An agonizing minute later, he was standing in the front room of a cramped apartment that nevertheless made his container seem like a glorified closet. The girl put several feet and a couch between them and watched his every move. “Sit there,” she said, pointing at a table shoved into the corner of the kitchen space. Reef sat. The new angle gave him a view of the bedroom, where a haggard old man lay dozing in the bed.
The girl followed Reef’s gaze. Her face tightened. “That’s Croy,” she said in a soft voice. The man looked to be forty or fifty, with deep lines etched into his forehead and around his mouth. His head rocked back and forth in delirium. Gauging Reef’s distaste, the girl added, “He brought me to the overlap when I was fourteen. My parents had sold me to a matchmaker, and he rescued me.”
Reef squirmed in his chair. “I didn’t think . . .”
“He doesn’t hear us.” The girl closed the bedroom door. “It’s the drug that did that to him. Once you start, it’s a slow death with it and a quick death without it.”
Reef fingered the tin in his jacket pocket, his mouth dry. He’d never let himself get up to such a high dose. He wondered how old the man really was. Thirty? Thirty-five?
The girl took off her coat and laid it down. Reef tried to keep his gaze from roving all over her. He pushed back his jacket sleeves and tried to guess where the other husband was. Home any minute to show me out at knifepoint.
The girl came and sat across from him, still keeping a wary distance. “I’m Cadence,” she said.
“It didn’t say in the ad.” He’d been wondering.
She shrugged. “Guess that part’s not for sale, then.”
Reef chafed at the word sale. This wasn’t about money. Not just about money—he wasn’t going to marry a girl just so he could get past a paywall.
Cadence held out her palm, expecting something. “You’re at two ninety-nine?”
He’d told her in his message, when he’d answered the ad. He pulled his goggles over his head and handed them over so she could check his stats for herself.
The sheen on the goggles lent her blue eyes an underwater look, especially when the images began to shimmer on the lenses. He’d left his inventory up and he watched her eyes move over his items. It was like someone opening up his rib cage and rummaging in his chest cavity. Her hand closed around his sword, although Reef saw only her delicate fist waving through the air. He suddenly regretted the snarling wolf’s head he’d had “etched” into the blade. It seemed stupid and boyish now.
“This is nice,” Cadence said. “I never had a sword like this. Don’t play enough.”
“I could help you level your character.” Footsteps in the hallway claimed Reef’s attention for a moment. He prickled at the thought of husband number two with a knife, a gun. The footsteps went on past the door, but he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“I really only play to use the chat function,” Cadence said. “Cheapest way to talk to someone out of the province.”
“You still talk to your family?” After they sold you to a matchmaker? Reef guessed that’s who she meant.
“My—sister,” Cadence said haltingly. “Some nice Canadian man bought her from the matchmaker.”
His focus went back to Cadence, the tightened corners of her mouth. She was glaring at some holographic item he couldn’t see.
“And visas are expensive,” he said as the realization came to him, “which is why you put out the ad.”
She gave him a polite smile. Her fist made figure eights in the air—she had moved on to admiring his crystal dagger. “How’d you get up to two ninety-nine?”
“Play all the time.” He couldn’t tell her what he’d told Maksim at the diner. “Since I was a kid.”
She went on trying out his weapons. He listened for more footsteps while taking manic inventory of her apartment: tins of coffee lined up on the speckled counter, scribbled crayon drawings papering the fridge, a sticker on the kitchen faucet that said their water came from the desalination plant. He thought he detected the faint scent of apples and he filed it away for future dreaming. He couldn’t ask for one.
On a side table sat a framed photo of a little girl who must have been the artist of the crayon drawings. Not a boy, Reef was shocked to find. Even though just a little money could guarantee one.
He realized that Cadence was staring at him through the digital images. He looked back at her blue eyes behind the blue display. It was like looking down into a well and finding something you’d thought was lost for good.
He flexed his fingers. He wondered if all girls disappeared the moment you reached for them.
“You seem lonely,” she said.
“So do you.” Her hand was on his arm.
The wind beat against the one little window. It made the apartment smaller. Cadence pulled off the goggles. Her voice was quiet under the howl of wind. “I can’t sleep with you. He wouldn’t like it.”
He followed her gaze down to the back of her wrist, where a name was tattooed in sharp, angular script: Aedric. Something inside of Reef closed tight as a fist.