Chase looked down at the scar on his calf as if noticing it for the first time.

“Oh, gross! Yeah, that’s from Hauling. Echin carapaces are sharp as the devil’s pitchfork.”

“And you just dragged it down your whole leg before noticing it?”

“I s’pose.”

He kicked himself for not wearing pants. He’d have sweltered in the heat, but it was better than incriminating himself, especially with such an obvious identifier. Hopefully there weren’t any follow-up pictures of him tumbling down onto the recycling bins, a trail of blood dribbling down his calf.

“Anyway, what you wanna do next?” he asked.

“Anything to get out of this heat,” Kim answered. “The Gardens were a good choice, but if I sweat anymore this shirt’s gonna be see-through. Boba?”

Chase clasped his hands together in something resembling prayer. “Abso-frickin-lutely. As long as the place has air-conditioning, I’m cool with it.”

Kim smiled. She had the kind of smile that Chase thought was insanely cute, though he wouldn’t say it. Her mouth opened slightly, like she was laughing or surprised by something. She’d clearly had braces — definitely the kind of person to wear her retainer every night.

“Follow me, then,” she said. “I know just the spot.”

***

They hopped off the train at One City, which had recovered from its splash of excitement since the last time Chase was here. The streets were mostly back to their straight cut edges and organised, consistent colour schemes. Walking through the streets felt like he was breathing luxury, as if the oxygen had been laced with a teaspoon of sugar. There was a crane parked in the street, heaving a grand piano into someone’s penthouse.

Kim led them down a curved alley that would be death to navigate in a car. It was filled with foot-traffic, throngs of people dropping into cafés with French names, smatterings of awards advertised on their shopfront windows. A whole section of wall was dedicated to a mural of The First Hunters — a group of unnamed people who protected New Melbourne when the first Gates appeared. They were the first to sum up the courage to step through those shimmering portals to extra-terrestrial planes, the first to battle against the spawn of other worlds.

Now there were sixteen-year-olds who did the same thing.

Chase looked at a few of the menus as they passed fancy restaurants. “Why do I feel as though this boba is going to cost me an arm and a leg?”

Kim laughed. “It shouldn’t be too bad for a Guild Leader like yourself. Trust me, I used to come here when I was at the CIU — I might’ve liked the job, but the salary was peanuts. I worked hard to find cheap spots like this.”

The alley seemed to extend forever, turning and winding until Chase was starting to worry about making it back out. Kim seemed to be doing fine, but even the cardio he kept up as a Hunter and Hauler wasn’t helping. If the temperature wasn’t hot enough to fry eggs on a shovel, he’d have killed to wear his magic hoodie.

“Here we are,” Kim finally said. She brought her arms up like an aircraft marshal, directing Chase to enter a shady culvert-looking entrance with stairs leading down to a dim landing.

“If this was a first date, I’d think you were going to kidnap me or something.”

“What’s stopping me from doing that on a second date?”

Chase hesitated before he was politely shoved into the entrance. At the bottom was a bleak white door with a metal slider at about eye height. Kim rapped on it, and the slider flew open, an icy breeze bursting out into Chase’s face. Behind the slider was an olive-skinned man in sky-blue snow gear.

“Booking?” he asked.

“Walk-in for two, if we can,” Kim answered.

The slider shut with a muffled wham. Twenty seconds later, the door swung open and two warmly dressed staff held out giant fluffy coats.

“Quick! Don’t let the heat in!” one of them cried.

Kim rushed in and pulled Chase with her. Around them was a room made entirely of ice — furniture, cutlery and crockery included. Going in after being in the outside world was like stepping from hell’s crucible into a cold beer. It sent shivers up Chase’s spine, and he quickly threw on the coat being offered to him, buttoning it up.

“It looks like you’re naked under that,” Kim said.

She was right. It dangled past Chase’s knees, and the collar obscured the top of his shirt. With it buttoned up, he looked like a garden-variety flasher.

The front buttons came undone.

As if planned, Kim’s coat accented her outfit perfectly, turning her into a mobster look-alike. The long fur lining fell past her grey skirt, and with her sunglasses on she was positively intimidating. She took them off.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“Shall we order?” she asked.

“Depends. Can you get boba tea served hot?”

***

Once seated (the frozen furniture was lathered with cushions to prevent icy bottoms), Chase held his hot tea in his hands, desperately trying to warm himself. Kim sat opposite him, sipping at her iced lychee boba garnished with chocolate strawberries. To Chase, it was a wild combo.

“This was a good idea,” he said, after downing a few hurried gulps. “But I’m so not ready to go outside after this. How do they keep this place cold?”

Kim shrugged. “We’re effectively in a big fridge, I guess. Or a freezer. Either way it slaps, doesn’t it?”

Chase nodded. Being wrapped in the coat with a hot cup of tea was like sleeping in a freezing room whilst completely warm in bed. Although the freezing temperature had brought on a runny nose, which he didn’t imagine was very attractive.

“And you said you used to come here on lunch breaks? That’s a hell of a way to spend an hour.”

Kim giggled. “No, not lunch breaks. This used to be our ritual after we solved a case. Then we went to Burney’s Tavern down the road if the prosecutor bungled it and we lost in court.”

“Who’s we?”

“My team,” Kim answered. “At the CIU, we didn’t really have our own singular case-load. It was more collaborative, which you’d think might make things slow since everyone has to be kept up to date, but it worked surprisingly well.”

Chase sipped more tea. It cooled rapidly in here, plus he was worried about the steam rising up and melting the ceiling above his head.

“My sergeant was the one who showed us this place— apparently it’s been here a while, and it’s like a tradition amongst the One City CIU. Passed down from generation to generation. It helps that they don’t serve alcohol here. HR likes that very much.”

Chase laughed. Part of Jenny’s plans to expand Ballistic involved starting a HR department. He’d been wary, but she quickly dispelled those fears by telling him of a few horror stories from Majesty. When he asked how he’d never heard them before, she simply answered, ‘because of HR’. That was convincing enough.

“So why aren’t you at the CIU anymore? Not to be rude, but you don’t strike me as a Four City GRA kind of person.”

“Oh yeah? What do I strike you as then?”

He laughed and nervously ran a hand through his hair. “You know what I mean. The other day, you mentioned the CIU before the GRA, and you seemed a lot more impressed with it. What happened?”

Kim pretended to pout, then continued anyway. “I’m not supposed to tell you, but I doubt you’ll go snitching, right?”

“Right.”

“Well then,” she paused, as if gathering courage. “I did something stupid — which of course I didn’t think was stupid back then — and nearly got another agent killed.”

Chase sat with that for a moment, unsure if sipping his tea was the correct response.

“And they fired you?”

“No, not fired. If they’d fired me, they would’ve had to admit that a mistake was made, and that opened them up to lawsuits. So instead I was given a two-week paid vacation to Tasmania, and the first day I came back I found a letter on my desk telling me of a ‘strategic repositioning’ I was to take part in. Lo and behold, Kim Seo-ah became the GRA’s newest employee.”

“Shit, that’s rough.”

Kim shrugged once again, as though indifferent to the whole affair. “Rougher for the guy who was nearly killed. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.”

“What happened to him? No lawsuit?”

The last tapioca pearls travelled up Kim’s straw as she slurped the bottom of the cup. “No, we dodged that. Though he basically coerced them into giving him a cushy desk-job at HQ. He’s probably my Sarge’s boss by now.”

“That tracks. Sounds like you’ve lived through a TV-drama,” Chase said.

“Yeah, well, here’s to my redemption arc, right?” She downed the last dregs as if they were suds at the end of a foamy beer. “Anyway, I showed you this glorious spot, so you can return the favour by paying.”

“Wow.”

Not long ago, Chase would’ve been calculating how such an expense would affect that week’s grocery shopping. He’d have the supermarket catalogue out, circling the specials and trying to think of how he could combine all the cheapest ingredients into a workable meal.

Ballistic had put him in the green. Why not splurge every once in a while?

*******

Once she got home, Seo-ah peeled off her sweaty clothes and got into the shower. The ice-bar had been a stroke of genius, simultaneously a great date spot as well as a perfect way to avoid the suffocating humidity and heat. Despite being well past the point of puberty when one seems to smell bad no matter what corrective measures are taken, she felt like their hike through the Botanic Gardens was toeing extremely close to that line.

She’d enjoyed herself. After all Pearl’s attempt to curate the perfect person from her gaggle of arrogant Hunters, it turned out that an entirely reasonable guy had popped up just out of pure luck. Other than Pearl, she’d never told anyone the details of her transferral to the GRA — not even her parents. But with Chase, it was easy. Maybe it was because he was mostly a stranger. Maybe she’d just bottled it up for too long and was gushing to anyone who would listen. But that didn’t matter.

She rubbed the second round of shampoo into her head. It was at the length where she ought to get it cut, but she was getting attached. If it weren’t for the annoying ritual of having to toss it out behind her every time she rolled around in bed, she’d want to grow it down to her waist.

Her hands worked methodically, massaging the shampoo through as the hot water washed it down her back in rivulets. After acting out this routine a few thousand times, it was automatic. It gave her time to think about other things.

Like the scar down the back of Chase’s calf.

The case of the Gun-Hunter had all but dried up ever since that eyewitness account given to Hal and her by the Guild Leader of Scotch-A-Day. It hadn’t given them much to work with; pursuing the case was like trying to collect rainwater from hot concrete — the puddles evaporated as fast as they found them.

But that changed when the CIU officer in Four City took those photos. It was a stroke of luck that the culprit had shown up in her area — if it had been in a different Town or City, the information might never have been given to her. It was only a shame that the photos were of such a nondescript person. With the baggy black hoodie hiding any identifying factors, the profile would fit a few hundred thousand people.

But the scar.

The third photo she’d received was the key. It showed the culprit leaping over the fence, almost clearing it in a single bound.

Almost.

She’d inspected every pixel of that photo until her eyes felt cross-eyed and it hurt to look at her computer screen up close. It was slight, but the jagged top of the wire fence was definitely bending under the weight of the culprit’s leg. And one thing she knew from tracking down other perps was that no one escapes that kind of encounter without the fence taking its pound of flesh.

She waited for the conditioner to do its thing, before rinsing it out and stepping out of the shower into her foggy bathroom. The exhaust fan had died a few days ago, and she hadn’t been bothered to fix it. Not while these new details nagged at her.

All she knew was that she wanted to see Chase again. But nailing down the purpose of this meeting was difficult.

A date, or an interrogation?