Chapter 5 #2
Having her material needs met at the Station still felt different from having money in Dead Earth, and despite the—to her—absurdly large balance now in her checking account, booking the hotel room had nearly given her an apoplexy due to the cost. She accepted the return of her debit card and a set of room keys, and dragged her companions to the elevators.
As the doors dinged shut, leaving them as the lift’s only occupants, a thought occurred to her.
“How did you and Morgen stay anywhere on your grand Dead Earth tour without a bank account? Hotels don’t take cash anymore. ”
“Prepaid credit cards,” Morgen said.
She supposed she really should have thought of that.
The elevator went up. And up. And up. And up.
It finally opened on the fifty-third floor and they filed out, Nyx checking the plaques on the walls for the room numbers.
They passed an alcove with an ice maker and a vending machine, and had to stop and wait while Morgen fed one-dollar bills into the latter.
“I love these things,” he said, punching in the letter-number combination for a bag of Bugles.
Nyx couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, me too.”
“The machines or the corn-chip product?” Evra asked.
“Both,” she and Morgen replied in unison. He grinned, handed Nyx the bag of Bugles and got another one for himself. She kind of wanted to also get the Milky Way Midnight hanging out in slot C13—a rare find—but instead took her bag of Bugles and led everyone down the hall to their suite.
The space was both larger and nicer than her last studio apartment in Tempe, and the cost for one night, after taxes and fees, was more than the studio’s monthly rent.
It had two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen stocked with a shocking amount of booze that no doubt cost a fortune in incidentals, and three televisions.
Morgen whistled as they walked in and promptly went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, out which Nyx had to admit the view was impressive.
While he was gawking, Evra inspected the suite’s two bedrooms. “Morgen and I will take this one,” she said, tossing her bag and Morgen’s into the bedroom with the king-sized bed.
It was also the bedroom that had the jetted tub in the bath, but Nyx wasn’t going to complain.
She didn’t think she was going to be in the mood for long relaxing soaks in the tub on this trip anyway.
That left the slightly smaller bedroom and the foldout couch in the living room.
Nyx hadn’t really given much thought to the sleeping arrangements beyond the suite having three beds, because prior to this morning, she wouldn’t have given a second thought to putting Kaden on the couch, mostly because she knew him well enough to know he wouldn’t care.
Now, feeling mildly guilty about what she’d said in the car, she said, “You can have the other bedroom, if you want. I can take the couch.”
“This is fine.”
“I don’t mind. If you want—”
“The couch is fine, Nyx,” he said, in that voice that said the matter was closed.
“Okay.” She stalked into the other room, dropping her own bag next to the bed and walking over to the bedroom window.
Twitching the curtains back, she looked out.
She knew she should be feeling something—some awe at the city around her.
The high-rises, the Empire State Building.
The ingenuity of human construction that had managed to build so many tall structures so close together.
But all she felt, looking at the press of buildings, was the impossibility of their situation.
She opened her bag of chips as she wandered back into the living room, listening to the satisfyingly squeaky sound of the seal giving, and drowned her sense of inadequacy in salty, crunchy goodness.
She resisted the urge to put the Bugles on her fingertips before she ate them, mostly because she was no longer ten, which meant her fingers were considerably larger and Bugles no longer reliably fit on them.
She had crunched her way through half of the bag before Morgen came over, having made approximately the same amount of progress through his own bag.
“We still have several hours before nightfall,” he said, “and all of the tourist propaganda claims this is the City that Never Sleeps, so we can most likely make a fair amount of progress today. Should we head out now?”
Nyx set the bag of chips aside and wiped her hands on her jeans. “Yeah—about that. I was talking with Evra, and we were thinking you and Kaden should try tracking while we hit up the more conventional methods.”
Morgen frowned. “I’m not following.”
“You and Kaden are on magic detail, Evra and I are on library detail.”
Morgen raised an eyebrow. “You want to take Evra to a library. To do research. That Evra?” He pointed at his girlfriend, who was lounging on the couch.
The ’s response was a throw pillow sailing across the room to strike Morgen harmlessly on the shoulder. “I am capable of reading,” Evra said.
“Under duress, certainly,” Morgen answered, launching the pillow back across the room at her.
She caught it one-handed. “You are merely jealous because you will miss me.”
“Though I always miss you when you are gone from my side, in this instance, I am concerned for Nyx’s mental wellbeing if she has to put up with you in a library for more than fifteen minutes.
” He frowned, directing his next statements to Nyx.
“And I am not sure what the utility is. I thought you already researched what you could.”