Reef strained to hear what Aedric was saying but couldn’t make out much. A thought sent fear spiking through his chest. “You wouldn’t know a way to get a visa, would you?” he asked Olly. “Even a fake one?”
“To where, Mexico? You looking for family? Mexico doesn’t even care if you have papers. You could walk all the way to Argentina if you wanted to. It’s all one country now, right? Hey, maybe there are some Alt lands down there we’ve never even heard of.”
“Not Mexico—”
“Where are you from, then?”
Reef pushed away memories of his mother telling him the story of “The Gypsy Queen,” of the taste of cinnamon in coffee. “I’m talking about getting a visa to go to Canada.” Could aliens get them more easily than ordinary people—is that what Aedric was doing here? Cadence had told him about Reef, and now Aedric was desperate to get her away to Canada so he wouldn’t have to share her? Reef gripped the metal tag tied to his wrist and engraved with Cadence’s name.
“Canada?” Olly scoffed. His owl hooted, as if sharing his derision—the sound came through Reef’s dangling goggles. “Forget it. It may be all one country, but Canada’s another planet. You think the president wants people like us crowding his cushy headquarters?”
Reef felt a flicker of annoyance. “You keep talking like there’s only one of them. There’s, like, a whole cult of them genetically conditioned to run this country. You know that, right?”
“I like to hold on to my fantasies.” He turned to admire some passing figure Reef couldn’t see with his goggles off. A chesty sylph, most likely.
Reef crept along the line of containers. Aedric was too distracted to bother with vorpals now. Behind him, the little girl had come out of the candy store gripping a sucker in each fist. She had dropped a blue glove on the sidewalk, the tiniest glove Reef had ever seen. Aedric went on talking to his friend in low tones. He was speaking some mixture of English and an alien language Reef had heard before, a slur of z’s and s’s. When the other guy answered, the only English he used was Floating Isle. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they must be talking about: smuggling goods from the Other Place and onto the elite residency isle that floated in Puget Sound. Not visas after all.
“Nice clothes,” Olly said behind Reef. “You’re not planning on jumping them?”
Reef grunted. “Think the four-year-old will put up a fight?”
“Wait, I know what this is.” Olly snickered. “Those are the guys, aren’t they? The ones you’re sharing a girl with?” He wheezed with laughter.
“Just the one on the left,” Reef muttered. “The other one’s an alien.”
“Huh, really?” Olly peered at him but quickly lost interest. “Two other guys. You’re paying to be the third guy in line.” He laughed into his sleeve.
Reef’s annoyance turned to anger. “You know prostitutes aren’t monogamous, right?”
“Look, as much as I love spying on your boyfriends, there’s an Ice Giant at the bus station I’d like to introduce to my new sledgehammer.”
“Fine. See you later.”
Reef’s gaze went back to the tiny blue glove the girl had dropped. The caption on those government posters kept popping into his head: Daughters Bring Joy. The girl licked the two suckers in turns, yellow orange yellow orange.
Reef slunk away from the maze of containers and scooped up the glove, held it out while he slow-stepped toward the girl. Her eyes were the wide-set eyes of her mother, round now in consternation. Daughters Bring Joy. He wondered how her eyes looked when she was laughing.
A hand slammed down on his wrist, and the next moment Aedric had Reef’s arm twisted behind his back, his face pressed against the pebbled wall of the building.
“I’m Reef!” he blurted.
“Who?”
Pain spiked from Reef’s elbow to his wrist. “Reef.” He held up his other arm so Aedric could see the bracelet with Cadence’s name on it.
Aedric let go. Reef turned reluctantly to face him and saw that Olly hadn’t left after all. Aedric saw too. “This your friend?” he asked Reef, smiling as if at some secret joke. Olly took a step closer, sizing up Aedric like he could do anything.
“Yeah,” Reef said. He hoped Olly had dismissed the ridiculous glowing owl.
Aedric’s face was the flat, ordinary face of any other west-coaster. Skin Seattle-pale, but race impossible to discern. He scrutinized Reef’s tattered clothes, the goggles around his neck. His smug smile grew. “You’re going to get her the visas she wants? Enough for all of us?”
“If I could get a visa, I wouldn’t be living here.”
“So that’s a no? Good. If you had said yes, I would have known you were a fraud.”
The little girl watched this all with fascination. She stared openly at Olly’s goggle-eyes. Reef handed her the dropped glove and she accepted it cautiously.