Crack.

The outer shell of another sweet chestnut breaks, its corpse added to the pile atop the balcony’s railing. Kelly wipes his hands, picking aside the shards. Nutty skin and splinters stick to his palm as he rubs them together for friction before wiping at the nearby glass’s condensation—a salted concoction of grapefruit juice and gin. It’s his daily wake-up call in a highball glass. One of the many medicinal wonders that keep him working in top mental-physical condition. His lips smack as he stares off the balcony, silver-framed D’Valay shades reflecting the digital sunlight that wafts off Hu Shih’s pearl necklace of churning artificial waterways.

Breakfast will end shortly, as Kelly’s promised.

It’s been an assortment of purposefully familiar food for Ginevra. Or, what his research would assume is familiar to her. She can see them through her cynical third eye, Kelly’s assistants and analysts, ones peppered with bandaged bullet wounds and nursing concussions suffered during quarterly rebalancing. Paid-by-the-billable-hour pissants tearing into strips of data like the scavengers they are. Data like Sant-Sarnin’s imports and exports. Their eventual statistical analysis cobbles together variables and twists them into a guest’s supposedly perfect meal: Ibriki pot coffee paired with plant-meal hard-boiled egg substitutes and over-greased tyropita puff pastries stuffed with salted pseudo-dairy. Like the chestnuts, the spread is overdone. The meal made from focus groups and digitally collated data streams. Independent from any true reality.

Most importantly, the layers of phyllo bread are too thick. It’s as if they’ve been frozen, then unfrozen. Between huffs of her cigarette, Ginevra picks at the chunks caught between her molars.

It’s a messy meal.

Barely better tasting than the lukewarm congee-scallion stews she’d scarfed down at The Regimental—meals Ginevra prepared in private, avoiding any staff-led poisoning schemes. The pastries’ flakes gather atop the table and coat the balcony’s floor, Hu Shih’s artificial breeze too weak to dispose of the refuse naturally. Unless they land in the water below, they’ll take to the streets, rolling in piles, collected by tart-card sweepers. Kelly’s already torn through a single koulouri grain-sphere with a semi-pleased, ‘hmm,’ crumbs splattered atop his informal outfit of khaki slacks, pristinely pressed white button-up, collar starched, Mashpee-branded. His outfit is more fit for watching a game of jai alai than continuing their hunt.

Kelly’s said his driver will be here shortly. He’ll be a Blemmi. That stout race with all shoulders, no neck. Like the rest of his headless companions, talking straight from the mouth on his chest. But he’ll be quiet. “Nonintrusive,” Kelly insists, as “he’s the seen and not heard type. Good help. Low turnover, worked with him for years,” he alleges.

Kelly smiles at Ginevra. It’s a purposeful, disarming sort of look. As if he’s earned the right. And as sloppy as the filly looks, she’s slept well.

But you wouldn’t guess it.

The pelt around Ginevra’s eyes is less touched-up. Makeup-less. All-natural and hastily dried. A sin, she thinks, though her eyes have lost some of that horrifying redness. And her outfit looks just as good as it did the day before, though layered with a bit more of Hu Shih’s grime. Smelling vaguely of stale skewers and spent cigars. At a distance, her shoulders are less hunched with anxiety. Less murderous, it seems, even when paired with the way she bites into her peach with a worrying squelch.

“Fresh, right?” Kelly asks with a smile. “Locally cultivated. And I’m not fooling. See that building just across the lake, the one with the triangular façade? A whole hydroponic complex, if you can believe it. Just zoned to look like housing. The owner lives two floors down from me. Always makes a racket about how fresh he gets these babies, the way he works their growth cycles. Loves his squash, too. ‘The game and the food,’ he says. It’s his only joke, so I let him have it. But he’s just a riot, otherwise. You know, I ought to give him a call sometime soon.”

Ginevra ignores the polite outburst. She’s more focused on her own logistics. Between licking her fingers clean, she weighs her situation. Her vessel, the Retaliation will be kept at dock. Kelly’s dock, more specifically. The one located at the industrial Northern Edge, near the rest of the low- and high-end garages at the railway’s terminus. Mothballed, momentarily, so that Kelly can take the pilot’s seat on her behalf. As they brunch, his contracted porters dutifully transfer weaponry and clothing to Ginevra’s new place of temporary residence. All of Ginevra’s relevant mailings to be forwarded to the Disagio—for now.

The Disagio’s built for speed, Kelly says. Ginevra assumed. She’s heard the advertisements. Its model is too high-end for the usual marketing like digital blitzes or subconscious programming. Word-of-mouth only, the reviews reaching her through polite conversation with other hunters. Synthetically sold through friends-of-friends, commission kickbacks traveling upwards through pyramidal command structures, marketed at multiple levels. The goal—to blur exclusivity and quality.

The brand’s succeeded with their advertising maneuver, Ginevra thinks.

Nevertheless, it’s got six engines, all Denhaut-54’s. Luxury accommodations for two. Enough room for two additional staff when the cargo bay is not in use. Like now, during their hunt, where that Blemmo will have his own cot when not passed out in the pilot’s chair, head-chest cradled between crossed arms in underpaid exhaustion. The whole craft leased through the Network. Expensive, but there’s less liability that way, Kelly claims. Plus, you can expense it.

Ginevra assumes it’ll smell like stale cedarwood and jasmine, the Disagio. Olivewood and oranges. Just like Kelly’s real-cotton sheets, the smell still entrapped after so many housekeeper washings. Those same scents that lurk behind the artisanal twin sinks, wafting from behind the depressing brutalist colonnades, hiding atop the second dresser, that one piece of furniture that’s so suspiciously full. The scent that clashes with the lingering perfume—Itacaré Reunião with its subtle conflicting notes of coconut milk and pistachios, in that expensive yellow-gold font—its small bottle lodged in one of the forty bathroom cabinets, cap lost somewhere in one of the twin walk-in closets. Neck chipped, like it was pitched in anger at somebody else. The artifact unearthed by Ginevra is an obvious sign of a connubial rupture, a divorce of some flavor or brand.

After all, Ginevra would know.

“The Disagio must be cramped, with only one berth,” Ginevra chides. “Will she mind?”

“What?” Kelly’s lost himself. Must be thinking of the work he’ll be leaving behind. Or squash invitations when he returns.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“Will she mind?

“Who?”

“Your wife,” the filly brays.

“Probably as much as your husband will,” he fires back.

Yet he smiles, still. Unfazed by her comment, unrepentant. An unexpected response for the filly. Another chestnut breaks at his hands, splintering onto the pristine balcony floor, disturbing their tenuous conversation and giving Kelly an opportunity to go on the offensive.

“Even after last night, which I think was so enjoyable, even if I’m in the minority,” he sing-songs through chews, punctuating every syllable, sweeping a loafer at the shell pieces, kicking them off the balcony’s edge, “you still want to play hardball? Man, you are one fast filly and I can’t help but respect it. So in such a spirit of comradery, I’ve got a question for you—is it two at every meal, two before bed, and two once you get up? Or do you just take them whenever you get tilted?”

Ginevra pauses, glaring down her snout, past the desecrated bodies of peach pits and half-excavated jars of jam. She’s scowling again. Whatever levity their last evening has conjured is gone. Lost off the balcony, like the pieces Kelly kicks. In the distance an illegally-held lion dance performance echoes against Hu Shih’s cloudless digital ceiling without the correct permits, belted from the nearby marketplace, prickling with firework belt crackles. Maybe there’s been a birth, or the opening of a new business—maybe a funeral.

Whatever it is, it’s a racket.

“The pills you’re taking, I mean,” Kelly continues.

“I know what you mean,” Ginevra hisses.

“Alright,” he laughs to himself, “so how many, then?”

“Why do you care?”

“About how many pills you’re scarfing down by the handful? Well I just can’t think of a reason,” he admits. “How about we just say I’m curious, is all.”

The distant lion dance concludes. Hooting and hollering subsides. Hu Shih’s state-enforced quiet resumes, the artificial rushing water from below the balcony a distant cackle.

“You know,” Kelly muses, “I could never stand the taste of them. Anti-psychotics, I mean. Had to take them for work. My file might’ve mentioned it.”

“It didn’t,” Ginevra barks.

“Good. Because it was a while ago. Before I made partner. Had a nightmare that my secretary came at me with a machete while I was stuck in the john. Not like that dream wasn’t a bit prophetic, I mean, since she came at me with a month later during a takeover attempt. A real piece of work. If she was a better shot, she would’ve blown my chest to bits before I had to sack her myself. Killing her didn’t stop the jitters, though. Or the visions.”

His shoulders shift. That’s all. His spine’s still rigid, loafers splayed in each direction. Unwilling to relax, by the looks of it. Enjoying the spotlight on himself—the foreign warmth unable to be recreated outside a boardroom crowded with corporate hostages.

“And back then, all we had was Copaltix, not the Bulenzo most people are hooked up with now, you included,” he fingers. “Couldn’t stand the old recipe. Too medicinal, and not in the comforting way, either. You didn’t get that, you know, that warm, comforting sensation. The normal cocktail of downers that makes you all drowsy, where you keep salivating and can’t swallow, like molasses dripping off your gums—you had to take a whole other genre of drugs, like spiking spezie for that, and get lucky. And that little bit of humiliation, that knowledge of your own lack of professionalism, where you’re sneaking those pills, trying to find odd points in conversations, I mean, why the stress? You’re supposed to get un-stressed with these things. You know, my doc rose hell when I said I was quitting them. Said I’d regret it.”

“And did you?” Ginevra can’t help but ask. It’s a purposeful nonchalance. Like the curling sneer given to someone who asks the time. Teeth nearly jutting, lips splayed in disgust.

“Does it look like I do?” He looks as if he’s genuinely surprised. As if that plastic confusion could be misconstrued for a real emotion. Nonetheless, he takes Ginevra’s skeptical scowl as a no. “After a week or two, my senses came back. No more hand jitters, no night terrors, nothing at all. Silence. Just had to outlast both the withdrawal and the doc’s nagging. Not to mention someone else’s nagging… But, I’m sure you can empathize with that one.

“Tried Whispering, too,” he huffs, levity nearly blowing him off the balcony. “You know, that thing where you get spiked, and the overpriced girlie gives you a little brain massage. Now that—that worked. ‘Alternative medicine.’ What a riot. I didn’t believe it at first, but it worked better than any black market mumbo-jumbo I was getting from my pharmacist. You ever try that?”

Ginevra knows that Kelly knows she has. And Kelly knows she won’t answer. So, in the silence, he rubs his palms together, scraping the glaze off his fingertips.

“But, do what you want. Keep taking the pills, don’t, I don’t care either way. You’ll get a chance to prove which choice is right, anyways. Just… People notice. And I don’t mind, so don’t say I do, but from one professional to another,” he pauses, “just keep your third eye open.”

Ginevra grimaces at his platitudes. Corpo nothing-speak tacked onto a cavalcade of unimportant factoids. He’s plastic all the way through, it seems. But as she digs a nail between her molars, scraping at peach meat, she pauses. His perspective is one she can’t ignore, insincere as she believes them to be. They’re stuck together, after all. She’d try and craft a rebuttal if it weren’t for the pleasing three-tone hum that flickers from the nearby communicator screen built into the balcony’s wall, chirping incessantly with those polite flute-played tonalities.

“Well, that’s breakfast. We have an appointment to make, and time is the only thing we both can’t buy more of.” His charm has returned.

“You never said who we’re meeting,” Ginevra interrupts. She’s statuesque. Slouching like a petulant, dying Gaul.

“Yeah I did,” Kelly scoffs. He checks for his gun at his waist his sunglasses atop his chest. “Pirates. Your sister’s old crew. They want her dead—or captured, or whatever we end up agreeing on—as much as we do. For obvious reasons. Ever seen that ship of hers? The ‘Sim-ran?’

“No,” Ginevra lies.

She’s seen the Cimarron. Of course, she’s seen it. Often.

Like when she’d lie awake at The Regimental, pouring over Arabic-Osmanya-scribbled schematics and charting last-spotted positions with thumb-pinky sextants, assuming—incorrectly—that the Cimarron’s shore leave on Hu Shih was meaningful to her hunt. But Ginevra saw it even before dissecting those blood-stained schematics. She saw it when she was dreaming. Snoring, next to Augo.

Those were hazy memories: Ginevra sat atop the captain’s chair, chewing through khat that she’d never truly tasted, fighting battles that took place before she fired a gun for the first time. The crew but a collection of familiar faces—familiar to some other mare, at least. A crew made up of portly maquis and snide androids, throngs of piratical companions whose names always felt on the edge of her lips. Silently-mouthed whispers she’d forget as soon as she would buck awake to the imagined Cimarron’s klaxon howls. She’d blink, taking in her foreign surroundings, her sleep-walking fits leaving her alone somewhere in Camelot-XII, in its maze of in dimly-lit hallways, polished domes, and hibernating monorails. Between her nervous snorts, the people-movers would hum through the night like a bow’s stroke on violin.

It’s how Ginevra learned Camelot-XII’s layout, after all. Always stumbling about in the dead of night. She’d be stranded.

Her sleep-drained body ripped away from the captain’s chair, alone in the low-light purple hallways, radioactive storms dulled by fife-galoubet white noise, she’d drift in and out of nightmarish conscience. Groggy, most of all. Lonesome when flanked by shuttered cafés and boutiques, residents squirreled away until morning. Eventually, she’d stumble home, finding her way back into Augo’s grasp. Or, more often, into his embrace as he’d locate her again, night after night, tracking Ginevra through Camelot’s halls. His face would be sullen. Tired yet not disappointed, he would claim.

Then he’d politely ask Ginevra if she had remembered to take those damned little pills of hers.

Reflexively, she reaches for the pills at her hip—but stops herself. Kelly’s looking, after all. She remembers his nonsensical chastising about a ‘third eye’.

“Why?” Ginevra asks with a certain dismissive tone. “What’s in it for me?”

“For us? Coordinates,” Kelly’s sugar-coated fingers reach for his glass to finish off the last bit of watered-down grapefruit juice. “Maybe a little something else, too.”