“The what?” Sue asked, her brow furrowing. “Committees?”
“Snitches,” Eva said, curling her lip in a snarl. “Have to make sure your little revolution doesn’t start its own counterrebellion. But hey, maybe these folks are just checking to see that every neighborhood is happy and healthy instead of rounding up political prisoners for fun and profit.”
“Eva,” Pink said, her tone a warning. Eva nodded even as she rolled her eyes.
“Right, so, the plan,” Eva said. “Vakar, you’re going to—”
“Infiltrate the local networks and attempt to determine whether there is any trace of a Joshua Zafone,” Vakar said. He munched on a stack of nutrient cubes, their smell and texture similar to a mild cheese, and washed it down with a plant-based shake.
“Pink?”
“Pop into a medical center and see if they need help,” Pink said. “With all these tourists, they could probably use someone with broad cross-species experience, and someone might be willing to talk about recent human patients. As long as it doesn’t violate any laws or ethics, mind.”
“Sue?” Eva asked, throwing a fake scowl at Pink, who shook her head.
“I’m going with you to, um.” Sue stared at her reconstituted potato mash, her pale skin mottled from discomfort. “Talk? To people?”
“Some people will be talked to, yes.” Eva took a bite of her own food, talking around it with a hand in front of her mouth. “We’re going to scout out the tourist centers to see what kind of human presence there is, and ask around about any particular humans who might have come through in the past six months.”
“And I’m coming, too,” Min said, slurping up a noodle for emphasis.
Eva paused, fork halfway to her mouth. “No, you’re staying on the ship.”
Min shook her head, blue hair swaying around her face. “I want to see the Attuned! And the Pod Pals. This place is way too awesome for me to stay in here.”
“It’s also dangerous,” Pink said. “Y’all are soft as a baby kitten.”
Min licked sauce off the corner of her mouth. “Oh, right, Mala wants to come, too!”
The calico cat sauntered in as if summoned, her tail straight up, hazel eyes surveying the available food options. With a gentle chirrup, she approached Pink and began to rub against her legs, meowing plaintively.
Eva swallowed. “No me diga,” she said. “We’re on a mission, not a vacation.”
Vakar smelled pensive. “Perhaps you will appear less suspicious or threatening if you are believed to be tourists.”
Eva squinted at him, then looked at Pink, who was making a similar face. “What do you think?” Eva asked.
“I don’t love it, but he’s not wrong,” Pink said. “You think you can babysit both of them and still get anything done?”
Min and Sue erupted into complaints about being compared to children, talking over each other almost too fast for Eva to understand. Eva gave a sharp whistle to cut them off, then put her fork down on her plate and shoved her chair back from the table.
“You’re not children, but you’re also not trained in more than basic self-defense,” Eva said. “So the deal is, if I take you, I do any and all fighting while you two run or hide. I do all talking to the locals, all bargaining, everything. You act like you’re tethered to my antigrav belt so you don’t get lost, and por favor, do not touch anything. Me entiendes?”
“Can we bring our bots?” Sue asked.
“No,” Eva and Pink responded in unison.
Sue and Min nodded and murmured assent, continuing to eat their food.
A plaintive meow and gentle pressure drew Eva’s attention downward. Mala had rubbed against her leg and was going in for another pass, pausing only to look up at Eva.
“You can’t come,” Eva said.
“Miau.” Mala’s pupils dilated briefly.
“No, you’re a tiny snack pack, don’t be ridiculous.”
“Miau.”
Eva glared at the cat. “If you come, you’re walking. I’m not gonna carry you.”
“Miau.”
“Fine. If you pee in my backpack, I’m giving you to a local.”
Mala purred and rubbed against Eva’s leg. Malcriada.
Eva had a bad feeling about all this, but she told herself that was just her own enormous sense of shame talking. With luck, one of them would find something, some hint of a trail that would lead them to Josh quickly, and then it would be smooth sailing back to Mari haloed in the sweet glow of success.
Sure, and maybe they’ll elect you the first ever president of space, Eva thought, glaring at the last few bites of beans and rice on her plate.
After a series of cable-car rides—which consisted of the whole crew snuggling in one car that periodically detached from existing cables and floated over to alternate ones—they arrived at the seaside tourist district, itself an arm of Spectrum City that extended directly from the spaceport for the convenience of the many visitors flocking to the pristine white beaches and their accompanying attractions. The water, as Eva’s commlink sensors and her newly engaged guide VI informed her, was a dihydrogen monoxide solution measuring a pleasant thirty-five degrees Celsius, its waves lapping serenely at the accumulation of carbonate minerals that comprised the shoreline. Different species preferred to interact with the natural treasure in different ways, with some taking holovids, some resting on or above the sand, and some swimming or floating languidly in the ocean. Some also appeared to be drinking the water, which struck Eva as highly questionable given her own experience with oceans, but she wasn’t there to wreck anyone’s good time.
Far enough from the beach to avoid sound pollution, a cluster of standard vacation experiences had been arranged to lure in an array of visiting species. Stores, restaurants, gaming rooms, museums, art galleries, science exhibits, concert halls, parks . . . everything was clean and orderly and had the air of being designed by a committee after extensive research and focus groups. There were also medical facilities and quantumnet cafés, among other modern conveniences, situated on side streets since they had less alluring fabulosity associated with them. All the buildings were constructed from the same translucent materials, their bold colors and geometric shapes forming bright shadows on the ground based on the angle of the blazing-white star overhead.
Eva and her crew passed a trio of xana in pale-gray uniforms wearing antigrav harnesses, all apparently unarmed. They were almost a full meter taller than Eva, their arms and torsos relatively thin but their thighs thick with their species’ equivalent of muscle. Soft, short fur covered the exposed parts of their bodies, in different patterns of alternating pale and dark stripes. Their eyes were huge and black, with no visible irises, their ears small and pointed, mouths thin and lipless under a rounded snout. Long prehensile tails were hooked primly into loops extending out from the back of their necks—part of their clothing, not their anatomy.
Each of them also had an Attuned, either nearby or in direct contact with them. One resembled a turtle, but was bipedal and had its own tail that curled into a spiral. Another was like a small featherless todyk, and the third was more or less a walking plant with a face.