Everybody sat down and listened to the preacher talk about heaven and God and stuff, but I tuned out. Through the mass of shoulders and umbrellas, I caught a shimmer of purple. There was something moving behind a tombstone out there in the rain.
“Grady,” someone said.
My eyes shot open, my heart racing. The air directly in front of my nose shimmered, then I was looking down the barrel of one brown eye and one blue eye.
I flinched back, then remembered it was just Sushi.
“Geez.” I pushed her off and turned onto my back, scrubbing my hands down my face. “What the heck is my deal lately?”
“Deal?” Sushi echoed.
“Nothing, I’m just being stupid,” I said.
According to my HUD, it was early morning. I could’ve slept another few hours—as far as I knew, there wasn’t a set time yet for my fight with that boot-stealing Ylef—but I didn’t want to fall back asleep and chance having another crazy dream.
I got dressed and took my dirty clothes downstairs. Not many people were up and about yet, just a couple janitorial staff and some food stall workers. Most of the stores in the market court still had metal grills rolled down over their windows.
I found the laundry room Biggerstaff had shown us. It took me a minute to figure out the combo washer-dryer, but once I’d dropped the credit, it pretty much took care of itself. I stuck around anyway. If yesterday had taught me anything, it was that I was dealing with a bunch of criminals whose first thought when they saw something unguarded wasn’t, “That’s not mine,” it was, “Do I want that?”
While the clothes were washing, Sushi swam around the laundry room, chasing down flies and nosing crickets out of the corners. I messed around on my Winchester, searching the hyperweb for info about whether a change in climate—like going from super-arid Ghost Town to super-wet Bogland—could give you weird dreams. Just like with the internet back on Earth, the hyperweb had a bunch of people who said climate totally did affect your dreams and a bunch of people who said absolutely not and everything in between.
By the time the washer-dryer was finished, more of the stores out in the market court were open. I headed down to the Pawning Post, sold the loot from the night before for less than I would’ve liked, then went straight to the fountain court and picked up a bunch of hot biscuits fresh out of the oven. They would’ve been great with some butter and sorghum, but the slug dude running the stall acted like he’d never heard of either. When I asked him what the biscuits were made with, he couldn’t figure out what a biscuit was. Figuring I was being trolled, I dropped it and headed off to the boot store.
“Back again?” the lady behind the counter asked, looking up from some leather she was cutting.
“Yeah.” I checked my account, even though I already knew I only had forty-six credits. “You guys don’t have a clearance section, do you?”
She pointed me toward the back corner and a rack that said As-Is. The boots there were all broken in and faded. Some of them smelled like the bodies Kest used to scavenge in the Shut-Ins. Some had dark splashes of dried blood staining the leather. It took some time to find a pair I could afford that were also close to my size and didn’t look like something Porter Wagoner had worn to a massacre at the Grand Ol’ Opry. In the end, what I came up with was something close to work boots, with the leather wearing out over the shiny steel toes and a chunk of metal visible on the right sole where a hidden switchblade had broken off. They were a half-size too big for me, but I figured if I wore an extra pair of socks and laced them extra tight, they’d work.
I left the boot store one pair of work boots heavier and twenty-one credits lighter.
Across the hall, a wiry redhead with a cauliflower ear caught my eye. Warcry was leaning on the counter of a place marked Interplanetary Mail. The huge snapping-turtle alien behind the counter handed him a box, and Warcry dropped the silk fan from the train into it and sealed it up.
I headed over.
“Ya want a message embedded wit’ it?” the turtle asked him.
Warcry’s eyes shot over to me, then he glared down at the box. “Nah, leave it blank.”
The turtle leaned in a little and lowered his voice like I wouldn’t be able to hear. “Fer only half a credit per character, I kin scrawl it fer ya.”
“I’m literate, ya slug-egged moron,” Warcry snapped. “The receiver ain’t. But she probably won’t get this anyway, so there ain’t no bleedin’ point to a message, is there? Just send it already, yeah?”
He shoved the box at the turtle and stalked off.
I debated for about half a second about whether it’d be smarter to not poke the bear while it was mad, then figured I might as well; Warcry was always mad.
“Who was the fan for?” I asked when I caught up with him.
“Your ma asked me for something nice,” he sneered.
Pretty much the level of civility I’d expected. I let the fan thing go.
“Do you know when your first fight is?” I asked him.
“Put me name in when I came down this morning. Scheduling said I oughta have an opponent in a couple hours. Place’s better organized than some IFC-sanctioned tourneys I been to. When do you and the Nameless face off?”
I pulled up the Heartchamber’s roster page on the cracked screen of my Winchester. A little jolt of nerves hit me when I saw the schedule.
“It’s one of the first fights of the day,” I said.
Warcry grunted. “Better come with me to the distiller and get your healing elixir, then, hadn’t ya?”
“Yeah, I
