“My Queen, you are late for the brunch.”
Lola said it to her holo and not to me, and the not-to-me was the part that I noticed the most.
She didn’t look up. Her stylus kept moving across the projection in those small, precise strokes, approving things, routing things, being the single most functional person in a building full of people who got paid to be functional. The light from the display caught the side of her face and threw it cool blue, and her hair was still pinned exactly as I’d left it this morning.
I’d materialized maybe a meter from her desk, fresh off a swamp dragon, with mud that wasn’t real still ghosting somewhere in my muscle memory and a victory I’d been carrying like a present all the way back to Earth.
And the present had nowhere to go now, because Lola had said My Queen in the voice she used for meetings. “Lola.”
“There’s a logistics summary on your band,” she said to the holo. “The northern supply chain held. Congratulations on the dragon. You don’t need to read it.”
Every word of it was a gift, delivered with the warmth of a parking ticket. “Lola,” I said again, and crouched down next to the desk so I was looking up at her instead of down, which is a cheap trick and I used it shamelessly. “I missed it.”
“You’re a queen; you can afford to miss unimportant meeting.”
“I lost track. There was a whole part with illusions, and Yuki did this thing with light that I will absolutely tell you about, and by the time we cleared it the brunch was—” I stopped, because I could hear myself building a fortress out of reasons, and Lola had never once in her life been impressed by a fortress. “I’m sorry.”
Her stylus paused. Just for a second. Then it kept going.
“It’s fine,” she said, which from Lola meant the opposite with a precision no other human being could match.
I knew that tone.
I’d been on the receiving end of that tone exactly enough times to respect it. It wasn’t the door slamming; it was the door being held open with terrible courtesy while she waited to see whether I’d walk through it or stand in the hallway making excuses.
I’d promised her brunch, and I’d spent that hour up to my magical heels in glamoured swamp water.
“Okay,” I said, standing. “Okay. I hear you.”
“Mm.”
“I’m going to fix it.”
“There’s nothing to fix.” She finally looked at me, and her eyes were perfectly composed. “You’re very busy. You’re the owner of a multinational and a queen of a country that technically doesn’t exist. Brunch was ambitious of me.”
“That’s not—” I bit it off. “I’m going to fix it,” I said again, “and you’re going to let me, and you’re going to be insufferable about it later, and I’m going to enjoy that too.”
She returned to her holo without answering, which was a yes. Hopefully.
I retreated to my room.
Here was a thing about me that I wasn’t proud of: my best strategic thinking happened horizontally.
I closed the door, kicked off my shoes, and got into bed fully clothed, on top of the comforter, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling as if the ceiling had answers.
Somewhere down the hall the most competent woman alive was being disappointed in me with corporate restraint, and I had to do something about it that wasn’t candles, because I’d already played candles, and I’d gotten fleeced on the candles, and a repeat performance would be the apology equivalent of bringing the same flowers from the gas station twice.
I needed something specific.
Something that said I know you louder than it said I have money, which was a hard line to walk when the truth was I had an obscene amount of money and almost no idea how it worked.
I pulled the card out of my inventory and turned it over in my fingers. Matte black, no numbers on the front, the Rimebreak mark stamped into one corner like a brand on something expensive. Dmitry had handed it to me weeks ago with a speech about ‘discretionary executive liquidity’ that I had not listened to, and somewhere in the speech had been the words no limit, which were the only two words I’d kept, and which were, frankly, terrifying.
I flipped it again. On the back, under the chip, in letters small enough to require squinting:
Concierge—press to speak.
Huh.
I pressed it.
The card warmed faintly against my thumb, and a voice came out of it. “Good evening. You’ve reached priority concierge for your account. How may I assist you?”
I sat up. “Hi. Yes. Hello.” I cleared my throat. “I need ice cream.”
The voice on the other end paused, and I was kind of proud of that. “Of course. Are you looking for delivery, a reservation, or a recommendation?”
“Recommendation. A specific flavor.” I closed my eyes and pictured it; the moment three days before all of this, when I’d opened Lola’s fridge looking for the oat milk she asked me to get, and found, tucked behind a row of grimly responsible meal-prep containers and a single bottle of wine she clearly never drank alone, a pint of bright, lurid, electric-blue bubble gum ice cream. The most composed woman in the building. Bubble gum. It had nearly killed me. “Bubble gum,” I said. “I need a place that does really good bubble gum ice cream.”
“An excellent choice.” The concierge did not sound as if it thought it was an excellent choice, but it was contractually obligated to. “I’m cross-referencing premium partners in your area now.”
“Sure.”
“I’ve located a highly rated establishment, Glaçon, in the financial arcade. They specialize in artisanal small-batch flavors, including a hand-churned bubble gum sorbetto featured in three lifestyle publications this quarter. They are a verified premium partner. Shall I arrange priority seating and have a reserve portion held under your account?”
It sounded perfect. That was the first warning sign, except I didn’t know enough to read warning signs, so I sailed straight past it like a woman stepping cheerfully onto a banana peel. “Yes,” I said. “Do that. All of it. Hold the bubble gum.”
“It’s arranged. Your reservation will be held for ninety minutes. Is there anything else? Transportation perhaps?”
“No, thank you. You’ve been—” I genuinely didn’t know how to talk to a card. “Very helpful.”
“It’s my pleasure. Enjoy Glaçon.”
The card cooled in my hand, and I lay back down for exactly four more seconds of horizontal triumph, and then I got up, because triumph that stays in bed is just napping with extra steps.
Lola was still at her desk. The woman would be at that desk after the heat death of the universe, approving the paperwork on it.
“Get up,” I said.
She did not look up. “I have the quarterly—”
“The quarterly will be there. The quarterly is immortal.” I plucked the stylus out of her hand, set it down on the desk with great ceremony, and held out both of mine. “Come on.”
She looked at my hands. Then at me. Then back at my hands, with the expression of a woman pricing out exactly how much dignity this was going to cost her and deciding, grudgingly, that she had it in the budget. She stood, but did not take my hands.
But she stood, which was what mattered, and she let me walk her to the elevator while pretending it was her idea.
The lift dropped us down to the lobby, and out the front to the curb where an AI taxi was already pulling in because I’d pinged it from my room like a person who had thought ahead. The doors hissed open. I steered Lola in by the shoulder; she let me, stiffly, the way you let a small dog herd you, and slid in beside her, and tapped the destination into the console before she could see it.
The taxi pulled out into the river of light that the city became after dark.
“Where are we going?” Lola asked.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises.”
“You love surprises. You just like to be the one giving them.”
She turned her head and gave me a look that could have melted my heart, such a cute glare. “Charlie. Where are we going?”
“Somewhere nice.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s a partial answer. I’m releasing the answer in installments.”
“Charlie.“
I had an entire plan to hold it, to make her wait, to walk her through the door of someplace gleaming and watch her face. But she was sitting there with her arms crossed and her armor on and that little crease between her eyebrows that meant she was actually, genuinely, underneath all the formality, a little bit hurt, and I have never in my life been able to make Lola wait when she’s hurt.
It’s a structural flaw.
“We’re getting ice cream,” I said. “Bubblegum ice cream.”
The crease vanished.
For a second she just looked at me, and something moved behind her face that the professional mask wasn’t built to hold; it slipped, the whole composed architecture of her, and what was under it was so soft and so startled that I felt it in my chest like a hand closing gently around something.
“You—” she started and stopped. “How do you—”
“Your fridge. Behind the sad little meal-prep army. I went looking for oat milk and found a national secret.”
“That was hidden!”
“It was behind two containers of quinoa. That’s not a vault, Lola; that’s a polite suggestion.”
She laughed, and then she leaned across the seat and kissed me, quick and warm, her hand finding the side of my face, and when she pulled back her eyes were bright in a way she’d have denied under oath.
“I forgive you,” she said. “For the record. You missed the brunch, and it was rude, and I was going to make you suffer for at least two more days, but you remembered the bubble gum, so. I forgive you.”
She settled back, smoothing her skirt, putting one piece of the armor back on for form’s sake. Then her eyes flicked to the console, to the destination glowing there, and the warmth in her face curdled instantly into something far more dangerous. “Wait. Where did you say we were going?”
“Glaçon,“ I said, proud of my pronunciation. “It’s a premium partner. Three lifestyle publications. Hand-churned bubble gum sorbetto.”
Lola closed her eyes. “Oh, Charlie.”
“What?”
“Glaçon is a scam.”
I cleared my throat. “It has a reserve portion held under my account.”
“Of course it does. It’s forty credits a scoop, the bubble gum is a base mix they buy by the drum and dye blue, and the only thing artisanal about it is the markup.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Who told you to go there? Who recommended it?”
I considered lying. I was a queen, a tactician, the slayer of a ‘swamp dragon’. I looked into Lola’s tired, fond, exasperated face and I caved like wet cardboard.
“I called the credit card company,” I admitted. “The concierge. The little voice in the card.”
There was silence.
And then Lola started laughing, the formal armor gone completely now, head tipped back against the seat, the sound filling the taxi. “You called the card,“ she managed. “You had a problem, and you called your card.“
“It was very helpful! It arranged things!”
“It arranged for you to be robbed in a financial arcade.” She wiped her eyes, still grinning, and reached past me to the console, and her fingers moved over it fast and sure, deleting my destination, typing in a new one from memory. “Charlie. My love. Light of my overworked life. I am the only assistant you will ever need, and I am telling you, with complete authority, that the card does not know where the good ice cream is. I know where the good ice cream is.”
“Where’s the good ice cream?”
“You’ll see,” she said, smug as a cat, and tapped to confirm.
The taxi recalculated and turned us off the main artery, away from the glass towers, down toward the older part of the city where the streets got narrow and the light got warm.
“This is a surprise,” I pointed out. “You said you don’t like surprises.”
“I love surprises,” Lola said. “As you pointed out, I just like to be the one giving them. I can give you a hint—Roberto told me about that place.”
The place didn’t have a holo sign; it had an actual painted sign, hand-lettered, Trattoria da Francesco, the paint a little faded, a string of warm yellow bulbs over the door that were just bulbs.
The window was fogged at the corners and steam-bright in the middle, and inside there were maybe ten tables with red-checked cloths and a counter at the back. A barrel-chested man behind the counter looked up, saw Lola, and his opened like a window.
“Lola!” He came around the counter, wiping his hands on his apron, and Lola got folded into a hug that lifted her off her heels. “You don’t come, you don’t call, and now you arrive at this hour. What is wrong with you? Sit, sit.”
“Francesco,” she said, breathless and pleased, “this is Charlie.”
Francesco held me at arm’s length and inspected me the way you’d inspect produce, then nodded, apparently satisfied by criteria I would never learn. “The boss,” he said. “She talks about the boss. Sit. You eat first, or you—”
“We’re here for the ice cream,” Lola said.
Roberto’s expression underwent a complicated journey. “The blue one.”
“The blue one.”
He sighed the sigh of a proud man making peace with a personal failure. “We are an Italian kitchen,” he told me, as though it were a confession he needed witnessed. “Sixty years, my family. Gelato, proper gelato; pistachio, stracciatella, the fior di latte that makes grown men weep.” He pointed an accusing finger toward the back. “And this one comes in, and she asks me—she asks me, in my own kitchen—for bubble gum.“
“And you make it,” Lola said serenely.
“I make it,” Roberto admitted, defeated. “God forgive me. I found a way. Real cream, a little of the syrup, I balance the sugar so it does not taste like a child’s birthday party.” He kissed his fingertips, the betrayal apparently complete. “It is the best in the city. I hate that it is the best in the city. Sit down.“
We sat. He brought it himself, two glass coupes, the ice cream a soft, real, faintly blue-pink that looked nothing like the electric horror in Lola’s fridge, and he stood there with his arms crossed and watched Lola take the first bite the way an artist watches you look at the thing he’s ashamed of having made well.
Lola closed her eyes. “Francesco,” she said.
“I know.”
“It’s better than last time.”
“I changed the balance.” He threw up his hands. “I am improving a bubble gum. This is my life now.” But he was grinning, and he squeezed her shoulder once and went back to his counter and left us to it, and the little restaurant hummed around us, warm and unbothered and not trying to sell us anything at all.
I took a bite. It was extraordinary. Soft and cold and just barely sweet, the bubble gum reined in until it stopped being a joke and became a flavor, a real one, the platonic ideal of the thing Lola hid behind her quinoa.
“Okay,” I said. “This is better than Glaçon would have been.”
“Everything is better than Glaçon would have been. Glaçon is a felony with a valet.” She had her spoon in her mouth and her shoes half off under the table, and her hair coming loose.
“I am sorry,” I said. “About the brunch. Genuinely. Not the card-concierge level of sorry, the real kind.”
“I know.” She nudged my foot with hers under the table. “You came back with mud in your soul and you went looking for me anyway.” She took another bite. “Just—next time. Remember.”
“I will!” I promised.
“You won’t.”
“I won’t,” I agreed. “But I’ll mean to, and that’s basically the same.”
She laughed, and I reached across the table and stole a spoonful directly out of her coupe, exactly the way I’d stolen her popcorn few nights ago, and she made a sound of pure betrayal and guarded the rest of it with her whole forearm, and Francesco called something disapproving from the counter about people who don’t order their own, and Lola threatened to bill me for the theft, and I told her to take it up with my concierge.
We stayed until Francesco started flipping chairs onto tables.
The taxi home was quiet; Lola tucked under my arm, smelling faintly of bubble gum, her hand loose in mine and her thumb moving slowly across my knuckles. The city slid past, all the cold light I owned a piece of, and none of it was worth the warm weight of her against my side.
“For the record,” she murmured, half asleep, “the card is fired.”
“The card is fired,” I agreed.
“I’m the only assistant you’ll ever need.”
“You’re the only assistant I’ll ever need.”
“Good,” she said, and said nothing else. I watched the lights and thought that of all the things I’d cleared that week, this was the only one I’d actually wanted.
Author's note: This inspired the ice-cream: