Chương 145: Chapter 138

Cale Ellara made me promise two things before I left. That I would be polite, and that I would not, under any circumstances, do the face. I have never been sure which face she means, but I promised, because it is easier to promise Ellara things than to argue with her, and because she had spent days on my hair, my clothes, my demeanor, and my attitude. Which is unfair, because my attitude is excellent. I thought the night was going well enough.

La Falle was tasty, and the atmosphere was pleasant once you got past the people working so hard to seem important and to impress one another. It is not somewhere I would eat on a regular basis. A little too stuffy, and the portions were an insult. The food was good, but the self-aggrandizing wears on a person, and I have spent too much time already around people with an overinflated sense of their own importance. It is a real contrast to the true leaders I have known, the ones who wield actual authority.

When I think of people like Kelva, or Threnna, or even Ordin, who was still running the Hidden Valley Farm last I heard, people who simply are the power in the room, the ones who only perform at it get boring fast. So boring. And Deryn was the most boring of the lot. Despite the asshat, I found myself having a good time. She was lovely and easy to talk to, and she was intense, though not necessarily about me, which I liked. I think she is simply intense about living.

After all the pleasant unpleasantness with Deryn and his manufactured trophy, who I suspect was a concubine, though it is hard to tell, we had a genuinely nice dinner. Traded a few jokes. Even had a little wine, which I am not keen on. Whoever decided fermented grapes were a good idea was an idiot. I insisted on paying. I have plenty of money from my ghost days, and my master left me a fortune besides. At some point Siobhan is going to wonder how a boy in a scholarship coat covered a bill like that.

A problem for another day. When we were done, Siobhan took my hand and walked me out of the finest restaurant on the island like she had bought it and was thinking of having it moved. She is an interesting one. It was as though she were performing the entire time, and performing herself. A version of herself. That one did not make sense even to me. We walked hand in hand until her MMV came into view, pulled up and waiting. We got in and drove off. She gave me a smoldering look.

"You were perfect in there. Are you always this handsome?" I rolled my eyes, but I smiled. We drove a while along the roadways of Lumineth before she pulled without warning into a way station, parked, and stepped out. I followed her.

"Turn around," she said, at the car. I turned around. It seemed simpler than asking why. Behind me I heard fabric, and a zip, and the quiet of a woman doing something she wants you to know she is doing and testing whether you will look. I did not look. Not out of virtue. I have stood in rooms where looking at the wrong thing gets you killed, and the habit does not switch off because a beautiful woman is changing her dress against the side of an MMV worth more than a house.

"You can turn back around, you know." There was a laugh under it.

"That was the whole show. You missed it." I turned back around. Whatever La Falle had required of her was gone. What she wore now was built on a single principle, which was using as little material as a person legally can. It was effective. I am not made of stone, whatever my sister believes. I registered it as you register a drawn blade, with a kind of alert respect, and then set it off to the side with most things.

"Nothing?" She was watching my face, delighted and faintly affronted at once.

"I change for you into something that should count as public indecency, and I get nothing? Not even a little drool?" I looked her up and down. She did look amazing. She knew it. It was why she dressed as she did.

"You look nice," I said, with a small smile. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. She laughed, a real one, surprised out of her, and it changed her whole face. I understood for the first time that evening that I did not have the measure of this person at all. She drove.

I had assumed she would let a construct do it, as people with cars like that do, but she drove herself, fast and easy and clearly for the pleasure of it, one hand on the wheel and the other finding reasons to be elsewhere. My hand. My knee. The inside of my wrist. Small touches, unhurried, checked against my face each time to see what they earned. I have worked out harder things than one girl in a fast MMV, and I could not work this one out. She did not want anything. I know what wanting looks like.

I have been wanted for what I can do, for what I might be worth, for what killing me would prove. I have been wanted the ordinary way too, and even that usually arrives with an invoice, some quiet thing the wanting is working toward. Siobhan Morrigan touched my hand at a river crossing doing twice the legal speed, glanced over, grinned at whatever she found there, and wanted, as near as I could tell, nothing at all beyond the glancing itself. This has been the strangest week I have had in a long time.

And I live my life as a legendary, almost mythical bogeyman and a secondary school student. I have an odd life. I really do. Siobhan did not care about any of it. She was in the moment. She kept stealing looks too. Those were purposeful, and meant something, but were somehow separate from the touches. The touches were for her own amusement. The looks felt unexpected and reactive, like she had liked something I did, probably back at the restaurant, and she really wanted to show me as much.

Me being me, it took most of the riverway to place it. It was my reaction to Deryn Cassar; that was the most basic conclusion. Whatever I had said to him had rearranged the calculation, the dialogue she had concerning me. Apparently she liked what she saw, but she kept coming back to check the rearrangement she had settled on. I did not mind. That surprised me as well. I have spent a long time making sure that how people look at me tells them as little as possible about what I will do next.

Being looked at by someone who was not going to do anything, who was only pleased, was a thing I had no file for. Then the road ran out into the water bridge, and I saw where she was taking me, and I almost laughed. Sarien had built a club on an island which she clearly converted into something grand. The club was towering and the island huge. Past the shoals, on the one lit bridge that reached it, a line of very expensive machines was crawling across at the pace of the truly important.

The whole front had been turned into a runway of light and lenses, projections thrown up over the harbor, a crowd screaming at each arrival as though the arrivals had personally saved their lives. It was loud. It was chaotic. It was the exact kind of place I go out of my way never to be seen. And I knew it. Not the building; the building was new, obviously. But the shape of the thing, the taste of it, danger dressed in good lighting and sold to the rich by the glass.

I knew whose it was the moment Siobhan said the name.

"It's been a while," I said, mostly to myself. She hears everything.

"You've been here?"

"That was about the person, not the place." The bridge inched us on.

"Though it does remind me of somewhere. It has been a long time since I was there." Sarien was making a statement with this. She had built it for a purpose. I know she carries quite a backstory, her family, her sister, and I do not have all of it. Maybe it is time I took a greater interest. She is resourceful, and I like her fighting style. Which was when I remembered that she had actually invited me to this. I was supposed to call her after our little meeting at the Galleria. I hope she is not too pissed.

The fans and the hopefuls working the rope for a place on the lists and in the lights were thicker even than at La Falle, which was saying something. People screamed as we walked the pathway, guided fast toward what I took to be the VIP entrance rather than the line itself. More bouncers. More flashing light.

"Names, please," said an enormous man who had to be half troll. I do not say that lightly. The Trollian people of the Plane of Mytar in the Southern Bloc may look fearsome, but they are some of the kindest folk I have met. This one had the ears, the wide eyes, and the long nose for it. He smiled, and it looked like a Rift monster deciding where to start. He was polite, at least.

"Cale Arcanus, and Siobhan Morrigan," she said, not missing a beat. The bouncer gave another approximation of a smile, and with a crystal interface in hand he threw a holographic list up into the air, where anyone could watch our names run against it. Sarien was almost certainly behind all that black glass already, knowing full well her new club had pulled a Morrigan and a stranger onto her pier. Knowing her, she would have opinions about everything. I should make sure I said hello if I saw her.

All of this assuming they let us in. I am a nobody. Siobhan was popular enough to warrant some attention, but I did not know whether that translated to automatic access. The place had the look of somewhere that turned away titles for sport. Siobhan caught my expression and misread it, as people do, and squeezed my hand.

"Relax, Arcanus. You are with me. They will let us in." I let her keep the reason. It was even half true. But if the woman who owned this island wanted me kept out, no list of Siobhan's would have saved me, and if she wanted me in, there was no door on these planes that would stay shut. So one way or another, I was about to learn exactly how Sarien felt about seeing me again.

I straightened the silk shirt my sister chose specifically for dancing, and I did the thing I had promised Ellara I would not do, whatever it is my face does right before something interesting starts.

"Come on," she said.

"Let's get somewhere you can put your hands on me."