“A threat assessment requires a pattern. Patterns are assembled from associations, movements, and company kept.”—Sentinel Corp, Field Assessment Manual, Rev. 3
“Habibi.”
I dropped onto the banquette across from Omar, and the cushions took me deeper than I expected, that same worn seam pulling my back into the exact right place. I leaned the sword against the wall next to me, where I could reach it without thinking about it, and let it be.
“You made it.” Omar was still grinning. “You actually made it. I thought you’d get to the platform, smell the salt, and turn around.”
“I almost did.” I looked at the teapot between us, big enough to serve six, mint crowding the two empty glasses. “You started without me?”
“That’s the last one. Killed it. This one’s yours.” He put a hand flat on the brass like he was introducing me to it. “But no—wait. You don’t order yet. First, we fix what you’re drinking, because if you order like a tourist, they’ll bring you tourist tea, and I’ll have to sit here and watch you drink it, and it’ll ruin my whole day.”
I furrowed my brow. “I was going to point at a picture.”
“Habibi.” He said it with his hand on his chest, wounded. “No. Okay. Listen.” He leaned in. “You want it strong. Like, too strong, and then more sugar than that, so it fights you a little. And the mint—” he tapped the rim of the empty glass, “—here it’s not normal mint. They grow their own. There’s mana in it. Small, but you’ll feel it, right at the back, like the tea’s a little more awake than it should be.”
I blinked. “Mana mint.”
He pointed at me as if I’d cracked it, delighted. “The Wālī pulled the seeds out of a blue shard years back, brought them here, and now half the roofs in the district are growing it. You drink it here and it tastes like here. You can’t get it anywhere else, wallah.”
They’ve got a fucking mana mint,” I mumbled. The lanterns, the crescent I’d clocked in the floor tile two streets back, the crescent worked into the doorframe, the server who’d known exactly which corner to point me at.
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Omar. Is this a gang teahouse?”
He laughed. “Yeah,” he said when he came down. “Yeah, it is.”
I picked up one of the empty glasses and turned it in my fingers; a fleck of spent mint stuck to the bottom, and glanced back toward the door where the crescent sat in the tilework. “You said it like you were telling me about the mint.”
“Because the mint is the good part!” He wiped his eyes. “But yeah. The auntie who runs it, the Kātim, you’ll meet her; she’s the sweetest woman on this coast. She’ll pinch your cheek and short you on the change, and you’ll thank her for it. She runs the whole place. Good people.”
None of those words meant anything to me, Kātim, Wālī.
It went past me like the Arabic on the transit board, letters I couldn’t read arranged around something everyone here understood but me. What I picked up was that my best friend was this comfortable in a room like this, tossing out the gang’s furniture like it was his cousin’s living room.
I leaned back into the cushion and shook my head at him.
The server came around the banquettes, the same one from the door, tray tucked under his arm. “I was recommended the strong one,” I said. “Extra sugar. Your mint.”
Omar made a small, pleased noise, like I’d passed something.
The server nodded and was gone, and I turned back to Omar. “So. You’re here a lot now.”
“Best mint on the coast.” He said it into his glass, mock-solemn, and held the innocent face for exactly as long as it took me to raise an eyebrow at him.
Then it broke, and he set the glass down. “And because they need hands, habibi. The feds have been leaning on everyone for—it’s been going for a while now. The mayor wants his second term, so it’s all ‘clean up the districts, take back the streets, one more percent from every citizen for a safer Tago’.” He did the broadcast voice for half a second, flat and grand, and dropped it. “So everyone’s stretched. They take help wherever it comes. Me, I’m around, I know the place, I’m useful.” He shrugged. “It’s not a big drama.”
I nodded slowly. And then I clocked what I was wearing, and where I was wearing it. I put a hand on my right hip. “Omar.”
“Mm?”
I turned in the seat so that the holster faced him. The Sentinel Corp mark sat there in the light, embossed into the leather, the same logo stamped again into the grip of the revolver above it, clean and proud and about the most wrong thing a person could carry into a room full of crescents.
Omar looked at it.
His face did a slow, magnificent fall. “Ohh. Oh, no. Habibi, I forgot. I told you the revolver was fine, I completely—” He glanced around the room, quick, then back. “Okay. Okay, that has to go under something. You have a cloth? A wrap, anything?”
“Yeah, I carry hot glue in my pockets.” I joked, but went through them anyway because he was already looking hopeful. Left hoodie pocket: a spare battery, half-charged, that I did not remember taking off the bench. Right pocket: a single translucent coilgun slug I definitely hadn’t meant to carry around loose. Cargo pocket—
I pulled out a small, crushed foil packet. Strawberry. Comma’s.
I stared at it. I’d taken it that morning, meaning to eat it in the basement, and forgot all about it. She had been right about me being a snack-snatcher. Later, I need to bring an Ice-cream shaped apology.
“That’s not a cloth,” Omar observed.
“No,” I set the battery, the slug, and the stolen snack on the brass tray in a sad little row. “That’s the inventory. No cloth.”
Omar looked at the row of junk, and I watched an idea arrive on his face, giddy and terrible. He dove for his bag.
“What?” I said.
“You’ll see.” He was grinning into the bag, elbow-deep.
“Omar. What?”
“You’ll see!” He came up with something pinched between two fingers, held low so I couldn’t see it, mischief all over him. He waggled the fingers at my hip. “Turn. Come on, turn, give me the side.”
I sighed and gave him the holster.
He leaned in, careful, tongue between his teeth, and pressed something onto the leather with his thumb, smoothing it down. Then a second, smaller one, up over the grip. He sat back to admire the work.
I looked down.
A Palistra Apex — Certified Quality seal now sat square over the Sentinel mark on the holster, cheerful and blue and holo-glossed. And over the grip, smaller, a little Escalante Inc. energy sticker.
I glared at him. “I hate Palistra.”
“You,” Omar said, delighted, “are a Sol Fifteen sellout, and you’re going to sit there and hate Palistra?”
“Where did you even get these?”
“The station! They were free. Whole rack of them by the turnstile, some promo thing.” He spread his hands, the case obvious, unanswerable. “You wouldn’t leave free stuff lying around, right?”
The tea arrived before I could find the words.
The server set it down in front of me, it was a small glass in a metal holder, the tea inside it so dark it was almost brown-red, a raft of mint crushed against the top. Steam came off it, carrying the smell, and the smell was already too much, sweet and sharp all at once.
“Wait, I need to send this to my friend,” I said. “I promised them to share my culianary experiences.
“Oh? Is that someone a cute girl?” Omar laughed again. “Also this isn’t food.”
“Yeah, smells worse,” I scrunched my nose, but took the picture. Omar leaned into it at the last second grinning.
“Tell her she can have my number anytime!” he grinned as he leaned back into his seat.
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t send it to Ceci yet. Instead I lifted the cup by the rim, the way Omar had, and drank. It hit the back of my throat. Sweet first, so sweet it was almost a wall, and then the bitter tea underneath it, strong enough that my eyes came open a little wider on their own.
And then, last, the mint, and under the mint the mana, a thin cool current that ran up behind my eyes.
I put the glass down. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay, that’s the best tea I’ve ever had, and I’m angry about it.”
Omar laughed and refilled his own.
We stayed there for the better part of an hour. He told me about Creston, the teachers he liked and the one who had it out for him, a group project that had gone to pieces because nobody but Omar did anything, a girl he wasn’t going to talk about and then talked about for ten minutes.
I told him about the run that had gone deep, the gear that had saved me, the stone I’d cracked at the end of it. “I’ve got attributes now,” I said. “Real ones. Better than C.”
Omar lowered his glass. “Better than C, how? Like, B? Higher than B?”
I grinned and drank my tea.
“No—habibi. That grin is a felony. You can’t just grin at me. How high?”
“Drink your tea.”
“I hate you.” He was beaming. “Corpo baby comes to my teahouse and grins at me about his S-tier whatever. Wallah, unbelievable.”
The shisha smoke climbed between us. I let him have the mystery and he let me keep it, and for a while it was just the two of us and the lanterns and the oud on the speakers, and nothing was trying to kill me or disinherit me, and I could have sat there until the coal died.
Then Omar’s band lit up.
He glanced down at his wrist, and something crossed his face and was gone. He read it twice. Then he set his glass down.
“Hey. I’ve got to see someone for a minute.” He was already sliding out of the banquette. “Two minutes. Just—stay, drink. I’ll be right back. Yeah?”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Sit. Enjoy the mana.”
I let it go. He went up toward the front of the room, weaving the tables, and I watched him get to a low table near the window where an older woman sat alone; the auntie, had to be, gray hair under a loose scarf, a glass of the same dark tea at her elbow and both hands folded around it.
She looked up at Omar as if he were a nephew and he sat.
And then they were talking, and it was in Arabic, quick, and I understood exactly none of it. So I did the only sensible thing, which was to lean back into the cushion and drink my tea and stop pretending I was going to learn anything from over here.
It took twenty minutes.
I was down to the dregs, dark syrup and drowned mint, when Omar dropped back onto the cushions across from me, all smiles again.
“Okay,” he said, reaching for the shisha hose. “Sorry. Where were we?”
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Boring stuff.” He took a pull, and the coal glowed, and he tipped his head back and let the smoke go toward the lanterns. “Gang stuff. You’d be bored.”
“Omar.”
“It’s boring, I’m telling you—”
“Omar.”
The smile came down. He looked at the shisha hose in his hand instead of at me, turned the mouthpiece a little, and when he spoke the jokes were gone out of his voice and it had dropped low. “Look, habibi. I’m Ṣifr. That’s—nobody. I’m nobody in the gang. I run things from one hand to another, and I don’t ask what’s in them.” He shrugged. “It’s really not a big deal.”
“You’re not nobody.”
“I don’t even have the ink.” He turned his forearm over, the inside of it bare, and tapped the skin where something wasn’t. “See? Nothing. You’re not made until you’ve got the ring.” Then the corner of his mouth pulled, and a little of him came back. “But. If today goes okay—I get it. First one. So.”
He didn’t say anything more about it. He just took his tea, drank, and took another slow pull off the shisha.
Omar was the best friend I had who didn’t share my blood, and he was about to walk into a gang with both eyes open.
It wasn’t just him though.
As far as the whole world knew, I was the heir to a Sol Fifteen. Most people only had the name—but the name was Kallum, and Kallum was enough.
I’d already sat in a Sentinel cell once for the crime of being it, listened to their rehabilitation loop for hours, walked out with an apology and a revolver and no interest, ever, in going back. Standing next to a made gang member when the feds were making a show of the districts was exactly the kind of association that put me back in that room.
And he probably needed the afternoon to get ready anyway.
I let out a long breath and reached for the sword. “Well. Good luck, habibi. Go be somebody.” I started to stand. “I mean it. Message me after, tell me you’re—”
“Come with me.”
I stopped, half-up. “What?”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” he gave a weak smile. “I swear. But—come with me. Just for this.”
I sat back down slowly. “Isn’t this a gang initiation? Like a—test? Prove yourself, fight the champion, whatever?”
He burst out laughing. “Habibi. It’s not the holos. There’s no champion. Nobody’s going to make me fight a guy.” He wiped his eye. “I could just use another pair of eyes I trust. That’s all. That’s the whole thing.”
I stared at him.
The truth was Omar had done a lot for me, and not only lately. Back when I was nobody, a pleb with fake IDs and trash gear grinding the school mines, when there wasn’t a single thing I could do for him in return—he’d still picked up. He’d still crashed on my floor and bought the popcorn, and answered the call. He had never once needed me to be a Kallum to be my friend.
I put the sword back against the wall.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m not fighting a champion.”
Omar’s face lit up . “No champion. I promise.” Then he pointed past me at the payment terminal set into the wall by the banquette. “And—corpo baby. You’ll get this? For the tea?”
I groaned.
“You have the S-tier attributes and everything—”
“I didn’t say S-tier.”
“You grinned S-tier.” He was already sliding out of the seat. “Come on. You’ve got money to burn, and I’ve been buying you popcorn since you got booted out of Creston.”
I put my wrist to the terminal, because it was true, he’d been buying me popcorn for years. The caveat, which I kept to myself, was that he’d been the one dragging me to those movies in the first place.
[Paid: ¢71]
“Yalla,” Omar said, grinning, holding the door of the banquette like a doorman. “Let’s go, habibi.”