Chapter 5 #2
As we lift, the estate shrinks behind us into a tidy glow.
The vineyards comb the hills into neat waves; the towers hold up the sky like stubborn fingers.
I look back once and catch the faint glint of the guards at the east wall and—for a breath that hurts—the silhouette I know by posture alone, high on the parapet, watching the ridge line.
The night blurs him into ink. The night blurs everything.
The hoverlounge floats where the highway breaks and the land forgets which way is down.
A platform suspended on humming anti-gravs, wrapped in a spine of neon that throbs pink and ultramarine, it looks like a jellyfish someone taught to love bad decisions.
The underside glows with safety lights for the sober; the top is a kaleidoscope of bodies and lights and the promise of anonymous joy.
The wind up here tastes like ozone and fried sugar and melted plastic, a carnival no one can shut down.
We slip into a parking lattice and the Midge settles with a satisfied chirr.
At the entry ramp, a bouncer the size of a freight crate—Kilgari, four arms, glossy carapace catching the neon—checks IDs with two hands while the other two direct traffic.
CynJyn leans in, murmurs something in Kilgari that sounds like a dare and a blessing, palms a little black chip the size of a fingernail.
The bouncer’s mandibles flex in a grin; their upper hands stamp our wrists with a phosphor sigil that blooms under the UV wash.
“Welcome to the Drop,” they rumble.
The ramp hums up into the pulse. The floor inside is semi-clear, layered glass looking down into the lit struts and the traffic far below—like walking on a river made of light.
Sound hits like weather; bass wraps my chest and shakes loose whatever’s stuck in there.
People move in eddies, all color and heat and breath and laughter that doesn’t carry last names.
A wall of screens stutters and glitches in beautiful ways.
Lights travel like comets and come back as confetti.
CynJyn grabs my hand and squeezes. “Let’s make you remember you’re alive.”
I squeeze back, because for the first time in days I don’t feel like a statue with a borrowed smile. We step forward into the neon and the noise, and the air tastes like a thousand bad decisions I desperately want to make.
The Drop is an electric fever dream pretending to be a building.
The floor hums like a beast under glass, the bass turning my bones into tuning forks, and the lights—gods, the lights—spill over everything in pinks and electric blues until even the shadows look expensive.
The air tastes like fried sugar and ozone and a fake apricot smoke that sticks to the back of my tongue.
We step into the current and it swallows us whole; CynJyn tightens her grip on my hand and yanks me toward the center where bodies move like a storm found rhythm.
“Rule one,” she shouts in my ear as glitter hisses from a ceiling vent and salt-dust sparks across my lips, “if you can still think about duty, you’re doing it wrong.”
“I always think about duty,” I yell back, but the DJ slams the beat and my body votes no with both hips.
The gang sluices around us—Lloyd shouldering a path, Boo Boo already sniffing out a food stand, Smurfette counting cameras with a predator’s calm, Chuckles grinning like low light was invented to honor him.
I’m laughing before I know I’ve started, a hot, startled sound that tastes like freedom.
A glass appears in my hand, glowing violet under the UV wash.
It’s cold and sweet and a little dangerous; bubbles pop sharp as sparks on my tongue.
Under the blacklight the stamp on my wrist blooms into a tiny galaxy, and for a second I let myself be just a girl with stars on her skin.
We jump as the bass dips and rises; bodies brush and break away; someone slings an apology in three languages; I sling one back in two, and we’re all grinning like we got away with a crime.
Except no one ever gets away with being who they are.
A cluster at the edge of the dance circle catches the light wrong: cloaks cut too perfectly to be “unmarked,” a half mask paired with a family crest ring, posture that screams portrait practice.
Nobles, badly disguised, slumming it as oxygen.
One of them laughs too crisp for this place; another can’t stop glancing at the nearest camera to make sure anonymity notices them.
I tip my glass to shield my face, which is useless because the metal thread in my jacket loves UV like a cat loves sunbeams.
CynJyn clocks them too. “Tourists,” she says, rolling her eyes. “They come here to purchase a pulse.”
“Maybe they’re here for the synth-calamari,” I say, and then a ribbon of hot oil and fake lemon snakes through the air from a food pod and my stomach forgets politics. We surf the crowd to the counter where Boo Boo already stands, dual-wielding skewers with a look that says fight me.
“Share,” I beg, reaching.
“Trade,” she counters, hooking a brow. “One coil for whatever’s in your rave goblet.”
“It’s probably poison,” I warn, hand already out.
“Then we’ll die sparkly,” she decides, and gives me the bigger piece. The batter shatters between my teeth, crisp giving way to silky chew, sauce dripping down my knuckle. I lick it and don’t care who watches. That’s the point here—nobody’s supposed to care.
The DJ swings the tempo into a dirty groove and the floor answers, a thousand steps laying down a single heartbeat.
The layered glass shows a ghost of us from below—fractured reflections, girls and boys and everyone in between smearing into color.
A strobe catches a ribbon-wrapped pillar and a streak of gold slices the dark in my periphery.
My heart misfires; I whip around like I’ve heard my name.
It’s a column. Just a column. The relief is nearly anger.
“Okay, your face did a thing,” CynJyn says, leaning into my shoulder so I feel her laugh through my bones. “Snack-spotting or future-sighting?”
“Pillar,” I say, taking another swallow I don’t need. “Pillar pretending to be my bad decisions.”
Smurfette appears at my other side, eyes narrowed at the ceiling rig. “Pillars are suspicious. They hold up capitalism.”
Chuckles barks out a laugh and steers us toward a lower bar where the lights stop trying to undress us. The counter is matte graphite, the bartender a glitter-armored oracle who looks like they know more secrets than the senate. “What’ll make you forget your surname for a half hour?” they ask.
“My first name for ten,” I say, and a glass slides to me smelling like smoke and citrus pith. I sip and the edges of the room sand down. The bass drops a floor deeper. The Drop leans in like it wants to hear me confess.
“I hate being a pawn,” I tell CynJyn, too loud, then quieter, which makes it worse.
“I hate that everyone smiles like I’m a parade float for peace.
They talk about legacy and ports and tariffs and songs—great, fantastic, let’s get bards on payroll—but I didn’t vote for this with my body.
Sneed schedules my breathing.” I swallow, and the drink turns to heat where it lands.
“And I don’t even hate him, which would make it easier.
Kaspian is… nice. He listens. He didn’t even gloat when I dropped a wineglass like a debutante.
He made a stupid little shore in his palm for a tree and it was sweet and I wanted to kick him into a fountain for being earnest.”
“You hate the wall,” CynJyn says, bumping me. “Not the guy stuck on the other side of it with you.”
“I hate the wall,” I agree, and then the wall grows eyes in my head.
“His eyes,” I hear myself say, and my throat softens like it forgot how to be defensive.
“Rayek’s. That molten-coin color? Looks flat from a distance, predator-flat, and then you stand close enough to count the layers and it’s…
it’s not flat. It’s deep. It’s so much. And the scar over his left eye—jagged, not elegant, like something that didn’t want to let go.
When he’s thinking hard it pulls a little, and his mouth goes tight, and I know before he knows that he’s about to say something he’ll pretend he didn’t mean. ”
CynJyn’s smile tilts. She doesn’t save me. “Go on.”
“And his hands,” I breathe, because the words have started and stopping feels like choking.
“When he’s planning, he holds his fingers like he’s balancing a thought between them.
When he’s worried, he taps his claws against his thigh—three beats in, three out, like a drill he can’t unlearn.
When he’s… when he’s proud of me, he does this thing where he almost smiles and then the corner of his mouth—” I demonstrate on my own face, ridiculous, drunk on honesty. “He thinks I don’t see it.”
“Star.”
I finally look up. CynJyn has her eyebrows in that I win the obvious position. “You are so not over him.”
“I am—” I try on a lie; it splits at the seams. “I am extremely complicated about him.”
“You are in love with him in a way that is not convenient for dinner seating,” she says, squeezing my elbow. “It happens.”
“It is not supposed to happen to me.” I scrub a hand over my face. The glitter there moves like tiny constellations. “I’m supposed to be a crest with a pulse.”
“You’re a person with a crest,” she corrects lightly.
“And he is a person with a job, and those two truths are trying to kill each other in public.” She glances toward the dance floor where a masked noble nearly drops a flute of something neon and recovers with vaudeville grace.
“Make him see you, or stop looking. But don’t split yourself in half forever.
You only have one spine; stop letting everybody else rent it. ”