Her ‘goal’ had changed dramatically over the last few short hours. No longer was it to make enough money to buy a ticket into space. Forget that. Now all she wanted was to scrape together enough money to make it through the next three weeks until Aaron returned, and then, that was it…she’d head back home with her tail between her legs and be thankful for the simple comforts of home once more.
You’re pathetic Ellie. You’ve only managed to last half a day before whimpering for home.
She found a small zipper-bag inside her own bag. She frowned with confusion, she didn’t recognize it. Curious, she quickly opened it and delved inside, pulling out a note scribbled on paper. It was a note from Aaron:
Ellie,
Forgive me, I looked in your bag to see how much money you’d brought with you. 356 creds!!? How long did you think that was going to last? There’s some more money in this bag. It should be enough to keep you until I get back. By then I’m sure you’ll be more than ready to go home. It’s a loan girl, alright? I’m sure your parents will happily square with me when they get you back in one piece.
Dionysius, breakfast, three weeks, ok?
Aaron
She felt around inside the bag and pulled out a slim wad of New Haven notes. She quickly counted them.
There was eight hundred creds there. Eight hundred…and her three hundred and a little. That gave her a total of eleven hundred credits. She quickly did the math in her head. That was just enough to pay rent on a cube for two and a half weeks at sixty-five creds a night. If she could find somewhere marginally cheaper, say sixty, maybe even fifty-five, she’d be covered for the full three weeks. Of course, she conceded, there were luxuries like food that she’d need to find some money for, but if she could get just a little work, just enough to buy even some protein paste and water, she’d at least live.
Ellie sighed.
This wasn’t turning out to be that First Day In The Big City that she’d been fantasizing about for as long as she could remember. The city felt dangerous, not exhilarating; the people living here didn’t fascinate her, they frightened her. But she was going to be able to afford somewhere to sleep, probably not that comfortable or particularly nice to look at, but it would be a bolt hole for her, away from the noisy, scary chaos of the street.
Thank you Aaron.
She peeled the plastic lid off the cup and took a sip of the synthi-caff. It was bitter and stewed but the sweetener, although she actually hadn’t wanted any of that chemical-gunk in her drink, helped to at least soften the unpleasant tang. It would do. She placed the money Aaron had loaned her, and her own pitiful savings, into the zipper-bag and placed that back in to her own shoulder bag.
‘Okay then, first things first, let’s go find a room to rent,’ she uttered, stirring herself to action. She placed the plastic lid back on her cup and took it out with her into the churning hum of the street.
Almost immediately she felt a tap on her shoulder and spun nervously around, hot ‘caff splashing from the drink-hole of the plastic lid. Behind her stood an exotic-looking off-worlder; a lean, pale-skinned man, with hair gelled up into stiff spirals and colored red and blue. He wore a bright orange puffa-jacket with, Ellie noticed, one of the more expensive logos embossed across it.
‘You? Am need resting? Stay?’ he said with a confusing click of the tongue between words.
‘I’m sorry?’ she replied.
‘Am needing place. Stay. Pay money for stay?’
Ellie smiled, she understood. ‘Yes, I’m looking for a room to rent. A cheap one. Can you help me?’
‘Helping. Yes.’ The man smiled, revealing gemstone teeth like that leering man in his booth. The bizarre, gaping mouth full of multi-colored crystals was still a smile though, the first she’d seen all day. Unpleasant though he looked, she instantly felt a small bond with him. The first person today to offer her a shred of compassion.
‘I’ve been looking and everywhere is just so expensive.’
He raised a hand. ‘Too fast, speak slow now. Do you speak….’ He pronounced a garbled word she’d never heard before. It was a question.
‘Sorry no, I just speak Old Earth English.’
The man nodded. ‘Okay. So you speaking slow.’
Ellie tried again, this time speaking the words slowly and loudly. ‘I…need…a…cheap cube.’
‘Need, place. Cheap place. Yes.’
‘Yes, I need cheap place.’
The man reached out with one hand and grabbed her forearm. ‘Good, show you. Come.’
Ellie was a little taken aback by the sudden gesture and took an involuntary step back. ‘Uh…where are we going?’
‘Place, cheap. Go up for cheap.’ He said pointing directly above them to a squalid-looking tower that over-shadowed the street.
‘We’re going up there?’
He nodded, clicking his mouth repeatedly. ‘Up is cheap.’
‘Umm…okay then.’
The man pulled her by the forearm across the heaving street, weaving adroitly between the other pedestrians. He led her to a recessed doorway tucked between two small boutiques selling wares that looked disturbingly like weapons.
‘We go up, number 561, press,’ he said drawing her attention to a grubby keypad beside the door. ‘Press. 561!’
‘Oh, right.’ She leant forward and studied the grimy keyboard trying to pick out the numbers. And it was then, of course, while she was distracted, that it happened.
She felt the strap of her bag slide off her shoulder, down her forearm, and over her hand, all in a split second. As she spun round to try and grab hold of it, the man was off into the street with it clasped firmly under one arm.
‘NO!!!!!!!!!’ she cried desperately. Everything was in there.
Everything.
Without thinking she turned and gave chase, following the man out into the busy street. He was running against the flow, buffeted and jostled by those shambling in the opposite direction. She could see the red and blue spirals of his hair above the crowd and followed those, making equally slow progress as her mugger.
‘Help me!!! He’s got my bag!!!’ she screamed into the faces of those she was struggling to get past. Most of them flinched irritably from Ellie, not wanting to have to deal with her, not wanting even to have to acknowledge her.
Shit happens, seemed to be what they all wished to communicate with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders. If no-one was going to help her, at least they started moving out of the way more quickly for Ellie than for her thief. She was gaining on him.
He turned a corner into a much wider street which was shared by pedestrians, pod-cars and d-peds weaving effortlessly around them. The spiral-haired off-worlder scrambled desperately through the crowd towards a large yellow skyhound that had descended gracefully to the ground and disgorged about a dozen people. It was looking ready to take off again and proceed to its next stop, and he looked determined to leave with it. Ellie followed him into the street and quickly caught up with him as he was held back from crossing to catch the skyhound by a dense gridlock of pods, between which pedestrians were attempting to squeeze one by one to cross the street. He cursed angrily as the large yellow vessel began to rise with a roar of suspenso-jets, up to join the air traffic two hundred feet above.
Ellie approached him from behind. He wasn’t looking around, apparently confident that he’d already lost her. She reached out for the shoulder strap that dangled below the bag, held tightly in his arms.
‘Hach!!!’ he shouted as he felt her tugging it. He spun round to see Ellie, his eyes widening as he recognized her.
‘It’s mine! You give it back!’ she shouted at him loudly, hoping someone bigger and stronger might step out of the wall of onlookers around them and intervene on her behalf.
He tugged back at the strap. ‘Leave go!!!! Mine bag!’ he shouted in turn, realizing what she was up to. ‘Stealing! Thief!’ he bellowed pitifully as he hung onto the bag.
‘What?! But it’s mine!’
‘Thief! Thief!’ he continued, his eyes rolling with mock-fear.
She pulled hard on the strap, dislodging the bag from his vice-like gripe. It fell to the street.
‘Hach!!’ he said again with frustration and bent down to grab it. Ellie reached down at the same time and got a hold on the other end of the bag. As they both rose and pulled with all their might, the bag ripped open, scattering all of her worldly possessions onto the ground. She saw the zipper-bag fly gracefully into the air and into the path of a pod travelling at a fair speed towards the corner.
‘Oh no!’ she had time to whimper before the pod smacked into it and a cloud of paper creds billowed up into the air.
The spiral-haired off-worlder cried out miserably as he witnessed his booty floating to the ground and every pedestrian within grasping distance helping themselves to whatever they could catch.
The off-worlder turned angrily towards Ellie, he raised one of his hands as if to strike her, then after spotting a law marshal further up the crowded street, thought better of it. She slumped down on the street, oblivious to the thief’s snarling abuse. She sat on her bottom, cross legged, her arms splayed protectively around the few of her belongings that hadn’t already been snatched away by hands emerging from the swirling mass of pedestrians passing by.
Her thief snarled something that sounded threatening before turning away and disappearing into the crowd.
She gathered together what remained of her belongings; her tartan dog, Jonny, her voice diary, one pair of pants and a pair of socks. The rest of her things had been flung into the milling crowd or been snatched off the pavement.
Above the still unmoving logjam of pod-cars, the last few notes of her precious money fluttered lazily, waiting to be claimed by an outstretched hand. The flurry of activity amongst those pedestrians that had been close enough to make a grab for the rest of it had died down, and once more they all resumed their sullen-faced journeys, each of them with a little bit of easy-money in their pockets and casting glances of disconnected curiosity over their shoulders back at Ellie
She let her head drop and felt the last of her will to live ebb away.
It’s all gone. All of it.
‘I give up…I want to go back home,’ she whispered to herself as she remained on the floor, lacking the strength, the desire even, to get up. New Haven had beaten that final submission out of her within only a few short hours.
A single note of money fluttered to the ground beside her. A five-cred note.
Enough for a single hot snack.
As she reached out for it a shiny leather boot slammed down on the note, pinning it to the ground with a long, thin stiletto heal. Ellie pulled her hand back nervously.
‘Okay, okay…you can have it,’ she muttered miserably, flinching as she looked curiously up to see what sort of pitiless person could happily take the last of her money.
The leather boot belonged to a shiny leather-clad leg; the leg to a lean, athletic-looking torso covered with a fine, form-hugging lycra bodysuit. Looking down at her, Ellie saw a hard face pulled into a frown. Dark, almost black, lipstick and a thick orbit of dark eye shadow around each of her steel grey eyes gave the woman an almost ghostly presence. Her face was thick with a powdery white foundation and framed by a black bob of hair.
‘That was pretty spectacular,’ the woman said with a husky voice.
Ellie could only nod. Her mind was still on that last note of money, and perhaps if she played her cards right, the leather-clad female zombie standing over her might just let her keep it.
The woman kept her heel on the note and continued to look down at Ellie, as if studying an interesting new species of urban cockroach. ‘First day in town?’
‘Yes,’ Ellie replied with a weak croak.
The woman knelt down beside Ellie with a creak of tight leather. Up close this woman’s face didn’t look quite so frightening. It softened still further as the faintest hint of a sympathetic smile crossed her glossy midnight lips.
‘Had a pretty nasty first day huh?’
‘Yes,’ she answered, fighting hard to keep a lid on the tears of frustration she wanted to spill.
The woman continued to study Ellie, her face was a model of sculpted porcelain, beautiful; the sort of face that could sell toothpaste or an energy drink, or in fact anything on the toob. It was a face, Ellie could imagine, that had probably never looked like hers did now - crumpled and blotched with anxiety and grief.
‘Let me help you,’ she said reaching out for what was left of Ellie’s possessions and wrapping them up in the tattered remnants of her shoulder bag. She held out a hand to Ellie.
Ellie glanced at it uncertainly. The woman, sighed impatiently, grasped Ellie’s upper arm and lifted her onto her feet with a surprising strength.
‘Come on limp-chick, I think you need a little bit of patching up.’
CHAPTER 21
Ellie stood in the doorway to the bar, unable to take a step forward.
‘It’s holo-décor floor girl, it’s not real,’ the woman laughed and shook her head, her glistening black bob waving gently like the wings of a bat.
Ellie stared at the flickering volcanic landscape below her. A cauldron of lava bubbled and spat hundreds of feet beneath them. The woman walked across to the bar, seemingly across an invisible force field and waved for Ellie to join her. Ellie took a tentative first step, her mind struggling to reassure her that the convincing illusion was nothing more than an effect projected against the floor. The second step was easier. Ellie caught up with the woman.
‘Totally drool, isn’t it?’ she said.
Ellie nodded. She looked around the bar. The woman had said it was called Dantes. The walls and low ceiling were flickering with the reflected fiery amber glow from the holographic projection beneath their feet. There were several small intimate booths around the walls. In the middle of Dante’s floor was a circular bar with a solitary barman standing idle in the middle.
Ellie watched with horror as a small table in one of the booths suddenly erupted into flames. Two men sitting at the table and arguing intensely about something, failed to even register the enormous jet of flames that billowed around their faces and then rose to the ceiling lazily as a small, livid mushroom cloud. From another booth a few seconds later a second jet of flames spurted from a table and drifted up to the ceiling where it discreetly faded out.
The woman watched with amusement at the expression of horror on Ellie’s face.
‘Relax. They’re just holos. Pretty tidy eh?’ she smiled.
Ellie nodded. ‘Totally…uh…drool.’
‘Listen, go find a quiet nook for us to sit in and I’ll bring you a little pick-me-up,’ the woman ordered.
Ellie didn’t feel like a drink, but she didn’t feel able to protest either. She nodded lethargically and headed towards a booth towards the back of the bar. She made her way across the glowing lava, staring down at the churning sea of magma, and wondering how merciful it might be if the glass floor beneath her opened up right now and dropped her into a lake of real lava.
She slumped down on a couch that curled around the little table. Both table and couch were flanked on either side by sturdy chrome poles that flickered with the distorted reflections of the churning lava and intermittent mushroom clouds of flames.
Despite the deep volcanic rumbling coming from the floor, and some gentle background music, the bar was a surprisingly soothing, almost restful place to be. It was empty, she noticed, except for the two men she’d seen engaged in a heated exchange in another booth. Given the crush outside on the street, she found that odd.
She watched the woman as she ordered some drinks from the barman. They seemed to be discussing something, and she saw the woman point her way. The barman turned to look at Ellie and then shook his head after he’d seen her. He handed the woman a couple of bottles and said something to her that clearly annoyed her. She replied with a hand gesture and walked over towards Ellie with two small, red bottles of drink.
She grabbed the chrome pole beside the couch and swung round gracefully on to the couch beside Ellie.
‘Why is it so empty?’ asked Ellie, seeking something to open a conversation with.
‘It’s not open yet is why. Doesn’t open until later in the evening.’
‘Oh,’ she replied, realizing there was no explanation forthcoming as to why they’d been let in.
The woman pushed one of the bottles across the table towards her. ‘Drink up, it’ll settle your nerves,’ she said.
Ellie looked up at the woman. ‘Thanks for…’
‘For what? Buying you a drink? Big deal…you just lost all your creds. I saw that druck rip you off girl. You did pretty good chasing him down and fighting to get your bag back. Plucky. You were pretty lucky though.’
‘Lucky?’
‘Yeah, he was thinking about doing you some serious hurt. I could see his hand going for something he was carrying. Maybe something pointy, or worse.’
Ellie felt a cold chill run over the backs of her arms. ‘But there were loads of people all around.’
‘You think that would make a difference? Not here I’m afraid.’
Ellie looked at the bottle in front of her. It was decorated with a red and yellow swoosh, a logo she was vaguely familiar with, perhaps an ad she’d seen on the toob.
‘It’s a Spartan. It’s good,’ said the woman.
Ellie took a sip of the ice cold drink, and immediately felt it chill her throat and warm her tummy an instant later. The woman took a swig of hers and then with no preamble at all, held her hand out across the table.
‘I’m Jez. And you are?’
‘Ellie.’
Ellie reached out and held her extended hand. Jez recoiled with embarrassment and shook her hand off. ‘What? Ew! No…no don’t hold my hand! Crud! Everyone will think we’re lebby-chiks. No like this…’
She held her hand out again and gestured for Ellie to do likewise. Jez then locked her thumb round Ellie’s and then waggled her fingers. Ellie copied her and the pair of hands locked together by thumbs looked like a bird flapping its wings.