“He sent a spy?” Reef asked Cadence.
“I think he mostly follows us around to make sure we’re safe, although most of the people here are familiar faces.” She glanced up to a loft, where Reef spotted an older woman playing with a little girl he recognized. “Once, Shasta and I went out to the harbor for the whole day and Aedric never seemed to know. Or anyway, he didn’t seem angry, even though he worries about people seeing us and figuring out we’re girls. Getting sold to a—a matchmaker or something.”
She’d been about to say something worse, but Reef could tell she didn’t want to think about it. He measured the little girl’s tiny frame as she crouched against the railing with her toys. He rolled her name around in his mind. Shasta. Fear for her clutched at his stomach. The gruesome things that could happen to her on the streets of a city like this . . .
“I wish I could talk to him, but I’m no good with languages,” Cadence went on, her attention on the alien again. Reef’s hand against her back was getting so heated he worried she would pull away, but she slid her palms up over his shoulders like they were dancing. His heart jostled. “Did you know that the reason they used to wear those red bracelets was so people would know they were aliens? That’s why you always see them in government posters wearing red bracelets. Even though I’ve never see one wear anything like that in real life. Aedric’s friend has one tattooed on his arm.” She frowned. “Or is it just me seeing that?”
Reef looked to the corner of the room again and saw a band of red ink around the alien’s forearm. “No, I see it too.”
“They can make themselves look like anything they want. Kind of like an Alt avatar.” Cadence lifted her goggles to her eyes. “Should I find out what imaginary tattoos you’ve got?”
Reef’s hand went automatically to the digital label that showed under his chain-metal sleeve in Alt’s game world. A free add-on he’d gotten for turning leeches over to the government.
“Leech-hunter, huh?” She lowered her goggles again. “A do-gooder.”
He felt his face going hot. “It pays.” Sort of.
She seemed to calculate something in her head. The price of a visa in leech bounties, maybe. She looked around at the lights coming to life on the wall. “Do you think it really does much good in the end?”
Reef pictured the imaginary Beijing bar, the map of the American continents carved into provinces—Canada and the States and Mexico and South America. All riddled with tiny bulbs, a thousand of them lit. A million, more. “I don’t know.”
He leaned in and pressed his face against her neck. She smelled like ozone, the clean smell after it rains. Her arms tightened around his shoulders. He kissed her lightly on the jaw, shaky with nerves. He kissed her on the mouth and kept kissing her. Her frame was so slight in his arms he was afraid to hold her too close and then he was thinking about her leaving, escaping to Canada without him. The voices that hummed around them echoed wildly in his head. His own voice came in through a tinny filter. “How close are you to getting a visa?”
Her hands tensed against his back.
“It’s what you want the money for, isn’t it?” Reef asked. She’d never really said, even though they both knew it was true.
She slid her arms off his shoulders, her gaze on the alien watching them in the corner of the room. “You know why they stopped wearing those red bracelets?” She closed her hand around the metal tag on Reef’s wrist, hiding the letters there that spelled out her name. “Everyone wanted something from them. They thought the aliens could make anything happen with their vorpals. Could make everyone get along, stop wars. Make neighbors turn down their stereos.” She gave a little laugh.
Reef looked down at her hand covering the bracelet. “I don’t mind if you want something from me.”
She pulled away, her brow furrowed. His arms were left reaching, holding nothing. He dropped them to his sides. “I have to take Shasta home.” She half turned toward a staircase that led up to the loft, then stopped to pull her goggles off and hand them to Reef. “Here, take a look around first. It’s a waste to come to a place like this without goggles.”