Quantum wrath, p.5
Quantum Wrath, page 5
Judging by my most recent time in Laylix, these were the garments of a humble maid looking for hire. These maids had once been solidly upper-middle class here, but then they had been displaced by tech, and from what I knew, they often queued up at the eastern Grift Market looking for any sort of paid work.
“I knocked out some glittery airhead and took her clothes,” she said casually. “I figured it’s time you and I get to know each other. How about you buy me a drink?”
“How about you go fuck yourself?” I shot back.
“I’m sure you’d like that.” She smirked. “Wouldn’t you?”
I overcame the urge to shove her face-first into the steaming plate of food in front of me in favor of not causing a scene.
There was a rush of balmy air as the front door swung open, and several more glittery-skinned women swept in. They were wearing clothes that were a combination of frilly and scanty, which immediately marked them as rich girls who had strayed far out of their territory in search of a good time.
“There’s a whole line of street-lamps that are shattered out there,” one of them complained as she hobbled along. “It’s like… so confusing.”
“Sooo confusing,” an airy glitter girl agreed.
“And like, sad,” a third said with a dumb little pout.
“Sad.” The first one nodded fervently like this was somehow a super important detail to add.
Yikes. These women had gotten even more simpleminded since my last visit.
The more devious blonde woman next to me, however, chose that moment to snatch up one of the translators we’d been examining and stuff it in her ear. She followed it up with an evil smile that made her face about ten times more punchable to me at the moment.
The worker looked a mixture of overwhelmed and intrigued as she allowed the waitress to bustle over to the disgruntled glittery woman.
I shot the blonde a furious look and yanked her into the seat next to me. “Sit.”
“Only if–”
“Shut up,” I said briskly before turning to the worker. “She’ll have your trashiest cocktail and a rental on that translator.”
“Suuure thing,” the worker said with a slightly dazed look. Then she gave her head a little shake and turned to whip a drink together.
She returned with a vibrant pink drink with a wedge of fluffy foam on top and a handful of what looked like purple maraschino cherries. Then she seemed to take pity and heaped a small helping of food onto a plate and slid it over.
“It matches your hair,” the server said with a spaced-out giggle. “Pink…”
“You think?” the wannabe villain shot back in a painfully perfect imitation of the girl’s dazed tone of voice.
“Totally!” she said without catching on.
I shot the blonde woman a dark look as I handed over some cash.
“This is in exchange for you not making a scene,” I muttered in a low, no-bullshit voice.
Her pink eyes widened into an expression of unconvincing innocence as she nodded.
On my other side, Dougy was already halfway through his plate, although he was sending shifty, nervous glances around me at the blonde woman every few bites.
I tuned back into the conversation near the door as I started in on my own food.
“… I just don’t know what could’ve caused it,” the glittery rich woman said in a ruffled voice. “Like, how harsh and uncalled for. We like lights.”
“I love lights,” her airy friend sighed and slumped. “So bright and stuff.”
I ground my teeth together and decided to block out the dumb for now.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” the blonde pain in the ass asked me with unexpected shrewdness. “I bet exploding streetlights is like sneezing for you.”
I actually did a double take. “Sneezing?”
“I can tell you’re allergic to dumb bitches and glitter,” she said with a shrug. Her words were slightly muffled by the purple cherry she was sucking on.
I had a brief yet overwhelming urge to laugh before annoyance set in again.
“Eat more, talk less,” I sighed before shoveling a mountain of food into my own mouth.
“Alright, alright,” she said hastily. She swallowed the cherry, closed her eyes, and sighed. “I’m… sorry. Let’s turn over a new leaf.”
She let out a tiny giggle as she waved the little leaf on her cherry stem.
I massaged my temples and turned back to Dougy.
To my mild surprise, my friend was now being approached by a whole cloud of glittery women.
They seemed entirely willing to forgive the blonde woman’s poor, maidly presence as they clustered around him.
“He looks like a Pheretrian,” one of them murmured. “But his skin is so smooth, so pristine...”
“Like alabaster,” the worker put in again as she cleaned off a nearby table.
“Yes, totally!” One of the glittery women stroked Dougy’s cheek with her finger. “I believe he likes us, too.”
At this point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Dougy had levitated off his seat with happiness. It was almost enough to make me forget I wasn’t welcome here.
But there was no missing the scowls I was getting from the other people across the restaurant, and the blonde nuisance next to me sure as hell wasn’t doing me any favors.
And worse still, now that we weren’t talking, the lights were starting to flicker again.
“You need to get your power under control,” I said in a low voice. “You’re making the lights flicker. You’re going to get us thrown out.”
“I thought that’s what it was,” she muttered with an annoyed look at the lights. Then she shrugged. “I can’t help it. I’m too powerful.”
I resisted the urge to repeat ‘I’m too powerful’ in a high-pitched baby voice.
That’s exactly what this woman was. A fucking villainous superbaby who was, despite her small size, like a bull in a china shop.
And apparently, I was her babysitter.
At least for some portion of the next seventy-odd hours.
Son of a bitch.
“If I can do it, you can do it,” I said shortly.
She perked up slightly. “Oh yeah. Your power–”
“Isn’t up for discussion at the moment,” I said calmly.
Her eyebrows knitted together, but then she nodded reluctantly. “Alright. Well, I’m Lucyra.”
“Of course you are,” I muttered.
“But you can call me Lu,” she said.
She looked at me expectantly, but I just stared into my own drink as Dougy shoveled the last of his food into his mouth with only half-focus, and I contemplated my next move.
Getting Dougy settled in was still top priority for me in the next seventy-two hours, but for the night, I thought it was best for us to secure a place to sleep.
And I had an idea of the perfect place.
“Let’s go,” I said.
Lu drained the rest of her glass in two seconds and leaped to her feet like she was ready to run a marathon. The lights all dimmed drastically for a moment. My hand shot out to grip her arm, and they flickered back up to their previous brightness.
“Where are we going?” she asked like nothing had just happened. “And B-T-dubs, if you don’t tell me your name, then I’m going to call you Big Papi.”
I ground my teeth.
“It’s Heath,” I finally said. “As for where we’re going… Somewhere calm. And it’s going to remain that way. Because you…”
I raised my eyebrows and waited.
“Are going to behave,” she finished primly.
I nodded.
The worker gave me a cheerful wave that somehow seemed to be in slo-mo when paired with her ditsy smile as I got to my feet.
“Good meeting you, Heather-man!” she called. “Your vibe is weird, I like it!”
Lu dissolved into muffled cackling next to me, and the worker shot her a pathetically friendly smile that just proved she could not pick up on what a bitch this chick was.
I gave the glittery woman an extra-large tip for putting up with the nightmare of a woman at my side.
It took a good five minutes to extract Dougy from the glittery women, but once that was accomplished, he floated along with me like he was in a dream.
“They were all over me, Heath,” he said dizzily. “I didn’t even have to say anything. They just told me… all sorts of good stuff.”
He turned red toward the end. I thought this was partly out of bashfulness at the glittery women’s kind words, and partly because Lu was staring at him so fucking hard.
I pulled her firmly to a stop. “What’s going on?”
“Hmm?” she murmured. “Oh. I was just trying to figure out what his deal is.”
“What do you mean?” I asked with a frown.
“Why do you take care of him?” she asked. “Is he, like, valuable, or something?”
She sounded partly curious and partly like she was wondering if she could somehow use this to her advantage.
“More valuable than you,” I muttered. “Dougy’s a good guy. I’m going to get him set up somewhere before I leave.”
“Before we leave, you mean,” she said boldly.
“No, that’s definitely not what I mean,” I said with a narrow look. “But for right now, our objective is to find a nice, mellow place to sleep.”
“Well, where are we now?” she asked as she looked around at the area we were entering. “Fucking Disneyland?”
I snorted with laughter. Partly because she was right– this place did look like Disneyland. And partly because Disneyland was absolutely extinct back on Earth. She was saying it the way someone might say ‘Narnia,’ or ‘fairyland.’
And Disneyland was somewhere I had been in my youth.
Good god, this life was a fucking trip sometimes.
We were approaching an area that was full of buildings that looked like some combination of Mickey’s toontown and Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Everything was almost absurdly whimsical.
Then the tiniest wisp of sound suddenly floated through my hearing. It was quiet, but something about it put me on edge. I jerked my head around and saw Lu with her lips pursed into a whistle.
A split second later, there was an explosion of frenzied yipping and high-pitched snarling from behind all the white picket fences on the road around us. And things only got worse when the blonde pest started taunting the tiny canines with cherry pits that she had apparently pocketed from the bar.
“Come on,” I growled as I seized her by the shoulder. I propelled Dougy ahead of us while I cursed fluently under my breath.
Once we had rounded a corner, I shot Lu a dark look.
“One more stunt like that, and you’re out on your ass,” I said coldly.
She sighed deeply. “Then I guess this is a bad time to tell you…”
I took a deep breath and prayed to the gods I didn’t believe in for patience.
“Out with it,” I commanded.
Lu slowly pulled out a tiny, gleaming earpiece and held it out on her open palm. I immediately recognized it as a translator.
“I stole this from one of the glittery bitches in the street,” she admitted. “I think she was from out of town.”
“And you took it because…?” I asked with exaggerated patience.
“Because I thought it would be funny watching her prance around without knowing what was going on,” she said with a poorly-stifled giggle. “And I was right. She’s ten times as dumb now, which I didn’t think was possible, but… Oh, and I took her earrings, too.”
She gestured at the gleaming pink diamonds that now dripped from her earlobes.
I had a momentary urge to rip them out of her ears. I settled for flinging the earpiece back at her, and she caught it.
“No more,” I said coldly.
She made a big show of going completely mute as we came up outside a gate of pure rhodium with something a little like a padlock enclosing it.
I slipped an engraved rhodium plate from my bag and inserted it carefully into the slot where a keyhole would be.
There was a beep, a soft click, and then the latch opened.
“What the hell is that?” Lu asked as she followed me inside. Her voice was a harsh stage-whisper, like my patience might shatter if she spoke too loudly.
I ushered Dougy in and pocketed the rhodium plate.
“It’s to keep the poor people out,” I said with a pained sigh.
“You’re shitting me,” she scoffed with a complete return to her louder self. “It didn’t even take your… money, or whatever that was.”
“The rich people only want other rich people to get in here,” I said. “But they don’t want to take their money.”
“Why the fuck not?” she asked in a baffled voice.
“Because they’re elitists,” I said with a shrug.
There had been two types of elitists in Pheretri when I had been here last. One that dabbled in tech, and one that shunned it just like the original, rural inhabitants did.
Of course, the latter group were either old money or did a lot of shady side business with the technocrats– it was the only way to get rich here, after all– but they kept that private.
I led my two companions to a gleaming, glass-sided channel with a river that wound through it. It arched out into a sparkling bay here, and there were all sorts of rentable electric boats lining the docks. True to character for Laylix, most of them were shaped like leaves.
“In you go,” I said to Dougy, and I ushered him into a modest, leaf-shaped boat.
I climbed in next.
“This is absurd,” Lu breathed as she clambered in after me. She stared around at the boat and tapped the vibrant green metal with an almost disgusted look. “What are these people on?”
“They cling to nature,” I said. “It feels familiar. And safe, probably.”
“Safe,” she repeated in a mutter. At first she sounded bitter, but then she gestured at the buzzing electric boat with a snicker. “Yes, this electric, cartoon leaf boat feels veeerry safe. Fucking idiots.”
“Safe enough.” I tapped a few buttons on the touchscreen to get us going. “It doesn’t have a very difficult job to do.”
We wound through rows of absurdly cutesy houses, villas, and shops. Lu stared at it all like we were on fucking Mars.
But I guessed seeing something like this was genuinely unthinkable to someone who had only lived on Earth in the last century. If I were trying to be objective, it really was a nice place.
Just a little too nice for me. It was more the sort of place I’d stay if I wanted to slowly go insane and become a nudist or something.
Soon we arrived outside a big villa with another pure rhodium gate.
Before we got out of the boat, I tapped a few buttons and popped an unengraved rhodium plate into the machine.
The slot swallowed it up, and a gleaming rhodium key fell out in its place. Lu snorted with laughter.
“Asinine,” she muttered.
“Pretty much,” I murmured.
As I approached the gate, she followed a little more slowly than before, and she looked at the villa ahead with something like disbelief.
“Wait,” she said with her pink eyes wide. “Is this seriously where we’re staying?”
The place seemed to be part building and part tree– but one of the biggest trees I had ever seen. It was wide enough that several cars could’ve been parked inside. Its roots rose up out of the ground like a hill, and a small waterfall rushed between them. Stepping stones were set into the roots that led up to a small, grassy doorstep. In the front, the tree’s gnarled white trunk parted to reveal an arched ebony doorway and then came together again. Above that, a little villa sprouted out of the tree like it had grown there. Somehow it looked a combination of whimsical, gothic, medieval, and oddly futuristic.
“Yup.” I slid the key into the slender lock, and it opened with a soft click.
“Ohhh, so you’re rich rich,” she snickered.
“No, I’m prepared,” I corrected.
“Rich,” she sighed lightly and pushed past me into the room like a snotty princess.
I fought the urge to trip her ass and send her face first onto the floor.
Inside, the place was a landscape of sleek surfaces and electronics that had been shaped to fit the naturey theme of this place. A self-rocking hammock was draped over the corner of the room near a backlit waterfall. The floating staircase was made up of smooth river stones like the ones outside, and a little placard informed me that every step placed on them would generate energy to help power the house.
The whole surface of the counter was a glass terrarium with a whole tiny ecosystem inside. Touchscreen buttons allowed the house’s occupant to play god by forming new waterfalls, releasing capsules full of tiny, fast-growing seeds, or turning on a miniature sun that made all the flowers open their petals.
“Shrivelllll,” Lu whispered as she cranked the sun dial up to its full extent. She did the same with the wind, and a small giggle escaped her as several blossoms were whipped from their stems.
“Cut it the fuck out,” I commanded.
“Why?” She glared like a petulant teenager. “They look better like this.”
“Hmm… Fair point.” I smirked and crossed my arms. “Why don’t you shove your head under all that shit? Fry that blinding frizz you’ve got going on. It’d look better like that. Or better yet, I’ll do it for you.”
Her face darkened, but she just sulked silently as she returned the dials to their former places.
“Soooo,” Dougy said. He sounded both nervous and excited. “Heath… Now that we’ve got a moment, I have some questions.”
I led him to the fireplace and sat down. “Go ahead.”
Dougy took a deep breath and fidgeted for a few seconds, like he wasn’t sure how to say whatever was on his mind.
“Am I immortal now?” he finally blurted.
“Ah.” I traced my fingers over the fabric of the armchair absently as I studied his face. “Dougy, I don’t think so.”
His face fell. “Why not?”
“Wait,” Lu cut in. She plopped down on the arm of my chair and crossed her legs as she stared at me with bulging eyes. “You’re immortal?”
