For supper, Kest found a diner on the other side of the city. Maybe it was the general cleanliness of the urban sprawl, but all of Pearl City seemed pretty upscale to me. There weren’t wild discrepancies in wealth like on Shinotochi-Ryu, where shantytowns crammed in the free space between luxury condos. Even the residential neighborhoods on Selk were fancy, the townhouses all shouldered up against each other, surrounded by short wrought-iron fences and crested with ornate metalwork. Here and there, towers poked up like wizard hats.

  But in the rickshaw over, Kest said she’d picked this diner because it served an area with a median income in the working-class range, which was apparently the largest demographic of voters on Selk.

  The only attention I’d paid to politics back on Earth had been when Gramps got riled up about something on the news, so I didn’t have much to judge by, but I wondered whether elections were as calculating and manipulative there as they were here.

  “Doesn’t this feel kind of… nasty?” I asked Kest. “All this plotting and scheming and acting like somebody else so people will like you? I mean, I get that elections are literal popularity contests, but still.”

  She gave me a flat look. “Hake, Takeshi sent me here to win.”

  I snorted.

  “Okay, that was Metal. I was starting to think you were morphing into some other kind of Spirit for a minute there.” I batted my eyelashes and put on a falsetto voice. “‘I’m just a hometown gal, never mind that I never set foot here before today. I stand for that one thing you stand for way more than those other jerks. In fact, they told me they hate that thing you like—’”

  Kest smushed her hand over my mouth and yell-talked over me. “Malleable Metal is whatever it needs to be to get the job done! Anyway,” she said in a normal voice now that I had shut up, “this diner was owned and operated by the same family back when my grandparents still lived in Pearl City. It’s where they met. Pop-pop proposed to Nona there.”

  I pried her hand off my face. “That’s very different than median voter income working demographic.”

  “It can be two things.”

  Black lace blazed across the tops of her cheeks. She was embarrassed.

  “Kest, you can just say that you want to eat at the place they ate at.” I slipped my fingers through hers. “I’m not going to make fun of you. It’s awesome that you finally get to be here and see all this stuff.”

  You could tell she was about to say something shrugging off how much this meant to her, try to play it Cold Heartless Metal. But at the last second, she stopped.

  Instead, she nestled against my good side. I put my arm around her, and she leaned there for the rest of the ride.

  The city’s dome had darkened from that cloudy afternoon light into cloudy night, and streetlamps shined over the sidewalks. The noise level had dropped with the artificial sun in accordance with the local noise pollution ordinances. The rumble of rickshaw traffic and the hiss and thunder of the storm they piped in from the surface were the only sounds.

  What would happen if I asked Kest to marry me in the same diner where her grandpa had proposed to her grandma? It had to be some kind of sign that we were going there, right?

  The rickshaw pulled to a stop in front of a diner on a corner. Yellow light shined through its huge windows and made rectangles on the street. Sort of like that Nighthawks painting, except the signs were all written in the alien script that my brain translated to English, and the patrons all had huge, lacy eyes, and the ladies wore skin-patterns that complemented their clothes.

  As we walked in, Kest’s cinnabar arm rippled, creating a raised design in the metal like a lace sleeve. A second later, identical black lace rippled down her flesh and bone arm.

  She must have been practicing that one in secret, because I’d never seen her change the network of capillaries for decoration before. It reminded me of something she’d said forever ago about some Selkens wearing nothing but different designs of that lace.

  Kest caught me staring.

  “What a showoff,” I said, rolling my eyes so she wouldn’t guess what I’d been thinking about.

  She smirked. “You must really like showoffs.”

  “One of them, definitely.”

  Several of the supper rush crowd stared at us as we followed the directions of the Seat Yourself sign. Maybe because I was the only non-Selken in there. Or maybe because of my Obviously a Big Five Gangster suit.

  I suggested we take the booth in the back corner, not mentioning that we’d be less visible and vulnerable there, but Kest wanted the one in the middle of the big wall of windows.

  “This is the one,” she whispered excitedly as we sat down. “This is the booth where they had their first malt.” She tapped on her HUD. “I’ll show you, I have the picture here somewhere.”

  When was I going to get a better chance? I smoothed my hand down my shirt like it needed fixing, feeling for the Crucible Casket underneath.

  Plink.

  A metal dragonfly bumped against the window and hovered at shoulder-height, staring at me. I pretended not to notice it.

  The other diners were whispering now. A couple pointed at Kest. One guy even snapped a photo.

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  I quit digging for the Casket and leaned my elbow on the table, covering the side of my face with my hand, twisting my upper body so I’d be mostly out of the shots.

  “Heads up,” I told Kest, “I think you might be famous.”

  “Maybe. My swim down and registration are all over the hyperweb,” she said, swiping through election coverage and informal polls. She frowned. “With all that media coverage, you’d think we’d have cracked the top ten. We’re behind my projections for Day One ranking.”

  “What are you ranked?”

  “Fifty-eighth out of one twenty-eight.”

  A Selken waitress with a beehive of graying hair stopped by our table to set down bowls of clear miso soup and hand us each a cracked, plastic-covered menu.

  Where the Specials in a diner back in Missouri would’ve been hamburger steak or chicken fried chicken, this place had chanko and sashimi. I ordered the hotpot that looked like it had the most meat in it. Kest asked our waitress what she recommended—the sashimi and nori garden special—then ordered that.

  “Fifty-eight out of a hundred and twenty-eight sounds pretty high for somebody who just got to this planet,” I said when the waitress left to put our order in. “Top half.”

  “It’s not near enough to get the name recognition we need to win this.” Kest shook her head and typed something into her HUD. “We have to make the top ten by our first fight or we’ll never…”

  Kest trailed off, the lace in her eyes darkening dangerously.

  “Unbelievable.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Lips pressed into a thin line, she rotated her HUD wrist so I could see the screen.

  A video played of her on the sub dock kissing me on the cheek. Across the bottom, a ticker scrolled with stuff like Candidate Iye Skal’s Deadly Romance and Returned Exile’s Taste for Outer Planet Bad Boys: Bad for Selk and Youngest Candidate Brazenly Flirts with Death.

  “Someone’s trying to use you against me,” she said.

  Smaller text rolled down the side of the video—people going on appalled rants, mocking us, and straight-up trash-talking—rolled down the side of the video like some kind of disastrous livestream.

  Living it the first time had been weird enough. Seeing the kiss on replay with all those tabloid slogans and comments made my skin crawl.

  “Maybe don’t kiss me in public again.” That came out even worse than in my head. “I just mean so they can’t do this with it. Anyway, PDA is weird.”

  “Do you think I wanted this to happen?”

  “No, but it was your idea to put on that act out where the paparazzi bots could record it.”

  Kest plopped back in her bench seat and stuck her nose in the screen of her SignalSong. Wireframe schematics flashed and twisted in the reflection on the window. Hiding from her stupid boyfriend in her work.

  I hunched over the table, face burning, and imagined proposing then. She would probably blowtorch the ring and throw the molten slag in my face.

  Plink. Plink. Two more metal dragonflies joined the first, buzzing up and down the pane.

  HUD cameras inside the diner watching Kest. Technol drones outside watching me.

  I scowled. “If one more camera shows up, I’m blasting everything in range with Moldering Bones.”

  “Why don’t you save the Miasma and just message the CPA to come arrest you,” Kest said without looking up.

  Then we both had to shut up while the waitress dropped off our food.

  Food doesn’t really have a taste when you know someone’s mad at you. It’s just lumps falling down your throat and sitting in your gut. It fills in the space around this big, gaping hole, but not in a way that helps.

  Before Sarca, I had almost gotten past thinking that Kest was going to drop me the second I made the tiniest wrong move. After Sarca, I knew she wouldn’t, but it felt like she should. Like I deserved it, and this was all just a waiting game for her to realize I did. Especially at times like this.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching across the table to grab her hand as she set her miso bowl back on the table. “If this place stocked Coffee Dranks, I would buy us some.”

  “I’m the one who should buy the Coffee Dranks,” Kest said. “I miscalculated, and I blew up at you because my miscalculation probably hurt us in this stupid election.”

  The knots in my stomach eased up.

  She blew a loose strand of hair off her cheek. “I haven’t even been on-planet for twenty-five hours and already I’m letting the stress turn me into a jerk.”

  I shrugged. “I was already like this. I just brought it with me.”

  That made her smile. “Okay, goof.”

  The food tasted a lot better after that. I ate two bowls of the chanko, which was delicious in a homecooked, healthy kind of way, and Kest talked to the waitress about her grandparents eating there. The waitress hadn’t worked at the diner that long, but she brought out the cook. His family had owned the diner since it opened, and he remembered Kest’s grandpa.

  “Old Hot Rod Sharali! No guppy of Hot Rod’s is spending a thin credit in my diner, I tell you what. Nor her meat roach boyfriend, neither.” In a confidential tone, he told me, “Hot Rod was always very open minded about foreigners.” Then he turned back to Kest. “Say, guppy, did you inherit Old Hot Rod’s sweet tooth? My wife makes a sweet spring roll that will knock your eyes white, I tell you what. Y’all wait right here, she’s just upstairs.”

  He brought back his wife and a plate of incredible, crunchy little spring rolls drizzled in caramel and cinnamon and stuffed with a fruit similar to bananas. Kest slipped into my side of the booth and invited the older couple to sit on the opposite side. While they exclaimed over how nice it was that Kest had taken the time to visit, asked after every member of her family, and asked me leading questions about how much more comfortable a water world was than a dry planet, Kest and I shoveled down about half a dozen sweet spring rolls apiece. They also brought up my not being Selken multiple times and said they didn’t care what anybody thought about meat roaches, as far as they were concerned, we were A-OK as long as we made sure not to cultivate past our limits.

  When it was finally time to leave, they wrapped up the leftover rolls to go and refused to take a single credit.

  “Come to think of it, I still owe Hot Rod a fifty-spot,” the old man said. He chuckled and slapped his knee. “This’ll make us even, I tell you what.”

  We left a tip for the waitress and headed for the door, Kest promising we would definitely come back now, ya hear.

  In spite of that rough patch there in the middle, it was shaping up to be a great night.

  Right up until I opened the door and spotted the CPA agents crossing the street toward the diner. Pointed Ylef ears stuck up on either side of their caps, the female agent’s sparkling with earrings.

  Although Technols recruited anybody from any race as long as they had enough cutthroat machinery skills, the majority of the gang’s members were Ylef. These two weren’t even trying to hide their Big Five affiliation. A metallic healing script tat peeked out from under the female agent’s collar, and her left pupil blinked red. The guy agent’s whole right side had been replaced with tech. Wires and running lights and pneumatics bulged the right sleeve, tactical vest, and the right pants leg of his uniform like cybernetic musculature.

  The lace in the old couple’s eyes thinned out in fear.

  “They’re two weeks early,” the cook muttered. “Scavengers.”

  “They can’t possibly expect us to have the protection fee already,” his wife said, grabbing his wrinkled arm. “We just paid them on the third!”

  What Agent Rav had said about the CPA hassling Mortal supertypes ran through my head again.

  “If I were you, I’d keep my head down for a couple days.”

  Easy to say when you didn’t have a blinking red eye locked on you like a crosshairs and two CPA agents beelining your way.

  “I don’t think they’re here for you guys,” I told the old folks.

  I’d been in the middle of pushing open the door for Kest, but I switched off the chivalry and shoved out into the night in front of her, slamming it behind me.

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