Warcry leered at her. “Right, and I was born yesterday on the dark side of Qaspar-7’s moon.”
She ignored him. “Do you want to go, Hake? I know you just ate...”
“Just a piece of fruit.” That giant blueberry had hardly put a dent in my appetite, and the script tattoo had already burned through whatever calories I’d gotten from it. “I’m starving.”
She grinned. “Give me ten minutes.”
She was gone for forty-eight minutes, not ten. Rali and Warcry went back to their game, and I spent the time reading up on Proving Forge, trying to keep my mind off my growling stomach. Apparently, there were several brands of Ten-preparation elixirs on the market. Iron Body, Diamond Skin, Power Strength Build Excellence—they all primed a cultivator’s body for the next level. Proving Forge was too fancy for your standard industrial website: its page was all black with the same three directions as the bottle had printed on the label: Drink. Survive. Prevail.
Cool looking, but not real informative. I was getting a little hangry by then, so I didn’t have the patience to keep digging for info on an elixir that either I was already supposed to know about or was just too cool to tell its users anything.
I tried watching Warcry and Rali’s game for a while to see if I could figure out how it was played, but I was having a rough time concentrating with the script tattoo eating me alive.
By the time Kest came back down, I was right at the starvation breaking point. I had another one of those blueberry things in hand, tossing it back and forth and swearing I was going to eat it if she didn’t appear within the next five minutes. Her boots hit the top step just in time.
“Ready,” she said, jogging down to the ground floor.
She’d obviously taken a shower, because her long black hair was damp and hanging down around her shoulders instead of up in its usual messy buns, and she’d changed clothes. Instead of the weld-burnt skirt she always wore, she had on a tank top and a pair of skinny jeans I’d never seen her in. The ugly parasite necklace I’d given her bounced against her chest. She’d even dressed up her cinnabar arm, adding a raised lacy pattern that matched her eyes.
She came to a stop at the edge of the sunken living room and stuck her real and metal fingers in her pockets—not that there was a lot of room for anything in there, with how tight they were. Black lace faded into her cheeks.
Oh, duh. Because Warcry and I were staring at her with our jaws on the floor like total creeps. It was just that Kest looked completely different. Still cute, but also hot and older, like she wasn’t just out of our league, but out of our age range, too, like a college girl home to visit her little brother and his loser friends.
Rali glanced at his twin, then went back to the game.
“Guillotine to three,” he said.
Warcry cussed under his breath and turned back to the board.
Kest ducked her head a little and fidgeted, her eye lace shifting uncertainly.
“Do you still want to go?” she asked me.
“Heck yeah.” I tossed the giant blueberry back in the basket, then grabbed the edge of the sunken living room and hopped up instead of taking the stairs. “Let’s go.”
“Don’t keep my sister out too late, Hake,” Rali joked. “She’s got a spy operation in the morning.”
I cringed at that, but Kest slid her metal fingers through mine.
“Silencer, remember?” she said, pulling me toward the door. “The Technols can’t hear anything we’re saying or track my HUD.”
“Oh, right. Isn’t it suspicious that you’re packing around something to keep them from listening in on you?”
We headed down the steps and toward the gate.
“It would be more suspicious if I didn’t have one,” Kest said. “Every Technol has one as a basic precaution against being hacked. My senior advised me to get one as soon as possible.”
“I guess that makes sense.” If you could listen in on anyone through their HUD, you would naturally be paranoid about other people doing the same to you.
The city around the Soulchamber was a mix of super technologically advanced and super rustic. Skyscrapers in futuristic shapes towered over corrugated tin shacks with buzzing neon signs. Hovering vehicles and farm animals clogged the roadways, and the restaurants varied from too cool to have a name on their sign to little street stalls with butcher blocks next to the counter and stacks of squawking cages nearby.
We didn’t have to wander far from the Dragon Soulhome before we found a place Kest wanted to eat at. They served ramen, which I was skeptical about at first, but this wasn’t the dehydrated packaged stuff that costs fifty cents at Dollar General. This was fancy ramen, with ingredients like hardboiled eggs, veggies, strips of meat, and a ton of different sauces to pick from.
The little stall had a couple of tables set out made from those round cable spools turned on their sides, but it started to rain while we waited for our orders, so we scooted under the tin canopy and ate at the counter.
We slurped up our noodles and joked about blood type personalities.
“It’s outdated with what we know about cultivation and Spirit types now,” Kest said, “but there are some old people who still swear by it. My nona said when she was a kid, it would determine everything from who you should marry to best time for advancement to what sort of career you should have...”
“Sounds like the crazy people who believe horoscopes.” I gave her the rundown on astrology, which she thought was ridiculous.
Various kinds of aliens came and went, some of the more humanoid guys shooting me looks like I might not realize I was on a date with a girl a loser like me didn’t have any
