Where Futures End (17 page)

But he hadn't done it. Especially once his mother, and then he, had become dependent on resin to stay alive. And then, one day . . .

He'd come home to find black-oil blood and twisted sheets. Her chalk-white arms reaching for nothing. Silence and death so thick in the air that he couldn't breathe.

He shook away the memory, jostled the boy next to him a little too hard. A spill of long, golden brown hair slipped free from the hood. Not a boy after all. Reef couldn't see her face, but it didn't matter because his gaze was locked on that long fall of hair, glinting a dozen different colors in the morning light. He reached to touch it, though he felt the same as when he had reached for the Banishment Spell in its ephemeral bubble—that it was impossible, that she would only disappear . . .

She turned sharply. “Not for sale,” she said, as if he couldn't tell the difference between a prostitute and someone with regular access to a shower and no taste for a drug that would forever alter her body chemistry. She took in the sight of his goggles perched on his head, the rings around his eyes, the stain of the drug on his shirt where flakes of resin had dropped and left green-gray spots. “Couldn't pay me enough to be with a filthy raccoon like you anyway.”

She snatched her bag of food from the counter with a trembling hand, her face white with fear of whatever violence she imagined Reef would do to her. Reef caught sight of the bracelets on her wrist, engraved with her husbands' names, and then she darted out the door.

“I think you mean
owl,
not raccoon,” Olly said after her. “And if you wait for the afternoon rainstorm, we'll be cleaner than whatever's stuck up
your
ass.”

Reef tried to laugh but his throat seemed to have swollen nearly shut.

The owner of the diner, Maksim, came by then and set down two bowls of their usual: potato and Tabasco soup. “What trouble have you two been into today?”

“No trouble,” Olly said. “Just saving the continent from a looming digital war.” He rolled his eyes.

Maksim shook his head in disapproval. “It's always that game. You need to find a girl.”

“You going to provide the map? The one who was just in here doesn't seem eager to come back.”

“Don't need a map.” Maksim winked. “Just a little money.”

Olly stared into his bowl, but not because he was embarrassed. Reef knew he'd been with girls before, and what other girls were there besides prostitutes?

“What level you boys at now?”

Olly gave him a glum smile. He was far below Reef. “Two ninety-nine,” Reef admitted.

Maksim whistled. “No. Really? How does someone your age get so high up there?”

“Start as a little kid. Got to have something to do while your mom's with clients.”

The comment didn't throw Maksim at all. “They'll be surgically attaching those goggles to you someday. Owl Eyes is already half there.” He nodded at Olly.

“Better than having them snatched off my head like my last pair,” Olly muttered.

“When'll you hit level three hundred?” Maksim asked Reef.

A fresh surge of frustration mixed with the soup in Reef's stomach.

“He's stuck at a paywall,” Olly said. “One that requires a pretty serious amount of cash.”

“Ah.” Maksim grimaced in sympathy as he turned to help another customer.

Olly gulped the last of his soup and hopped down from his stool. “I got to go meet with a raiding party, Two Ninety-nine.” He pulled his goggles back on and looked at Reef. “Think you can delay the digital war on your own for a while?”

Reef frowned. “Do I take names first and then kick asses, or is it the other way around?”

Olly chuckled and strode out the door.

Maksim returned to the counter and said to Reef, “You seen this posting? Could help you get past your paywall.” He tapped a monitor on the wall.

Reef squinted at the screen. It was an ad for a worker husband. Posted by someone with two husbands already and looking for another income. The photo showed a young woman with the wide-set eyes and rounded chin of a doll. The ad said she was only nineteen, but Reef suspected it was a lie. Ads like these were always too promising.

“You get the money you need for level three hundred, she gets a little slice of your income.”

“Any slice is a slice too big.” But Reef's gaze wandered to the photo of the girl again. Underneath her sweet expression were hints she had lived in Seattle too long: the tilt of her mouth, the flinty black of her pupils. The way she side-eyed the camera seemed to say he could fix all of that for her.

“Photo's nice.” Maksim leaned one elbow on the counter and flashed a fatherly smile that made Reef look away. “Fairy-tale characters can't fill up the space in that empty container of yours.”

Reef nodded, mostly to put an end to the conversation. In his mind, he went back to the days when he'd come home to someone who was happy to see him, who would tousle the rain from his hair and give him tea warmed with a heat sleeve. And then he couldn't stop his thoughts from returning to the day when he'd come home to that terrible sight: black-oil blood, his mother dead.

It wasn't really true, what the stories said. About how you'll find the Other Place when you look for what is lost.

He answered the ad.

He used the rest of the money from the government bounty to buy a new shirt and pay for a shower. He wished he had enough to buy a new jacket too, considering how cold it was despite the sunshine. It was one of those rare days when Mount Rainier was visible, a purple smudge on the horizon, getting ready to shrug off another layer of rock in the winter rains like a creature shedding its skin. The rivers would get choked, Puget Sound would flood.
Everyone would grumble:
Too much water in winter, not enough in summer.
The government would respond by reminding people that everything was slowly getting better now that the Other Place was eating our excess solar energy. Or anyway, that everything was at least not getting worse.

Outside the deli where Reef was supposed to wait, a water nymph lounged in a tiled fountain. She winked at him and flashed a gold-green fishtail. He ignored her. Nymphs parsed out rare potion ingredients, but only in exchange for actual human hair. Shaving his head probably wouldn't make the best first impression on a potential wife.

Reef rubbed his wrist, imagined a bracelet there engraved with someone's name, a
wife's
name. He kept scanning the crowd in front of the deli, searching for the face from the ad and trying to do it without drawing attention to himself. Several men eyed his goggles in a calculating way.

“What I am doing here?” he muttered to himself. He'd never spent much time thinking about how he might look to girls, and that was suddenly the only thing that mattered. He thought his hair was nice enough: dark and kind of longish around his ears. And even though he was too skinny, he was on the tall side and his skin stayed brown all through the winter instead of going ghost-pale like a lot of other Seattle natives. But his grubby pants were ripped at both knees, his shoes held together by duct tape. He was careful to brush his teeth every day to ward off the yellow tinge the drug lent them, but he spent all of his time outdoors and knew he must look weathered.

The nymph was still winking at him. At least he impressed
someone
.

A muffled voice came from under the hood of a huge raincoat. “Are you Reef?”

It was her. Reef could just make out the rounded chin. She pulled back her hood enough to show wide aquamarine eyes and a spray of dark curls. The rest of her slight frame she kept wrapped inside the overlarge coat. She hadn't been lying about her age.

“I'm Reef,” he answered, tugging his goggles down to hang around his neck.

She looked him over, stony-faced. “Are you high?”

“No.” It wasn't really a lie. He woke up every morning craving the drug and held off as long as possible before giving in. He barely registered its effects anymore, never felt the floating euphoria he had once experienced when taking it.

“Planning on stabbing me?” she asked, her gaze level. She was at least a foot shorter than he was, the shape of her shoulders completely lost inside her huge sleeves.

“I don't think an imaginary elf sword would do you much harm.”

She scanned his frame, her gaze stopping on the bulge created by the real knife strapped to his ankle.

“I don't use that on people half my size,” Reef said.

She frowned, maybe not believing him. “What's that scar along your cheekbone?”

“From a fight.” Reef shuffled his feet, forced out the admission: “And made with my own knife, if you have to know.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “At least you got it back.” She glanced through the glass front of the deli, where the owner was trying to oust a band of street youths. “I already called the cops, just in case you
were
planning on stabbing me.”

Reef whipped his head around, searching for any sign of them. They didn't much like grubby street gamers.

“So we'd better get out of here.” She turned and headed down the side street.

Reef blinked at her back for a moment and then hurried after her. She led him to an apartment building with a chipped colonial façade. Reef reached reflexively for his goggles, wondering what sight Alt's creators had designed to overlay the building. But the
clunk
of a bolt sliding aside jolted him back to the real world, where the girl was passing through a door that led to a flight of stairs.

She's taking me to her apartment??
Panic flared in his belly. He'd been so busy worrying she'd reject him on sight, he'd had no time to consider what he'd have to do if she accepted him. He'd never been with a girl before. He figured things pretty much worked themselves out once everyone took off their clothes, but what if he was wrong?

An agonizing minute later, he was standing in the front room of a cramped apartment that nevertheless made his container seem like a glorified closet. The girl put several feet and a couch between them and watched his every move. “Sit there,” she said, pointing at a table shoved into the corner of the kitchen space. Reef sat. The new angle gave him a view of the bedroom, where a haggard old man lay dozing in the bed.

The girl followed Reef's gaze. Her face tightened. “That's Croy,” she said in a soft voice. The man looked to be forty or fifty, with deep lines etched into his forehead and around his mouth. His head rocked back and forth in delirium. Gauging Reef's distaste, the girl added, “He brought me to the overlap when I was fourteen. My parents had sold me to a matchmaker, and he rescued me.”

Reef squirmed in his chair. “I didn't think . . .”

“He doesn't hear us.” The girl closed the bedroom door. “It's the drug that did that to him. Once you start, it's a slow death with it and a quick death without it.”

Reef fingered the tin in his jacket pocket, his mouth dry. He'd never let himself get up to such a high dose. He wondered how old the man really was. Thirty? Thirty-five?

The girl took off her coat and laid it down. Reef tried to keep his gaze from roving all over her. He pushed back his jacket sleeves and tried to guess where the other husband was.
Home any minute to show me out at knifepoint.

The girl came and sat across from him, still keeping a wary distance. “I'm Cadence,” she said.

“It didn't say in the ad.” He'd been wondering.

She shrugged. “Guess that part's not for sale, then.”

Reef chafed at the word
sale
. This wasn't about money. Not
just
about money—he wasn't going to marry a girl just so he could get past a paywall.

Cadence held out her palm, expecting something. “You're at two ninety-nine?”

He'd told her in his message, when he'd answered the ad. He pulled his goggles over his head and handed
them over so she could check his stats for herself.

The sheen on the goggles lent her blue eyes an underwater look, especially when the images began to shimmer on the lenses. He'd left his inventory up and he watched her eyes move over his items. It was like someone opening up his rib cage and rummaging in his chest cavity. Her hand closed around his sword, although Reef saw only her delicate fist waving through the air. He suddenly regretted the snarling wolf's head he'd had “etched” into the blade. It seemed stupid and boyish now.

“This is nice,” Cadence said. “I never had a sword like this. Don't play enough.”

“I could help you level your character.” Footsteps in the hallway claimed Reef's attention for a moment. He prickled at the thought of husband number two with a knife, a gun. The footsteps went on past the door, but he couldn't take his eyes off it.

“I really only play to use the chat function,” Cadence said. “Cheapest way to talk to someone out of the province.”

“You still talk to your family?”
After they sold you to a matchmaker?
Reef guessed that's who she meant.

“My—sister,” Cadence said haltingly. “Some nice Canadian man bought
her
from the matchmaker.”

His focus went back to Cadence, the tightened corners of her mouth. She was glaring at some holographic item he couldn't see.

“And visas are expensive,” he said as the realization came to him, “which is why you put out the ad.”

She gave him a polite smile. Her fist made figure eights in the air—she had moved on to admiring his crystal dagger. “How'd you get up to two ninety-nine?”

“Play all the time.” He couldn't tell her what he'd told Maksim at the diner. “Since I was a kid.”

She went on trying out his weapons. He listened for more footsteps while taking manic inventory of her apartment: tins of coffee lined up on the speckled counter, scribbled crayon drawings papering the fridge, a sticker on the kitchen faucet that said their water came from the desalination plant. He thought he detected the faint scent of apples and he filed it away for future dreaming. He couldn't ask for one.