“This is good,” Seth said to herself. Herself in the mirror looked worried. She kept folding her arms over her chest.
“This is good,” she repeated, annoyance in her voice. Herself in the mirror frowned. She made herself unfold her arms. She had put creases in the front of her own shirt with her own stupid arms.
Two light knocks sounded against her door, and she turned to see Decon leaning on the outside of the frame. “Polyester doesn’t burn well,” he said, smiling, like some kind of God-damned rom-com second-choice hero.
She turned swiftly to the mirror to see what was giving her away, but saw no smoke or steam or wavy ripples in the air. Maybe he was just getting good at telling.
“You can come in,” she said. “You’re not a vampire, and it’s not like this is a private suite.”
She could see his grin in the mirror, and with the little distance the reflection gave her she recognized the shyness under it. Taking a breath, she tried to let some of her tenseness out, shaking her hands.
It really wasn’t; it was only nominally ‘her room’ though she found herself bringing more and more of her stuff over and getting more and more comfortable just leaving it. Technically, they had rooms for nearly a dozen people in the ‘living quarters’, all semi-furnished, so taking one as ‘hers’ was both totally reasonable, at this stage, and also didn’t make it really hers. Like, not privately, long-term hers.
“You know, when you sold me on this you were, like, hey, this’ll be, like, the most fun!” He said.
When her eyes narrowed in the mirror at his ‘impression,’ he grinned wider and put up jazz hands – she decided to let him live.
“This was your idea, and you really seem like you don’t want to go,” he said. He came two steps into the room, but now he had nothing to lean on, so he just looked kind of awkward.
“Are you sure that’s not just you?” she asked, turning with her best false confident grin. She picked up her earrings off the edge of the bed, and put them on as she turned back around, so they would sway and glitter.
“Like, I’m one-hundred-percent sure it’s me, dude, but that doesn’t mean it’s not you, too. This idea is cracked.”
Adjusting an earring, she turned back to him skeptically. “You talk really weird, you know that? Who’s a ‘dude’? You’re not even from California, you’re from, like, the very opposite of California…”
“We’re all dudes,” he said gravely, putting on that perfect serious preacher impression he could do. Then he cracked a grin, and she wondered if he knew how… effective that was for him. “I don’t know, we picked up a lot of people back home. I probably got it from them. But let’s be honest, here, when you’re not trying real hard, you start to sound a little homey, too…”
A glare seemed to settle him, though with a smile rather than any indication he was cowed. That wasn’t helping her nerves. The last thing they needed was to sound like outsiders, too.
She was working herself up – not for no good reason, but still. She let out a sigh, shaking out her hands. “I mean, I do want to do this – it could be fun – but… you realize this is dangerous?”
“You said it would be fun,” he said, perfectly nonchalantly, playing with the frayed edge of his coat.
“Yeah,” she said, slapping his hand away from it. “You’re going to make it worse. It will be. It should be.”
She let out another frustrated sigh and looked down at her clothes – her nice clothes, her going-out clothes – like, real person clothes, clothes her mother didn’t know she owned, that she hadn’t worn for weeks.
“We should both get out of here.”
“I just got here,” he protested, a statement all the more true for how rarely it was true.
“Yes, you actually went home for once, but I mean…” she picked up her jacket from the bed, throwing it on, hating the heat before she could get herself calibrated to it. “…I mean, I feel like we need to get out of here. Out of the files, and the… work and everything. We need to…”
“What?” he asked. “Stop living in a literal luxury tower and meet the people?”
“Shut up, but yes.” She tugged his arm around to direct him out the door, then followed.
“I like the luxury tower,” he said. “I never had a luxury tower before.”
“It’s not about that,” she said, as they entered the den. “It’s about recruiting.”
“You should have a guard,” Wes said, scaring the ever-loving bejesus out of both of them.
He just happened to be in the kitchen. Neither of them were quite sure why he spent so much time in the kitchen, as it didn’t seem like food was being eaten at an unusual pace. Nothing was ever out of place. As far as they could tell, he just… hung out there. Not interacting with things. Like an incredibly awkward ghost.
Decon said it was probably food insecurity, just of an unusual kind. It didn’t seem like he necessarily wanted the food, but maybe he did want to be nearby, as if to watch it. He also said it wasn’t the weirdest thing he’d seen, and that he was expecting it might be weirder, given the circumstances. Decon was kind, not necessarily comforting.
“I think we’re guard enough for ourselves, and anyway, it’s not that bad,” Seth said, after a few deep breaths. “I used to go back home.”
It wasn’t any good to tell Wes not to worry – she wasn’t sure he worried exactly – he expanded his hypervigilance to include them, or something. But what they really didn’t need was a socially awkward and hair-trigger violent non-Islander bodyguard. Having gone back home, she knew it would be fight from the moment they walked in, and Wes would not only make it worse, but be seriously outgunned. Sure, the vast majority of the people there wouldn’t be able to do much more than throw hands and glow at them, but the ones that could throw hands absolutely would, and be good at it, you had to look out for the ones that could do more. Like her.
Wes hadn’t responded, which they were generally coming to understand meant he thought they were utterly wrong. Or that he was thinking about something else.
“It’s just a concert, right?” Decon asked into the gaping hole of silence. “I thought I was having fun by getting out and going to a concert.”
“For recruiting purposes,” Seth said. “We have to have an excuse in case it gets back to the board!” she insisted to Decon’s dubious expression. Now both Wes and Decon were silently looking at her.
She threw her arms out, jazz hands: “We’re going to have fun!”
When Seth shared their bus route on the way to the stop, Decon immediately asked, “Will the bus pick us up there?”
“Yeah,” she said, with far more confidence than it deserved. The bus should. Her internet research had told her it would. Probably. Just not with any rapidity. Unless there was a service blackout. Or... like it didn’t want to?
But that seemed to be the extent of his doubts – the doubts he would express anyway – and now she swayed in her seat as the bus’ juttering wheels and wheezing frame rolled them out to the edge of the warehouse district. It wasn’t the train back home – it was a fucking bus, in every way inferior – but still, something about the shitty corpse lighting that winked out at every stop when the door opened was helping her throw off the sense of confinement she always felt at the Tower. Even just slumping there, feeling every edge of the molded plastic of the seat because the cushion had long since met its God, putting on her public transit ‘fuck you’ face and, since it wasn’t crowded, deliberately physically expanding to the edges of her personal space bubble, made her feel like she could finally breathe.
Finally breathe the awful body odor, gasoline, dried vomit, and decaying plastics air of the bus – at least until the lady with her rolling cart full of bags of vegetables packed in restaurant-quantities in strained little plastic-wrapped styrofoam plates came on. Then it smelled better.
As they approached their stop, Decon glanced over and she knew he caught her grinning. He had stood the whole time, lazily holding the handle just in front of her seat, obviously ‘with her’ but a respectful distance away. He had some instincts – she still wasn’t sure whether sometimes his niceness and naïveté was just obfuscating. Like he had to have seen some shit, right? He grew up in a big-city group home.
But she still wouldn’t have told him to take the bus by himself. She just kept feeling like he could somehow ‘get hurt’; her instincts didn’t trust his instincts.
They squealed to a stop. She and Decon were the only ones who got off. Except for the station, it was a deep, pitch black – the sort of dark-not-dark of a city too lit up to see the stars at night, but deep with shadows. Little patches of too-strong light, like panicky yelps in tense silence, just destroyed night vision.
Big square buildings with pin-prick lights directed them where to go by being the only not-derelict choices visible. There was nobody else outside – at least nobody visible.
She peered around in the dark.
“What are you looking for?”
“I mean, usually there’s at least one glowing kid to give it away.”
“Aren’t we kind of late?” Decon asked.
She tried not to roll her eyes at him, and knew she only half succeeded. “Did you ever go out at all back home?”
Decon shook his head. “Not on purpose. I’m such a homebody,” he said, with an over-cute little grin, nonetheless so clearly making fun of himself that she grinned back.
That’s why she brought him – instincts or not, he could be a charming little jerk.
“Seriously, though, I didn’t get a lot of invites, and didn’t particularly want to get shot, or arrested, or well known as somebody who didn’t get shot or arrested. It was a very layered social scene. Plus nobody wanted me around their electronics – and I didn’t want to be around anyone else’s electronics. Thank God nobody figured out I was scared of bullets and a natural at hotwiring.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way. “I guess keeping a low profile was a good idea.”
“Unlike you, little miss,” he said, giving a low whistle. “The balls on you.”
She snorted. “My mother.” She paused – to be honest. “Well, the both of us.”
“What did your mother think about this kind of excursion?” Decon said, raising his brows towards the half-open hangar door they were approaching, since now they could actually see each other’s faces again in the building light.
Seth snorted louder. “Please. If she knew, she would kill me. Kill me, sue the shit out the property holders, the organizers, the city, the city zoning board, raze the whole area and put up a memorial tree in my name with a little plaque saying ‘my daughter should have known better.’”
“Dang,” Decon said.
“Yeah,” Seth replied, but by then, they had stepped inside.
The building was enormous, and cavernous, and the noise of the band on the makeshift stage – standing barely two feet off the ground – ricocheted cacophonously off the sheet metal walls, despite a makeshift attempt at sound absorption with sheets of foam, cardboard, and general soft refuse tacked to the walls closest to the stage. Somebody, at least, had enough of a connection that they had a pretty good, though frighteningly under-supported set of lights on tall scaffolding flanking the main floor.
Like with any Islander event, however, the guests made their own light.
The crowd of dancing people was pocked through with various soft neon shades of green, purple, orange, blue, and a few who looked suspiciously pink. There wasn’t really one ‘look’ to Islander crowds – getting enough of them together for a crowd was both rare and rarely not depressing – and Seth was relieved to see that held true here, where the defining feature of the outfits wasn’t style, or color, or type so much as adaptation.
The lights and the glowing people both reflected off the winking metal of mobility aids and prosthesis; a whole outfit arranged around a decidedly ‘country’ theme had the pearl-snap buttons left open to accommodate something that looked like it might be holding the wearer’s extra lung. A good contingent wore intricate gothic outfits, stylishly complimented by braided body hair or shy opera masks, while others seemed to be at a beach of their own devising – dressed for it, and, given their expressions, maybe drugged for it, too. There were several distinct groups of activity, too – everyone dancing danced as they wished, including a tiny mosh pit, set off a bit to the side so they didn’t barrel over into the others.
Some Islanders saw their difference and embraced it, hold it close, made a philosophy of it, took it to extremes – and she loved those. She envied them, a little. There was something appealing but untouchable about them for her. She didn’t really understand.
The vast majority of the crowd, though, wore the see-me-not clothes of the city. Hoodies and jeans, jackets and plain pants – as dressed to ‘go out’ as they would ever get, because fitting in was out of reach, but dressing any more meant they would stand out, and standing out meant trouble.
New people, however, always stood out.
It was hard to totally ignore the swiveled faces, blank like sockets, that looked and lingered and then turned half-away to comment to friends. It was never a huge scene, the Islanders – a percentage of a percentage of a percentage that of that percentage could reasonably get out and about or had enough support to be able to get out.
“Wow,” Decon said, voice having melted to that smooth-as-butter tone he got sometimes, like a lion tamer persuading his charge not to bite, his hands shoved in his pockets and whole body radiating ease and comfort. “I think if we brought Boswell, he’d be dead by now.”
That was why you brought Decon, Seth thought – he got people. He liked people. Even when they were shit. He saw a crowd of hostile, insular, defensive weirdos and thought, ‘how neat’ instead of ‘oh my God they’re going to tear me apart.’
Seth’s specialty was adults. She could charm the pants off a boardroom full of stiff executives. Back home, she had to be scrappy to get in with the Islander crowd.
“Do you think there’s drinks?” she asked, glancing around, desperate to have something in her hands.
“Did you bring any money?”
A frown cut unevenly across her face. “Back home it didn’t cost money. There was a cover. BYOB, kinda.”
“Oh, dang,” Decon said, surprised at himself, “I have money!”
“Don’t freaking shout about it,” Seth hissed, body blocking him, hands coming up around him to keep him from presumably taking a wad of Tenor-level cash out of his wallet, watching several faces swivel towards them.
He just laughed – damn, she was glad she brought she brought him. “Don’t worry, girl – whoever wants my twenty can have it. Especially if they’ve got drinks.”
“Do you drink?” she asked, shocked. “Drink-drink, I mean?”
“No,” Decon said. “Do you?”
“Not really,” but she looked away from him.
“Well, we’re not going to get anywhere standing here,” he said, “drinks or no drinks. Let’s get closer and enjoy the music.”
They were still being stared at. They were going to be stared it the whole time they were here. She realized that somehow she had let herself become jumpy, when this had all been her idea.
She blew out a ferocious breath and grabbed Decon’s hand to tug him deeper into the crowd. “Yeah, let’s enjoy the music.”