“Barani was conceived as a gift to the working families of Tago. A district where the dreams were real. Where the tile was laid by hand. Where a child could grow up knowing what the sea sounded like before sleep. Haqqani Arbitrage is proud to have funded its construction, and prouder still to have made its homes available, today and always, at prices the people of Tago can meet.”—Haqqani Arbitrage, Barani fiftieth-anniversary statement
The morning had gone into the coilgun.
I’d been on the Orbital since the light came up, the new design ghosted onto the workspace in pale wireframe, and I’d been turning the assembly over in three dimensions for what the clock told me, when I bothered to look at it, had been the better part of four hours.
The barrel was finally acceptable.
The capacitor stack wasn’t.
I kept pulling it forward, pushing it back, watching the balance redistribute along the chassis like water finding a new level, and somewhere around the third or fourth pass my back protested and I crashed on the chair and just browsed pulse for a good half an hour, before I went back to adjust the stupid capacitors.
Then the door opened.
“Lunch.”
I didn’t turn around. “In a minute.”
“Now,” Comma said. “Mom said. I made it. Come.”
I dropped the wireframe and followed her up.
She’d made sandwiches. Good bread, two glasses of something cold, napkins folded under the forks.
“So Padawai,” she said, two bites in, “are doing the run soon, and the venue is the big one near the canal, which is better, because the small one has terrible sound, and—” She stopped and pointed her sandwich at me. “Are you listening?”
I’d been somewhere else, alright. Since the call. “Sorry,” I said. “Yeah. The big one. Better sound.”
She squinted. “What’s going on with you?”
I blinked. Comma didn’t ask. Comma rolled her eyes and went back to her holoband and let whatever was going on with me be my problem, and the version of her sitting across the table looking at me with an actual question on her face was a version I didn’t see often.
“Nothing much,” I said.
She pouted. “You’re being strange than normal.”
“Stranger.”
“Stranger than normal. And that’s weird, because you’re normally very strange.”
I laughed before I could stop myself, and some of the loop went with the laugh. “Okay. I talked to Uncle Dot.”
She stopped rocking in her chair. Her face did the thing where the fourteen-year-old slid sideways and the Kallum kid who’d grown up at the same long dinners I had came forward in her place. “What he said?”
“He tested me.” I cut a corner off the sandwich and didn’t eat it. “He had his assistant call. There was a quest. A planet I’d never heard of, a church doing a purge of the locals, and they needed a low-level templar to go play inquisitor on the streets. Convert or remove. The remove part was the part you’d think.”
“You declined, right?” I nodded. Her grin came up so fast it caught me off guard. “He didn’t like that. Like grandpa,” she said, and I could hear her sorting through the family stories she’d been fed at the same table I’d been fed mine at, finding the one that fit. “When he turned down the mining contract. The one with the natives.”
“The natives there fed off that exact energy,” I said. “Yeah. Pretty close.”
She was nodding, pleased with herself for the connection, and then the pleased part fell off her face and the rest of the thought arrived behind it. “So. You’re no closer to being un-disinherited.”
“No.”
She looked at the sandwich for a second.
I reached across and ruffled her hair, and she made a noise like I’d attacked her with a wet cat, swatting my hand away and scraping her chair back six inches in protest. “Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“I’m not worried.”
“Good.”
“We’ve still got Sompong.” She said it brightly. Too brightly. “Right? Mom’s Sompong? The contract guy with the jet? We’re counting on him to have a pool.”
I put my face in my hands. “Oh, no.”
She lit up. “You forgot!”
“Any news?”
She shook her head, hopped down off the chair with her plate, and headed for the sink. “Nope. Mom goes quiet every time I ask. Which means there’s news and we’re not getting it.” She ran the water. “Or there’s no news, and she doesn’t want to admit it. One of those.”
I brought my plate over and bumped her hip aside to get at the tap. We did the dishes the way we’d done them ten thousand times; her rinsing, me stacking.
“Anyway,” she said, drying her hands on the front of her shirt, “you’re grumpy. Go outside and have fun.”
I looked at her sideways. “Who are you?”
She stuck her tongue out. “You eat my snacks when you’re grumpy. You ate the strawberry ones. I’d like to keep my snacks.”
“I don’t—”
I made a grab for the tongue because she’d left it out a moment too long for someone who knew me, and she pulled her head back with a sister’s exact reflex, and my fingers closed on nothing.
“Ha,” she said.
She went up the stairs two at a time, and her door shut, and the music started a few seconds later, Padawai, of course, at the volume that meant the conversation was officially over and she was returning to her natural state.
I stood at the sink for a moment with the water still running. I could go practice my magic, there were a lot of things I could repair after all. Or maybe put runes on things? I still wanted to create that mask, or finish the coilgun. Yeah, coilgun first—
I shook my head.
That was grinding. I could either ask Erika on a date, well, at least to something I thought of as a date, but I missed Omar; we had little time to just be aloof, we often crashed near his home. It was high time to fix that.
I shut the water off and pulled my band. “Comma, you’re often a pain, but this time you’re right.” I went down to the basement and called Omar.
He picked up on the second ring, already grinning before the projection finished resolving. “Habibi!” Something was in his hand, a controller, and he set it down out of frame. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much. Are you doing anything this afternoon?”
He leaned back. Whatever he’d put down got pushed further out of frame, and then he was scratching at the back of his neck, eyes off to one side. “Hmm.” Then he came back to the camera. “I was in the middle of something. But—yeah. I’ll head to Maqha al-Hilal. Meet me there.”
I sat up and opened the search. “Where?”
“Maqha al-Hilal.”
“Repeat that.”
Omar laughed. “Habibi. Just the teahouse is fine. I’ll send a pin.”
My band buzzed against my wrist a second later. I flicked the link open—
“Wait, in Barani?”
“Yeah, lately I’ve been coming here more.”
“Isn’t that near the ocean?”
His face changed. “Wait. You haven’t been here? You haven’t seen the ocean yet?”
I glanced at the TABLO, avoiding directly looking at him. “Well. From space?”
“From—” He made a sound that was half-laugh, half-outrage, and leaned all the way into the camera. “Habibi. No. You and me, we’re going to the beach properly. Not today, you’ll see, but soon. Yalla.”
I laughed. “Okay.”
“Also,” he pointed at the camera. “Bring only the revolver and the sword.”
I glanced over at the coilgun. “Why?”
“Guys get nervous when someone walks around with big weapons.”
I gave him a cheeky grin. “The small ones can also bite.”
“I know. But still.”
“Ugh. Fine.” I rolled my shoulders. Whatever had been sitting on me since the morning wasn’t anymore. “No need for big guns if we’re going to have fun, right?”
“Exactly! Maybe we'll catch the sunset on the beach.”
The Coast Outer Line ran… toward the coast.
That was most of what I knew about it. The board called it Coast Outer in clean white letters and underneath the same words in Arabic script I couldn’t read, and a route map ran out across the wall in a long shallow arc that ended at a transfer dot labeled Barani.
[Paid: ¢3]
Afternoon light came in flat through the windows; the corporate towers on either side threw shadows that made the inside of the car feel later than it actually was.
The towers grew taller before they thinned.
That was the trick of the outer districts, I’d noticed every time I’d ridden up high, there was always another corpo block in the way, taller or set just wrong against the horizon, and the ocean stayed a thing you’d see from orbit and from nowhere else. The Coast Outer Line went straight at the worst of them.
We climbed.
The track lifted off the ground and ran a long curve through a corridor. Holo-ads sat at the height of the higher floors, big enough to be readable from miles, slow enough to hold a face for half a minute at a time. A woman drank something golden. A man drove something gold. The same gold, somehow, but the corporation forgot to put its name on it, so I did not know what it was for and didn’t care.
The track climbed past them.
Then it broke.
The buildings ended on a clean line, and the track lifted clear, and the windows of the car went grey-blue all the way to the horizon.
I leaned into the window.
The ocean was further out than it had any right to be. I’d seen it from orbit, a blue arc with weather sliding across it, and I’d seen it on a screen, and I had never seen it from the inside of itself, with nothing above it.
There wasn’t anything to say about it. It was just there.
I kept looking.
Something in the middle distance pulled at my eye. I picked a freighter off the water for scale, a smear of red and white maybe halfway between the shore and the thing, and let my eye walk back up from the freighter.
A wall.
A few miles off the coast.
It rose out of the water as a single light blue face, no breaks I could see at this distance, and it ran north and south past where the window let me follow it, and somewhere to the south it bent and came back in toward the land at an angle that took it out of frame.
Tago’s outer wall.
I’d known the city sat inside something. That was what was between the city and everything else, and in half a year I’d be behind the wall, figting. I eyed the wall. Probably, maybe.
The train dropped.
The track came down off the elevated stretch a few miles later, easing into a low run of permacrete that went past nothing for a while. The towers were behind us. What was around the train now was the outer band, flat industrial lots, a fuel depot, a long stretch of low buildings with no windows and forty-meter cooling stacks, and then the farms.
Vertical farms.
The farms ran past the window for half a minute, and then the train slowed for the transfer station, and I stood up and pulled my hood back into a hood instead of a collar.
[Coast Outer — Barani Transfer]
The Barani Loop pulled in three minutes after I sat down on the platform, and it was the new Schwarzstahl floater, the one with the seamless windows.
The doors opened with a magic hum instead of hissing.
[Paid: ¢2]
The inside was clean enough to be off-putting.
Holo-ads cycled on every panel above the windows; Najjar augment clinics, a Bhavsar fresh-fish promotion, something for a Barani-only Palistra Apex storefront that promised same-loop delivery, then back through them again.
Haqqani arbitrage had an ad about how they funded the construction of a ‘genuine ancient-district’ and that Barani was open to all to live at their apartments, at reasonable prices.
Yeah, sureee, sign me in…
The ads on the outside of the car cycled too, projected onto the glass at angles that read from inside as inverted shadows.
A route map ran the length of the car above the doors. Twenty stops in a rough oval, the line bowing wider on the coastal side and tighter on the inland one. The Dash Map put my stop deep on the inland arc. I sat down and let the train move.
It moved without me feeling it move.
Eight stops in, my band buzzed, and I stood. “I’m here to enjoy the atmosphere. Not to fight, or grind,” I murmured to myself in a futile attempt to relax. The doors hummed, and the smell hit me before my foot found the platform.
Salt.
The actual smell of the actual ocean, miles off and somehow still right in my face, wet rock and weed and a sweetness underneath that I didn’t have a name for. I stood in the doors for a second too long, and someone behind me made a polite throat sound, and I stepped out.
The platform was open-air. That was the second thing that hit me. Just a strip of permacrete along the line with a low wall and the afternoon coming down on it. The third was the gulls, or whatever Tago called the things doing gull duty.
The Dash Map laid a half-mile arrow over the street on my needle and told me to walk.
I walked.
Barani came at me all at once.
There were normal Tago towers, twenty to thirty stories of peak corpo black colors, but also a lot of buildings were the color of bone and ochre, white plaster on the upper floors and stone at street level.
Doors painted a deep blue I didn’t have a name for, half of them propped open. Shutters in the same blue, half of them open too. Horseshoe arches over windows, over doorways, over the entrances to side streets that ran off at angles the city grid hadn’t approved.
The street I came out onto was a working market.
It started at the edge of the platform and didn’t stop. Stalls everywhere, permanent ones, brass and copper trays stacked under striped awnings, hanging lamps that weren’t all holo. A man two stalls down was building a pyramid of citrus that had to be six feet tall, balancing the top fruit by feel.
Across from him, a woman fried something in oil that smelled better than anything I’d eaten today, sorry Comma, and the line in front of her was eight people deep and many more stalls.
People bought.
People argued.
A brass scale on a leather cord rocked while two old men disagreed about what was in the pan. A delivery cart bot on small wheels threaded the crowd, the program pushing it announcing its own progress with a steady call I couldn’t parse but everyone got out of the way for.
I let the crowd carry me half a block.
Then I looked up.
A delivery drone was caught in a… screen? If my memory worked correctly, Omar mentioned it was a mashrabiya screen above a second-floor window. The screen was the smart-glass kind, opaqued at the moment, and the drone had punched into the lattice on one corner and gotten its lower rotor wedged in the carved-composite grid. The drone was still on. The rotor twitched at intervals. The Palistra Apex logo on its underbelly flashed cheerful blue against the screen.
On the balcony directly next to the screen, an older man sat in a folding chair with a glass of tea in his hand, watching the drone with open enjoyment. He took a sip. The drone twitched again. He smiled.
I almost laughed and walked on.
The neon was where the salt had done its work. Every contact point along every sign showed corrosion, pitted metal at the connectors, blooms of green-white crust where the wiring met the casing, a hum that wasn’t quite right on half the signs I passed.
Fifty years of ocean air. The signs themselves were fine; the joints were eating themselves alive.
I clocked the first crescent two blocks in.
It was worked into a doorframe in a tile, a silver crescent moon set into the corner of an otherwise standard geometric pattern, small enough that the pattern absorbed it and large enough that you saw the silver first.
Al-sirr. The crescent was the gang’s, and the doorframe was theirs or paid them, and the building behind the doorframe was operating under their permission.
I saw the next crescent half a block later, in the floor tiles outside a tea stall. Then on a shutter. Other signs were mixed in too—a stylized eye, a thing that might have been a fish, marks I didn’t know, and I let them pass.
Not my problem today.
The Dash Map said three more blocks.
A balcony came up on my left, low enough that I could see straight onto it from the street. A row of clay pots ran along the rail with herbs in them,basil and mint and something else broad-leafed I didn’t know,and a grandmother in a long blue dress was watering them out of a metal can with a long spout, going pot to pot.
Behind her head, a holo-ad cycled. Najjar Bionics. A young man with one new arm tested the new arm by catching a ball. He caught it. He smiled. The ad reset, and he caught it again.
I kept walking.
Two blocks later I came up on the wall.
It ran the entire side of a four-story building, and it had been a mural once. You could still see the bones of it under the salt damage, a figure on the left that might have been a worker, a building going up on the right that the corrosion had eaten down to outline, the whole composition bleached and pitted and gone to ghost-color.
A slogan ran along the bottom. The first half was gone. What was left of it was in big square caps:
...BUILT WITH THE HELP OF HAQQANI ARBITRAGE
A kid was kicking a ball against it. Maybe eight. He kicked at the same spot, low on the wall, where the corrosion was worst; the impact point was a soft pit, gone to crumble. The ball came back to him.
He kicked it again.
“One way to stick it to the corpos I guess,” I whispered, and he didn’t look at me as I went past. The ball hit the wall. The lawyer’s name held up under it. The rest of the mural did not.
The Dash Map ticked down to two blocks. Then one.
The street smelled of charcoal and mint now. Tea and shisha smoke were leaking out of the doorways. I’d stopped seeing stalls a block back; this was a residential-and-tea-house stretch, more interior than market.
The Dash Map pinged.
The sign was Arabic script over a wooden plank above the door; the letters carved in and gilded, and underneath in smaller text the English version: Maqha al-Hilal.
The outdoor seating spilled across half the street.
Low round tables in hammered brass, glasses of tea with mint, two old men working a holo-board game with holo pieces between them, the men playing fast, the dice cup hitting the brass with a sharp tap every time it came down, revealing holo-dices. A shisha stood at the elbow of the man on the left, a thin stream of smoke climbing off the coal. He looked up at me as I passed and looked back at the holo-board.
I went inside.
The light was warm. Lanterns hung from the ceiling in clusters, a mix of real cut metal and holo; the holo ones were a little too steady to pass for real once you’d watched them for a moment. Oud and synth on the speakers, low enough to talk over.
Banquettes ran along both side walls.
Heavy embroidered cushions, low tables in dark wood, brass trays on most of the tables and teapots on most of the trays.
A few standing-height tables down the middle. The clientele was older toward the back of the room and younger toward the front, especially the laughing grandmas were giving me PTDS from Mrs. Adelaide.
A server came up on my left before I had made it three tables in. “Looking for someone?”
He was somewhere in his thirties, white shirt, brass tray under his arm, moving across the floor without looking at it.
“Omar,” I said. “I think he’s a regular.”
He nodded toward the back wall. “Corner banquette. The big teapot.”
I nodded my thanks and went back.
The back of the room was warmer than the front. The clusters of lanterns hung lower over the banquettes; the cushions were deeper.
Omar was in the corner.
He was half-reclined into the cushions, settled into the exact spot where the seam in the upholstery let your back rest. A big brass teapot sat on the tray in front of him, two glasses next to it, mint already in both. A shisha at his elbow with the coal still glowing on top, the hose lying across the cushion next to him.
He looked up and grinned.
“Habibi.”