by K. N. Knight
There were a few crazy old people trying to peddle electrical goods, as if they’d been in a coma for the past five years and hadn’t yet realized that power didn’t exist anymore. There were also handicraft stalls selling paintings and handmade and embroidered clothing, and a huge array of food stalls. My stomach rumbled as I surveyed the unfamiliar foods. There were lots of sugary, syrupy things and I came to a stop at one stall, just taking it all in.
“Here.” Rael appeared at my side and handed me something on a sheet of old paper. “Salted caramel choc slice.”
I gasped, already salivating as the sweet, rich scent wafted to my nostrils. “I think I love you,” I said. And then I bit my tongue. “Uh, you know what I mean.”
“Sure,” he purred, eyes crinkling in mischief. “Try it.”
I could feel his eyes on me as I bit into it. Oh my god. It exploded on my taste buds, rich and sweet and indulgent. It was incredible. Not quite as good as sex, but pretty close. When I opened my eyes again, Rael was watching me, pupils dilated.
“Want a bite?” I held it out to him.
“Nope.” He shook his head. “It’s all yours.”
I continued eating, each bite blissful. I’d forgotten how good sweet things made me feel, the sugar already rushing in my veins. I was even making little mmm sounds as I chewed. I didn’t care, though. I was too happy to care.
“Wow,” I murmured when I was done. “Thank you so much.”
“The pleasure was mine,” he said, and I could tell he meant it. He’d been watching me the whole time I was eating, which should’ve made me self-conscious, but I sensed he got enjoyment from giving me something that made me so happy.
“Now, let’s find you some pants,” he said. “If I remember, the stalls with the newer stuff are at the back somewhere.”
We traipsed through the rows of stalls, passing among the performance artists and pausing when one or another of them caught our attention. Rael laid a light hand on my shoulder or hip to guide me from time to time, and I became aware I liked his touch. I hoped he’d keep doing it.
There was a very diverse range of performances, from circus acts like juggling and acrobatics, to magic tricks, to freak shows, which were mainly performed by shifters who had the ability to remain halfway through their shift for extended periods. Humans watched them goggle-eyed, but they upset me.
“We shouldn’t be showing our secrets to the human world like this,” I whispered.
“I agree,” Rael replied. “Everyone seems to think the rebirth of the fire will bring order to the world, but that’s not going to happen if we get to this level of chaos.”
One shifter was doing a skit about a lion tamer, where he was acting both the part of the lion and the tamer. First he played the human part, grandly announcing the spectacle that was about to come while twirling a fake moustache that looked like it had been made from the bristly end of a broom. Then he ripped his costume off, which was held together with Velcro, and shifted into his lion form, roared, pawed the ground, then jumped through a series of hoops. It was actually quite funny, and against my better judgment, I found myself laughing helplessly. I kind of collapsed against Rael, and he caught my waist, chuckling, as he steadied me. “It’s good to hear you laugh, Ranger,” he said. We each dropped a coin in the performer’s upturned hat and kept going.
“I never thought I’d say this, but I’m having fun,” I replied.
“I knew you would.” He gave me that twinkly look of mischief again.
“I feel bad for Zain, though,” I blurted out. “He’s missing out on all this.”
A frown fleetingly darkened Rael’s features. “Don’t. If I know him, he’s lying in the wagon right now, halfway through the second jar of honey, thinking blissed-out, beary thoughts. Anyway, Oran will take over when he comes back with new horses.”
We’d come to the rear of the town, and there was just scrubland beyond. But there was also a final row of stalls. I exclaimed at the clothes displayed there. Everything seemed brand new. They even had the smell of a factory finish. “How is this even possible?” I muttered, holding up one pair of pants after another.
“You know what they were saying when the fires started and everyone was getting obsessed with hoarding stuff?” Rael said. “Economists calculated there were enough clothes in the world at that moment to last the next three generations of humanity for the rest of their lives. I guess a lot of it got burned, but I’m sure plenty of it was salvaged, too.”
I grabbed four pairs of pants, and the stallholder, a small bony woman with shrewd, gleaming eyes, directed me to the back of the stall where two curtains were hung to create a changing room.
Two of them fit me perfectly, and I jumped up and down happily. I was used to holding my clothes together with bits of string and safety pins.
“Do we get a fashion show?” Rael called.
“Uh, I dunno,” I muttered.
“Try these two.” His hand appeared through the gap in the curtains, proffering two shirts.
I held them up. One was a turquoise cotton jersey with a round neck and long sleeves, and the other was a mint green and black check button-down. The first one fitted me well, and I took a deep breath and stepped out of the changing room, wondering why I suddenly felt nervous.
“Perfect,” Rael proclaimed, his eyes appreciative as they ran over my figure. “I knew that was your color. It contrasts really well with your hair.”
“Thanks,” I said, dipping my head. Compliments always made me feel hot and squirmy.
I ducked back into the changing room and put the other shirt on. It was rugged and somehow comforting. Rael looked it over with approval. “It’ll be good for active stuff,” he said.
Funny, I thought as I changed back into my scruffy old gray shirt. Rael was one of the last people I had expected to enjoy being a shopping buddy. “I’m not sure which to get,” I said as I emerged.
“Get them all. I told you we’d cover the cost,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say they only owed me for one shirt, pants, bra, and panties, then thought better of it.
“I’ll settle up here, and in the meantime, there’s a stall for underthings right over there,” he said, as if he’d read my mind. I was getting seriously low on underwear, and that was before one of my sets got torn to shreds. I scurried off to the underwear stall. All their stuff was new too, and I quickly selected a black bra and five pairs of boy shorts in bright colors.
Rael continued wandering around the stalls until I was ready, and I paused and watched him for a moment, touched by his tact. He also bought a pair of khaki pants, a plain black shirt, and three T-shirts.
“I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I think I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said when I joined him. He was almost bouncing with enthusiasm, his pupils dilated and irises very light green.
“You know how much you remind me of Tigger right now?” I said.
He crooked one of his thick, sloping eyebrows. “That’s what my mom used to call me sometimes.” A faraway look came into his eyes. He shook his head. “Damn, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you sad.”
He grabbed my hand and squeezed it, then, to my total surprise, he pressed it against his heart. “My mom’s gone, which will always be a deep sadness to me, and that’s why I’ll never regret being reminded of her.”
I watched him wordlessly, feeling the strong, steady beat of his heart. His sorrows were like an electrical current through my body, but there was a lot of tenderness there, too, which made it bearable.
At last, he let go of my wrist, and I withdrew my hand. But I already missed the feel of his body beneath my fingers.
“Anyway, enough tripping down memory lane for now,” he said. “Let’s see if we can sniff out that surprise.”
I wandered beside him in a daze, aware that we’d shared something—something that didn’t need to be articulated between us.
And then I smelled meat. Cooked meat. I instantly salivated, then my instincts took over and I went on a rampage. Darting through the crowds, I located it in no time. There was a stall with an electric grill, and on top of it were sizzling slabs of meat. “Oh. My. God,” I breathed.
“Ha!” Rael said, close behind me. “This is it.”
I ran my eye over the whole set up, scarcely able to believe it was real. There was a big solar panel connected to the grill, and two big, burly shifters were guarding it. The price of the cuts of meat were chalked up on a blackboard. They were sky-high, but I didn’t care. I handed over all the money I had left and received a big slab of what the stall holder said was beef. It smelled more like deer to me, which was all good. Rael got the same, and we sat on some chairs that were set up off to the side and ate like we were half-starved.
“Incredible,” we both concluded, minutes later.
“Want another?” he asked.
“No, I’m so full.” I rubbed my stomach and groaned. “But I’m so coming back tomorrow—that’s if I can make some money in this town first.”
“I’m sure that won’t be a problem, but let’s relax tonight,” he said. “You can hustle to your heart’s content all day tomorrow if you want.” He elbowed me to show he was teasing.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “What did you have in mind?”
“Let’s go check out these famous casinos,” he said. “I always wanted to go to Vegas. Now here’s our chance.”
I opened my mouth to say I was out of cash, but he cut me off. “I’ll give you some coins to get you started, Ranger. You would’ve been earning these past days if it wasn’t for us. And unless I’m mistaken, Oran deliberately sabotaged your last earning attempt?”
“Yeah, he did,” I said, still too annoyed about it to bother playing it down.
The first casino we came to was named Golden Palms and had two enormous battered plastic palm trees coated in peeling gold paint at the entrance to prove it. As we went inside, Rael handed me a bunch of coins, and I slipped them into my pocket. It was an old circus tent, full of tables of different kinds of games. I’d never been in a casino before, but I recognized some of them from old movies. There were card games, blackjack perhaps, and roulette tables, as well as some of the games that seemed to be recent inventions, involving customers betting on various chance events. I wasn’t a fan of gambling, especially since my stepfather used to have a problem with it, but I was curious to see all the different tables. Everything was a little shabby and ragged, but that was normal these days.
“I’ve been wondering something,” Rael purred as we paused at a roulette table. “Does your ability to feel the past mean you could also feel the result of, say, the throw of the dice?”
I laughed. “Maybe. If the dice was suffering,” I said.
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Why don’t you try it?”
We went over to one of the quirky games and took a seat at the board. The croupier, a slender young woman with white-blond braids, dressed in a sparkly red jumpsuit, laid a bunch of objects on the table—a spoon, a glass ring, a plastic spider, and a Rubik’s cube—then she hid them all behind her back, and the players had to guess which one was in her left hand. I watched her rummage around behind her back, while her big brown eyes observed me playfully. She switched everything from hand to hand, two, three times. Then the glass ring was in her left hand and everything else was in the right. I don’t know how I knew; I just sensed the ring was connected to her in some way the others weren’t. I whispered my conclusion to Rael who then laid four coins on the table and made the triple-your-money bet for the glass ring. The other three people at the table each backed one coin on the other three objects.
The croupier gave us a big, cheesy grin. “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. The winner is the silver spoon.” She went to put the objects down and hand over a single coin. But, quick as a flash, Rael’s hand shot out and encircled her wrist before drawing it out and revealing the glass ring.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his tone smooth but dangerous.
Her smile turned to a snarl. Sullenly, she dropped all the objects on the table, rooted in her money jar, and pulled out eight coins that she slapped in front of us. “Don’t come back here no more,” she muttered.
“Let’s go,” I hissed, grabbing Rael’s arm and pulling him to his feet.
We scampered over to the other end of the room, laughing. Rael handed me the eight coins. “Nice work,” he said. “Was it a lucky guess?”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said slowly. “I felt she was thinking about the ring in connection to something from her past. Maybe if she’d picked the plastic spider it would’ve been a different story.”
“And it was a sad memory?”
“Yeah. My thing has only worked on sad situations. So far, anyway.”
“Interesting,” he said, his pupils dilated. “You want to try some more games?”
“Sure do!” I exclaimed. His enthusiasm was infectious. I felt looser and less inhibited than usual, as if I was getting drunk from it.
We tried roulette, but my ability didn’t help us since no one was thinking about the destination of the ball before it landed. We played three rounds of red and blacks, winning two and losing one. Then we went on to the card table. I didn’t know the rules of blackjack, so Rael held the hand and told me what we needed to aim for. There were two other players at the table, and I tried to tune into their mood, to figure out whether they were anxious or excited, and it helped us to win the first three rounds.
“We’d better go,” Rael said, standing up, “before we draw more attention to ourselves.”
As we drifted past the tables, heading toward the exit, I noticed Rael watching me with an odd look on his face, something like admiration.
I came to a stop and put my hands on my hips. “What is it?”
“You’re amazing, Ranger,” he said. “I can’t wait for the day when you start to realize that. You’ll be unstoppable.”
I blinked several times. “Please,” I mumbled, ducking my head to avoid meeting his gaze.
“I’ve really been having fun with you.”
“Me, too,” I said, and when I next looked up, his gaze was such a mixture of interest and attraction that it made me blush. That was pretty much exactly how I felt toward him.
“Let’s get some wine. I’m sure I saw a stall earlier,” he said.
We found one near the entrance to the casino and bought two cups. We stood next to the stall, and Rael raised his chipped yellow mug. “Here’s to beating the house,” he said. I clinked my own battered blue mug against it, and we drank. It was rich and tasted potent.
“And they say the house always wins. That’s because they haven’t met Ranger Mason,” he continued.
I giggled. Was the wine going to my head already? Such a lightweight these days. I felt its warmth seeping through my body, relaxing me.
“I’m so pleased you’re not sick of us yet,” Rael said.
“Who said I wasn’t!” I replied more animatedly than I’d expected.
His sloping eyebrows shot together. “Well, are you?” He suddenly looked so adorably worried that I giggled again.
“Actually, when I tried to leave you guys the other day, I couldn’t do it. I mean, physically, I couldn’t walk away from you. I had this bad pain in my legs, and the further I got, the worse it became. Until I ended up crawling on my hands and knees.”
His expression turned to deep interest, and I wondered if I’d said too much.
“And when you turned around again?”
“The pain disappeared and my strength came back.”
“Very interesting,” he purred in a tone I was beginning to recognize meant that the cogs of his brain were turning rapidly. “Which reminds me of something I read. Will you come back to the wagon with me?”
“Sure.” I nodded. We snuck away from the wine stall, taking the cups with us. Rael grabbed my hand in his urgency
, and we zigzagged through the crowds, laughing as we went and trying to stop the wine from sloshing everywhere.
When we reached the wagon, Oran was there, tending to two horses that were tied to one of the wagon wheels. They were both dark brown, almost black, and taller and skinnier than the previous two. I was surprised to see him brushing one of them very attentively. As his head turned toward us, there was something uncharacteristically unguarded in his expression.
“Nice work,” Rael commented, patting the horse on the neck. Immediately, it jerked away from him, snorting, eyes showing the whites. Rael groaned. “And these ones don’t like me either.”
“They haven’t been taking care of them,” Oran said brusquely and continued working with his brush.
I stilled for a moment, startled to see this side of him.
“You can go get some food if you want. We’ll stay here,” Rael offered.
“There’s a real grill,” I said. I had no idea why I was being nice to him, but the words were out my mouth before I had time to think about them.
Oran froze. “Actual grilled meat?”
“Yup.” I flashed him a smile.
“Okay.” He put the brush down. “I’ll finish the horses when I get back.” And he headed off at a run.
“Looks like you two are thawing out a little,” Rael commented, looking at me curiously.
I shrugged. “I was just being kind. I used to be a kind person before the world turned to ash, and it became every man and woman for themselves.”
Rael sighed. “Everyone’s gotten a lot harder. But you’ve got a kind heart, Ranger. You agreed to stay with us, after all.”
“It doesn’t look like I’ve got a choice in the matter,” I said with mock exasperation.
“Oh, yes, back to the books.” Rael went to the rear of the wagon. He climbed in, dug out one of his dusty old volumes, and laid it down on the floor board. He jumped back down and started leafing through it eagerly. Fleetingly, he looked more like a bookish scholar than an ex-fighting machine. I liked the way he switched between these two very different sides of himself. And I liked the way he absently swiped at his golden-brown hair as he scrutinized the pages. It was endearing.
