He answered the ad.
He used the rest of the money from the government bounty to buy a new shirt and pay for a shower. He wished he had enough to buy a new jacket too, considering how cold it was despite the sunshine. It was one of those rare days when Mount Rainier was visible, a purple smudge on the horizon, getting ready to shrug off another layer of rock in the winter rains like a creature shedding its skin. The rivers would get choked, Puget Sound would flood. Everyone would grumble: Too much water in winter, not enough in summer. The government would respond by reminding people that everything was slowly getting better now that the Other Place was eating our excess solar energy. Or anyway, that everything was at least not getting worse.
Outside the deli where Reef was supposed to wait, a water nymph lounged in a tiled fountain. She winked at him and flashed a gold-green fishtail. He ignored her. Nymphs parsed out rare potion ingredients, but only in exchange for actual human hair. Shaving his head probably wouldn’t make the best first impression on a potential wife.
Reef rubbed his wrist, imagined a bracelet there engraved with someone’s name, a wife’s name. He kept scanning the crowd in front of the deli, searching for the face from the ad and trying to do it without drawing attention to himself. Several men eyed his goggles in a calculating way.
“What I am doing here?” he muttered to himself. He’d never spent much time thinking about how he might look to girls, and that was suddenly the only thing that mattered. He thought his hair was nice enough: dark and kind of longish around his ears. And even though he was too skinny, he was on the tall side and his skin stayed brown all through the winter instead of going ghost-pale like a lot of other Seattle natives. But his grubby pants were ripped at both knees, his shoes held together by duct tape. He was careful to brush his teeth every day to ward off the yellow tinge the drug lent them, but he spent all of his time outdoors and knew he must look weathered.
The nymph was still winking at him. At least he impressed someone.
A muffled voice came from under the hood of a huge raincoat. “Are you Reef?”
It was her. Reef could just make out the rounded chin. She pulled back her hood enough to show wide aquamarine eyes and a spray of dark curls. The rest of her slight frame she kept wrapped inside the overlarge coat. She hadn’t been lying about her age.
“I’m Reef,” he answered, tugging his goggles down to hang around his neck.
She looked him over, stony-faced. “Are you high?”
“No.” It wasn’t really a lie. He woke up every morning craving the drug and held off as long as possible before giving in. He barely registered its effects anymore, never felt the floating euphoria he had once experienced when taking it.
“Planning on stabbing me?” she asked, her gaze level. She was at least a foot shorter than he was, the shape of her shoulders completely lost inside her huge sleeves.
“I don’t think an imaginary elf sword would do you much harm.”
She scanned his frame, her gaze stopping on the bulge created by the real knife strapped to his ankle.
“I don’t use that on people half my size,” Reef said.
She frowned, maybe not believing him. “What’s that scar along your cheekbone?”
“From a fight.” Reef shuffled his feet, forced out the admission: “And made with my own knife, if you have to know.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “At least you got it back.” She glanced through the glass front of the deli, where the owner was trying to oust a band of street youths. “I already called the cops, just in case you were planning on stabbing me.”
Reef whipped his head around, searching for any sign of them. They didn’t much like grubby street gamers.
“So we’d better get out of here.” She turned and headed down the side street.
Reef blinked at her back for a moment and then hurried after her. She led him to an apartment building with a chipped colonial fa?ade. Reef reached reflexively for his goggles, wondering what sight Alt’s creators had designed to overlay the building. But the clunk of a bolt sliding aside jolted him back to the real world, where the girl was passing through a door that led to a flight of stairs.
She’s taking me to her apartment?? Panic flared in his belly. He’d been so busy worrying she’d reject him on sight, he’d had no time to consider what he’d have to do if she accepted him. He’d never been with a girl before. He figured things pretty much worked themselves out once everyone took off their clothes, but what if he was wrong?