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Alice — incoming.
I’d texted the group chat, so I kind of expected that.
Alice’s face swung into the frame too close, the angle low, like she’d grabbed the band off something and hadn’t bothered to level it. Ceci’s room sat behind her and somewhere off to the side Ceci herself, starting a sentence with “I was going to reply—” that didn’t get to finish.
“Dash. Dash. What is that?” Her hand came up at the pickup, pointing past me at the table. “It’s moving. Is it moving? Is that—it moves to the beat? Show me. Show me right now, hold it up, that’s the most nova thing I’ve ever—”
“Whoa, slow down!” I laughed, but nodded. “Okay, okay.” I picked the EQ up off its little tray and turned it toward the band. “Here you go!”
The bar’s music was down in the low end right then, and the dark band at the bottom of the glass heaved up and dropped, and the gold static ran a bright shiver across the top.
“It reads the track,” I said. “Bottom layer’s the bass—see it drop? And the top does the—” the vocal came in and the middle glowed and pulsed against my thumb “—that. It just does that the whole time.”
“Thirty sols—okay, worth it, I don’t care, hold it steadier, you’re shaking it—” She went half out of frame and came back closer. “Okay. I’m coming.”
I lowered the glass. “You’re—what?”
“To the beach. To there. Where’s there—” She waved the question off before I could answer it. “Doesn’t matter, send me the pin. I already had Ceci find somewhere to eat, so it’s handled, it’s sorted.” She gave me a grin, pleased with herself. “Smort.“
Behind her was a faint protest, “I found three places, and you didn’t look at any—”
“—handled,“ Alice said over her twin.
“Like—now?” I said. “Now now?”
“Now now.” She said it as if I were slow.
I glanced around the bar while my brain caught up. The open counter under the slatted roof, the tables spilling onto the sand, and on most of them the same thing on paper: pressed sandwiches, cut corn off the cart, a basket of something fried. A man two tables down was working through a sandwich the length of his forearm.
“Alice, there’s no restaurant. It’s a beach bar. The food is sandwiches. That’s the whole menu. Sandwiches.”
“I want hotdogs.”
“They don’t—” I looked again, in case a hotdog had appeared somewhere. “It’s sandwiches.”
“Hotdogs,” she said, like she’d solved it.
Omar had been watching my face do whatever it was doing across the table, and now he leaned all the way over and put himself into the frame beside me.
“Habibi. Is this the cute girl?” To Alice, hand going to his chest: “Hello. I’m Omar.”
Alice gave him a quick nod and came straight back to me.
“You’re welcome, of course,” Omar said. “Any friend of Dash. Come, come, we’ve got a whole beach and one sad drink. Bring the sister.”
“Preem.” Both fists came up into the frame and knocked the pickup, and the holo jumped. “Be there soon, fast, whatever. Ceci, shoes. Dash—the pin. Don’t forget the pin; if you forget it, I’m calling back, and it’ll be worse for you.”
The holo-call collapsed.
I thumbed the location over before she could make good on the threat, and then I looked at Omar, who had dropped back onto his side of the table, grinning.
“What,” I said.
“Habibi.” He spread his hands. “You never told me you knew a beauty like that.”
“I told you,” I protested weakly. “I think?”
Omar let the correction slide right off him. “And she called you. Invited herself to your beach. Asked what to eat, told her friend to get her shoes.” His eyebrows went up and stayed there. “For a date. She digs you, Dash.”
Heat climbed the back of my neck, and I hated that it did. “It’s not a date. That’s just Alice, she invites herself everywhere.” I picked the drink back up, so I’d have somewhere to put my eyes. “And anyway. I like Erika.”
Omar tilted his head. “Did Erika call you? Ever—did she call and say, Dash, I’m coming to your beach, save me a seat?“
I shook my head.
“Mm.” He nodded as if it closed a file for him. “Erika’s not interested, habibi. And I’m not saying anything against her, she’s preem redhead, she’s very cool. But she doesn’t call and invite herself.” He pointed at the dead air where Alice’s face had been. “That one does. That one’s interested.”
“You don’t get to just pick,” I said, and set the glass down. “The heart doesn’t take orders, Omar.”
“Sure, sure.” He waved the whole thing off and stood, brushing sand off the backs of his legs. His beer sat where he’d left it, most of the way full.
“You’ve barely touched that.”
“I need to freshen up.” He tugged his shirt straight and checked it against the back of his hand. “Look good.”
“You don’t need to freshen up. She’s not coming for you.”
“Exactly. Which is why I make a good impression once, and then I never have to try again.” He backed off a step, pointing at me, at the drink, at the empty chairs waiting. “Watch the beach. Ten minutes. Yalla.“
He went off toward the back, and I did what you do when you’re alone at a table with a drink and orders to watch the beach: I ignored the beach and opened Pulse.
I scrolled past the local feed, and past a clip with a little too much crescent in the background for me to be looking at it, and kept going.
Ten minutes. The palms’ ground-rings came fully on down the strip, one after another. Fifteen. Omar’s beer sat where he’d left it and sweated a ring into the table without getting any emptier. I checked up the road toward where he left every couple of scrolls, and every couple of scrolls there was no Omar, just floral shirts and a kid chasing a drone shadow across the sand.
Somewhere past twenty minutes—
—arms came around my shoulders from behind, and a voice fired straight into my ear.
“Guess who!”
“Cecilia,” I said without hesitation.
The arms tightened into something between a hug and a headlock. “It is NOT—why would you—you always do that, that’s not even—it’s ME, obviously it’s me, who else hugs you—” Alice came around the side of the chair narrating the whole crime as she committed it, and dropped into the seat next to mine, close, one sandal already dangling off her heel. She had an oversized shirt-dress on, some loud tropical print in colors that shouldn’t have worked and did, sunglasses shoved up into her hair holding none of it back. “—Cecilia. I hug you, and you say my sister’s name.”
I just smiled at her. “You said guess.”
“Hi, Dash.” Cecilia had come the long way around, to the far side of the table where Omar had been sitting, and she moved his abandoned beer and his tall fruit thing a precise few inches to one side before she sat. She wore linen, pale, and she carried a wide flat-brimmed hat that she set crown-down on the table. Both of them looked extremely good, and I hated to give Omar the point even in my own head.
Behind them the beach kept doing its thing, except now three men in clothes nobody wears to a beach had folded quietly into the space around our table, one at each open side, close enough to matter and far enough to look like they weren’t there. Bodyguards. I clocked the formation, and then I let go of clocking it, because that was just what came with sitting with the twins.
Alice took a big breath in through her nose and let it out fast. “So preeem here.”
Cecilia tapped the table, and the menu bloomed up. She started at the top and scrolled slowly, reading it.
“Good idea,” Alice said, and called up her own, and scrolled it fast, and about four seconds in her face folded down. “They don’t have hotdogs.” She looked up, betrayed. “Dash. There’s no hotdogs.”
“I told you.” I picked up the EQ.
Alice opened her mouth to keep being betrayed, and then she saw the glass move in my hand and forgot the entire menu. “Oh—it’s the—hold it, hold still—” She leaned into my space, both hands not quite grabbing, watching the bass heave the dark band up and drop it back. Across the table Ceci’s eyes flicked to the drink, held for a second, then went back to the menu.
Alice sat back, and the pout returned, refreshed. “I’m going to demand a hotdog,” she announced, and stood.
She walked off toward the counter, and one of the three men peeled off and went after her at an unhurried distance. Ceci and I both watched her go.
I breathed out. “She’s going to make a scene.”
Ceci smiled and didn’t argue it. She’d already chosen; she leaned back into her chair. “I picked the ham. Best value per sol on the board, and I want to know if their ‘real meat’ claim is true.”
“You can tell?”
“Sometimes.” Color came up in her cheeks, quick and against her will. “Not always. But I—really like real meat. Even though it hurts the animals.”
I was still working out what to say to that when Omar came back into the frame on my right, and every thought I had gone out to make room.
He’d freshened up.
The baseball cap was his gang's one. Ugh. The shirt matched the cap. The shorts matched the shirt. Every stitch of him now announced, to a beach full of tourists and one cluster of Lunaris corporate security, precisely which crew he ran with. And slapped high on his right thigh, in an open drop-holster, rode a crappy gun.
It wasn’t so crappy I was afraid of him hurting himself, but I wouldn’t trust it to shoot in the general direction of aiming.
“Ya jameela!” he called, wide and warm, one hand pressed to his chest, already crossing toward Ceci. “How’re you doin—”
The bodyguard still at the table moved before he finished the word, stepping into his line and catching him high on the shoulder. “Sir. Please move along—”
“Don’t touch me!” Omar tried to twist out of the grip, got exactly nowhere against a man built on a different budget than his, and kept twisting anyway on principle. “This is our home, wallah—this is Barani—we go where we want—”
Ceci glanced across at me. I already had my face in my hands.
I nodded.
“It’s fine,” she told the bodyguard. “We know him.”
“You’re sure, miss?”
“Yes,” she said with a small smile, and the hand came off Omar’s shoulder.
Omar rolled the shoulder, recovered his entire dignity in the space of a second, and dropped into the chair beside Ceci, grinning like he’d won something.
“Hi! I’m Omar!”
Omar settled into the chair as if he owned it, and the table, and the sand under it, and started telling Cecilia about all of them.
“You picked the right beach, jameela.” He tipped his chin at the water, the strip, the whole coastline, taking credit for it. “This place? People know me here. Anything you want—food, a better table, somebody gives you trouble—you tell Omar. You’re under my eye now.” His hand drifted down to his thigh and settled next to the gun.
Ceci’s smile stayed exactly where it was and cooled about ten degrees. “That’s kind.”
“Barani’s not inland.” He leaned in and whispered, as if the next part could get him killed. “Out here you need someone who knows how it runs. I run with serious people. Can’t say names.” He tapped the brim of the cap twice. “Serious.”
I have watched Omar talk to strangers his whole life and never once wanted to climb out of my skin until right then.
“So,” he spread his hands. “Where’s home, for a jameela like you?”
“The moon,” Ceci said.
Omar lit up as if she’d handed him a winning chit. “The moon! Wallah—Dash. Dash, she’s from the moon, you’re from the moon, you hear this? It’s meant, this is meant —”
“I’m from Mars,” I said.
He waved it flat out of the air. “Moon, Mars, khalas. It’s all up there. It’s not here. Same thing.”
Ceci looked at me for about a quarter-second, and whatever went across her face she wrapped it away before it finished. “Mm,” she said instead, and turned her hat a few degrees on the table.
Then, from the side came—
“Dash! I got you one too!”
Alice came across the sand at speed, beaming, and she was carrying three hotdogs.
Three. On a bare little tray, steaming, from a bar whose entire menu was sandwiches, and I had checked twice on her behalf, no hotdogs.
I blinked at them. “How?”
She didn’t answer because halfway to her chair she saw Omar.
Or she saw the cap, and the shirt, and the shorts, and the thing riding his thigh, all at once, and something behind her eyes clicked over. Omar had stopped mid-sentence and gone still, looking at her, then at Ceci, then back at her, mouth agape.
Alice set the tray down and dipped her head. “Greetings,” she said, and sat.
I have known Alice long enough to have been hauled by the wrist through four separate buildings. I had never heard her use a word that small.
Omar kept looking between the two of them. “You’re... two?”
“We’re twins,” Ceci said.
Alice slid a hotdog onto the table in front of me, close, all warmth and misdirection, and while my eyes were on it, reached over with her other hand, took my EQ, already down to half, and stole a mouthful of it.
I snapped my head up. She set the glass back exactly where it had been and gave me a look of such pure manufactured innocence that I couldn’t even get mad, only impressed.
Omar, undeterred by two heiresses turning to permafrost across the table from him, went for the close.
“Okay, okay—you know what you two should do.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder and shook me by it, presenting me like a lot at auction. “Every month, me and this one, few ‘nother friend, we go to the cinema. Every month. Tradition. Sacred thing.” He held up a finger. “You come with. And Palistra day—Palistra day we go again, popcorn, the good seats, you can’t beat it. Yeah? We make it a thing. All of us.”
There was a small silence, and the ocean filled it.
“We’ll see,” Ceci said.
“Perhaps,” said Alice, a cute arsonist who had just handed me a hotdog. “We’ll look into it.”
Ceci set her folded hands on the table and looked at him. “There are gangs on the moon too,” she said. “One of them spent the last ten years putting holes in Lunaris. Bombs in the transit rings. A lot of damage, a lot of goods stolen. So I know a little about how it runs.”
Omar brightened. “Yeah? Good. Stick it to the corpos.” He said it like a toast with his beer.
He’d heard ‘gangs’ and ‘corpos’ and quit listening somewhere before ‘bombs’.
Both twins shook their heads at once and said nothing. “I’m a corpo,” I pointed out.
“Nah.” Omar reached over the table and got the back of my neck in one warm hand, giving me a little shake, grinning at the twins like he was letting them in on something. “Not you, habibi. You don’t count. You’re my corpo.”
My band buzzed against my wrist. I turned it face-up under the table, out of Omar’s line.
Palesa: Activity confirmed. We’re moving in soon. Thanks, Kallum.
I had no idea how long soon was, but it didn’t matter. I looked up at Omar. “Hey. That thing.” I tilted my head, just enough. “It’s going to happen. Soon.”
The showing-off dropped off him for one clean second.
“Soon,” he said. “Got it.” Then the grin came back up over the top of it, because there was an audience. He tipped the beer back, finished it in one long pull, set the empty down, and stood.
“Jameelat.” He put a hand to his chest and bowed to the two of them, deep. “It was an honor. You’re safe on this beach—you’re on Omar’s beach now, remember that. Barani looks after its guests.” He pointed two fingers at me, already walking backward toward the strip. “Cinema. Palistra day. I’m holding you to it, habibi. Yalla.”
And he went, gang colors and all, swaggering off up the road with a strut he had not held an hour ago, to be somewhere publicly far away from a shop that was about to stop existing.
The table was quiet.
Alice glanced at Ceci. Ceci gave her a small nod. Alice turned back to me and opened her mouth—
I put my hands up and closed my eyes. “Sorry. He’s usually normal.”