At least the view was interesting. The enclosed spiral staircase leading down to the arena was as plastered with advertising as everything else here, but there were still plenty of gaps I could look through to see the cliff-wall of moving buildings we were walking past. They were really moving, too, their constant grinding causing the metal staircase to vibrate like a bandsaw under my boots.
“Why do they move so much?” my father asked, sticking his smoke head through the grate to get a better look at the buildings whirling by.
“This is the DFZ’s staging area,” I explained authoritatively. “The place where she stashes all the buildings that are due to move into or out of the wider city, but which aren’t quite ready for final placement yet. It’s a place of constant instability and change, but she still wants people to live here, so she doesn’t charge rent. Hence the name ‘Rentfree.’”
“I knew that much,” Yong said, which was a shock. I’d thought my father had steadfastly avoided learning anything about the DFZ. “I meant, why do they move all the time?” He pointed through the wire mesh at the wall buildings that had been shifting constantly since we got here. “See? If it was really just staging, you’d expect the buildings to move off to their final locations, but they don’t. They just spin in circles, like teeth in a giant gear. They’re not going anywhere.” He scowled. “It makes no sense. Even for the spirit of a city, moving something as huge and immobile as a building has to be prohibitively difficult, so why is she doing it? What’s the point?”
I didn’t know. The staging area thing was just what I’d always heard. Now that my dad mentioned it, all that movement did seem pretty wasteful, not to mention obnoxious. I couldn’t imagine living in a building that never stood still. Apparently I was in the minority, though, because every window that went by us had something inside. Sometimes it was a family eating dinner, sometimes it was a bunch of squatters passed out on cardboard boxes, sometimes it was a nest of wire bats chewing on electrical cables, but there was always something.
Clearly, the lure of free rent was stronger than the inconvenience of living in a place that spun like a top. Hell, for a lot of people, having an eternally shifting address was probably a bonus. If you were looking to disappear, sleeping in a room that was never in the same place twice definitely gave you a leg up, which might have been why she did it. The DFZ did prize herself as being a place where anyone could start over, after all.
That was the sort of thought that usually prompted a response from my god. When I turned my attention her direction, though, the place where the god spoke in my head was quiet. So much so that I was starting to worry she wasn’t there.
“Is something wrong?” my father asked. “It’s not like you to be quiet.”
“I’m fine,” I said, pushing up my goggles to rub my suspiciously empty temples. “Just nervous.”
There was certainly plenty to be nervous about. After what had to be a hundred spirals, we were finally nearing the bottom of the stairs, stepping out of the enclosed mesh tunnel into a huge, brightly lit, hawker-filled ticketing yard.
The chaos down here was even thicker than it had been at the entrance. We were standing at the very bottom of the Rentfree chasm, which was much bigger than it had looked from the bridge. Beside us, the Gameskeeper’s Arena rose like the humped back of a giant sleeping animal, its huge rows of doors thrown open to accommodate the ocean of people who were already swarming inside. In front of those were the ticketing booths, their snaking lines caged in by a labyrinth of street carts and food stalls. People were running everywhere, jumping from line to line as they searched desperately for the one with the shortest wait.
This seemed silly to me since surely everyone had reserved their seats through the online interface already. When I sent Sibyl to ping Will Call for the ticket Nik had said he’d save me, though, my AI informed me that there was no online interface. All arena tickets were paper and sold in person the night of.
“Physical tickets only?” I repeated in disbelief. “What is this, the Dark Ages?”
“That’s just how they do things here,” Sibyl said mournfully. “I told you this place was terrible!”
Cursing under my breath, I got up on my toes to try and find the Will Call booth over the crowd, but all I could see were heads. I was taking off my goggles to hold them up so Sibyl could find it using my cameras when my father’s voice spoke over my head.
“It’s that way.”
I glanced up in surprise to find him floating several feet off the ground. An unnecessary move since his inhuman height already put his eye level well above the mortal crowd, but one he was clearly extraordinarily pleased with.
“Show-off.”
“One makes use of what one has,” Yong replied as he floated even higher, hovering above me like a smug dragon cloud as I elbowed my way through the never-ending wall of promoters, scalpers, and T-shirt sellers to the end of the Will Call line.
By the time I made it to the actual window, I’d been pitched everything from a private lap dance to boxing lessons to a condo in the flooded ruins of what was left of Florida. The hawkers were pretty good about taking no for an answer once you said it three times, but there were so damn many of them. The
