Where Futures End Page 15

  “Photo’s nice.” Maksim leaned one elbow on the counter and flashed a fatherly smile that made Reef look away. “Fairy-tale characters can’t fill up the space in that empty container of yours.”

  Reef nodded, mostly to put an end to the conversation. In his mind, he went back to the days when he’d come home to someone who was happy to see him, who would tousle the rain from his hair and give him tea warmed with a heat sleeve. And then he couldn’t stop his thoughts from returning to the day when he’d come home to that terrible sight: black-oil blood, his mother dead.

  It wasn’t really true, what the stories said. About how you’ll find the Other Place when you look for what is lost.

  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 façade. 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?

  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 m
oment. 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.

  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.”

  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 Q
ueen,” 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.”