The hotel was nice. Not as nice as Vanaka’s room in the compound back home on Eylo, but she’d set out on this whole venture determined not to be a spoiled little brat. It was fairly large, cut inside near the top of a pillar, and they had a window with a good view. There was a separate bathroom, a bedroom with a comfortable double bed, and a little living room with a set of armchairs. Vanaka had also received assurances that the staff were absolutely not allowed to enter without an invitation.

More importantly, the room had a comm unit fastened to the wall, connected to the planetary network. And it left Vanaka to face a somewhat weighty issue. She wasn’t sure she wanted to get into this, but there was protocol to tend to before everything else, even her association with the network.

She accessed the unit, and even as she searched by memory she considered having Erine handle this. The woman didn’t lack in people skills, and her parents had been ansoti themselves. Erine understood Vylak issues as well as anyone. But no. She’d best do this with maximum propriety.

Vanaka located her target: a small community a few hundred kilometres away from any population centres, as these usually were. She made the call, and soon enough got a greeting in the local tongue.

“Good greetings,” Vanaka said in Vylas, a tongue never taught to outsiders.

“Good greetings yourself,” said the woman on the other end.

“Is it safe to speak?”

“It is.”

“I am Vanaka Fan Umo of Eylo. Is Elder Masathon available?”

“He is not,” the other woman said. “Though he will be soon.”

“I have only just arrived on this planet and I will be staying here for a few days, at least. I am staying in the capital, in Hotel Swansia, Pillar Xania 12. I am unable to visit, so instead I extend an invitation.”

“I shall tell him this, young one,” the woman said, erasing any doubt that she was indeed a Vylak rather than an ansoti.

“Simply call this number if you wish to contact me.”

“Very well. Is that all?”

“That is all.”

“Then farewell, in kinship,” the woman said to her.

“Farewell, in kinship.”

Vanaka ended the call. Brief though it had been, she was still left a bit nervous.

“Well!” she said as she slapped her own hips in an attempt to shake it all off. “Just one more call and then I’ll go out and see if I can land a performance.”

She looked at the comm unit.

“Look... I’d like for one of you to stay here in case my kin call back quickly.”

Erine and Losan looked at one another.

“I will do it,” Erine said. “I’m tired anyway. And you’re probably better off with Losan at your side for this next part.”

“Yes,” Losan said, nodding in that ever-serious manner of his.

“Good,” Vanaka said.

She went into the luggage and opted for a bright red unitard for the first of this afternoon’s meetings, then for the second one she covered it with a more plain brown jacket with an attached hood. Losan simply went as he was. Presentation was never a big concern of his, and luckily his default outfit was plain enough.

The hotel was in the middle of an entertainment district of sorts, and so it was a short walk from the lobby to their first stop. The two of them soon found themselves standing on a particularly spacious fifth-level platform, before a set of beautifully blue double doors.

Above them was an elaborate logo that Vanaka lacked the cultural background to understand, and the words Nuhuna Lounge. They walked through, into a dimly-lit and eminently stylish foyer, all dark panelling and smooth vat-leather. Vanaka might have taken a few moments to take it all in if she hadn’t seen the exact setup so many times already. There seemed to be some kind of official style-guide for these places.

She stopped being a tourist as the receptionist met her gaze, and adopted her confidence-stride. Losan and Erine had assured her, under repeated insistence on being truthful, that it wasn’t overdone.

Vanaka offered the man a friendly greeting, then reached into a shoulder bag and produced her job papers. It got her a face-to-face meeting with the boss in short order.

“Kana the Black, is it?” he said with an air of good-natured scepticism as he went through the papers from behind his desk.

“On account of the hair and eyes,” Vanaka replied, indicating each with a different hand.

“I will grant that it sounds better than Kana the Black and Very Dark Brown,” he said, clearly no stranger to stage names.

Various kinds of franchises reached through the space lanes, taking strength in uniformity and a shared purse. Somehow a series of nightclubs had joined that list, and proven a great boon to Vanaka’s current choice of lifestyle.

Before her sat the regional manager, head of several local outlets of Nuhuna Lounges. He was impeccably groomed, somewhat androgynous-looking, and clad in a very fine dark suit of a local style she’d noticed on the streets. The overall effect, coupled with a charismatic smile, was quite striking. Enough so that Vanaka was having to suppress an urge to seek ways to get her teeth in him. Just once, not enough to form a lasting bond.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Keep things professional, she told herself.

“You certainly move about, Kana the Black,” the boss said as he went over the confirmations left on the sheet by various outlet bosses. “And these certainly are glowing recommendations. Hmm. ‘Amazing strength and agility’, my counterpart says here. ‘Highly promising young talent’, says another.”

He gave her an expectant look, and Vanaka handed her jacket and bag over to Losan. The office had a lot of empty floor space, which she presumed to be for just these occasions. She imagined music, and then let it flow into her limbs as she slowly raised an arm out in a beseeching motion. Then she leapt backwards into a spin, and spun-spun-spun her way across the floor. She smoothly went down into a split and did a bit of floorwork, before putting her palms on the floor and kicking her legs up in the air. She bent backwards to land on her toes, then did two split-jumps to return to the front of the desk.

Finally she did the beseeching arm in reverse, and finished. The music left her limbs and she was once again in the world outside of herself.

“Not bad,” the man said and applauded softly. “Not bad at all.”

“Just an example,” she said. “But thank you. I am also perfectly fine with doing something more serene, given the right kind of music and atmosphere.”

“Yes, I see your song list here,” he said, glancing back at the papers. “Is there anything in particular I should know?”

“I keep my clothes on.”

“I see that too,” he said with a smile, and tapped the papers.

“Some others have not,” Vanaka told him.

“I maintain a well-behaved crew,” he assured her. “It’s just good for business. Now, are you looking for a particular slot?”

“I have only just arrived on this planet,” she told him. “And I need to see to some other things. Can you simply give me your schedule for the next few days, and I will get back in touch with you?”

“Certainly. Would you like it printed, rather than electronic?”

“Yes, please.”

“I suspected you would... Kana the Black.”

He worked on his computer and a few moments later Vanaka held a carbon printout of Nuhuna’s local schedule for the next eight days.

“We have nine outlets here in the capital, and four more in surrounding areas,” the manager told her. “As is standard you may seek any available slot in any of them, but of course mind that they do close up rather quickly.”

“I know.”

“I am sure you also know that you would be best off staying in one place for a while and drawing a crowd by word-of-mouth?”

“Perhaps someday I will,” Vanaka replied. “But for now I am content to drift.”

“Youth will be youth.”

“That is that,” Vanaka said as she again stood beneath the open sky.

“So it is,” Losan said.

“It seems foolish to ask if you’re ready.”

“I am always ready,” he assured her.

Losan parted his jacket just enough to show the telescoping baton clipped to his belt, and then parted the other side to show the little civilian self-defence stunner.

“I’d prefer a proper weapon,” he told her. “But of course the best bites of equipment are this,” he indicated his eyes, “this,” he pointed to his ears, “and this,” he finished with as he put a finger to his temple. “Not much will keep you safe without those three.”

“True, true. Shall we be off?”

After another trip on one of those tiny monorails they went back to travelling by foot. They walked a set of exterior stairs down from a second circle to a first circle, and from there they took a public circle staircase that had been cut into a pillar interior. That put them down on the streets proper, where larger vehicles drove by.

It was all quite chaotically laid out, a consequence of mostly laying the streets around the pillars rather than through them. But it was also well marked, and all they had to do was look up at the numbers above each crossing and intersection. They walked past plainer-looking storefronts and plainly-dressed people leaving work as afternoon began turning into evening. They went further away from the colours and the lights, and the cameras, towards those overlooked areas she’s first seen from up in the monorail.

They were moving further into the darkness.

There was a subtle shift around them, in the streets and the cave-like dwellings and the people. There was more garbage on the streets, and it occurred to Vanaka that of course much of it would blow from the rings and bridges down to street level before being collected. There were more signs of vandalism, decay, and a lack of either funds or will to do anything about it. And aside from simply being dressed in more practical, worn clothes than the people around the hotel and the lounge, there was simply something in their bearing. There was an edge on display, some hard to quantify quality that spoke of being on alert, and having to struggle.

Losan, when Vanaka chose to glance his way, was on guard in that subtle fashion of his, not radiating violence but ready for it in a way that might have passed by someone who knew him less well. Vanaka left her inner tourist behind more and more as they continued on, and the predator replaced it in equal measures.

She watched the people, the small groups that might pose a potential threat, and the loners whom she might be able to bite. She wasn’t planning to, but habit and instinct would not be denied and she automatically picked out the easy grabs in dark spots. She kept alert for lit windows and cameras and other people, and when none of these were around those solitary pedestrians were tempting targets indeed.

But she knew perfectly well how unsatisfying such a feeding would be, and left the predator to its calculations in the back of her mind. It was something to work with, not for.

Vanaka didn’t have enough experience with slums to know if this actually counted as one, but the early evening inebriation on display here and there ruled out any doubt that they’d definitely reached those darker areas she’d seen from above.

Following the instructions she’d gotten during that second call brought them to a relatively narrow pillar. Curved three times around it was a glass snake, glowing neon yellow in the thickening dark. Beneath its head was a set of double doors outlined in more neon, and between the two was a sign in the local script. Loud music dripped out into the street each time a new patron entered, and the crowd within seemed to be growing rapidly.

Vanaka and Losan circled the pillar for a few seconds until spotting the end of the snake’s tail. There beneath it, as promised, stood two figures. They in turn clearly spotted the two of them right back, and Vanaka could practically hear the two strangers comparing them to her description during the call.

She walked towards them with Losan at her side. It was time to meet with the local Chainbreakers.

The man was of average height, but so stocky that Vanaka suspected he was a Kapadian even before she got close enough for the faintly bluish skin to confirm it. He wore a plain dull green coat and a red cap, as she’d been told. The woman next to him seemed slim, but it was a bit hard to be sure, what with her drab, baggy clothing. She topped it with a hood, and it wasn’t until they were within an arm’s length that Vanaka could tell she had golden eyes and impossibly flawless skin of the same colour. She was a Chanei.

“Good evening,” the man said. “Are you here for Erlen’s party?”

“She gave me the invitation only hours ago,” Vanaka said.

It was her part of the password, and the bulky man was clearly satisfied.

“It was me you spoke to earlier,” he said. “I am Unta.”

Vanaka turned to the Chanei. The golden woman looked both of them up and down with a cold, piercing stare, and lingered on Vanaka slightly longer than she was comfortable with.

“And I am Kiris,” she finally said in an oddly accented voice that was somehow a perfect match for her stare. “Welcome.”