Lydia falls asleep in the late afternoon and everyone leaves her alone until she wakes up around 10:00 P.M. She idly remarks to Mum that the antilag shot she bought at the hopper terminal was rubbish and didn’t work, and her glasses ask her if she wants to post that as a product review. She says yes.
Facing the prospect of being wide awake all night, Lydia decides to go out. Out out. Not with old friends, or Gil (who won’t be back for hours anyway): on her own. She digs out some old clothes from a vacuum box Mum has stashed in the hallway cupboard, but of course they no longer fit her, so she’ll have to go in some work clothes. She adjusts her outfit in the long mirror by the front door while Mum sits with her feet up on the coffee table and plays a strategy game set in a cod-medieval fantasy world. (Lydia can’t help but notice the evil army of wraiths in the game bear more than a passing resemblance to the Logi.)
“You look nice,” says Mum while her stream is temporarily muted so she can sip her tea.
“Yeah,” says Lydia: the gray-and-black striped suit goes well with her new dark green hair, and she’s absolutely nailed the eyeshadow. “Who cares if I look massively out of place?”
“Exactly.”
“Doesn’t matter, because I’m an international deluxe bitch.”
Mum frowns. “That’s not how I’d put it.”
“Well,” says Lydia, straightening her silver tie, “you’re not me, are you, Mum.”
“Have fun,” says Mum, unmuting her stream and going back to her game.
“I will.”
Lydia goes to Hidden Palace, a club she’s been to precisely once before, on her eighteenth birthday. Back then it was rare her friends ever felt rich enough to go hardspace clubbing (the only kind Lydia could join in with) and when they did they went somewhere cheaper than Hidden Palace. The club seemed impossibly luxurious back then but now seems shabby and dated. Or maybe it was never that nice, and she just sees it differently now.
She easily scores some & and has a dance, but after an hour or so she still feels wound up and frustrated and she’s just starting to think this was a waste of time when her gaze momentarily settles on a cleanskin guy with long dark hair and flowers sewn into his shirt staring down at the bar and she thinks, Christ, he’s fit.
He looks up at her. She glances away but he’s already seen her looking. He walks over.
His name is Hari and he’s younger than she is, early twenties at the oldest, maybe even late teens. He tells her she doesn’t look like anyone else in the club, and she tells him he doesn’t either—but it turns out this isn’t true because his friends join them and they’re rocking the same look he has. Hari introduces her to them—Chukka and Fionn. They’re cleanskins too—they don’t even have piercings—and Chukka is heavily bearded, like Lydia’s granddad in old images. They want to know who she is and where she’s from and what she’s doing here and are amazed to learn she’s originally from Halifax. They ask a lot of questions and buy her drinks. They chatter eagerly and offer some of what they’re on, which is some vape-chamber thing—she doesn’t catch the name but accepts it anyway because they seem to think she’s cool and she doesn’t want to break the spell. It gives her a mild, not entirely pleasant buzz which gives way to a jittery rush, on top of the &, and she hopes it wasn’t a terrible idea to take it.
Fearing she’s being rude by talking about herself, she asks them questions (Hari’s an on-call cybersecurity patcher; Fionn’s a colleague of his who specializes in data analysis; Chukka makes and sells bespoke hash pipes). But they don’t really want to talk about themselves, they want to know about life in Manhattan and all the places she’s seen with her own eyes. They ask, is it really different when you’re really there? And they want to hear her say yes, which is good because it’s true.
As they’re leaving Hidden Palace, Hari sheepishly tells Lydia he shares a bedroom with his younger brother so going to his flat’s not really an option. No problem, says Lydia: she looks up the nearest Quickrooms on her glasses and requests an open-ended short stay, because booking a hotel room on a whim is what an international deluxe bitch would do. The hotel itself is not deluxe—it’s a spartan crash house for seasonal workers—but it’s all there is. Minutes later they breeze through the doors of the hotel and kiss in the elevator. The room, when they reach it, is tiny and barely accommodates a double bed—but a double bed is all they need.
His body is sleek and solid and full of energy, and after sex they engage in excitable chatter. He laughs at her jokes. There’s a moment when he holds her gaze and she feels like she might tell him about why she’s back in town, because she glossed over that part when she met him in the club.
But the moment passes and they fuck again instead.
It’s after 9:00 A.M. when he finally falls asleep. She could just leave him here, tell him the room is paid for and he can check out when he wakes up. But she stays. Her thoughts go back and forth, like a conversation. She thinks how relieved she was last night to see herself through the eyes of Hari and his friends. They were properly impressed with her. She misses Manhattan. So what if it’s become a theme park? She likes theme parks. And she wants to make up for her mistake: she’s afraid of failure and the associated humiliation, but she’s already suffered that, so what does she have to lose?
Above all she misses the focus and certainty she gets from Fitz, that when she’s with him she knows exactly what she’s meant to be doing, and that he’s not just bullshitting her.
The other voice in this conversation Lydia’s having in her head belongs to Fitz. The voice doesn’t say exactly what Fitz would say, but says it how he’d say it. They told her at LSTL this was normal, that after a while she’d hear the voice of her assigned Logi in her head even when they weren’t around, and it’s become so commonplace she rarely thinks about it. But suddenly, perhaps because she hasn’t spoken to him in a few days, it strikes her how weird it is.
“What’s weird?” says Hari sleepily, turning his head on the pillow and looking up at her.
Lydia realizes she spoke that rather than thinking it. She’s embarrassed, then decides not to be, and just explains what she was thinking.
“That is weird,” he says. “Having him in your head all the time.”
Lydia agrees. But she doesn’t mind. She likes the weird.