Even though the last train ran at midnight, the Electric Town has only just begun to slow. I watch it slide past from the back of the autobike Cal chartered to take us to her apartment. We ride back-to-back with the repulsorfields off, too tired and drenched to care about the downpour. Colorful neon paints half my face; white-tan lights of passing autocabs periodically warms the other. The Shimano Heavy Industries engine purring inside the chassis vibrates up through my legs. Only the faintest electronic hum as it glides through the rainstreaked streets.

Late-night electric jazz seeps into the air while we drift to a stop at a crosswalk. University students and off-shift workers drift out from the retro rotating doors of electroclubs and holoarcades around us, firing up their classes and taking flight if they don’t add to the growing number of people waiting to cross.

Cal lets out a sore, dismal groan at the wait. Leans back in her seat, resting her hand on both sides of the frame where I’m sitting. Red light silhouettes her head as she glances back, noting the pained grimace on my face. The polluted black ki still smoking out of my chest; like an ethereal lance impaling my heart from front to back. “You gonna shut that off?” she asks, arching an eyebrow. “It’s a ki thing, right? If you turn off your JOY, it’ll go away.”

“I never turn my JOY off.” Green light fills every pool on the road. I tighten my legs against the chassis as the bike jets forward. “Haven’t since I was a kid.”

“That’s impossible,” Cal says. She watches me with genuine curiosity, letting the machine drive itself. “JOYs always shut off when you fall asleep. It’s one of the core anti-psychosis routines. No one’s been able to hack it out- it’d make global news if they had. The only workaround is-”

“Not going to sleep at all. I know.” I cross my arms against the cold. “I didn’t hack it out. Sleep-linking is something Thane and I figured out together. Took us six months of really shitty nights.”

Cal snorts quietly. “If that was all, I’m sure someone else would’ve figured it out by now. Pros rack up millions of hours on their JOYs and their neural link still shuts off when they sleep.”

“You can sit around and watch me like a creep tonight, if you’re really that desperate to be proved wrong.”

“Hey, don’t tempt me. I might.” The pressure of Cal’s spine lifts away as she returns her hands to the throttle, manually piloting us towards an on-ramp that crosses the vast river dividing the Electric Town from the University and Glass Districts. Neon shimmers in rainbow hues up and down the length of the bridge, cascading like a waterfall. Far below, dark water boils in the rain. The bridge splits ahead, half heading towards the immense skyscrapers of the Glass District, the other towards humble apartments and cozy student-life ambiance.

Cal takes us towards the latter. Lovely. Right back into hostile territory. Though that’s practically the status-quo these days.

I stifle a yawn and ask, “How much further?”

It’s telling to her exhaustion that she barely manages an ounce of sass in her reply. Turns out the exit was a just-in-case. We cut back through the underpass and into the Glass District in near total silence. Just the pattering of rain against perfectly smooth asphalt as we cruise into a graveyard of giants.

Immense skyscrapers of steel and glass wall us in like mountain cliffs. Forty stories is the smallest they come. The streets are hugely wide, perfectly aligned, and devoid of life or greenery. Four lanes each side, every light green. None of the Electric Town’s pedestrian chaos and vibrant neon. Nearly a hundred meters ahead, the only moving thing I can see, a gleaming black supercar, banks a right and leaves us totally alone.

The silence stretches, vast and lonely. Aunt Jolie has told me plenty of stories from her and Dad’s adventures in the capital, but few of them involved the Glass District. How could she have conveyed the scale of this place to a girl who’d grown up only knowing the villages? I drink it in with my eyes wide open. The wealth it must have taken to build this district is incomprehensible. Even with the power of JOYs, it’d take a team of expert metal Elementals and a plethora of other classes years of time and billions of credits to finish just one of these skyscrapers.

It’s no wonder the corporations used to hold so much sway before my father’s reign. This is an entirely different sphere of influence than the Electric Town. One with its own rules, its own titans. Even if its chokehold on the Section was broken, the bankrollers here are the unseen backbone that props up the gladiocracy and even the Champion himself. That Gami lets the corporations continue to enjoy this opulence tells me all I need to know about how little spine they have left.

In the end, even the rich bow to true power.

Cal takes us to a long, arcing road that chases the river’s western side. The Electric Town glimmers across the water; shrouded in storm. A few more minutes of driving in the silence through the rain and we’re wordlessly dismounting in front of a waterfront property of several limestone lowrises built around a central courtyard of pools and bubbling lagoons. A pedestrian walkway arches over the road, connecting the apartments to a lattice of docks that juts over the bay. Drizzling mist dampens the air, turning the pale streetlights fuzzy.

I breathe in the surreal quiet, looking over the rest of the waterfront. The void of sound is absolute. There’s no bugs, no birds, no anything.

A jolt of pain spasms through my chest while I turn. Grimacing again, I reach up and clutch at my heart, fingers pressing against my ribcage. The ache inside pulses like an open wound. Painful and ever-present. “You sure no one’s going to recognize us here?” I ask.

Cal snatches her JOY back from the autobike and gives it a slap on the rear tire, sending it humming off along the riverside. “Here?” Her eyes flick up; she laughs. “This isn’t my apartment. I’m in that one.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

She points past the courtyard to the looming blackness behind it. It takes me a second to register the infrequent lights scattered up its side as manmade, not reflections of the mist. My eyes drift up fifty sheer stories of supermodern aesthetic. Black, quartz, and glass from top to bottom.

Imported palm trees from my homeland rustle and sway above as we hobble through the courtyard. Cal’s apartment complex looms in front of us, swallowing the rest of the skyline. It’s even taller than the Metro Blockhouse, I think. The walk from the lowrises across the huge empty concrete plaza into the shadow of the skyscraper’s skirted edge is one of the most uncanny experiences I’ve ever had. We’re like ants wandering around a garden of gods.

Cal doesn’t seem phased by the vastness or the emptiness. She takes us right between the massive pillars propping up the building- each as large as the house I grew up in- and beneath the lip of the building, into a huge lobby of black stone and amber mood lighting. Again, we’re alone in a tomblike quiet. Wisps of volatile black aura curl past my eyes as I stand awkwardly just inside the door. A hidden water feature gurgles out of sight. I sit down on a granite bench and ball up around the pain, all too cognizant of how much water I’m dripping, how out of place I am in this richness while Cal goes to sign a paper login book. Such a ludicrous and pointless waste of money.

I know I’m scowling as I gaze around the lobby. Can’t help the feeling that I’m the rat the cat drug in. The Electric Town was understandable, even in its scale. This… it’s like being in another Section entirely. And Thane lived half his life here.

Cal comes back a minute later and hooks her head towards the elevator lobby. Too tired for words, we pick the closest one and slump against opposite walls once we’re inside. She toes a button halfway up the lift’s display, grimacing as a fresh trickle of water drips out of her boot. I waver between holding onto the railing; pretty sure it’s real gold.

The ascent is awkwardly silent. A little too fresh of a reminder. Cal almost audibly breathes out a sigh of relief when the doors part thirty stories up, revealing a carpeted, high-ceilinged hallway that stretches down the middle of the building. Onyx double doors lie seamlessly in the walls at wide intervals, hinting at the size of the apartments behind.

“Home sweet home,” she sighs, holding her JOY over a holopad beside one of the nearest rooms. She swipes an index finger downwards, scrolling through the electric-blue text. “We’ve got the place to ourselves.”

I let her enter first, take one last look both ways down the empty hall, then follow her in. “You have people over often?”

“You would be the first.”

She stops in the entryway, unwrapping her scarf and unzipping her boots. I peer in over her shoulders. The apartment is far humbler than the gluttonous monstrosity I was expecting, and it’s appropriately her sized. Dark and red colors intermingle throughout the open main space, which flows in a single continuous room from a sunken social space to a wraparound hardwood bar that looks out over the river through rainstreaked glass. Understated, not new-money gaudy. Sleekly modern, black marble, amber lights at floor level, impressionist high-society artwork, not a single hard edge in the place. There’s an empty table for six by the glass wall-window, shelves stocked with bottles I’m pretty sure cost more than everything I’ve ever owned, a huge stream screen that looks like it’s never been turned on, and fashion magazines opened and left scattered just so by the cream-white couches. Like this whole place has been hardly lived in at all, and was just waiting to impress the first person to walk through the door.

“Blood money is good for something,” is all I can say after that first look. I lean out of the entryway, running my eyes over the tiered ceiling. Feels low in here, but not in a bad way. Moody and dim like a cave. A fireplace and subdued music sense my presence and activate down by the couches. “Place like this, I figured you’d be throwing parties all the time.”

“Why, because I’m some social butterfly?” Cal scoffs.

“Aren’t you?” I get to work unstrapping my sneakers. “Sure seemed like it at the electroclub. And at the metro station… and the jail.”

“Not everyone is as cold as you are, Tay. Normal people tend to be a little friendlier when they’re out on the town. Even if we have to fake it.” Cal doffs her jacket next, hanging it with her scarf on a peg that she has to stand on tiptoes to reach. “Just because I’m funny doesn’t mean I don’t like some separation. Sheesh. Next you’re going to tell me you thought I was actually flirting with you.”

She glances back over her shoulder when I don’t reply quick. Sees the eyebrow I’m raising, then rolls her eyes in response.

I just shrug. “I take people at their word.”

Cal swings away and pads barefoot into the apartment, face averted. “You have no idea how dangerous that is. It’s so…”

“Honest?” I follow her in, lips twitching in amusement despite the ache in my chest.

“Trusting! You’re so trusting of people you’ve never met, and it’s so stupidly coercive. It’s like no one ever taught you how to lie.”

“Dad always said I had a good sense of hearts.” My eyelids flutter from exhaustion. The impulse to say more rises, and I don’t bat it down this time. “It’s why I asked you for help in the jail. I knew you were still lying to me. But it felt like…”

All that’s happened between us this past day flashes back in a blur. The anger and hate and hurt on that rooftop. The fear and the panic when I learned Cal’s name. Who she really is. The agony of finding Jolie just to leave her behind. The whispered threats, our fight in the Metro Blockhouse, and the instinctive feeling that made me grab Cal and take her with me when I jumped into the storm, even though she’d nearly murdered me the night before.

That feeling still hasn’t changed. It’s grown a little clearer, even. My soul aches and fuels the painful aura that smokes from my body, but my sense of ki is open once more to the flow of energy that pervades the world. For the first time in three years, since I closed myself off from that flow to protect myself from the agony of the night I lost my father, I can sense the sparks of life inside both Cal and myself, even the faint embers in her scarlet bamboo plants. Though even that sense is masked by pain and rusted by disuse.

Just another thing to thank Thane for when I finally find him.

Cal looks at me oddly, waiting like she actually wants to hear what I have to say. “Felt like what?” she asks.

“…it felt like you didn’t want to,” I say, turning away.

She flinches like I just hit her. Her head disappears into a cabinet set in the wall as she starts digging around, growling up a storm. “First you critique my social life like we haven’t almost killed each other multiple times in the past two days, and now you’re making fun of me. After beating me like a pinata because of my last name, no less.” She pops back out with a plush black towel in hand. “Enough yapping from you tonight. We need to fix…” she motions vaguely in my direction, “…whatever that is before you set off a smoke detector.”

“You just waved at all of me.”

“Yes, I did. Shut up and behave for once.” Cal pushes me towards the bedroom, already reaching for one of the liquor bottles. “Shower’s through there. Go crazy.”