“Okay, so what’s Q3 supposed to be?”
“The marketplace.” Rhynehart nodded toward the third row they passed. A female orc in a tan leather skirt carried a basket of something that looked like purple grapefruits and roared with laughter. “Every Q3 on every compound that I know of has a marketplace.”
“You ever walk down one of those rows and check out the merchandise?” Cheyenne grinned at the thought of Rhynehart inspecting the table of finely woven rugs in bright colors spilling out of one of the shop’s front porches beneath the striped yellow and purple awning.
“Why the hell would I do that?”
“Uh, curiosity, maybe?”
“Yeah, I’m not paid to be that kinda curious.” Rhynehart shook his head and kept walking. “On every rez, the way in and out is through Q1 and the gate. Or whatever the rez council sets up in place of a gate. Some have a stone wall, some have giant elevator doors that turn on a crank. You get the picture.”
“Seen any portcullises?”
The man stopped and gave her a weird look.
Cheyenne fought hard not to laugh. “Apparently not.”
“While all the quarters look the same, and they’re all powered by those weird portal tower things, there’s one way on and off the rez. Don’t ask me what happens if we hop out of this magical bubble back toward the Jeep. I’m not stupid enough to find out, so I can’t tell you.”
The drow halfling glanced at Rhynehart’s black Jeep, which was parked precisely where they’d left it at the end of the dirt frontage road, and kept walking beside him.
“Once the Accord was formed and agreed upon, the major changes to the reservations happened in Q1 and Q2. Some people think the magicals over here before the Accord had already set up something like what we’ve got now. Security, military, correctional facilities—all that good stuff in Q1.”
“Wait, the rez has its own jail?”
“More like a prison. Medium security. But yeah. Then Q2 has everything you saw here, pretty much across the board. By the time we came into the picture and got our hands on the first two rez quarters, they were a mess. I don’t know if the magicals here had given up trying to update their assimilation protocol or what, but we had our work cut out for us.”
“You’re talking about the FRoE?”
“And the rookie puts all the pieces together.” Rhynehart scoffed. “Didn’t take you as long as I thought it would.”
Cheyenne stuck her hands in the back pockets of her tight black jeans, wishing she didn’t have that stupid burner flip phone in one. “You need to work on your compliments.”
“That wasn’t a compliment, but whatever makes you feel good.” The man jerked a thumb toward the last two rows of colorful marketplace buildings as they reached the end of the line on the west side of Q3. “As far as I know, Q3 and Q4 haven’t changed much since they were set up. We got the marketplace here, yeah? So take a guess, rookie. What are we gonna find on the other side of this magical wall?”
Rhynehart didn’t stop to wait for her answer. He strode to the edge of the tree line and disappeared.
Cheyenne stopped and gave herself a moment to take a closer look at the marketplace. Sure, some of the magicals here wore jeans and cotton sweatshirts and dresses. Most of them, though, looked like they’d come from somewhere else—which they had. Long skirts in bright patterns, corded robes on some of the males, feathers and beads, and larger pieces of jewelry that people on this side of the Border wore in overly eccentric fashion shows.
They look happy. I guess that’s why they came here in the first place.
A round of raucous laughter rose from a group of two orcs, a troll, and a short, squat goblin with a bright-red top hat almost half his height. One of the orcs smashed a tankard of what smelled like beer and honey—the scent traveled on the breeze to the half-drow’s heightened senses—against the goblin’s smaller mug and clapped the shorter magical on the back.
Yeah, that looks happy to me. Definitely not how I’ve seen orcs and goblins before.
Cheyenne walked toward the tree line, still watching the magicals gathered around in this colorful marketplace on the edge of a cliff in the middle of nowhere, Maryland. A female troll in a patterned dress of purple and red with two long, dark-purple braids wrapped in turquoise bindings hanging down her back lifted a shiny copper bowl toward the half-drow and nodded. The small smile on her violet lips made Cheyenne’s stomach flip.
She raised a hand toward the troll in a brief greeting, then moved forward through the next magical wall and into Q4…right back where they’d started on the south end of a different quarter. There was the tower ahead on her right again, the frontage road, the black Jeep ahead on her left.
Several feet away, a scowling Rhynehart waited with his arms folded. “Find anything interesting back there?”
“I was looking—”
“Don’t make me wait for you like that again. Got it?”
Cheyenne narrowed her eyes at him. “What? For thirty stupid seconds?”
“You’re not here to check things out, rookie. You’re not here to make friends or fraternize with the locals. You’re not here to do anything but what I tell you. We’re not gonna have a problem with that, are we?”
“I wasn’t trying to—”
“Shut up and keep walking.” Rhynehart spun on his heel and stomped off across the ground, which was now covered in a lush, healthy layer of green grass.
“Hey! You were the one who disappeared after asking me a question, jerk. Do you know how rude that is?”
“It’s not my job to be polite, halfling.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not my job to take shit from you. None of this is my job. You people kidnapped me—”
“Yeah, that’s right.” Rhynehart whirled toward her and stuck a finger in her face.
