“Coastal moderation zones maintain optimal conditions year-round: water clarity, wave regularity, ambient temperature, and threat exclusion.”— Haqqani Arbitrage, Barani Waterfront Overview
Palesa resolved above my wrist a second after the line connected, a hand-span of her, seated at her office desk. She had a stylus in one hand and didn’t put it down.
“That depends entirely on what you think you found, Kallum.” Her eyes went past me to the tarp, the rebar, the awful light. “And on why you’re calling me from a construction site.”
“There’s a shop in Barani fabbing guns,” I said instead. “Cheap copies of licensed models. I don’t know how deep it runs, but I know for a fact they don’t test their and it is pretty crap. I don’t like it, Inspector.”
“Cheap guns.” The stylus rolled once between her fingers. “That’s a Tago PD nuisance report, not a Sentinel case. Get to the part that’s mine.”
I glared at her, and she glared back. “Then they cover them in corporate certs, peel-and-stick. They sell it certified so nobody looks twice, and then it goes off in somebody’s hand and we, at Kallum, have to deal with bad PR.”
The stylus stopped.
“And Midorikawa, and a few I didn’t get close enough to read.” I didn’t tell her how I knew, and I didn’t tell her about the tray of them laid out under the work-lamp, or the man pressing them on with his thumb like they were nothing. “That’s a Fortune Fifteen mark on a gun, a counterfeit case, and I’m handing it to you with the address included.”
Palesa set the stylus down and leaned back, and the projection leaned with her. Behind her someone crossed the office with a coffee and didn’t look up.
“Fine. It’s a case. So, how do you want it? Loud or quiet. Loud, I roll a team, we breach it, it’s a counterfeit bust. Quiet, I watch the buyers and bust when we know everything. Those are different favors, Kallum. Pick one.”
“Whichever’s better for you.”
Her image held still, only the office moving behind it. “Say that again.”
“Take whichever one helps you more. I don’t have a preference. It’s your bust.”
The office kept moving behind her while she said nothing. “You saved my job. Fine. You call that even, we’re even, you never think about me again and I try very hard to never think about you. This is different. This is you putting a career case in my hands and letting me pick my own reward off the top of it. That’s not a man settling a debt. That’s a man opening an account in my name. So I’ll ask once, plainly, and I’d like it plain back. Why?”
I opened my mouth to give her the plain answer, and Uncle Dot came out instead.
“Because that’s how it works,” I said. “I'll help you now. It costs me nothing I’ll miss, and it lands a good case in your hands at exactly the moment you need one. You help me when I need it. That’s the whole trick. Maybe I won’t need help, and maybe you will need a friend too. Nobody makes a friend the day they’re desperate for one.”
Off to my left Omar had gone quiet, and when I caught his eyebrows were up near his hairline. I mouthed ‘what’, but he just waved his hand.
“Look, Kallum, I—” she stopped herself and shook her head. “I’m sorry about the whole debacle, okay? I should have verified your claim.”
That took me by surprise, but I smiled at her. “There’s no problem. I understand.”
“Okay, with that out of the way,” Palesa said and looked at me out of the little pool of light on my wrist long enough that I could hear the fab-fans running two streets over. “Loud,” she said. “Send me the location. I want it before they move it.” She reached for something off-frame. “We’re not friends, Dash.”
“You called me Dash instead of Kallum,” I pointed out. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but instead of answering, the projection collapsed.
I grinned at Omar, who wasn’t smiling at all. “What?”
He was looking at me the same way he’d looked at the gun. “Nothing. You just—that wasn’t you.” He almost whispered. “Whichever’s better for you.” He shook his head. “You sounded like a corpo, habibi.”
“I am a corpo.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I—” His laugh came out thin. “I knew that. Wallah, you say it every ten minutes, corpo baby this, Sol Fifteen that.” He tapped his temple. “I knew it up here.” He moved the finger to his chest. “I didn’t know it. Just now I know know it.”
I did too. That was the problem.
“I hate doing it that way. That’s not how I want to talk to people. I’m probably doing it badly, on top of everything—Uncle Dot could’ve had her thanking him for the privilege. I just made a fed think I’m running an angle.” I scrubbed a hand down my face. “But it works, and I need it to work. So I have to try.”
Omar watched me a second longer, thinking.
“Okay, habibi.” The grin came back up from wherever he kept it. “You did one corpo thing and you feel bad about it. Very you. We’ll build a shrine.” He stood, brushed permacrete dust off the backs of his legs, and tipped his head toward the gap in the tarp where the gold was sliding down into something lower and redder. “Come on. You’ve never actually seen it, right? The water.”
“No.”
“You called a fed, you saved my test, you hate yourself a little. Perfect time.” He was already moving. “Come see the beach. Yalla.”
I grinned, put the ugly gun into my pocket, and followed him out.
The Loop ran a few stops toward the coast.
[Paid: ¢2]
The car thinned out as we went, the older riders getting off at the residential stops until it was mostly younger people and a couple with a folded beach umbrella between their knees.
Over them ADs were changing, one of them was a Syntavelli swimwear line and a slow, gold-lit thing for a resort I was fairly sure wasn’t in Barani, a woman lying back on a lounger with a drink sweating in her hand and white letters that said:
You’ve earned the quiet.
“That one’s for you,” Omar said, watching me read it. “Corpo, come lie down. You’ve earned it.”
“I’ve earned nothing. I just called cops.”
“You earned extra days, then.”
The doors hummed open at the last stop, and the salt came in heavier than it had inland. The station let out across a low street, and across the street was the beach.
I stopped at the platform’s edge.
I’d seen it from the train, grey-blue all the way out. This was different. The water was right there now, a flat walkable distance off, close enough that I could see it move, the whole near edge of it sliding up the sand and dragging back and doing it again, over and over.
The sound came with the smell.
A long, low wash that didn’t stop and didn’t repeat exactly, always a little different, and I stood in the station doors.
“Yalla, ghost boy.” Omar was already off the platform. “It doesn’t leave.”
Palms ran the length of the beach road, evenly spaced, each one the same height as the next, their trunks wrapped in a low ring of ground-light that would come on when the gold finished going. A Tago PD sign on a post promised a patrolled family environment. The shield sat a few miles out past all of it, holding the line so that everyone this side of it could lie on a lounger.
Omar took me down the road at his easy pace, hands in his pockets, nodding at a guy grilling corn out of a cart, and I followed and looked at everything.
The beach itself was busy, but also had the… beach vibe. Umbrellas. Kids at the waterline running at it and running away from it. A group further down had a game going with a ball and a net.
It’s not that warm…
“See,” Omar said. “Now watch this. We go to the bar, you sit down, and you—” he looked me over, the yellow hoodie, the pants, “—okay, you don’t fit in exactly, but nobody fits in here. That’s the point. Everybody’s from somewhere else. You’ll look like a tourist. Wearing a hoodie. Take it off.”
“I’m not taking it off.” I plucked the front of it. “It’s a good hoodie. It runs cool when it’s hot out, and now it isn’t even that hot. I’m more comfortable than you are right now.”
Omar looked at the hoodie, and then at his own shirt. “Wallah, don’t tell me that. Now I want one and I can’t afford your gremlin magic.” He shook it off and pointed down the strip. “Anyway. Point stands. You’ll look like a tourist.”
“You realize we are tourists.”
I meant it lightly, but Omar winced and caught the wince halfway, and glanced up the road as if the word might’ve been overheard.
“Okay, that one—” he lowered his voice, half a laugh in it but only half, “—don’t say that too loud, habibi. Not here. I’ve got a face people know now. I’m a regular. I’ve got a corner.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Took me a while to get a corner.”
“I won’t.” I let it go. “Regular. Big teapot. Very impressive.”
“It is impressive. You wait years for a corner.” The grin came back up. “Come on. Drinks.”
The bar sat right on the sand where the road ran out, an open sitting, no walls to speak of, a long counter under a slatted roof with the sides thrown open to the water and a scatter of tables spilling out onto the beach itself.
Music came off it, quiet, not as loud as in Cassette.
The smell here was hot oil and toasted bread and cut citrus and something charring on a flat-top, nothing like the charcoal and mint of the inland streets. A different district entirely, a few stops away.
We took a table half on the sand, close enough to the water that I could keep watching it.
The Tago PD drone slid over the strip as we sat down. Nobody looked up at it. A man in a floral shirt walked right under it with two drinks and didn’t break stride, and it went on down the strip and left us to it.
Omar tapped the table.
A menu bloomed up out of the surface, a hand-span of light, and the top third of it was an ad. Big, bright, sitting over the actual drinks as if it owned them.
ChromaSurf Inc. presents The Equalizer Shot (“The EQ”) a novelty shot that literally visualizes the track’s audio spectrum inside the glass. Drink the room.
“Okay.” Omar put a finger straight through the middle of the ad. “That. You’re getting that.”
“I’m not getting a shot that costs—” I found the price under the glowing render. “Thirty sols. Omar. It’s thirty sols for a shot.“
“It’s thirty sols for a light show.“
“It’s a light show. I drink and then it’s gone.”
“Habibi.” He put both hands flat on the table, earnest as a hostage negotiator. “You need to celebrate your S-tier attributes—”
“I never said—”
“—and you are going to sit here, at my bar, on my beach, and you are going to buy the stupid glowing drink, and I am going to watch you drink it, and it is going to make your whole week. Do it. For me. Have fun.”
I looked at the thirty-sol render turning slowly in the light. Then I looked at him, sitting there wanting the dumb glowing drink.
“Fine,” I said, and tapped it.
Omar made a pleased noise.
He tapped through his own side of the menu without any ceremony and picked two things that came to twelve between them, a beer and something in a tall glass with fruit in it.
The confirmation floated up and hung there over the table. “While I drink that insanity,” I said, and shook my head at him. “Drink your cheap beer.”
“S-tier attributes,” he said happily to the ocean, “and he didn’t celebrate.”
I couldn’t suppress my grin. “Well… as you said, we celebrate now, no?”
Omar grinned, and I tapped the table.
[Paid: 30]
The EQ came out on a little tray of its own.
A tall, narrow glass, barely wider than my thumb, and inside it three bands of liquid stacked and refusing to mix, a pale gold on top, a deeper amber in the middle, something dark and red-black sitting at the bottom.
The server set it down on the table, and the base of it must have caught the music, because the whole glass came alive.
The top layer shivered, a fine bright static running across the surface in time with something high in the track. The middle held steady and glowed, a warm, even light that pulsed a little when the vocal came in. And the bottom churned, the dark stuff heaving up and dropping back with every beat of the bass, slow and heavy.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s stupid. That’s really cool, and it’s really stupid.”
“Thirty sol of stupid.” Omar was watching my face more than the drink. “Worth it?”
“Jury’s out.” But I was already reaching for my band. The bass churned up and dropped, the whole glass moving with the track, and I wanted it before I drank it and it stopped being a picture.
I framed it so the three bands caught the light and snapped it.
Then I pulled up the teahouse one, the dark tea, the mint raft, Omar’s grinning face crashing into the corner of the shot at the last second, and sent them both to Ceci.
Barani trip. Don’t ask about the second one.
“There she is,” Omar said, delighted. “The cute girl. You finally sent it.”
“It’s not—” I started, and my band lit before I could finish.
I expected a message back. Instead I got a call.
Alice — incoming.