Pink shuddered and nodded agreement.
“Did anyone see who threw the chair?” one of the security guards asked, her voice amplified to be heard over the crowd.
Eva picked up her pace and did not look back. She knew what happened to people who looked back, and it wasn’t good.
As they zipped away from Medoral, Eva checked her q-mail to find a message from her mom.
“Assuming your missing person wasn’t buying new bathroom lighting, he and his companions took a shuttle to Charon and bought three tickets to the gathering there. Hope this helps. Love you.”
Charon. Eva groaned. Why would Josh go there? And who was he traveling with? Mari hadn’t mentioned anything about him being with other people. At least there was a Gate nearby, so it wouldn’t be another few cycles just to reach Pluto.
“Hey, Min,” Eva said. “Set a course for Charon.”
“Really?” Min asked. “Are we, I mean, do we have time to—”
“Yes,” Eva said, rubbing her temple. “We’re going to Evercon.”
They convened in the mess again to discuss what they’d learned on Medoral and what to expect on Charon. Sue refused to sit, pacing back and forth in front of the table as Eva blew on her instant noodles to cool them. Min watched Sue pace, snacking on a protein bar; it was interesting that she’d ventured out of the bridge yet again, but Eva had more pressing questions on her mind. Mala had deposited herself in the middle of the table, in clear violation of Eva’s previous rants about hygiene, and had tucked her paws underneath her so she looked like a loaf of fruity pumpernickel.
“I have confirmed that your sibling did pass through Medoral,” Vakar told Sue. “The Fridge agents attempted to apprehend him and were unsuccessful. While they maintained a presence on the station for unrelated purposes, they were tasked with alerting their superiors if Josh were to return.” Between statements, he ingested cubes of nutrient paste quickly and methodically, and Eva resisted the urge to tell him to slow down.
“And your mom is sure he went to Evercon?” Pink asked.
“Pretty sure,” Eva said. “And with other mystery people, so that’s fun.”
“I can’t believe we’re so close to finding him,” Sue said, flapping her hands in excitement. “I hope he’s okay. I hope they didn’t make him do anything too bad.”
Pink leaned back in her chair, pursing her lips in a way that told Eva she had opinions. Eva waited, slurping her hot food carefully and burning the roof of her mouth anyway.
“You trust her?” Pink asked finally.
“My mom?” Eva asked, unable to keep the surprise out of her tone. “Yeah, I trust her. She could still be wrong, but I don’t think she’s lying if that’s what you mean.”
“I’m just saying, you trusted your sister and look where that got us.”
“This isn’t like that.” Eva put her fork down and sighed. “I know I’ve probably told you about this before, but my mom left Pete because he was a lying sack of crehnisk shit who thought laws were blueprints for building better crimes. She was worried about him putting us all in danger, but she hated the law-breaking and lying more than anything else. She always used to tell me, ‘Eva, lie to me and you’ll get double punished,’ and she meant it.”
“You still did it, though,” Pink said, smirking.
“Claro que sí,” Eva said. “I got away with it enough that it was worth rolling the dice. I didn’t even tell her exactly why we were looking for Josh, because what, I’m gonna say we’re on retainer for Mari’s super-secret intergalactic anti-Fridge club?” She grabbed her fork again, maybe a little too aggressively, and stirred her noodles.
“Agent Virgo said The Forge came first,” Sue said, pausing midstride to accept a random ship part from one of her tiny yellow bots.
“Counterpoint: Agent Virgo sucks plutonium exhaust,” Eva said, and Min giggled.
“So your mom’s not gonna stab us in the back later, then?” Pink asked. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. She might stop helping us if she thinks something is funky, because she takes the law a little too seriously, but she’s not gonna call the cops on us.” Sure, Regina worked for BOFA now, but she was auditing files or whatever. Staring at numbers on a holoscreen all cycle didn’t translate to calling in strike teams to drag her own daughter to the nearest rehab station.
“If you say so,” Pink said, shrugging. Then she smiled, her single eye staring vacantly at the cabinets behind Eva. “My brother was always big on rules, too. We knew he’d make a good lawyer someday, and he is. He can find loopholes a flea would have to squeeze through, and he’ll turn an argument right around on you before you can even get a proper grip on it. He’s slippery as a greased pig.”
“Good thing he uses his powers for awesome and not evil,” Eva said, taking another bite of food. “How about you, Vakar, you ever make your parents want to throw a chancleta at you?”
“My parents were not inclined to attack their offspring with improvised projectile weapons,” Vakar said, his scent laced with cinnamon as he relaxed. “I encountered some difficulties during my early training modules, primarily because I found them juvenile and uninteresting, but the programming adjusted quickly to compensate.”
“Hey, that sounds like me,” Min said. “I would get so bored, I would hack into the q-net and play free games instead of working. I totally brought down the whole system with a virus once.”
“By accident?” Sue asked, pausing to stare at Min.
“That time, yeah.”
Sue finished her circuit, stopping finally to lean against the counter. She flexed her calves so that she went up and down on the balls of her feet. “Josh got in trouble a lot,” she said quietly. “He’s way older than me, so he was allowed to do big-kid stuff that I wasn’t, but he still messed around.”
“Are we talking, like, skipping school and tagging buildings?” Eva asked.
Sue grimaced. “More like building prototype rockets and testing them without supervision.”
“That’s right,” Pink said. “Your family makes ships.”
“Mostly, yeah,” Sue said. “Ships, rockets, mining bots . . . custom stuff, you know? Sometimes we mod, sometimes we build from scratch.”
“Did you get in trouble, too?” Eva asked. It was hard to picture the pink-faced girl in front of her acting out, but Sue had robbed banks, so who knew.
“Our parents were less strict with me,” Sue replied. “I did a lot of the same stuff, but Josh was usually there to help, and if anyone got in trouble it was him for instigating.” Her forehead creased as she frowned. “He got really . . . intense after BOFA made us move.”
“Because of the Proarkhe discovery on your home planet,” Vakar interjected.
“Yeah. Then he went off to school in a whole other galaxy for a while. He still let me show him my projects, and when he got back he would sometimes hang out with me in the workshop, but mostly he was too busy with paying work.” She fell silent, tapping a staccato rhythm against the cabinet with her right hand, and Eva could almost read the thoughts and emotions flashing through her mind, because they weren’t far off from how she’d felt about Mari.
“We’re going to find him,” Eva said.
“Bet your ass we will,” Pink agreed.
Sue’s eyes welled up with tears. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I mean, I know we’ve been looking this whole time, but it feels like it’s really going to happen now.”
Min got up, ostensibly to throw her food wrapper into the recycler, but she veered off-course to give Sue a gentle pat on the arm. Sue smiled, her cheeks rosy as she stared at her feet.
Eva finished sipping her noodle broth and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “At least our next stop isn’t dangerous,” she said. “The worst thing we’ll have to deal with at Evercon is the clouds of sanitizing spray.”
Vakar swallowed the last of his nutrient paste. “Why are there clouds of sanitizing spray?”
Eva shook her head ruefully.
“You’ll see when we get there. Or smell, I guess.”
A few hours later they arrived on Charon, the largest moon of Pluto, in the Kuiper Belt of the Sol system. The local star was distant, but still brighter than any other star in the Milky Way, giving enough light at certain times of the cycle to illuminate the icy gray surface. More impressive was Pluto itself, looming in the sky with its snakeskin landscape mottled by orange and blood-red patches.
“Is it strange?” Vakar asked as Eva stood in the bridge, staring at the viewscreens.
“Strange?” Eva repeated.
“To be in the system where your species originated.” He studied her face, his gray-blue eyes hooded slightly by his inner lids.
“A little,” she admitted. “My family left Earth a long time ago, and we didn’t settle on Mars or Titan like some refugees. We kept going.”
“I am given to understand that war had a long reach,” he said.
“Long enough,” Eva said quietly. “And they knew they were never going back. My family, I mean. Some people, some exiles, figured it was a matter of time and they’d be able to pick up where they left off. Pero no fue tan fácil.”
“I never had a home planet,” Vakar said, smelling like jasmine with a hint of rust. “Our oldest histories tell us it was rendered uninhabitable by cataclysms, and its location was lost, perhaps deliberately. There is an old saying: ‘seeking Thadus,’ to mean wasting time on a pointless task.”
“We have a saying like that,” Eva said, sliding her arm around his waist. “Trying to find the Holy Grail.”
“A grail is a vessel of some kind? My translators are unclear.”
“A cup, a bowl, who knows.” Eva rested her head on the side of his chest. “It was supposed to heal people who drank from it, but only the most holy people could even touch it.”
He smelled confused. “What is ‘holy’ in this context?”
Eva grinned. “Virgins.”
“Ah, yes. For a species whose primary stereotypical quality is engaging in sexual intercourse with virtually anything, your various cultural preoccupations with chastity are quite curious.”
Eva bumped him with her hip, and he settled an arm around her shoulder. “Plenty of humans have no interest in sex or romance,” she said. “Probably about the same number who earn the opposite stereotype, maybe even more.”
“How fortunate I am that you are not one of them,” he teased, the smell of licorice taking over everything else he’d been sending out.
“Oye, Papi Chulo,” Eva said. “Our various cultures have changed a lot over the centuries, mostly for the better. But one thing hasn’t changed.”
“What is that?”
“Humans still like pretending to be other people for fun.” She finalized their Evercon ticket purchases through her commlink, grumbling internally at the cost. “And when it comes to making shit up, humans do not fuck around.”
Evercon hadn’t always been a convention. The original settlement on Charon was a standard dome habitat, complete with artificial gravity and garden pods, occupied mainly by scientists. Then the local Gate was discovered, BOFA made first contact according to their protocols for sentient species, and suddenly one habitat became a huge way station for newly minted intergalactic travelers entering and leaving the system. Once humans fully embraced FTL technology, there was less of a need for such a stopover, so the owners of the various hospitality properties rebranded them as a prime location for conferences and corporate retreats and similar functions.
Then one company, Iron Throne Enterprises, bought up the whole damn rock and consolidated.
In retrospect, it seemed obvious that a place with geological features such as Oz Terra, Gallifrey Macula, Mordor Macula, and Vulcan Planum would become host to various fan conventions. And indeed, despite best efforts to attract other species—and their money—to the facilities, it remained a uniquely human artifact. But no one anticipated exactly how wildly popular the place would be for pop-culture and nostalgia-seekers alike, and what started as a handful of separate events evolved into a never-ending morass of competing celebrations of humanity’s fictional accretions.
As Eva had predicted, Vakar took one smell of the place and backed out, claiming he had work to catch up on. It was just as well: nonhumans were more than welcome, but tended to draw more attention because humans assumed they were celebrities. On the other hand, Min was eager to explore, even if she clung to Sue’s hand, unaccustomed to the intensity of the crowds wandering the mazelike halls of the various interconnected buildings. Sue was also excited, mainly because of the dazzling array of technical prowess on display in the various costumes and props. Pink was Pink, and came along mostly to supervise.
Once again, weapons were not allowed, with all props carefully inspected for potential lethality and confiscated accordingly. Eva had left her cane behind this time, opting for a stim and pain meds, so she and her crew were able to make their way to the front more quickly. It still took a solid half hour because the line wound back and forth across the entire length of a room large enough to fit a fleet of short-range starfighters. And this was only one of the dozen possible entrances.
Not everyone wore a costume, but they were common. Eva had been to big parties where dressing up was half the fun, but this was a whole other level. The care and attention to detail, the elaborate layering and stitching and accessorizing, the makeup and prosthetics, the holographic displays and multisensory overlays, even the low-level psychic effects were so impressive that Eva couldn’t help but share in a fraction of the exuberance of the people around her who actually knew what the hell was going on.
It was lying, maybe, all this pretend play, but a kind of lying that felt good. It brought people together, made them feel part of something bigger than themselves. Some fans could be shitty, but pa’l carajo with those people.
That wasn’t to say it was all happy times, because it quickly became apparent that more was going on under the giddy, squealing surface.
“Run that by me again, please,” Eva told Min. “And maybe explain more about, uh, all of it.”
They stood against a wall in one of the main corridors in the Dragon wing, clusters of cosplayers drifting past like stately parade floats, pausing occasionally to pose for pictures. Sue could hardly keep her mouth closed, oohing and aahing at everyone, especially the ones with mechanical parts.
“Okay,” Min said, tugging on her blue pigtail braid with her free hand. “So even though this place is super huge, it gets full really fast, and some of the rooms are bigger or nicer than others, or have better tech.”
“Right,” Eva said. “Got it.”
An eerily beautiful man with silver hair and one enormous black wing, an absurdly large holo-sword in his hand, stopped in front of Pink. “Your costume is amazing,” he said.
“I’m not wearing a costume,” Pink replied. Her braids were pulled back in a thick ponytail, and she’d worn a green-and-black jacket over her spacesuit. Perfectly normal clothes for her. The only thing remotely costume-like, to Eva’s mind, was Pink’s eye patch; she’d worn her nice one, black with a gold crescent moon that almost looked like a simple line drawing of a closed eye.
The man shrugged and moved on. Pink glanced at Eva with a raised eyebrow, and Eva wagged her head noncommittally and returned her attention to Min.
“There are a lot of different groups running events here,” Min continued, “and they all have to book space in advance, which is super hard because, like, there’s so many of them? And some of them have really famous guests, but some don’t, and sometimes there’s overlap in the fandoms?”
“I think I’m following so far,” Eva said.
Another beautiful man, this one with long white hair and a floor-length fur stole over one shoulder, approached Pink. “I love your costume,” he said. “Could I take a picture with you?”
“Sorry, it’s not a costume,” Pink said.
“Oh, my error,” the man replied. “Nice eye patch.”
Pink flashed him a close-lipped smile and he moved on.
Min bit her lip pensively. “So, like, the groups form factions, so they can get access to better spaces and hotel block pricing? But they don’t always get along with each other. Sometimes it’s the people in charge and sometimes it’s the fans, but they’ll have these alliances that last for a while and then break up because of infighting.”
“Qué relajo,” Eva said. “It’s like diplomacy for geeks.”
A pair of teenagers in spacesuits walked past, took one look at Pink, and squealed simultaneously. After some excited but inaudible chatter between them, they ran off, wearing identical expressions of people on a mission. Pink’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“So the reason the event listings and panel locations keep changing . . .” Eva said, prompting Min to continue.
“Right,” Min said. “So even if it’s all negotiated in advance, stuff falls apart at the last minute. Like right now, the fantasy furries are fighting the sci-fi furries, and they’re both mad at the equestrian furries, and there was a fantasy medievalist coalition but they split because the reenactors decided they didn’t want elves on their costuming panels, and the manga and comic groups are back together so they took over a prime chunk of ballroom space to make their own artists’ alley, and the biggest military sci-fi group is having this huge thing over one fandom taking up too much space because their soldiers are, like, literally enormous compared to everyone else—”
“And you lost me,” Eva said. “The point is, it’s hard to know what the fuck was happening when Josh passed through here.”
“Yeah, basically,” Min said. “Whatever was on the schedule might have changed at the last minute, and might not have been updated in the official comms channels.”
The teenagers in spacesuits returned, their eyes practically sparkling with excitement. They’d brought an entire additional squad of other people in spacesuits, some of them wearing jackets like Pink’s but in different colors, some wearing helmets with different symbols on them—flowers, hearts, leaves, coins, and other shapes Eva couldn’t identify. One of the teens had apparently been appointed as speaker, because they approached Pink while the others held back, giggling.
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