My father scowled and ripped into the flimsy plastic bags, pulling out a black long-sleeved T-shirt with a wobbly hem, dark-washed distressed pants that were supposed to be jeans but contained no actual denim, and a pair of black plastic flip-flops.
“What is this?” he asked, holding up the shirt, which was so thin I could see his face through it.
“The best I could get,” I said with a shrug. “I didn’t exactly have the time or cash to run to a department store.”
“How can they legally call these clothes? These pants already have holes in them!”
“They’re fashionable holes.”
The look on his face told me exactly what he thought of that, and I rolled my eyes. “Just put them on, Dad.”
He did so with great reluctance, pulling the shirt over his head gently so as not to rip the tissue-thin fabric. Turning my back to give him some privacy, I dug my phone out of the pocket of my own sturdy work jeans to find us some food.
“Are we getting back on the internet?” Sibyl asked excitedly when I reinserted my earbud.
“No.”
“Oh come on!”
“We can’t take the risk.”
“But—”
“I know it’s rough,” I said sternly. “But until my dad is strong enough not to keel over the moment another dragon looks his way, we stay in ‘run silent, run deep’ mode. End of discussion.”
“Fine,” my AI groaned. “But how am I supposed to search for a restaurant if you won’t let me go online?”
She clearly thought she had me with that one, but I just grinned. “We’ll use what’s already in your memory cache. That thing’s always taking up like 99.9% of your available space. Let’s put it to work for once.”
“But I already dumped most of my cache for precisely that reason! I needed the space for backups since you won’t let me connect to the cloud, and all that info was out-of-date anyway. Everything is! It’s been so long since I checked in with a location server, my maps would be woefully inadequate even for a city that doesn’t move every day. In the DFZ, they’re totally useless!”
“I don’t need actual directions,” I reminded her. “Only the pictures. Just bring up whatever you’ve got left from my ‘Want to Eat’ list, and I’ll take care of the rest.”
With much wailing and gnashing of digital teeth, Sibyl dug down deep to find the long list of restaurants I’d marked to check out when I got the chance. As my AI had warned me, most of the listings were just broken links, but a few had survived in the cache with their pictures intact, and after a bit of scrolling, I found exactly what I needed.
“Perfect,” I said, zooming in on the street-view picture to get the details. When I felt like I had a good mental image of where I was going, I called over my shoulder to my dad, “Are you decent?”
“That’s open to debate,” came my father’s grumpy reply. “I’m no longer naked, but do the people here really go out in public like this?”
I actually thought he looked quite fashionable. When I turned around, my dad was dressed in the outfit I’d bought him, except unlike everyone else who had to make do with emergency clothes from a vending machine, he made them look good.
His current gauntness actually went perfectly with the all-black ensemble. His bony shoulders made the thin fabric of his T-shirt look delicate rather than cheap, and his jeans were as skinny as they got. Combine that with his waist-length, perfectly straight black hair, and he looked like a K-pop star going through a goth phase. He also looked much younger, which was weird. My dad normally dressed like a bank manager in custom-tailored suits that ran the color gamut from dark gray to navy. I was the one who’d picked his outfit, but actually seeing him in streetwear was so bizarre, I did a legit double take.
“Wow,” I said, looking him up and down. “I don’t believe it. You’re almost hip!”
“People have hips,” Yong informed me. “If you’re going to speak English, do so properly.”
“Annnnnd it’s gone,” I said, shaking my head as I started toward the front door. “Come on. Let’s get you fed before you blow away.”
He followed me slowly, which was disconcerting. He might look like a young twenty-something, but he moved like an old, arthritic man.
“Are you going to make it?”
“I’ll be fine,” my dad said stubbornly, joining me at the door at last.
“You don’t have to go far.”
“I said I’ll be fine,” my father growled, his eyes—which were still terrifyingly dull, nothing like their usual bright mix of blue, green, and gold—narrowing with insulted pride. “Just take us to wherever we’re going.”
I turned back to the door with a sigh, checking the saved photo on my phone one last time. When I felt absolutely certain I knew where I was going, I grabbed the knob and twisted, stepping through my apartment door…
And into the middle of a busy sidewalk.
The transition was so abrupt, I stumbled. I’d only had a picture of the restaurant’s front, so I wasn’t entirely sure where the door would open, but this didn’t look right at all. This place was supposed to be in a working-class area near the river. Even if it had moved—always a safe assumption in this city—the DFZ was usually careful not to relocate businesses too far from their customers. I’d assumed we’d come out in the same neighborhood at least, but the sidewalk my door had opened onto was packed with obvious tourists despite the late hour. It wasn’t until I looked up to find a coral reef of flashing pink neon shining beneath the noisy darkness of a huge elevated highway that I realized the truth.
“Aw, crap.”
“Where are we?” my father demanded, scowling at the flashing lights.
My cheeks began to heat. “Loveland,” I answered with a sigh. “We’re in Loveland.”
My father arched a disapproving eyebrow, but there was nothing I could say. The tourist strip that
