TWO HUNDRED TWO: Shoes

202

******

 

“That woman’s a slicer. I want something sliced!”

Natalie was looking down the pedestrian-only street toward a woman with long, silky gray hair. The color of it matched the skirt the woman wore, as well as the mesmerizing droplets that flowed down the backs of her fingers. A young man had just dumped a mound of what looked like oversized ginger roots onto the folding table in front of her, and she was making patting gestures over and around the pile.

“That doesn’t look like a spell impression,” Alden said, hurrying after Natalie, just as eager as she was to get a closer view of the magic.

He’d parked the nonagon against the wall of a building half an hour ago. Their destination was near enough that they could have been there in minutes, but the Free Spell Saturday event was so much fun that they weren’t rushing. The Avowed offering free magical services were wearing System name tags that said so. Some of them had booths or were carrying equipment with them that made them more obvious in the crowd. Others were casually browsing shops or sitting outside cafés.

Natalie hadn’t activated her own name tag, but she had a barter thing going on. She’d brought homemade sweets in her purse to offer people as thanks for their talents. Alden wished he’d known in advance that this event was taking place so that he could have thought of something similar. He couldn’t even figure out how to describe his skill on his name tag to explain how he might be useful or amusing to others.

They reached the woman with the folding table and stood behind a taped line on the pavement that indicated her space requirements. She had already finished with the roots. They were black inside, and she’d cut them into tiny cubes. A pungent smell filled the air. The man who’d brought them was scraping them into a large, dark green box shaped like a Chinese takeout container.

He tapped one of its corners and said a word that meant “seal” in Artonan. When nothing happened, he repeated it, pronouncing the word slightly differently.

After he failed a third time, Alden said, “I think you’ve got the wrong corner. It’s—”

“That one there!” Natalie was saying at the same time, pointing toward the one that looked a little more interesting.

Sympathy for Magic wasn’t annoying when it was like this—just a nudge that made the correct corner stand out from the others.

Some things that weren’t even powerfully enchanted, as far as Alden knew, glowed and made him turn his head. He wondered if some Artonans thought that their fellow wizards would be too stupid to detect the relevant parts of their creations, so they responded by doing the magical equivalent of writing, “PRESS THIS ONE!” or, “CAUTION! Poking this part with your authority WILL BREAK EVERYTHING!” in neon orange paint instead of keeping it subtle and trusting the end user to figure it out.

The man with the roots pressed a finger to the corner Natalie had indicated and gave the seal instruction again. The thick flaps that formed the box’s lid folded over and melted together.

“Rabbits?” he asked. <<Thank you, Rabbits! Thank you, Netta. I will bring you the inker next week.>>

What were those roots, and what is an inker, and what is Natalie doing with that chocolate covered pretzel stick?

“You want to see?” the woman asked, smiling at Natalie as she put the pretzel stick on the table.

“If you don’t mind.”

“You’re new to Anesidora,” Netta said, no doubt tipped off by Natalie’s accent. “Welcome. And you also.”

She was looking at Alden with eyes almost as silver as Natalie’s were gold. He thought he would have known she was an Avowed even if he’d met her on the street in Chicago instead of here in Apex. A little Appeal, a blue tattoo peeking out of the neck of her shirt that looked more authentic than the decorative ones some people wore in imitation, flawless light brown skin that made it hard to settle on an age for her. Though something about the way she was looking at the two of them did make him assume she was oldish.

“You’re Mr. Matadero Party,” she added.

“I…”

“That’s him! I made the turkey!” Natalie announced. “I cook, and Alden makes this amazing shield around things that keeps them safe. You can give him ice cream and then hit it with a blowtorch and nothing happens to it.”

“I do this,” said Netta. “Step closer. It won’t be dangerous with a pretzel as long as you don’t put your hands in the way.”

They stepped closer, standing shoulder to shoulder and watching as a bracelet she wore sent the silvery droplets rolling down the back of her left hand again. When they reached her fingertips, she flicked them off, and as they drifted through the air, they trailed slender filaments that stayed attached to her skin. The filaments stiffened a moment later, and she made the soft patting motion over the pretzel stick. It fell apart into penny-thin discs. With a beckoning gesture from their owner, the filaments retracted, became droplets once more, and slid back toward the bracelet.

“That’s a slicer for sure.” Natalie’s face said she was as delighted with the bracelet as Alden was.

Netta’s name tag did say, “Slicing Service,” but that really didn’t do her method justice.

“It’s your Meister tool?” Alden asked.

He thought the chances of the bracelet being crafted by a Wright were slim, but if she said she had a bunch tucked away for sale and they could be used by anybody, he’d be happy to be wrong.

“Yes,” she said. “Small, but mighty. I don’t think the System is satisfied with how I’ve grown into it. I haven’t heard of it giving anyone else one, and I once had a wizard ask me if I really couldn’t make the strands longer. But I like them just as they are. I don’t think short claws are such a problem.”

Natalie gifted Netta a fresh pretzel stick. They purportedly tasted like a friend smiling at you or a hug, depending on who was describing it.

“I’ve never tasted a smile before,” Alden hinted as they left. They were walking past a table full of Vocal Brutes who were sipping tea from tulip-shaped glasses while their name tags offered free songs and sound entrapment.

“Not many people have.” Natalie tucked the bag that held the pretzel sticks back into her purse.

“Are the chocolate pretzels vegan?” he asked.

“No, I’m sorry.”

Lies!

Okay. Not lies. The ones she’d just put in the purse weren’t, but he had caught a glimpse of a smaller bag with a single pretzel stick in it, and the gremlin was cool with that one.

“I should take a picture of your face and send it to Emilija and Hadiza,” she said.

“You’ve become cold and evil. They teach you to be mean-mean in culinary high school.”

“Weren’t you just bragging that you killed a teacher?”

“It was a fake death, and Klein had been breaking our legs for hours.”

She started to say something else teasing; he could tell she was going to by the look on her face. But before she could, they were both distracted by a shadow overhead. Alden looked up to see two long swaths of fabric—one red and one yellow—undulating through the air. They danced around each other for almost a minute before tying themselves into a big bow and drifting down to hover above a man with raised arms.

His name tag read, “Free Object Shaping.”

Natalie and Alden watched a family of two teens and two adults talk to the Shaper briefly. When he nodded, they all climbed into the loops of the bow together for a photo.

“That would be a fun picture,” said Natalie. “Do you want…or not, I guess.”

A crowd was already gathering around the Shaper. Alden didn’t know what he would do with a picture of himself sitting in a giant bow, but she sounded disappointed.

“I don’t mind waiting if you want to.”

“It’s all right. There’s so much else to see.”

She was right about that.

They passed a woman who was offering free pain relief and repair for injuries that were too minor to even bother going to a dispensary for. There weren’t many places in the world where you could find a Healer enjoying a day off by watching her Adjuster sister roast chestnuts while people strolling by asked to have the ouch taken out of burnt tongues and hangnails.

A Wright was demonstrating what went into making an electrical appliance run on enchantment. And a group of Brutes, Adjusters, and Shapers were speed-beautifying a couple of storefronts. Watching them work was better entertainment than a lot of the actual street performances. There was even a Sway who looked only a few years older than the two of them, offering “Free Self-control” to procrastinators. The woman talking to him was telling him that she wanted to want to throw away some of the junk in her apartment.

“Lobsters!” Natalie said suddenly.

“Where?” Alden looked away from the giant bubble he’d caught and preserved a couple of minutes ago. Someone was making them and sending them down the street. They seemed to be good old-fashioned soap bubbles rather than something magical.

“I just realized I might have to kill a lobster for one of my classes next quarter. You’re right. The culinary arts track is more violent than the hero track.”

“Do you have to do it even if you don’t want to?”

“I don’t know.” She adjusted her purse on her shoulder. “But I don’t actually mind doing it. If you’re willing to eat something…and some celebrations are about the meat being…you know…fresh. On other planets. What if I’m the person who makes the condiments for a traditional Artonan hunt? Or I get to visit a bunch of lortch when it’s a Night of Emergence? When those little fish-looking things climbed out of their burrows— ”

“You’d eat one of those?”

Her smile was hesitant. “Would it bother you if I said yes? Probably. Lortch are very serious about some traditions, and I wouldn’t want to offend whoever had welcomed me into their village.”

If Alden recalled correctly, lortch stabbed those things with a pair of pointy sticks as they crawled out of the ground by the thousands, then gorged themselves on whatever was left of the previous emergence while they prepared the new ones for storage.

“I don’t want to be invited to that event,” he said, “but it’s fine if you do.”

She looked more pleased with that answer than he thought she should.

“Don’t worry about what I think of your alien-tasting plans,” Alden told her. “As long as you have fun and stay safe out there…running around in the dark with a pair of stabbing sticks. Everybody needs goals.”

She nodded and poked the bubble. “I wouldn’t call that a goal. It’s something that might happen one day. That’s all.”

“Are you sure you haven’t just revealed your actual life’s purpose to me?”

She poked the bubble again, and he let it pop on them both. Her cheek dimpled.

“I have been worried a little bit,” she confessed. “I didn’t think you minded me cooking meat all the time, since you’re always talking about how good it looks and smells. But you’re so dedicated to your diet, and maybe you were just being supportive because it’s my skill, even though you thought…”

Until just then, Alden hadn’t realized why she was going into detail about what kinds of animals she might serve up on platters to diners of various species.

“The vegan thing!” he exclaimed.

She blinked.

“No,” he said. “Don’t worry about me being upset with you for that. I kind of fell into the diet. I haven’t actually pondered the morality of it as much as I should have by now? But I’m seriously fine with you cooking and eating lifeforms that are below a reasonable intelligence threshold.”

“Okay. Good!” she said. “I mean, I do think it’s really nice how much humans care about animals compared to a lot of other—”

“Right? One of the better things about our species. In modern times and most places anyway. So about those lobsters…you do what you feel right about. And then enjoy eating them. Without me.”

“That’s what I’ll do.”

They were both nodding at each other like something serious had been dealt with.

“Sorry for not catching on to what you meant faster. That’s the place we’re going, isn’t it?” Alden nodded toward a restaurant. The people exiting had their food in bags with the logogram for “meal” on them.

“That’s it,” Natalie said.

“The diet is inconvenient in a lot of ways,” Alden added as they headed there.

More than once on Thegund, he’d had the thought that a major eating restriction on top of a limited food supply could have been lethal. What if the lab had been stocked mostly with jerky?

“But it’s been positive for me in others. I’ve tried so many new foods because of it, and a lot of them are way healthier than what I used to eat. And delicious. Your vegan nachos. I thought it was your magic making them taste better than the regular kind, but that afternoon when you made them for me even though you’d fatigued your skill earlier in the day? Still the best.”

At the compliment, she hopped ahead of him and spun to face him. It was a dynamic, graceful movement. One that caught his attention in the way that still happened often enough even though he was used to how the Appeal worked, making all the pleasant things about her sing louder to his senses. There it was in the way her hair gleamed in the sun, and also in the way her long legs carried her back two simple steps that were somehow so perfect it was like watching a fragment of a dance.

“I might,” she said, her voice warmer than the day they’d both agreed felt like summer, “have one pretzel for you in my purse.”

“The truth comes out!”

“You can have it later.”

“I have to wait?”

“You do. I want you to actually enjoy this place, not be distracted by what I made.”

She pushed open the door, and they went inside.

 

******

 

The drudgery chest was the heart of the restaurant and the source of the food. There were no chefs present. Instead, a chalkboard listed the current meal and thanked the people who’d trained the magical device to cook it.

Alden and Natalie watched through a series of windows as knives chopped vegetables that then slid themselves onto pans. And as pans traveled to ovens, bouncing slightly like the person who the drudgery chest was mimicking had had a spring in their step.

An oven door opened and closed, a ladle dipped itself into a bubbling pot, and honey drizzled out of a bottle onto chunks of feta cheese.

A couple of people did help the kitchen out by supplying it with ingredients, but according to Natalie, it could go on cooking this meal for a week with only the resupply and occasional troubleshooting of things like dulling knives or drifting pans. Then, when the owner was ready for it to do something new, it was retrained with an entirely different menu.

Six argold bought a meal. There were no substitutions, and everything was served in carryout containers even if you were eating inside at one of the booths or the human-run coffee bar. There were multiple small dishes included, so Alden traded his feta for one of Natalie’s pitas while they talked about how full their new lives as residents of Apex were.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

She didn’t want to discuss the night of the disaster and what had happened. Alden was more than fine with that. Instead, she told him about some girls she knew who were planning to break the record for making the world’s longest noodle, then they shifted to school drama. He told her about Winston when she asked if Talent Development had stupid conflicts like Arts.

She brought up Lute and Emilija, and he was prepared to offer the opinion that Lute Velra deserved a much better reputation than he had. But before he could do that, she suddenly leaped from the two of them to him.

“You’ve never mentioned it,” she said, “but did you have a girlfriend before you got summoned and everything happened?”

Alden was surprised by the question, but maybe the surprising thing was that she hadn’t asked before. After all, people who’d only just met you asked you things like this sometimes.

“No,” he said. “I’ve never dated anybody.”

“I’m surprised,” said Natalie. “You’re so mature and thoughtful.”

“Thank you.” A tiny alarm had just begun to sound in Alden’s head. He was going to ignore it. “But I’m not that mature.”

“You are, though!”

The tabletop between them was barely large enough for their spread of food. Beneath it, one of Natalie’s shoes bumped the toe of one of his own.

That, thought Alden, could have been a friendly toe bump. The kind of thing you do for conversational emphasis, like a fist bump with feet.

“Most people would probably have bragged a little about having a commendation. Or shown it off. But you didn’t mention it in intake at all, not even when that guy who Paolo brought over to our apartment said he wouldn’t mind getting stranded somewhere if he got full pay and an apology fee.”

This is a small space, too, so accidental foot bumping happens.

It was just the question about girlfriends coming out of the blue in combo with it that made it seem loaded.

Natalie plucked an olive from the salad cup beside her and popped it into her mouth. “You just ignored him. I thought he was so stupid, and I was going to tell him so.”

“He was stupid.”

“But you were calm and collected about it.”

“Well,” said Alden, “I suggested we all go play with my pinball machine so that I could beat him, so I wouldn’t say I was one hundred percent mature there.”

Her laugh was bright.

“Did you hear about the commendation at school?” he asked.

“I did. People in my classes know I know you, so they were asking a lot of questions.”

“Sorry,” said Alden. “I expected them all to ask me questions, but it seems like most people are going to be semi-normal to my face and then grill my friends when I’m not around. Haoyu and Lexi got questioned by our gym class, and then I think the gym class is gossiping with the rest of the school. So far, all I’m getting personally are stray comments, and some people who didn’t care about me at all last week are acting like everything I say is interesting. Or deep.”

“Maybe you’re being deeper than you realize.”

“I don’t think I am. There’s this one guy who says I’m deep even if the most ridiculous crap in the world comes out of my mouth. I wonder if he thinks I’m scoring him on how many times he says it. You know, for the special commended-person report I send to the Triplanets every evening, letting them know which Celena North students are the best.”

Natalie gasped dramatically and put a hand to her mouth. “The rumors are true! How is my score?”

“Top of the charts!”

“Yes. I knew I was winning.”

The window beside them was briefly shaded by a sheet of red fabric shooting by, pursued a moment later by a yellow one. They both leaned in their seats to watch the fabric weave wildly through the people walking past and then spiral upwards.

“That Shaper has amazing control,” said Alden.

Another toe-bump made him turn back to face her. She was wearing the sweetest little smile as she slurped lemon water through a straw.