Chapter Sixteen Sadie
Sixteen
Sadie
I was going to a pub with Nedd.
I was going to a pub with Nedd!
And our flightmates weren’t with us, so I didn’t even have to mentally edit them out to pretend we were alone!
Of course, we were on a very serious mission to gather information, not to hang out with each other. And we were only going because Arturo ordered us to. And I was expected to do more talking…which meant I had to be sharp and helpful and coherent. At a pub. With Nedd.
Arturo must not know about my crush or he would have realized he’d just increased our odds of failure tenfold.
We found a shop not far from the coliseum where we used some of the metal coins we’d earned to buy clothes and a pretty blue headscarf, though we had to ask directions to a shop that sold work gloves so Nedd could find a pair that fit both his hand and his prosthetic.
Before we got too far away from Hoid, we used a public restroom to change and stash our flightsuits in our bags.
With no way to disguise them, we removed our earpieces—we wouldn’t need them to translate at the bar anyway.
I tied the headscarf over my hair. I felt festive with it on, and the color matched my natural hair in case the cloth slipped.
I asked one of the food vendors for directions to the Angry Badger. “Down the main road there for about a kilometer,” she told us. “You’ll see the mill on your right. Walk around the building and take a left just over the bridge.”
“Thanks,” I said. We didn’t seem to have aroused any suspicion yet, so I chanced another question. “How long until third shift?”
The woman looked at me sharply. “Third shift started an hour ago,” she said. “Are you late for something?”
“Yep!” I said. “I better go!”
Nedd fell into step beside me as I hurried away.
“How awkward was that?” I asked him.
“On a scale of FM to Alanik, I’d give you a solid Jorgen,” Nedd said.
I laughed. Being compared to the admiral couldn’t be a bad thing. “Come on,” I said. “We don’t know how long third shift lasts, so we’d better hurry.”
“We’d better hurry casually,” Nedd said, “to avoid drawing attention.”
“Right,” I said.
We hadn’t gone far before I realized I had no idea how to hurry casually.
I was pretty sure I looked anything but casual, bouncing down the road, trying to take everything in.
Nedd was walking with his thumbs hooked through the straps of his backpack, which held Squeeze and Twist. I had Nope in my own pack, though I didn’t think we would need a cytonic inhibitor, and even if we did, throwing one up might alert the enemy to our location.
I’d expected the streets to get less crowded as the day went on, but the level of traffic hadn’t changed much with the new shift.
We must have arrived in the morning, because the city wasn’t winding down at all.
Some of the buildings had lights on inside, and streetlights constantly illuminated the perpetual twilight.
Most buildings had large windows set into the same side, facing the sun to catch what light they could.
We found the mill—a large industrial building with a water duct running directly into it, coming from the direction of the water tank atop the city wall.
It had a large mural on the side with an image of a ship flying in front of a blue-and-green planet that could have been Earth.
The words For One, For All, For Elysium! were emblazoned across the top.
Beyond the mill, the water duct flowed on like an artificial river, lined with rocks and flanked by benches and beds of…
Oh stars, that was green grass. I’d heard of grass before, but I’d never seen it.
It was oddly spiky, little blades poking out of the ground like so many tiny swords.
It couldn’t be as violent as it looked, though, because people were sitting right on top of it, eating and chatting and enjoying the day.
Or night. Or whatever hour it was. My radio had a clock that would tell me what time it was back on Detritus, but that wouldn’t help here.
“Do you think anyone would notice if I touched it?” I asked.
“The river?” Nedd asked as we approached the bridge that stretched over the stream.
“No,” I said. “The grass.”
“Oh, that,” Nedd said. “Go for it. I’ll cover you.”
Nedd stood at my side as I stopped by the edge of the grass and pretended to adjust my boot, then reached to the side to touch the green plant.
Stars, it was soft! And fuzzy! I stifled a squeal and hopped up. “You have to try it,” I said.
“I’ll do it on the way back.”
Right. We shouldn’t both be freaks who pet grass. No one else was doing it, so I guessed it wasn’t some kind of custom, though it should be.
We wandered down a street with several restaurants, passing terraces where people gathered around tables, playing games with dice or cards, or sitting and talking over their food.
“So what’s our story?” I asked Nedd.
“Our story?”
“Yeah. Who are we? Why are we here? Where do we live?”
“You’re Sadie and I’m Nedd,” Nedd said. “That seems easiest, right?”
“Right.” I’d already told Liba my real name. It would be easiest to stick to that. We’d used our callsigns over the radio, so Ivy didn’t know our names. “And we’re…friends? Siblings? Total strangers who have never met before?”
“Friends,” Nedd said. “That’s also true.”
Oh nice. Nedd thought of me as a friend! I mean, it would have been ideal if he’d thought of me as more, but thinking of me as more than just a flightmate was amazing—and at least he didn’t want to pretend to be siblings. That would be weird, and I’d probably be bad at it.
“Great. Friends. Who are fans of the Ascension Games. Of which we have seen exactly one match and don’t totally understand the rules.” I scrunched my nose. That didn’t add up. It was a good thing I was talking through this now and not in front of people.
“We’re new fans,” Nedd said. “We work on a rice farm and traveled into the city to see our first match today.”
“And we have all the questions!” I said. “Hey! We’re so good at this!”
Nedd grinned at me, and I almost forgot who I was supposed to be again.
Oh right. Myself. The only lie we’d come up with so far was that we worked on a rice farm.
“Do you know anything about farming rice?” I asked. We’d seen dishes with rice in them outside the coliseum, so we knew they farmed it here.
“Didn’t you grow up in the farming cavern?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But the only rice we grew was made of coagulated algae. I’m pretty sure rice doesn’t naturally grow in a vat.”
“Yum,” Nedd said. “I love it when my food is coagulated.”
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought we were flirting.
But Nedd joked around like this with everyone, so I was pretty sure we weren’t.
“Good,” I said. “Once I tried to explain the algae coagulation process during dinner and T-Stall told me if I ever used that word again while he was eating I would be dead to him.”
“Okay,” Nedd said, “but do you think anyone in this pub will interrogate us about rice farming techniques?”
“Good point.” They probably wouldn’t ask us questions at all. Everyone would be too focused on the gladiators.
We found the Angry Badger set back from the road with a large terrace in front, a shingled awning erected over it to protect the tables from rain.
The doors on the far side of the terrace stood wide open and welcoming.
Serving staff wandered among the tables, which were mostly full.
It didn’t look much different from the pub we used to go to when I was in flight school, except for the total lack of DDF-issued jumpsuits.
The pub’s patrons were dressed in the same woven fabrics we’d seen, though there were fewer ponchos and headscarves here.
Like at the coliseum, the crowd came from a cross section of society, with some wearing fancier outfits—jackets, lapels, collars, and buttons—and others wearing loose-fitting shirts like the barge workers wore.
Most patrons had plates of food in front of them, and the smell of meat and spices was intoxicating.
I didn’t spot any gladiators, though I’d only seen two of them in the arena, and those from very far away, so I wasn’t totally sure I would recognize one when I saw them.
Nedd strode confidently through the crowd, flexing his prosthetic inside its glove. We walked through the terrace, into the pub, and up to the bar, where we found a pair of empty stools and waited for the bartender.
“Are there any gladiators here today?” I asked when he arrived to take our order.
“Not yet,” he said. “They might be busy training or spending time with their families, what with the End Times and all.”
“Yeah, what’s that about?” Nedd asked. “Why the big rush to send everyone to Elysium? Did something happen?”
“We’re winning the war!” the bartender said. “Hopefully soon the fighting will be over, and then we’ll get off this forsaken planet.”
Getting off this planet was exactly what we wanted for them, but I doubted Ivy could say the same. “Where would you go, if you could?” I asked.
The bartender shrugged. “Anywhere, I guess. There’s a whole galaxy out there to explore, once the aliens stop trying to kill us.”
They already have, I wanted to tell him, but breaking that news was definitely above my pay grade—and besides, I didn’t have any proof, so he probably wouldn’t believe me.
“You think the gladiators are off preparing?” I asked. “Where would they do that?”
“What do I know?” the bartender said. “I’m not their secretary. What can I get you?”
I looked at Nedd. There was no reason for us to spend our money here if no gladiators were coming, though maybe we could get someone else talking so as not to call it a total loss. We had to wait for Arturo’s team to scout the coliseum either way.
“Do you have anything with no alcohol?” I asked.
“We’ve got colada,” the bartender said.
“We’ll take two of those,” Nedd said.
“Sure,” the bartender said. He pulled out two smoky-colored glasses from under the bar and poured them both full. “Four bits.”