“And she told you what, exactly?” Eva asked, towing Vakar into her room and closing the door with a thought.
“She told me I should surprise you.”
Eva stared at him, openmouthed, and then erupted into laughter, unable to contain herself.
“You are,” she gasped between giggles, “too sweet to live.”
His confusion and embarrassment heightened, so she took pity on him and dragged him over to the bed. They had some time before they got to Abelgard, and she hadn’t taken that shower for nothing.
“Let me show you what Pink meant,” Eva said, grinning when she was rewarded with the scent of licorice and almonds, among other things.
Abelgard was affectionately termed a garden world by the humans who had settled there, but it was the kind of garden that was overgrown in some places and muddy in others, and had been otherwise trashed by an unfortunate proximity to intoxicated young people. It featured an exciting mix of densely populated urban nightmares, sprawling city-states, and idyllic country manors maintained by robots for their absent owners. There was also at least one underwater metropolis periodically resettled and eventually wrecked and abandoned by people whose philosophical leanings prized rational egoism.
Min brought La Sirena Negra down in Tyet-Ruru, one of the city-states, which had been built hundreds of years earlier and then rebuilt as buildings sank or were buried by soft sediment from seasonal flooding. It was split in the center by a winding river whose water looked murky and dense enough to stand on, with one side of the city mostly residential and the other more industrial, including the infamous Sump they were supposed to avoid because it was a bot-fighting hot spot. Looming over the shorter structures was the ivory-painted tower of Evident Academy, their first destination, much to Min’s disappointment.
“Who builds a skyscraper in the middle of a place like this?” Eva asked, staring at the awkwardly tall building with its holographic time display rotating around the top.
“Rich people,” Pink answered, curling her lip up. “Come on, girl, that ain’t even a question.”
Eva shrugged and checked her weapons. She didn’t expect much trouble from students, even assuming some of them were foolish enough to start something, but she had a feeling she and her crew wouldn’t be staying in the parent-approved areas of the city. Especially since Min was so keen to see what the bot fights in The Sump were like.
After some targeted q-net searches by Min, local law enforcement and college database hacking by Vakar, and old-fashioned snooping around by Eva and Pink, they learned a few important things.
First, Lashra Damaal had been through the area at the same time as Josh once again. Commwall ads for the Pod Pals were playing all over campus and in local student hangouts, and apparently Sylfe Company had hired a bunch of brand ambassadors to convince their friends how cool the little robots were. Worse, Damaal and Josh had gone to Evident Academy at the same time, and had apparently run in the same circles dealing with engineering and robotics and, to a lesser extent, venture capitalism.
Second, and infinitely more appealing to Eva since it didn’t involve Garilia, a mysterious bot-fighting champion in The Sump had been trashing all their opponents with an unreasonably overpowered bot, and they claimed to have connections to The Fridge, having escaped a huge firefight at a secret facility thanks to their own skill and ingenuity.
“That could be Josh!” Sue said, clapping her hands in excitement when she found out.
“It could be,” Eva agreed, but she wasn’t so sure. If it was, and if he was being so vocal about escaping from The Fridge, how had no one found him already? Surely that would have been easy enough for Mari to track, and she hadn’t mentioned it when Abelgard came up in their conversation. So either this person was lying, they had gotten very lucky, or The Fridge had found them already and gave no shits about getting them back.
At the very least, Eva was hoping it might be one of Josh’s mystery companions, who could give them more information about what Josh was up to and where he might have gone next.
If Sue was excited about the prospect of exploring The Sump, Min’s eyes practically sparkled.
“Jackpot!” she shouted through the speakers of La Sirena Negra, so loud Eva’s ears rang. “This is gonna be great. I had friends who started fighting here, and they always said it was the most fun, because you had all these rich college kids who thought they were literally the best, and the looks on their faces when you trashed their fancy bots were like, ahhh. So good.” She rushed around getting dressed and brushing her wild blue hair and making Pink plait it into a braid while Mala and a handful of other cats watched, their tails lashing back and forth unhappily.
“No fighting,” Eva said. “You know that, right?” She stood in the mess munching on one last snack before departure.
Min wagged her finger at Eva. “Come on, Cap, I don’t even have a bot. How would I fight without a bot?”
Sue choked on the tea she had been nursing, coughing profusely. Min rubbed her back absently.
“Take it down a level, Number One,” Pink teased. She had splurged on a few snacks at Evercon and was happily demolishing a container of something similar to chicharrones.
“I’m not Number One anymore,” Min replied. She smiled wistfully and reached up to fiddle with her braid. “I’m sure nobody remembers me. It was so long ago.”
Eva witnessed Min’s skills back when she first poached the pilot from the bot pits to come fly La Sirena Negra instead. “Number One” earned her name along with her reputation by wrecking every opponent who faced her, with whatever bot she could sync her neural implants with. It had been quite the sight: two hulking metal monstrosities facing off in an area the size of a cargo bay, punching and kicking each other before ramping up to more esoteric weapons like flamethrowers and nanoswords and even a last-ditch energy weapon that Min had rendered utterly useless by the simple act of dodging its beam.
And then the loser tried to kill Min, so Eva stomped his arm to jelly with her gravboot. Unfortunately, he had friends—or, rather, like-minded fighters who were tired of not winning. Eva had already planned to offer Min a temporary job, and Min was genuinely delighted to take it.
Ah, the good old days, for loose definitions of good.
Eva suppressed the urge to tousle Min’s carefully arranged hair. “Plenty of people remember you. Especially the ones whose asses you kicked.”
“Maybe.” Min’s expression brightened. “My friend Yeon-ha will be there. They said they could show us around. We used to call ourselves Team Diva, the times we played in doubles matches.”
“No fighting,” Eva repeated, with substantially less conviction than before. “We don’t want to draw too much attention to ourselves. We get in, we find this mystery champion, and we get out.”
Sue nodded, but her thoughtful expression remained, and she kept glancing back toward the cargo bay in a way that made Eva’s teeth itch.
The Sump was about what Eva expected for a place named after a nasty waste-collecting pit: dirty and overrated. The streets were littered with trash being slowly corralled by ancient sweeper bots, despite the presence of standard waste recyclers at every intersection. The buildings were clustered together without enough room between them for a rat to squeeze through, and their cheap holosigns flickered when they worked at all. It smelled like body-scenting nanites and hormones and the stale ozone tang of single-user transit pods. There were bars and brothels and, of course, places to buy incredibly cheap dorm furniture that would last longer than you would expect, unless someone decided to go on a bender and start throwing chairs.