He slid his arm out from under her hand, then immediately regretted it. Her skin had been so warm. And the hint of sadness he had seen in her face now flooded her expression.
She went to the window and peered down at the street. “You’d better go. He doesn’t know I brought you here.” She turned back to Reef with a tiny disc that would fit into the side of his goggles and call up some document. “If you submit this, I’ll automatically get twenty percent of any money you make.”
A marriage license, then. Reef hesitated, his fingers twined in the strap of his goggles.
“You’ll get a cash advance, of course,” Cadence said.
Reef nodded, but he still wasn’t sure if he should do this. “I could come back later.”
The hand that held the disc wilted. “You shouldn’t come here again.”
The glass shook in the window frame, and with it came the first spattering of rain. Reef imagined the container that awaited his return and the sound the rain would make against the walls: like someone knocking to find out if the box was hollow. “Would you come to my place?” Reef eyed the disc. “If I went through with this?”
Her gaze flicked to the window again and her face tightened with anxiety. She nodded.
Reef took the disc.
A week later, Reef held his jacket sleeve over his nose in Northwest Square as he made his way through the maze of containers stacked two and three high, dodging streams of waste that gushed out of drainpipes without warning.
“Why are we following this guy?” Olly asked irritably. He had a new digital pet—a bright blue owl that opened its beak every time Olly spoke so that it seemed to be talking for him. “Is he planting leeches or what?” The owl added a sharp hoot!
They emerged into an open end of the square, where Reef caught a glimpse of a lean guy in a familiar raincoat pushing his way into a store. It was the coat Cadence had worn a week ago at this same time of day. Reef had made a good guess that Aedric kept to a regular schedule.
Olly huffed at the sight of the candy store, turned into a troll’s den by his goggles. “I raided this dungeon when I was ten years old. Can we please take your level three hundred ass somewhere it’ll do me some good?”
“Level three oh one.” Reef pulled off his goggles.
Aedric had the relaxed look of someone who was used to winning knife fights before they started. He hadn’t even bothered to make sure he wasn’t being followed. From across the square, Reef watched him hand down candy to a small girl in a slicker and ski cap. He felt a twinge of guilt at spying on their family ritual. He hadn’t really meant to follow them all the way here. He’d only wanted to see who Aedric was, to rid himself of the image seared in his mind: Aedric’s name in black ink tattooed across Cadence’s wrist.
“Serious here,” Olly said. “Let’s go.”
“Relax. He’s just flexing his vorpal. Making people want to leave him alone.”
“Then why isn’t it working on you?”
“Why do you think I’m not going any closer?” Anyway, Aedric’s vorpal was strong, but it couldn’t be the strongest in the world—not if he lived in a tiny apartment instead of on the residency isle floating in Puget Sound.
“Just let him plant his leech and we’ll come back later for the bounty,” Olly said.
“I think he’s just buying candy.”
In the street, at the far end of the row of shops, another form materialized, stepping from a patch of hazy air as if from behind a curtain.
Olly didn’t seem to have noticed. He was rubbing his hand over a bald stripe at the side of his head and examining his forlorn reflection in a rain puddle. “I look like an idiot.”
“Don’t expect me to argue.”
“What a waste. I gave that water nymph some of my hair so she’d give me noxious mushrooms for a Grievous Potion. But right after I used the potion there was a power outage and my wireless connection skipped out. My character ended up all the way back at the beginning of the dungeon. Potion all used up.”
The figure that had materialized from the Other Place was walking slowly toward the candy shop, hands jammed in his pockets, gaze flicking all around the square. Aedric spotted the figure and came out to meet him.
“It would be nice if the government could alert us peons before they ration power,” Olly said. “Gave me a free digital pet, though, ’cause I complained so much.”
“It wasn’t a planned outage,” Reef said, his eyes on Aedric.
“They confirmed it this morning. Surprise rationing.”
“An excuse to cover up a digital attack.”
Olly shook his head. “Where do you get this stuff?”
“You don’t read anything that’s not written in an Alt forum. Great China’s pissed because we have better access to the Other Place and all its money. They’ve been increasing their digital attacks.”