I actually stopped and gazed upwards in amazement. It was honestly raining. On a space station.
Jyonal wore a big, pleasant smile.
“Ah, don’t look at me,” I said urgently. I didn’t want this freak’s mind wandering while he stared at my face. I might end up with four noses.
There was no ZR3 that I could see. I don’t know if it had only taken a few steps or if Jyonal had gotten rid of it. But I wasn’t going back.
I skipped the train and walked with Jyonal. He sobered up fairly quickly. Or became sober enough to talk to anyway, and his eyes, thankfully, stopped glowing. It ceased raining almost immediately. I think it was just in a tiny patch above us, but I couldn’t be sure.
“I need my old boots back,” I said, holding up his creations. The clown shoes were poorly constructed and hadn’t fit well. But it’s easy to be a critic.
He laughed at them.
“Seriously,” I said.
“I can’t. They’re gone.”
“Can’t you undo it?”
“I don’t even know what you were wearing.”
“They were black boots.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything, Hank.”
“And I had a cool gun and that’s”—I looked inside the shoes to be sure—“not here.”
“Sorry,” he said, rubbing his head. “This is why I gave up drugs.”
“Did you kill the robot?”
“No, I couldn’t see it.”
“How could you possibly not see it?”
“No, I could visually see it. But I couldn’t ‘see’ it. It wasn’t there.”
“What?”
“When I first started training, they would teach me to tell the difference between hallucinations and reality because I have to use so many drugs with my power. It was almost like that.”
“Hallucinations don’t tear up metal houses.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw. Or didn’t see. It’s like it wasn’t real.”
Jyonal was really tired and I carried him on my back the rest of the way home.
So we still had a robot and I had no boots.
I wondered if Delovoa was still sitting in the corner with his hands over his ears.
CHAPTER 29
Bright yellow shoes adorned my feet. I didn’t like shoes in general. They didn’t have the same heavy construction as boots, and they tended to tear along the seams when I wore them. But I was tired of having black feet because of ash from the fires and I wasn’t going to wear Jyonal’s clown shoes.
With the cargo ships here, we had a large assortment of food choices that had been absent before. My stomach had been loudly protesting my new dietary habits.
I was at a restaurant eating a kind of fried vegetable dipped in a spicy sauce. Not even five bites in, my stomach was already trying to push the food out.
A trim man wearing sunglasses, a hip beard, and some kind of antique military fatigues sat down across from me at my table.
“Hank,” he said.
I had no idea who he was, until:
“Rendrae?” I asked, shocked.
He looked around smoothly, trying not to attract attention.
“No names, please. Good to see you.”
I could barely recognize him. How did he change so fast? He took from his trousers a pistol that appeared to be bothering him now that he was seated and put it on the table.
“I’m just calling to check whose side you’re on.”
“Side of what?” I asked.
He lowered his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. As if talking to me these few moments was already frustrating beyond belief.
“There’s a revolution coming. You know this.” He stated both points as fact.
“I do?” I was utterly confused, so confused my stomach even seemed to stop complaining.
“You know about the military here,” he said, and sighed.
“Yeah, we already went over this. The telescopes and translators and such. I talked to some of those people. They’re fairly reasonable in the right circumstances.”
“Not them,” Rendrae snapped. “The Navy is here.”
I looked up at the ceiling. I don’t know why. We were in an enclosed restaurant and the latticework would have blocked any ship’s lights anyway. He continued.
“You think the cargo transports sat on the other side of the Portal for months, surrounded by Navy vessels, and nothing happened?”
I shrugged.
“Happened? Like what?”
“They boarded them,” he almost yelled, “and left some of their spies behind. When the ships docked here, they got off with the rest of the crew. The Navy has been watching us for weeks.”
Holy. Crap. My jaw dropped.
The bonfires. The airlocks. The gang reorganizations. Everything we were trying to hide, they would have seen. And it looks even worse that we tried to hide it because it shows we knew it was all illegal.