Billy blinks and he’s chopping vegetables, nine hours later: his rider has elected to suppress his memory of the evening. His calves and lower back ache, but there’s no sleep-grit in his eyes. Stimulants? Or a nap? He makes a note to run diagnostics.
First things, though. He tosses the carrots and broccoli in the steamer, purées them and takes his rider her dinner.
“You never ask where you’ve been,” she says, eyes bright above her white swaddling. “Doesn’t it bother you, not having free will?”
He puts the straw to her lips. “Why?” he asks. “Does it bother you?”
Lucie Corner’s back the following week, so they throw a receiveoff (or possibly a sendon; signs are unclear) to welcome her. You get traded a lot in Electric Magnajoust if you’re in it for the money.
Imani Rhodes (#17) has never been traded.
“Don’t do it,” Simon Yu tells Stephanie Long, as they lie on the roof with their feet in the window.
“I’m not,” protests Stephanie Long.
“Don’t hook up with Lucie Corner,” says Simon Yu. “She’ll wring you out, Stephanie Long. Stop coming to her parties. I mean it.”
Which shows how much Simon Yu (#0) knows about women.
“He seemed like such a nice young man,” says Mrs. Clenham as they pull another body out of the lime pit. “Quiet, polite, just kept to himself.”
“Which is why we called the police,” says Mr. Clenham.
“I’m not a freaking serial killer!” yells their struggling neighbor as the officers drag him to the car. “I hardly ever went into my back yard! I don’t even have a fence around it!”
“Have you heard the rumors that he removed his victims’ corneas?” says a titillated reporter.
“What a ghastly thing,” says Mrs. Clenham innocently. “I can’t imagine how those would taste.”
“It says here that you’re the sole member of Vampyromorphida,” says Judge Naeus, “and that your species name is infernalis, literally ‘vampire squid from hell.’ Correct?”
Vampire Squid confers with its attorney, who is also a squid (Loligo vulgaris). “Yes, Your Honor.”
“You survive at lightless depths in oxygen concentrations of 3%… you can flip inside out to appear in a frightening, spine-covered form called ‘pumpkin posture…’ I think I’ve seen enough here.” Naeus drops the folder. “I’m sorry, Vampire Squid, but you’re simply too cool to exist. Bailiff?”
Vampire Squid escapes, of course, in a cloud of bioluminescent mucus.
Radiane’s read the books about asylums, too.
Her wrist aches a little: sparring and bag work didn’t really prepare her for laying out a grown man, even one with a glass jaw. It’s cold in here. There have been no howls or rattling chains yet. She has noticed that the doors on these rooms are heavily secured, though, and the man at the entrance had no convenient ring of keys.
Georgette is shivering, but following; Iala is pale. “You do have a plan,” she murmurs, “as to what to do when we find her?”
Proserpina says nothing, just strides grimly on.
It takes about twenty people to run the world, and you only get to do it if you’ve been really, really awful.
There’s a waiting list.
“So what’d you do?” asks Barclay, peering through a porthole into the center of the Earth. Inside, ragged men shriek and stumble on the treadwheel, watched and occasionally electrocuted by cold-eyed imperators.
“Finance,” says Mathers shortly. “You?”
Barclay checks his phone again (still no service). “A little arms,” he says, “a little dope.”
“I invented the Electric Slide!” says Wellburn, which is just his little joke, he actually killed a lot of old people.
The locker room of St. Avarice Arena is cramped and fluorescent, floored with a queasy peachlike material. There’s only one room. It’s a coed sport.
It’s hard to care about mere nudity when you’re preparing for Electric Magnajoust.
Simon Yu (#0) restraps his neodymium footbrakes, worried that they might be wobbling, and also that Imani Rhodes (#17) isn’t speaking to Lucie Corner (#30).
“At least stop by her sendoff,” he says.
Imani Rhodes shakes her head. “Game tape to watch.”
“Electric Magnajoust isn’t everything,” says Simon Yu quietly.
“Yes,” says Imani Rhodes, “it is,” steps onto the launch rail, and vanishes.
“This is a sanitarium,” says the man in white, “and you don’t look deviant or retarded, and anyway if you were you’d already be inside, so piss off.”
“But I only want to visit my dear auntie,” she says, and her long dark eyes say: in return for which, all things are possible.
Sixteen is not, in this particular time and place, a young age for a girl. The orderly lets the hunger in his fingers twitch a smile from his face. “Well. Maybe. What was her name again?”
“Bend down here a moment,” says Radiane sweetly, “and I’ll tell you.”