She jumped when a large, foaming mug of kahve was slid under her nose, and looked up to see a pleasant-faced, plump middle-aged woman with long brown braids wrapped around her head. “Customers usually come up to the counter to place their orders,” the woman said, “but you look too tired to stand up again. Would you like something to eat with that? We’re out of most everything but muffins. The spice thorn ones are not one of Rojer’s most successful experiments, I’m afraid.” She looked back at the pastry counter. “In fact, we’re selling them two for the price of one. It’s better than throwing the last batch out and getting nothing at all for them.”
“Thank you,” Devra said. “I’d love to try a spice thorn muffin.” So the baker was called Rojer, not Mikal. Maybe Mikal just used this place for an address to give girls, so he didn’t have to reveal where he actually lived.
Moments later she was looking at a plate bearing two extremely large, odd-smelling muffins, dark and crumbly, with a greenish glaze over their tops. “Um – I only wanted one…”
“You can have one for the price of one, or two for the price of one,” the friendly woman told her. “Rojer’s going to get his feelings hurt if we have too many left over, so you’d be doing me a favor to dispose of these two.”
Oh, well. It wasn’t as if the price of a muffin would make that much difference to her account. Devra broke off a piece and sniffed. The spices appeared to be cinnamon and coriander, rather an odd combination, but anything warm and sweet would taste good now. She tasted the broken-off piece. Reasonably good texture, but the thornberries baked into it fought wildly with the choice of spices, and somehow the whole thing tasted, well, green. And the baker had used synth-egg; she could taste that subtly metallic tang through the whole piece. I could do so much better. But it would hardly do to boast here. The woman who’d served her was already aware of her baker’s deficiencies, and worried about his feelings. It was probably a family-run business and this Rojer would be a cousin or a nephew. Hadn’t Mikal said something about an aunt?
The muffin wasn’t too bad if you alternated bites of it with sips of the hot, milky kahve, which was extremely good. It must be a high-caffeine brew, as well; Devra felt her spirits and energy rising as she started on the second muffin. She also became aware of her less-than-perfect appearance. At least her short dark hair fell into place naturally, but she felt grubby and damp. Her smartcloth tunic and pants had been doing their best to absorb dirt and repel rain, but they were obviously overworked; she really needed to take her clothes off and shake them until all that they’d absorbed was removed and the fabric could work at full capacity again.
All right. She’d rent a room just for tonight. A hotel room would probably cost as much as a week’s rent at one of the places she’d looked at this morning, but it would be worth it for the amenities. Just the thought of using a body cleanser cheered her up enormously. Even the shabbiest hotels would have travelers’ grooming kits; imagine combed hair, clean buffed nails – oh, it would be luxury indeed, and then there’d be a real bed with a pillow. In the morning she’d look and feel much more respectable, ready to resume her job hunt.
She went to the counter to pay her bill, and asked the friendly woman if she could recommend an inexpensive hotel nearby. “Mm, yes, let me add this first…” Strange, she was adding up the bill on paper. No CodeX on her wrist. Well, it probably got in the way if you spent the day serving tables and washing dishes. When she came to the total, Devra entered the amount in her own Codex and asked, “Credit slip, or transfer?”
“Slip, please. Our accounting system is down. Again,” she added, sounding slightly harassed.
“Print credit slip,” Devra said to her CodeX.
Nothing happened.
“Print credit slip.”
This time the CodeX emitted a series of beeps, so loud they drew the attention of everyone seated near the counter. Devra looked at the screen and read, “Insufficient funds in account.”
“That can’t be right!” she exclaimed. She’d had enough credit to pay for a week’s meals and lodging, maybe two weeks if she were careful. “Show account balance.”
That elicited another, even louder sequence of beeps and the message, “Account terminated.”
Whatever had gone wrong, she wasn’t going to be able to fix it here. Her face and neck grew hot as she imagined everybody staring at her. She plunged into incoherent apologies – a mistake, an accounting error, she’d straighten it out as soon as the credit union opened….
“Don’t worry about it,” said the braided woman. “We know you’d pay if you could.”
“I will pay,” Devra said through gritted teeth, “as soon as I can.”
“Yes, yes, of course you will. About the hotel –”
“Don’t worry about it,” Devra echoed the other woman’s words.
She left, carefully not catching the eyes of any other customers, and feeling her face burning. Would they think she’d come in here intending to order food she couldn’t pay for? If I were going to do that, discord it, I’d have ripped off a real restaurant where I could get a square meal.
“It’s a community shelter for the likes of you, not a hotel,” said a man whose outstretched legs she nearly tripped over.
“And it’s the street, not the Green Cat, for you!” snapped the woman in braids. “You’ve no need to talk like that to a girl who’s down on her luck. I thought you people believed in Harmony!”
You people? But Devra didn’t care about the strange phrasing; she was focused fiercely on two equally important goals.
She had to find the nearest People’s Shelter and register for the night.
And she had to not cry.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The gatekeeper at the public shelter seemed almost maliciously pleased to tell Devra that they were no longer serving the evening meal. “And another thing,” she added, looking down at Devra’s ankles. “No pets.”
When had Scat caught up with her?
I didn’t need to follow you, Scat said. I knew you were going to wind up at a shelter tonight.
“But there are several shelters,” Devra said. “How did you pick this one?”
“Same way the rest of us picked this one,” said a man in line behind her. “Hurry up, will you?”
Scat had vanished into the shadows. Devra wondered, as she held out her hand for scanning, whether it was worse to be caught talking to a cat or talking to her own feet. The gatekeeper handed her two printed flimsies, one for a sleeping place assignment and the other for breakfast the next day. “Which you’ll want, seeing that you’ve missed dinner.”
“It’s all right,” said Devra. “All I want is to use a cleanser and go to sleep.”
“Discord! Why didn’t you say so while I was printing? AccountX,” the woman said, “print cleanser flimsy. The line’s over there,” she told Devra, pointing to the right-hand side of the inner wall.
The line of people waiting to use a cleanser was long and moved slowly. Long before Devra’s turn came, a loudspeaker announced that the cleansers were closed for the night and anyone without a bed assignment should take their slip to a warden immediately.
“I guess that means me,” Devra said with a sigh. She did feel grubby. Well, she’d just have to wake up early in the morning and get to a cleanser before the long lines formed. She saw a few other people with slips of paper heading for a man who was standing on the other side of the hall, and followed them.
The warden was actually efficient, possibly because he wouldn’t get off his shift until everybody had a sleeping assignment. Even though Devra was last in line, within minutes she was standing before him. He took Devra’s accommodation slip, dropped it in the feed slot of his CodeX, and collected it from the output slot. A letter and two numerals were now stamped on it. “Here you go,” he said, handing the slip back to Devra. “Row J, mat number 27.”
***
Devra was so tired, she expected to fall asleep immediately. But the floor under h
er sleeping mat was hard, and the thin blanket was inadequate. She lay awake for some time, worrying about her predicament. Things seemed to be getting worse and worse. I can quit worrying about that now; it can’t get worse than this. On that thought she dropped into a fitful slumber, startling and waking up every time someone made a noise. Eventually she sank deeper into sleep.
She dreamed that she was warm and comforted, except that her wrist was being moved this way and that with light, delicate touches that were very irritating, drawing her out of deep slumber. She woke fully to a cry of pain. “Fucking cat,” and a dark shape retreated hastily.
Something still felt funny. Loose… she touched her wrist and realized that one of the catches on her CodeX strap had been undone. And there was a furry, rumbling weight on her chest. “How did you get in here?” she whispered to Scat, as if the cat could answer her.
I’m not as big and clumsy as you bipeds, the cat replied. Only, of course, it was all in her imagination. And a good thing, the imaginary dialogue went on, because you obviously need me. That man was trying to steal the stupid box on your wrist.
Imagination. If she ever imagined the cat giving her information she didn’t already have, Devra decided, then she’d worry. Right now she was too tired.
“You’d better get out of here before morning,” she whispered. “They don’t allow cats here.”
Do I look stupid?
The next time Devra woke, she felt first hands fumbling at her crotch and then a sharp pain as Scat launched himself by digging his rear claws into her chest. A moment later the touching stopped. This time the shape bulged so much that it didn’t even look human, and it was twisting frantically. Then it separated into two shapes – cat and person – and Scat landed on her chest with all four legs stiff.
I marked this one, the cat said proudly, and curled himself into a furry ball on her chest.
Devra decided it would be ungrateful to mention that he had marked her, too, with two sets of claw marks and four sore spots that would probably ripen into bruises in the morning. Besides, it wasn’t as if Scat could really understand what she said.
For the rest of the night she remained tense and watchful – at least she thought she did – but when the blackness of the windows became a dull gray light, the cat was no longer lying on her chest. She must have slept through his departure. Or, more likely, she had dreamed the whole thing. No matter – she needed to hurry and use the cleanser.
Only, whom could she trust to hold her clothes and CodeX? Devra glanced at her neighbors on either side. One, a man, was lying on his back snoring. The other, a woman, was stirring like someone just waking up. Devra wondered if she’d come to the shelter to escape an abusive husband; her face and one arm were… all covered with red lines that were just beginning to rise into welts, and that looked, she told herself, nothing at all like cat scratches.
But she really couldn’t trust any stranger, could she? She’d wait until a warden showed up.
By the time the morning warden appeared, the lines for the cleansers were as long as they’d been the previous night. And this new man did not look as if he was in a mood to do any favors for anybody.
Devra felt as if her skin was crawling. She had never in her life gone so long without using a cleanser and putting on clean clothes.
Fortunately, there were more lavatories than cleansers, so the lines for them weren’t so long. And they moved a lot faster than the cleanser lines, because people didn’t have to disrobe and hand their clothes to an assistant warden – from this angle she could see one standing in front of each cleanser. Once again the cleansers were closed before she got to one, and she stood in another line to exchange her “breakfast” slip for a bowl of unflavored nanosludge. Well, it was supposed to be nutritionally complete. But it was hard to make herself swallow something with no detectable taste except a slight sourness. She’d only managed to eat half the bowl when the shelter closed for the day.
Even if they hadn’t been wearing their silver uniforms, Devra thought she would have recognized the two habbers. They were leaning against the wall on the far side of the street, arms crossed, watching the stream of people trickling out of the shelter. She walked right up to them. “I’m much too tired to run and hide. What do you want?”
That rather spoiled the tall one’s greeting of, “Just come along and don’t make trouble.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
They delivered her to the same room where she’d stood for hours the last time. At least, she was facing the same man, and she thought it was the same room. But maybe all the interior, windowless rooms looked alike, with muddy gray syncrete walls, a desk of the same material, video feeds like menacing red eyes at each corner of the ceiling.
This time, though, there was a chair for her.
“Oh, sit down, Citizen,” said Grigg. “You look like you’re about to pass out. I don’t want you fainting before we have our little talk. Pasko and Nikols, you can wait outside,” he added in the same breath.
Devra wondered what he meant to do to her that was so bad he didn’t want witnesses. It didn’t matter. No one escaped the Security building, and anyway she was too tired to do anything but sit as ordered.
The next words shocked her into full awareness.
“Would you like a chance to redeem yourself and resume life as a loyal citizen of Harmony?”
“Sir – Citizen – I am loyal to Harmony. I have never not been loyal.”
The gray man snorted. “So you just lie to Security for amusement? Just so you know – obstruction of our inquiries is also a crime.”
I didn’t mean to lodged in her throat. So did I truly repent and It won’t happen again. Possibly because none of those things were true, and Gran had raised her never to lie.
It would have been nice if my aversion to lying had stopped me in the first place, before I spun that stupid story for Ferit’s sake.
Finally she found some words. “I know that now, if I didn’t before.”
“So.” The grey man sat back slightly, elbows on the desk, fingers tented together. “We agree on something. You have committed crimes against the state.”
“If you want to sentence me to rehab or a labor camp, I wish you’d just go ahead and do it. I’m too tired to argue.” Also, she was by now quite certain that Vikki had been right about one thing. Scat had fleas.
“You may be able to serve your country in a higher and nobler way. Wouldn’t you prefer that to being rehabbed?”
“Wouldn’t anybody?”
A thin smile appeared on his face. “I believe that in ancient times the term was ‘making an offer you can’t refuse.’ Or at least, an offer only a fool would refuse – and I think you’re brighter than that, Citizen Fordise. If you perform this little assignment acceptably, your record can be cleared of all Security notes and the Bureau for Labor will be happy to assign you a job and an apartment. Now isn’t that better than stumbling in and out of public shelters like a choof-head?”
Devra nodded vigorously.
“Good! I knew we could come to terms.” He tapped the corner of the desk and said, “Pasko, come in now. No, just you. Well, I’ll find Nikols something to do, if his boss can’t think of anything.”
“M-my assignment?” Devra said just before the door slid open.
“You’ll be told when the time comes. Ah, Lukas. Take the citizen to one of our private rooms. And try to clean yourself up,” he added to Devra. “You wouldn’t pass for anything better than a choofer yourself, right now.”
When they were out in the corridor, Lukas said in a low voice, “Want to use the cleansers first, or would you rather just go to sleep?” Either option sounded wonderful to Devra – and not the kind of choice one expected in Security.
“Cleansers,” she said, and he showed her to a wonderful double stall, almost as big as her home cleanser, with a door that closed at a wave of his hand. “Take as long as you like; just knock on the door when you’re ready to come out.”
Devra took him at his word, and tried not to think about the fact that he could open the door again at any moment. Concentrate on what you can control. Right now, that meant stripping and running the cleaning and decon airsprays over her hair and body until all her accumulated grubbiness was gone – not to mention the fleas Scat had left her with. She held her clothes by her fingertips, shaking them out in the spray until she felt all the fleas must be dead, and then continued shaking them until the smartcloth had shed all the dead skin cells and bits of grime it had collected and looked crisp and new again. Finally she used the tubefresher to clean her teeth and take the sour memory of the shelter breakfast out of her mouth.
By the time she knocked to be let out again, Lukas had contrived to find a comb somewhere. “I think I love you,” she informed him, vigorously setting about the tangles that remained even now that her hair was clean again.
Lukas grinned, completely altering his face. That habitual twisted, sneering expression had made him look evil. Without it, he looked younger and much more approachable. “One of my mates,” he volunteered, “thinks more about arranging his pretty curls to frame his face than he ever thought about anything in front of his face. He’ll miss the comb, so keep it in a pocket when you’re not using it.”
“But you –”
“Don’t worry. His fancy sweetwood comb goes missing at least once a week, or his mirror falls off its hook or somebody uses his manicure set to dissect bugs. The poor fellow just has a continual run of bad luck.” Now Lukas looked exactly like Ferit talking his way out of detention for a practical joke. Well, apart from being six inches shorter than Ferit, and pale rather than brown, and having close-cropped red hair instead of unruly black curls. But the expression was one she was intimately familiar with.
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