Three lowered his eyes back to his glass, kept the woman and boy in his peripheral awareness. She moved from patron to patron, urgent, pleading, waved off impatiently. Three shut his eyes and drank deeply the remaining honey-liquid from his glass. He set it back on the table with a dull crack, felt the table shift again.
Good, he thought with a half-smile. Table, not me.
When he opened his eyes, she was there.
“Please…” she began. Three’s gaze flicked to the door behind her. In the next instant, it swung open, and she whipped around to face it, inhaling sharply. Whoever she was expecting wasn’t there. Just a pair of teen Skinners blowing in off the street. She clenched her eyes, bent over Three’s table, dropped a fist to support herself. Three watched her hazily, felt his eyes float to the boy. The boy ran his hand slowly, methodically, back and forth along the edge of Three’s table, tiny fingers wrapped around some scavenged plaything: a model of an ancient shuttlecar with a few flecks of yellow paint where bare metal hadn’t yet worn through. He fixed Three with a wet, penetrating stare, and never looked away.
Three reached in his vest pocket and flicked a pair of nanocarb chips onto the table, a hundred Hard. The woman opened her eyes, stared down blankly at them, then back up at him, shaking her head.
“No,” she practically whispered, teeth catching her bottom lip for an instant in an almost imperceptible struggle to maintain thin composure. “We need help.”
“You lose something?” Three heard himself ask heavily. The fog was settling nicely now.
“What?”
“Did you lose something?” he repeated, with overemphasized precision.
“No, I—”
“Looking for someone?”
“What? No, we’re just—”
“Then I can’t help you.”
The woman straightened, and looked back to the door, but didn’t leave. Three glanced to the boy again, found himself staring into deep green pools, fascinated. The boy seemed equally intrigued by Three. The woman made one more attempt.
“I’m not asking you to help me,” she pushed the boy to the front. “Look, will you help him?”
“I’m not being rude, ma’am. Just honest.”
Three tilted his glass on the table, signaled to the bartender for another. Still the woman stood, chewing her lip, pressing her fist to her abdomen, while the bartender jerked his way over and refilled Three’s glass to the brim.
“Take the money,” Three said, sipping from the glass, feeling the warmth roll down his throat, filling his chest with dull flame.
“Mama,” a small voice peeped next to the woman. “Mama, let’s just go.”
The woman stared vacantly, at the door, at the table, at the Hard.
“Go on,” Three said. “I’ve got plenty.”
“Mama, please, can we go now, can we go?”
Without a word, the woman swept the two nanocarb chips up off the table and into her pocket, then whirled and tugged the boy along behind her to the bar. She spoke animatedly with the bartender, who directed her with various twitching gestures towards the back. The boy never took his eyes from Three, not until he vanished with his mother into a back room and, Three assumed, out again into the streets.
Three downed a good half of his glass, felt a faint satisfaction waft through, like the smoke-wisp of a just snuffed candle, knowing he’d helped some local skew and her runt, and hadn’t even been annoyed when she hadn’t thanked him. A hundred Hard was probably more than she’d make in a week of nights under sweaty Joes who couldn’t afford even C-grade sims.
“Hold my table,” Three called to the bartender, hauling himself out of the booth to take care of the growing pressure in his bladder that he’d just noticed.
In the stall, he watched in a sort of drunken lucidity the stream splashing onto the stainless grate, knowing somewhere below it was being absorbed, filtered, broken down into useful parts for biochem batteries, or solvent, or cooking. He chuckled aloud at the thought of his fellow patrons out there drinking his recycled urine.
But then the sudden image of the boy’s sea-green eyes cut short his personal amusement, and Three couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something in them he should’ve noted, something he missed that was important, or would’ve been if he’d noticed. He was still rolling it over in his thickened mind when he stepped back out to the bar and felt the twinge, the automatic heightening of senses he’d learned to trust even when he didn’t know why.
He continued to his table smoothly, seemingly unconcerned, knowing any change of intent might draw unwanted attention, and slid into his booth, absorbing at a glance the altered environment. The adrenaline surge burned away all traces of the alcohol-induced mist he’d spent the afternoon cultivating. The bar was nearly the same; same hazy atmosphere, same regulars, same bartender. The regulars weren’t chattering now. The Skinners had a new companion.
He was tall; taller than the bartender, broad-shouldered, with long, stringy dark hair like tendrils down his back. His face was skullish, skin stretched taut across sharp features, unnaturally smooth despite other, more subtle signs of age. Thin hands, tapering to long, dexterous fingers. The eyes were the key: a slight wrinkling at the edge, with thirty more years of life in them than the rest of the man’s build suggested.
Genie, Three guessed. Dangerous.
He’d run afoul of a couple of Genies before, humans who through extensive genetic engineering, or outright tampering, had attained preternaturally advanced talents or skills. It was a mistake Three didn’t plan to repeat. The trouble with Genies was you never knew what about them had been enhanced. The eggheads were never a problem. Others, though, could be lethal. Judging the tall man at the bar, Three guessed he was a strength tweaker. Could probably crush a man’s skull in his massive hand.
The man spoke few words, but each brought forth a torrent of information and gestures from the Skinners, as they tripped over one another trying to convince him of their eagerness to help. They both looked terrified. Three hadn’t drawn his notice, but the newcomer wasn’t interested in him anyway. One of the Skinners motioned to the back of the bar, and shortly after, the tall man exited by way of the front door, without so much as a glance in Three’s direction. After several tense moments, one of the regulars mumbled something that drew laughter from the others at the bar. Normalcy rebooted, a programmatic hiccup resolved.
Three reached for his glass, half-empty when he left, now half-full. The boy’s eyes burned before him, innocent, unaccusing. There was no doubt the tall man was after the woman; the boy. Veins in the tall man’s temples had bulged slightly as he left the bar. Anger. Three knew in his heart that the tall man meant harm to those two. He shook his head: not his problem.
A hundred Hard, Three thought. That’ll go a long way, if she’s smart.
He picked up his glass, swirled the slightly viscous liquid. Unappealing now. He wanted to want to drink it, but instead just watched it spin and settle. Over the rim of his glass, on the far side of the table, something caught his eye. A small model shuttlecar with chipping yellow paint.
He left the glass.
“How much do I owe you?” Three called to the bartender, standing and gathering his things.
The bartender looked his way, puzzled.