“I’ll buy it,” Regina said immediately.
“Mami, no, por favor. Let’s go to another store, or I can always wear something I already have.” She didn’t have anything appropriate, and wasn’t sure how she would get it off the ship without being noticed and risking a quick deportation, but she could try.
Regina’s face took on a surprisingly serious expression, her eyes watery and glinting as they caught the light. “Mija, you never had a quince,” she said quietly.
“I didn’t want one,” Eva said. That was half true; Eva had wanted to have a wild night of karaoke with friends because she’d seen it on a holovid and it looked like the most fun ever. Her abuelos had offered to help pay for something, but her mother had been too proud to accept, and Eva had been too conscious of their wobbly finances to even think about asking for anything expensive. In the end, she got a commlink—not the newest model, but at least it was an implant instead of a cuff, and way better than the government-issued ones.
“I can afford it,” Regina insisted. “Por favor, Eva-Benita, let me do this for you.”
Eva’s stomach clenched as she fought every impulse to reject the offer outright. She was enough like her mother that the notion of being gifted something so expensive made her anxious; she didn’t want to feel indebted, burdened by a favor she would feel compelled to repay somehow, at an uncertain point in the future. Because Regina would absolutely keep this in her back pocket as emotional leverage, even if she didn’t mean it that way right now. And Eva knew she didn’t, that this was one of the awkward ways her mother showed love, that rejecting this would be like pushing a hug away.
Even so. It was a big ask. And Felsira was waiting in the room behind her, so she had to choose.
“Fine,” Eva said. “Allá tú.”
Regina shrieked and clapped her hands in excitement, rambling as she floated away to start dealing with the bill. Pink gave Eva a meaningful look that suggested she had followed a lot of Eva’s thoughts on their merry spacetrain ride, but approved of where it had stopped. She mimed a finger gun and shot it at Eva, her lips forming a silent pew-pew that shifted to a gentle smile.
Eva’s eyes widened, and she smiled back, but for an entirely different reason. She ambled back into the changing area, her outfit more or less forgotten.
“I have an idea,” she told Felsira. “I still need to talk it over with my crew, but I think it will improve our odds.” Pink might not agree with it, since she was still undecided about helping the resistance in the first place, but it was worth a shot. Literally.
Felsira’s psychic emanation gained a curious edge even as it stayed polite, her hands still folded together in front of her.
“But first,” Eva said. “I need to get the hell out of this outfit.”
Chapter 18
Party On
The party was held on the roof of the Sylfe Company headquarters, which were located on an island near Spectrum City. Other buildings were clustered around it, all of them in the same style as the ones back in the city, false trees with bright trunks and gleaming branches hanging down nearly to the ground, or smaller edifices clustered like mushrooms around what would be the roots. It was hard to tell which had been built first, whether this place was entirely new or had barged into an existing town and taken over the way the robot Attuned were trying to supplant the living ones, but either way it was an impressive sight.
Transports hovered around the building, some merely picking up and dropping off the partygoers, while others were tethered to cables or docked in nondescript bays. Some of the tethered ones were extended to the full length of their attachments, floating like balloons in the golden light of the setting star, the people inside having their own private parties as they conducted business or pleasure away from the rest of the action.
Eva hesitated to call it “action,” given the glacial speed at which everyone seemed to be moving inside the event itself. It was more like small groups of people forming and dissolving and re-forming as individuals drifted around, carrying drinks or bites of food catering to their particular biologies. The decorations were elegant, a combination of elaborate carvings similar to the ones back at the hotel where Eva and crew had been staying, plants whose root systems were carefully wound around and through translucent hydroponic devices while their tiny fragrant flowers perfumed the air, and light fixtures mimicking the traditional ones despite containing what were clearly robotic reproductions.
Probably with their own surveillance devices, Eva thought. Pervasive and sneaky. The place was also crawling with Watchers—well, not crawling, since they all held positions around the roof, and were standing unnervingly still. Even their Attuned were quiet; they might as well have been robots, too. Maybe they were? Eva couldn’t tell the difference between the animals and the Pod Pals at a distance.
((Pink?)) Vakar pinged at her.
((Not yet,)) Eva replied, checking the chronometer on her commlink. If anyone were monitoring her comms somehow, the exchange would hopefully be vague enough to be meaningless.
Assuming all went according to plan, Pink would soon be in position in a hovering transport on the cables of a nearby building, along with Jei and Nara. Sue had outfitted Pink’s sniper rifle with a device that would let her tag people at the party from a distance, the same way Sue had tagged Jei during their bot fight back on Abelgard. Eva could then use one of her commlink overlays to isolate the frequency and find that person more easily among the crowd.
Certainly it wouldn’t be simple for Eva to do it on the ground, as she had suspected. Even with her gravboots on, she was shorter than most of the other guests, and vastly smaller than the xana. Vakar was taller, thankfully, so between him and Pink she was hoping they’d be able to do what needed to be done.
At least Pink had let her keep the gravboots, after they’d figured out the jumpsuit would cover them. Pink still griped about the shape being wrong, and Regina had griped about not being allowed to buy Eva appropriate shoes—“Tacones, mija, dios mío, I raised you better than this”—but Eva had stayed firm. Bad enough she couldn’t bring any weapons besides her sonic knuckles, which were tastefully hidden underneath gloves the color of her skin, made from materials that shouldn’t show up on any sensors normally used for that purpose. She’d also managed to work the towline from her spacesuit into something that resembled a belt, which could function as a garrote in an emergency. Pink had griped about that, too, but she’d acknowledged that utility outweighed fashion in some cases.
Vakar had scrounged up his own formalwear, a layered white suit similar to the ones the xana wore, complete with silvery harness. He wouldn’t tell her where or how he got it, just kept saying, “I have my ways” and smelling smugly of lavender. He looked better than she felt, though the way he had practically reeked of licorice and kept nuzzling her with his palps on the ride over suggested he thought she looked fine.
Now he smelled like vanilla and rosewater with a dollop of mint, which Eva hoped would come across as standard party nerves to anyone with scent translators. Or to the other quennians present, of which there were at least two, neither of whom Vakar recognized and both of whom he fully intended to question at some point during the event. He had already reported some suspicions on the Pod Pals to his superiors, and they hadn’t mentioned anything about quennians being among Sylfe Company’s backers, so either they didn’t know or they had known and didn’t tell him.