaid with glass. The stone floor is seamless below the pockmarks. There’s even a grand staircase flanked by golden pillars. Give the sixteen or so guys spread-eagled on its steps some laundered clothes and data-feed ear clips, and this place could double for the House Lord’s skytower.
Assuming it was scrubbed by an army.
Not a bad place as such. Dad will do okay here. Greg did okay here. It’s where he came the first time he sobered up. Or the second. This will work.
As long as I swing by and pay for Dad’s bed every morning.
If I hand Dad my transaction card, the first place he’ll hit is the bar.
The room goes dark. Pitch black. The lights, the fuzzy wall-screen in the corner, the whirring fans overhead—all throttled.
I freeze. Of all the places to be stuck in a power-out. Didn’t we just have one of these?
The whole room groans.
“God dammit! I didn’t pay no fifty reds to live in some damn cave!” yells a deep bass voice, followed by the clerk’s resigned, “Sammy, check the breakers.”
The pillar was straight ahead of me. I step forward, arm out, until my fingers hit warm stone. I slide around the side.
“It’s the third time this week!” Deep Voice continues.
“Second,” says the clerk. “And I can’t help when the grid shuts down.”
“Don’t you ‘second’ me, Gerry! I know what I—”
The lights blink on. Power-outs never last long, five minutes tops.
“About time,” says Deep Voice, who turns out to be a shirtless guy propped against the pillar behind mine. He has more meat than the skeleton, but not enough for a voice like that—especially when compared to the guy with the broad chest and ghost skin, who furtively glances around the same pillar like he’s looking for someone.
Our eyes lock.
The power technician from the museum’s rooftop.
I walk forward. “Hey, what are you—” but I swallow the doing here. It’s a boarding tower, and one of the better ones in the district. Power technicians must make less than I thought. “Uh . . . hey.”
The verbal save that wasn’t.
“You?” he asks. “What are you doing here?”
He’s dressed better than I’ve seen him—the whole two times—in slacks and a dark button-up. Quality stuff, from the way it falls as he shifts his weight. What a fidget looks like on a two-hundred-pound man.
“Trying to rent a room,” I say.
“Ha ha!” barks the guy on the floor. “Ain’t no room for you here, girlie.”