Chapter 5 #3
Behind us, Angie and Jewels are refueling both trucks.
Lou and Trixie, who still hasn’t looked my way let alone spoken to me, draw the kids over to the playground.
Even just a few miles over the border, California is all set up and ready for tourists, showing off their beautiful and very wealthy country.
As the older children run ahead, Lou and Trixie, who has the toddler on her hip, bow their heads together in a quiet conversation.
Cal pauses, watching Lou as I wander into the store.
Like the diner and the playground area, the store has a retro feel to it, but it’s a manufactured aesthetic rather than refurbished.
Three old-fashioned, coin-operated slot machines are displayed across the wall opposite the main entrance.
A large green neon sign overhead blazes: Try Your Luck.
“Little obvious, isn’t it?” I mutter. Then I realize that my forearm is still empty. There’s no grumpy death god there to share snarky observations with.
Cal lingers outside. I’m alone. But just as that yawning cavern in my chest threatens to crack open, the bonds hooked into my rib cage, right over my heart, warm. As if I had reached for them by instinct — the gryphon and the man.
Even though there are still far too many miles between us, I swear, just for a moment, that I feel a surge coming from the other direction.
Rought is reaching for me, feeling for me.
I press my hand to my chest, trying to hold onto the feeling. Then I pick up my pace.
The universe isn’t done with me. There are obviously more imbalances to shift in the correct direction before I get to go home.
A single coin sits on the console of the center slot machine, as if just randomly abandoned and forgotten. Hard currency is so rare in California that I doubt the gas station deals in any of it.
“You can buy a set of blanks,” the clerk behind the counter calls out to me cheerily before he returns his attention to the customer in front of him.
I pluck up the coin, insert it into the machine, and pull the lever. The slot machine clanks. Lights twinkle and flash. Then the central dials or whatever they’re called start to spin. One by one, each slows, eventually settling to display a single red heart.
Three red hearts in a row.
I mutter again. “Playing matchmaker, are we?” But despite my sarcasm, I stare at the three hearts just a little too long …
Is the third heart a bit tarnished around the edges? Or am I just seriously sleep deprived?
The slot machine all but explodes in a blaze of flashing lights and jangling music. Then dozens upon dozens of coins, mostly blanks, drop into a receptacle near the bottom of the machine.
“Holy crow!” the clerk cries, skirting around the counter.
“I’ve never seen any of these machines —” He cuts himself off, perhaps realizing he was about to expose company secrets — as in the machines being really just for display.
He blinks down at the large pile of coins and blanks, then rubs the back of his neck.
“Um, that’s, um, that’s a lot to count up. ”
I point to the display on the machine, which helpfully reads ‘$500’ in blinking lights.
“Right,” he says, his grin returning. “Great, um, let me get a container.”
“I just need four of your dollar scratch lotto tickets and a pair of sunglasses,” I say. “You can keep the change.”
He finally looks at me. “Keep the change? That’s … that’s like … that’s most of the winnings.”
I remove the cheap pair of sunglasses I grabbed at the last gas station. “Can you do better than these?”
The clerk blanches at the sight of my eyes.
As a null, he can’t feel my energy, my essence, but he obviously knows what purple eyes mean.
Education is a priority in California, including how to identify predators.
He’ll be making a call to the local police to report an awry sighting the moment I leave the area. Maybe even before.
“Your darkest, most expensive pair?” I ask, waving the sunglasses in my hand.
He bobs his head. “I have … I actually have a … it’s weird, but I saw this pair of glasses at the pawnshop yesterday. Vintage, you know. And I … they don’t even fit me well, but I bought them anyway …”
I laugh quietly. “They’re for me.”
The clerk breathes a little shakily, nodding. Then he stumbles over his feet as he crosses back around the counter without taking his eyes off me. Not as if I’m going to attack, but as if he can’t believe what he’s seeing.
He pulls a backpack out from under the counter, then tugs out a black glasses case, passing it to me while being careful to not touch my fingers.
I open the case, plucking out the black-and-gold-framed vintage designer glasses and sliding them on. “Perfect.”
The clerk blinks at me. Then a ghost of his former smile curls over his lips. “They look better on you.”
“Thank you.” It’s totally psychological and just a little bit snobby, but I swear my headache eases a little more. “The lotto tickets?”
“Four, right?” He lifts the polymer top of the shallow display case on the counter between us that holds dozens of lottery tickets. “Do you want me to pick for you?”
“Why break your winning streak?” I grin. Then, as his hand hovers over the twenty-five-dollar tickets in the corner closest to him, I add, “Just the dollar ones.”
“I can’t really take your jackpot,” he says quietly. “Employees aren’t allowed to buy the tickets or play the slots.”
“But you can accept tips?”
He nods.
I deliberately look up to one of the cameras angled toward us. “Then if anyone questions it, you have it all on video.” I will the camera to pick up my image, for more than one reason. “But no one will question you about it.”
The clerk pulls four different one-dollar scratch tickets from the display, lowers the lid, and slides them toward me.
I reach for them. Essence shifts under my hand, under my fingertips, as I lightly touch the back of his hand. “Good luck,” I say simply, allowing the wish to settle on him as it wills.
Being that he’s a null, it might not do anything at all. Or in the moment he really needs to take one path over another, make one choice over another, it might steer him in the direction he needs to go.
“Good luck to you!” He flashes me that big grin again.
I take the tickets, more of my essence sinking into them without any intent on my part as I step back from the counter and cross out of the store.
Jewels and Angie have pulled the trucks back into the side parking lot to join Lou and Trixie in the playground area.
Sara Ann has Trixie’s toddler strapped into a swing — trust California to mandate safety measures on swing sets — even though she’s barely big enough to push him.
The other three still-nameless kids are arrayed around a patio table, sipping sodas and eating sandwiches that must have been premade.
I’m not certain how Jewels could have otherwise obtained them so quickly.
Despite the kids’ uniformly dark hair and the various shades of tanned skin that their birth mothers matched as carefully as possible to the Cataclysm’s features, I don’t have to look at the threads of essence surrounding them to know they aren’t his get.
Jewels and the others have been playing a deadly game, risking more than just their lives.
I suspect that if the Cataclysm had much contact with the children at all, it would have been the clear signs of Cal’s parentage keeping him from looking too closely at the others.
And that reprieve wouldn’t have held for much longer.
Cal sits sullenly on the bottom of the slide, facing me but watching the group of women with narrowed eyes. “You said you were going to feed me, Zaya,” he says loudly, and not just for my benefit.
Lou and Trixie actually flinch, then spin so their backs aren’t to me as I approach. Jewels smiles, almost gently apologetic. Angie looks exhausted, but still … wary. Even more than she was at our first meeting.
I brush off a weird sense of rejection. I’ve spent hours with them, gotten them to safety, yet they’re still huddled together trying to figure out what to do with me.
Jewels starts. “Zaya —”
“You’re heading out. Without me,” I say preemptively. “We already settled that.”
She flushes. “Not if you —”
I hold the four tickets fanned out in my hand, arm stretched between us. Jewels hesitates, which just pisses me off further.
“When your future is so easily offered to you,” Angie says, admonishing her daughter, “you grab it with both hands and you hold on as hard as you can.” She takes one of the two tickets in the center of the fan, sliding it into the pocket of her skirt.
Then she bows her head and reverently taps three fingers over her heart.
“You bless us this day, Conduit. May everything you give to others come back to you threefold.”
There’s that number three again. The universe is not playing around today. Or maybe it thinks I’m just stubborn, willful. I’m not, really. Not until it’s over something important, like rescuing Presh.
But what if I don’t want all three? What if one of them is a real fucking asshole who set me up to die, like, more than once?
My gaze shifts to Lou and Trixie, and I speak without thinking about it — apparently because the universe is feeling pissy itself. “The thread is woven alongside choice and misdeeds.”
“Indeed,” Angie murmurs, looking pointedly at Jewels.
“Thank you, Zaya,” Jewels murmurs.
“Thank you for doing what you could,” I say.
“I’m … I’m not sure I had any other choice,” she says a little stiffly. Apparently, once she was done with the terrified and then joyful tears, she started thinking everything through. Or now that they feel relatively safe, Lou’s whispering in her ear has gained a little more hold.