It should have been easy. After all, I’d spent plenty of time people watching, and it took only a cursory familiarity with modern day media to get the general gist of what you were supposed to do. It helped that the basics weren’t entirely alien to me.

Have a plan.

Be consistent.

Make conversation, but don’t talk too much. Show the capacity to be a good listener, but make sure to add something to the conversation.

Be amicable. Friendliness and banter goes a long way to deescalating tension.

And of course, don’t be creepy.

Sae hammered the importance of the last point home. She seemed to enjoy her self-appointed role as my relationship coach a little too much, ever since I’d made the mistake of consulting her on a series of texts. The downside of that being the fact that her idea of teaching was repetition, and she seemed to fully expect this to blow up in my face. Which made me nervous.

way down.>

I swiped my messages away in annoyance, then checked myself in the mirror. A simple suit jacket over the top of my hoodie, white button-up underneath. Jeans, brown loafers. Couldn’t do anything about the dark bags under my eyes, but for the most part, I was satisfied with the ensemble. It was more layers than I’d consider wearing in the dead of winter, but I could put up with it for a few hours. Despite my earlier commitment to not rush, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t escape the feeling that this was a waste of time. That all I was doing was spinning my wheels when I needed to be doing something else, anything else. The feeling of problems piling up, a never ending collection of spinning plates, was only exacerbated by the timer. Too much to do and too little time.

Another message came in, and I nearly ignored it before pulling up my UI

I stopped mid-step.

Sunny—the more violent, less predictable co-leader of the suits—had been in the wind for weeks now. With his loyalists consistently disappearing or meeting with unfortunate accidents he’d put two and two together and split. Dallas was a big city, but it was still only one city. There were only so many places for him to hide with User powers in play. With that in mind, I’d cheated. Sent Max to scout likely hiding places, narrowing the search by factoring in Sunny’s known associates from Mile’s fed intel. When that didn’t work, I had Max more or less searching a grid, using his evaluation ability to ascertain the likelihood of finding Sunny within potential hiding places.

I hadn’t really expected it to work. If we could get to Sunny, that’d go a long way to removing one of the more problematic plates from my collection, one that’d been bothering me for some time.

It’d be one thing if I thought his hiatus would stick. That it was a full-blown retreat, rather than a tactical one. Sure, he’d threatened me, threatened my family, but I could be practical. If my problems were willing to eliminate themselves, I was more than happy to let that happen.

But I had a feeling Sunny wasn’t hiding. He was biding his time, lying in wait. And in isolation, he’d have all the time in the world to review who his enemies were, and narrow down the undoubtedly long list of who could possibly want him gone. He was one of the few people living that could connect me to Myrddin. In a way, he was even more likely to do that

It wasn’t great. The once grand Galleria, a massive three-story mall, first ravaged by the rise of Amazon and other online retailers, was practically derelict before everything kicked off. The few shops that remained were looted in short order after the dome appeared. Now it was a honeycombed husk of closed down retail stores and broken glass, populated by nothing but ghosts and the homeless.

To further complicate matters, the Galleria straddled the border of region 19 and region 20, slightly more on the nineteen side. If the rest of us were living in some weird System dystopia, suffice it to say that 19 and 20 were living in Mad Max. Significantly more guns, unhinged Users, and pissed off civilians than practically anywhere else. The only thing that’d stopped them from becoming more of a collective problem was that ever since the first transposition event they seemed to hate each other more than the rest of their neighbors and were perpetually at war with them. Said neighbors stopped engaging with them once they started driving around in system vehicles augmented with very much non-system firearms.

I hesitated, not entirely sure of the answer.

More than a few. Practically every week since I’d rescued Nick. It wasn’t like I was avoiding her intentionally. There was just always something coming up, something critical I couldn’t ignore. Realistically, given the clear scheduling issues, I wasn’t sure why she was still interested.

Come to think of it, that really was strange.

I closed the message with a dismissive wave and headed out the door.

/////

Had to hand it to the cleaning staff, the lobby was as sparkling as ever. The marble floors were reflective enough to be mirrors, and you had to look close to notice a few deep gouges in the wooden panels and impact craters no amount of polishing could hide. Beyond those, and a few short Corinthian columns absent busts, there was little evidence that the violence that occurred in the city at large had spilled over here.

I walked past a woman in a golden dress, probably a half-inch taller than me, looking for Tara, finding the lobby mostly unoccupied other than a man at the front desk and a few people moving in and out of the front-facing restaurant Tara worked as a waitress at.

I nearly moved that way, guessing she may have gone over to check-in before a voice called out from behind me.

“Matt?”

As it turned out, the woman in the golden dress was Tara. I’d only ever seen her in her work clothes, but what had really thrown me off was the makeup. Either she didn’t usually wear it, or her makeup for work was of the lighter, more “natural,” variety. Not to call her current make up heavy, but with careful contouring on her cheeks and something she’d done to her eyebrows to make them darker, in contrast with her curly blonde hair, gave her a distinctively fresh look. It must have taken hours. Paired with the designer heels and light pink clutch, she was dressed to the nines. She offered me a small smile, smokey makeup crinkling around her brown eyes.

Oh, no. Jaded eye murmured

“Oh, no.” I agreed.

“Oh… no?” She repeated, confused.

God dammit. Of course I said that out loud.

“Uh, sorry. Underdressed. Just gotta go back upstairs and change.” I muttered, overwhelmed with a sudden desire to run away.

“No, you don’t.” She grabbed my left arm in both of hers, wheeling me back around towards the door. “Relax, you look cute.” Then, lower, almost whispered. “And if I let you get on that elevator I’m guessing I may never see you again.”

I forced an awkward chuckle and escorted her outside.

The drive to the restaurant, while still somewhat awkward, was less harrowing than it could have been. Tara was skilled at filling silence, regaling me with personal details and stories about her life. It wasn’t the inane chatter of a narcissist, or someone with a hyper-inflated self-image. There were plenty of pauses, for me to either confirm I’d heard what she said, or offer a comment of my own. She was unexpectedly upfront, and in being so gave me a much better idea of who I was dealing with before we even reached our destination.

A&M, public relations major until she put that on hold on account of her brother Ethan. Details got a little cagey there, but I gathered that their home life was far from the best, seeing how Ethan emancipated. Regardless of why, he wanted to live with her, and for the state to recognize her as a conservator she had to hold a full-time job.

So Tara dropped out of college and made it happen.

They had an Uncle in Austin they were friendly with, but they didn’t see him much. Mainly on holidays or whenever Tara could get weekend consecutive days off work.

By the time we reached the restaurant, I was mildly disappointed. But not for any of the reasons I’d expected. Ever since Hastur screwed with my head, it’d been harder to be cold, more difficult to do the more… unpleasant things I needed to do. Most of the time I just did them anyway. This was supposed to be a farce. A fake, superficial relationship drummed up to conflict with Miles’s alarmingly accurate profile. Tara was perfect for it. She lived in my building, she’d pursued me first to save me the time, and she didn’t quit easy. She was also stunning and would easily draw attention away from me.

I just wasn’t sure I could follow through.

There were enough markers, enough similarities, that I could recognize the trappings of a young adult that forced to act as a parent because the people who were supposed to fill that role, failed.

I knew that life. I’d lived it. And it was hard enough without some schmuck coming around and wasting your time.

So, as the hostess escorted us to our table next to the window, I resigned myself to calling it. If dinner went well, and I didn’t get the sense that she was playing a part, I’d do what I could to help her, connect her either to Kinsley or people in the Adventurer’s Guild who could offer her a better position. If I was right, she’d work her ass off. And it was the least I could do for wasting her time.

We sat across from each other, easing into our chairs as the waiter poured our water and lit the candle in the center, leaving while we perused our orders.

Throat dry, I picked up my cup and tilted it to my lips.

“So,” Tara ran her fingertip across the rim of her glass, crystal emitting a pitched hum. “How long have you been living a secret life?”