“Every prize on display is available exclusively through play. Prizes may not be purchased, exchanged, or valued in credit. This preserves the integrity of the win.”— Vaultline Entertainment, Boardwalk Concession Standards
“Sorry. He’s usually normal.”
Alice pushed her sandal back onto her heel and pointed a hotdog at me across the table. “That was weird, Dash. That was so weird. He came in like a boss mob with a cutscene. You’re under my eye now.“ She dropped her voice for it and got about a third of the way to Omar’s accent before it fell apart. “Who talks like that?”
“He doesn’t. Normally.” I turned the EQ in its little ring of light and watched the bass drop the black band. “He’s the guy who buys the popcorn. He’s the guy who carried my ass in Apocalypse Fighters. That was—” I shrugged. “That was the cap talking.”
“The cap was loud,” Alice agreed, and bit her hotdog in half.
Cecilia had her hotdog in one hand and had not touched it. “He didn’t sound bad,” she said. “That’s not the part. He was showing off for two girls, which is a thing boys do.” She set the hotdog down. “What I don’t like is the crescent.”
A server came around the end of our table and set a tall glass down in front of her, pale orange, condensation already running, a little paper umbrella wedged into the rim at an angle that had clearly been thought about. Ceci rotated it a bit without seeming to notice she’d done it and kept talking.
“Because it isn’t just a cap. He’s telling the street who he answers to and they’ll going to have his name next to the crescent.”
I picked up my hotdog and started eating while she was still talking, because it was hot and it was in front of me and I hadn’t eaten since Comma’s sandwiches.
Ceci looked at me. She looked at the hotdog. Then she picked hers up and ate it. Alice grinned as if she’d caught us both in a crime, reached over, and took my drink.
“Alice—”
“I’m testing it.” She held the EQ up at eye level and turned it slowly, one eye shut. Two-thirds of it was gone. Two-thirds of it was gone and the three bands were still stacked in exactly the same proportion, gold on amber on that dark churning red, each one thinner and each one holding its share, the top layer shivering into static as something high came off the bar speakers. “Okay, that’s stronk. It re-splits itself. Ceci, it’s thirty sols of tiny little ratio gremlins—”
“I heard you.”
“—and also!” Alice put both elbows on the table and looked at me over the glass. “We hate gangs. Hard hate. Ghosted-from-my-life hate.” She drank some of my drink to punctuate it.
Ceci turned the umbrella in her glass. “Remember the explosion I told you about? The one dad still hasn’t recovered from? It was done by one of the gangs. Yeah, someone paid them to do it, but a gang did it.”
Alice had stopped chewing.
Ceci looked up at me. “But the gang put the charge in. Somebody in a nice cap went down there with a bag and set it and walked out. Payment doesn’t make the hand that did it disappear.”
The water kept coming up the sand behind her and dragging back.
Alice reached over and put the EQ into my hand, curling my fingers around it, and gave me a smile of such radiant innocence that I forgot for a second that she’d emptied a third of it in twenty seconds.
I shook my head at her. “Omar isn’t in a gang.”
Alice blinked at me. “What, he isn’t?”
“He’s pretending.” I laughed, and it got away from me a bit. “That’s the whole thing. He’s not in. He wants in. He’s been running errands for them for a couple of months, and today was his test, and if it lands, then maybe he’s in, and he doesn’t even have the ink yet. He showed me his arm.”
Ceci’s sandwich arrived, the ham on paper. She squared it in front of her, took a bite, chewed twice; and when I said Omar wasn’t in a gang, she made a sound like a hiccup, and her hand went flat on the table, and she folded straight over her own plate.
Her hotdog rolled off the table and into the sand.
“HEY—” Alice was up out of her chair. “Ceci, that was a whole—”
Ceci waved her off without looking and kept laughing, gasping it out in pieces. “He isn’t—but he was—serious people, can’t say names—” She pressed the back of her wrist against her mouth. “He was so—that was cute—”
I groaned into my hands.
“Yeah. His second cousin, or something like a second cousin, is actually made in Al-sirr, and he brings home a different girl every month, and Omar has seen it.” I looked up. “He wants to join a criminal organization to improve his dating outcomes.”
Alice was straight-up confused, strained her face in thought, and it looked so damn cute. Maybe I was falling for her? What Omar said about Erika still rang in my head. Maybe—
“That... isn’t how it works?” Alice finally finished thinking.
Ceci got herself down to a wobble, took a breath, and steadied herself. “His cousin is in the gang?”
“He’s in. And he’s also very good-looking, which is the variable Omar is ignoring.” I ate more of my hotdog. “And on top of that, Omar thinks the whole thing is a mission. They rip corporate designs and dump the schematics free on the net, and he talks about it like it’s a holy war.”
Alice nodded, entirely sincere. “That’s great, though. The licensing is sooo expensive.”
Ceci put her sandwich down and narrowed her eyes at me over the umbrella. “Dash. Did you tell him we’re Lunaris heiresses?”
I looked out at the water. The water was very interesting.
“Dash!” Alice shoved my shoulder, not hard, but with both hands. “Dash. He did all of that because you didn’t tell him! He didn’t know! He didn’t even know there were two of us; he asked if we were two—”
I kept my eyes on the ocean and drank from what was left of my own drink.
“Honestly,” Ceci said, and shook her head slowly at her sandwich, “now I feel sorry for him. He came in here with a gun on his leg and a cap and a speech, and he isn’t even in.“
“He might be by tonight.” I put the glass down, glad of the door out. “That’s the thing we were doing. There’s a shop in Barani fabbing garbage guns and stamping them with cloned corporate certs; Midorikawa, Kallum, whatever sells. Omar’s test was to find it. I followed the runners and found it, and then I called it in to a fed I know, and she’s rolling a team.”
Alice was frowning, which did not stop her hand from crossing the table and taking my drink again. “Huh. So the gang asked you to bust a gang.”
“Not a gang. Independent.” Ceci had gone back to eating methodically, working down the sandwich. “It’s a heat problem. The counterfeits pull corporate investigators into the district, corporate investigators bring the feds, and the feds are already all over Tago for the mayor’s clean-streets thing. So Al-sirr wants the source removed and their own hands clean.” She glanced at me. “Right?”
“More or less.”
“And Omar gets the credit,” Ceci said. “So Omar gets in.”
Alice slammed the glass down, which would have been more effective if it hadn’t been my glass. “Then we have to tell him it’s a bad idea. Gangs are bad news! It’s not a career! You don’t get dental!”
Ceci nodded once, agreeing with everything except possibly the dental.
I shrugged. “Sure. Tell him how?”
Alice’s face lit up, and I knew before she opened her mouth that I was going to hate it. “We’ll go to the cinema,” she said, “and talk him out of it.”
I closed my eyes. “You can try.”
The last of the gold went out of the sky while we finished, and the ground-rings around the palms came up in a slow chain down the strip, and Ceci ate the rest of the ham with a verdict she declined to share. Alice finished my drink. She got the last of the black layer, tipped the glass all the way back, and held it upside down over her open mouth until one last drop fell, and then set it down triumphantly among the wreckage of the paper plates.
“So,” she wiped her hands on a napkin and looked between us, already bouncing. “What’cha we do now?”
Ceci opened her mouth, and Alice’s hand closed around my wrist before whatever Ceci was about to suggest could get out into the world.
“The water. Obviously the water. He’s never been in it, Ceci, he’s from Mars—”
“I’ve been in water.”
“In a tub.“ She was already hauling. “Come on. Yalla. Isn’t that what your guy says? Yalla.”
“Don’t do the accent.” I planted my heel in the sand and stopped her, which took more than it should have. She gave me puppy eyes, and I let out a suffering sigh. “Alright. Fine. I’m coming. But not in my shoes.”
Alice let go of my wrist and folded her arms and stood over me while I did it, tapping one bare foot, radiating the patience of a bomb about to go off. I took my shoes off. I put the socks in the shoes. I squared the shoes up under the table next to the leg, where I could find them again without looking, and then I rolled the left cuff of my pants twice, neatly, up over the calf.
I got one turn into the right cuff before she grabbed my wrist and pulled.
“Alice—”
“Too slow. You’re doing homework.” I went four steps down the sand with my right leg still flapping loose around the ankle, and she didn’t slow down for it.
“The sword’s on my side.”
“So?”
“Then the revolver and the needle’s in my eye, Alice—”
She stopped dead, which made me nearly walk into her, and turned around and looked up at me with her head cocked. “Is any of it not waterproof?”
I opened my mouth.
“No,” I admitted. “Everything, including the holster, should survive.” I put the gun into my pocket just to be sure.
“So.” She let go of my wrist, walked backwards away from me toward the water with both arms out, and hit the wet sand grinning. “Get in the ocean, corpo.”
Ceci came past me on my left. She handed the hat to the nearest bodyguard, who was holding it in two hands with an unsure expression, and she had a fistful of pale linen gathered up in one hand and her sandals hooked on the other.
“She’s not going to stop,” Ceci said. “You may as well.”
I got into the ocean.
The first thing it did was to be cold. A clean cold that closed around my ankles and kept going up past where the water actually was. The second thing it did was come back warmer than it had been. And the third thing, the one nobody had thought to mention to me in twenty years of being alive on a planet that was mostly this, was that when the water went back out it took the sand out from under my heels.
I put a hand down and did not fall.
I have been hit in the chest by a Level 11 Reaver and driven through a wall. I nearly went down in a few centimeters of water in front of two heiresses and a man holding a hat.
“Whoa. Whoa, careful, it does that—” Alice was laughing. She was already past her knees, the shirt-dress bunched up in both fists, and the wash came up around her and dragged back, and she stood in it easily, rocking with it, and I watched her do it and copied her.
It worked.
Then I stopped watching how she did it, and looked out, and let it be what it was.
The sea went out from my feet to the horizon without stopping. The wall sat somewhere out there in the haze, holding the line, and past the wall was everything the wall was for, and none of that was in the water in front of me. It came in and it went out. It had been doing that since before Haqqani ever put a lawyer’s name on a beach, and it would keep doing it when the name was gone.
It was cold, and it moved, and it did not stop.
I stood in it.
“Ohh.“ That was Ceci, off to my right.
She’d waded in about the same as me, holding the linen up out of the water with the care of a woman who intended to end this evening dry from the knee up.
The wave that got her did not come in like the others. It came in from the side and it came in high, and it took her to mid-thigh, and Cecilia Lunaris-of-the-Moon made a noise like a startled bird and said, “That’s—that’s not—the pattern, the pattern was—” and her sister was already screaming with joy.
“CECI’S IN.”
“I am not in—”
“You’re soaked!“ Alice threw both fists over her head. “The ocean is preem. The ocean is the most nova thing on this whole planet, I’m putting it in the group chat—”
I chuckled. “You’re going to drop your band in it.”
Alice kicked water at me.
It came up in a sheet and got me across the chest, and the hoodie beaded it and let it run and did not soak, and I looked down at the water running off me and then up at her, and she saw the mistake arrive on her own face about a quarter-second too late.
“Wait—”
I got her with a full sweep of my leg. She shrieked and went sideways into her own sister, and Ceci, who had until that moment been conducting herself with dignity, took the wave, and the sister, and about a gallon of the Barani coast.
There was silence.
Then Ceci, calmly bent down, put both hands in the water, and destroyed us.
We were in there for a long time.
One of the bodyguards eventually took his shoes off and rolled his trousers and came out to stand at the waterline with his hands folded in front of him, watching the strip, hating every single thing about his life, and none of us acknowledged him and he never once looked at us.
Alice tried to get me deeper.
She had my sleeve, and she was walking backwards, out toward where the swell was actually swelling, and I took two steps and stopped, and my weight went back into my heels, and I did not go any further.
“It’s fine, it’s like chest—”
“Not with this on.”
I didn’t move my hand off the strap, and she looked at the hand, and at the sword riding my back with the seawater beading off the sheath.
“Okay,” she said, and let go of my sleeve, and splashed back toward the shallow water without asking.
Later, when the water was pulling out and leaving the sand hard and dark, I found the shell.
It was the size of my thumbnail, sitting in the drag-line, ribbed and pale and pink down inside the curl, and I got it up out of the water before the next wave took it back and turned it over in my fingers to check it wasn’t broken.
Comma had never seen the ocean either.
She’d told me to go outside and have fun so I’d stop eating her snacks, and I had the crushed foil packet of the strawberry one in my cargo pocket right now. I put the shell in my pocket with the wrapper.
The sun went down.
It went down over the water, which I had never seen, and the flat surface of it went to hammered copper all the way out to the wall, and the light came in low and level and turned the wash around our ankles into something with fire underneath it.
Alice stood up out of the water with her hair stuck to one cheek and the shirt-dress soaked black to the hem, and turned to say something to me, and the sun was behind her.
I didn’t hear what she said.
She had hauled me by the wrist through four separate buildings, stolen food off my plate, and thirty minutes ago drunk two-thirds of a drink I’d paid thirty sols for. I had never once looked at her and felt anything but what Omar said echoed back in my head.
I felt it turn over in my chest.
It came from nowhere, and it went through, and it left.
“—so I said we’re doing that instead. Dash?” She squinted at me, water running off her chin. “What?”
“Nothing,” I said.
I looked at the sea instead, and the copper light on it, and I did not look back at her for a while.
We got our shoes back on, and the sand came with them, and the boardwalk took us north along the strip with the ground-rings coming up under the palms in a long chain and the sky going out behind us.
Games ran the entire length of the boardwalk. Ring toss, a hoop cage, a thing with a hammer, all of them lit in strings of orange bulbs corroded green at every joint, and all of them shouting.
The shooting gallery was three stalls up from the corn cart.
It was a long booth, open at the front, with a counter running its width and three battered air-guns chained to the counter by the trigger guards. Down at the back, twenty meters in, little tin fish rode a rail from left to right and dropped out of sight behind a board, and came around, and did it again.
The barker was already looking at us before we were in range, because he’d seen the linen and the sunglasses and the three men walking a loose box around us.
Above the fish, above the mid-tier prizes and the sad rack of keychains, sat the top shelf.
It was an octopus.
It was enormous, a barrel of soft blue with eight fat plush arms flopped down over the shelf edge, two huge shining eyes, and a small embroidered tie around what I suppose was its neck. Along the front of the shelf, in the good serif, the sign said:
HAQQANI ARBITRAGE — EIGHT HANDS ON YOUR MATTER.
Ceci stopped walking.
She started again about half a second later, and she kept her chin level, and she said, to nobody, “It’s mass-produced polyester with a licensing tag on the tie.”
She did not take her eyes off it.
Alice’s head turned like a turret. She looked at the octopus. She looked at her sister. She looked at the octopus again, and then she walked straight up to the counter, put both hands flat on it, and said, “The blue one. How much.”
“Prizes aren’t for sale, miss.” The barker had a practiced smile. “Three hits, top shelf, ten sols a shot.”
“Fifty sols.”
“Ten sols a shot.”
“No, I’ll give you ten sols. For the octopus.” She was already thumbing her band up. “Right now, cash, done.”
“Not for sale.”
“A hundred.”
“Not for sale.”
Alice’s eyes narrowed. “A thousand.“
The barker looked at her with a glint in his eyes. “Miss,” he said gently, “you could buy the stall. You can’t buy the octopus.”
“Alice.” Ceci had gone the color of the sunset behind her. “Alice, I don’t want it—”
“You want it so bad it’s radiating off you, Ceci, I can feel it—” Alice spun back to the counter, and I made the mistake of laughing.
Both of them looked at me.
“Fine,” I said, and put my wrist to the terminal. “Watch this. Let’s start with one shot.”
[Paid: ¢10]
The barker slid the middle gun down the counter to me on its chain, and I knew what it was before my hand closed on it.
It was an airgun, and it was a wreck, and the wreck was on purpose.
I know what a gun feels like when it’s been used up, honestly. This wasn’t that. The rear sight sat proud of its notch, backed out and left there. The spring gave under the break with no life in it at all. And when I sighted down the barrel, along the top of it, the line of it was not a line.
Every gun on this counter would shoot. None of them would shoot where you pointed it.
“Something wrong?” said the barker. He said it pleasantly, and he watched my hands while he said it.
“No,” I said. “It’s lovely.”
The one that counted for the top shelf was the small one at the back, a fat blue fish that ran faster than all the rest of them. Three hits took the octopus. There were ten fish on that rail and I only cared about the one.
I brought the gun up.
I have shot a coilgun through a Zerakai mage’s chest at a hundred meters. I did not hurry. I put the front post on the small blue fish, tracked it, and squeezed.
The pellet went past it.
Not by much, it clipped the air right off the fish’s back and buried itself in the board, and the fish kept running, and Alice made a sound of pure delight.
Two meters of thin light hung in the air where the shot had gone.
The line was not straight. It left the muzzle low and to the left of where I’d aimed and it bent on its way out. So that was the trick. Low and left coming out of the muzzle.
“You missed,“ Alice said, delighted, appalled, hanging off my shoulder. “Dash. Dash, you’re the sniper, you told me you were the sniper—”
“The gun’s rigged.”
“Sure it is.” She took it out of my hands before I could take a second shot, put her band to the terminal, planted her feet, shut both eyes, and fired.
The pellet hit the ceiling of the stall. There was a small silence, filled by the sound of a plastic tarp settling.
“That fish moved,” Alice said.
“It’s on a rail,” said Ceci.
“It moved.“ She put the gun down on the counter, folded her arms, and went to stand behind her sister with a face like a rainy holiday.
I put my wrist back to the terminal. “Three.”
[Paid: ¢30]
The first of the three, I went low. I knew I’d gone low the instant it left, and then the light came up and showed me exactly how low, and I stopped shooting at where the fish was and started shooting at where this specific, lying gun believed the fish was.
The second shot took the small blue fish square in the flank and knocked it flat on the rail with a ting you could hear over the music.
Ceci’s hands came together in front of her, silently.
The third shot missed by a lot.
A spring gone soft and a barrel that had been bent by hand and bent again, and no two shots leaving it the same way twice.
“It’s random,” I said. “There’s no fixing this. It’s not built to be fixed.”
“Two more,” Alice said instantly, hand up.
“Alice—”
“Two more.“
[Paid: ¢20]
The fourth took the fish clean and put it down, and that was two.
The fifth hit the small blue fish and dropped it a third time, and the bell over the stall came on, and every string of corroded orange bulbs around the frame started flashing, and the barker reached up with a long pole and got the octopus down off the top shelf.
Seventy sols. We had spent Seventy sols to win a grand prize on a rigged gun for a girl whose family could buy the beach.
An hour ago I hadn’t wanted to spend thirty on a drink.
“Here,” I said, and held it out to Ceci.
It was bigger than her. She had to open both arms to take it, and the eight arms flopped over her elbows, and she stood there in her ruined linen with a Haqqani octopus filling her chest and looked down at its stupid little tie.
“I didn’t ask for this,” she said.
Her voice cracked in the middle of it.
She turned around and walked a few steps out toward the rail and stood with her back to us, holding it, and Alice looked up at me with her eyes shining and mouthed she LOVES it, and grabbed my wrist, and shook it, and let go.
The parking tower was at the end of the strip, ten levels of stacked lots with the car up on the roof, and the Circle Line station sat at the base, down a wide flight of stairs under the lights.
We stopped where they split.
“So we’re doing the cinema,” Alice said. “The thing. With your guy. We’re doing it, and I’m going to fix him.”
I closed my eyes. “Alice. You’re not going to fix him.”
“I’m going to fix him,” she said, with an octopus arm in her fist, because she had taken hold of one of them and Ceci had let her.
Ceci gave me a small nod over the top of it. “Thank you for the evening.” The corner of her mouth moved. “And for the polyester.”
They went up. The lift ran up the outside of the tower, all glass, and it carried the two of them and their three men and one enormous blue octopus. The one who’d stood in the surf had his trousers still dark to the knee. The one who’d held the hat was holding the hat.
Alice waved at me through the glass with an octopus arm until the roof took them.
I went down the stairs to the platform, and the salt came down with me, and there was a shell in my pocket next to a crushed strawberry wrapper.
[Coast Circle Line — Barani Beach][Paid: ¢2]
“This counts like relaxing, right?” I asked nobody and grinned.