“But that’s stupid!” I protested. “Tengu’s not even close!”
“You don’t know that. And if he does catch up to us, he’d be able to pluck our destination right out of your head,” Puck reminded me, not for the first time. “Besides, we’re almost there.”
“How long?”
He smiled patiently. “Not much more than a couple of hours.”
I sighed. Lacking anything else to occupy my time, my mind had turned to wondering about our destination. Before, I hadn’t given it much of a second thought; I was just happy to be away from Voltaire. Now I was fixated on it. While I supposed Puck’s reasoning made a certain kind of sense…I didn’t want Tengu rooting around in my brain at all, but I certainly didn’t want him plucking anything out of it… the curiosity was killing me.
It was a tense, quiet two hour ride, much like the hours that had filled it before. Biv was awake, apparently all slept out for the time being. I was honestly hoping he hadn’t heard any of the back and forth between Kiasis and me earlier….I was pretty sure he’d been sleeping, but we hadn’t exactly been soft spoken in our disagreement (maybe disagreement wasn’t quite the right word. At the very least, we’d pretty well agreed on the fact we disliked each other). Kiasis had immersed herself almost immediately back into meditation…to see if she could sense anything from either of the hostages, she claimed, but I suspected it was mostly just to avoid any further contact with the rest of us. The only occasional conversation came from myself and Puck, and consisted mostly of me trying to wheedle information out of him and failing miserably. All my attempts were met with patient amusement until I finally gave up.
I had almost forgotten my impatience when Puck’s voice pulled me back out of my thoughts. “Alright, princess. Wait’s over, we’re here.”
I perked up almost immediately. “Where’s here?”
“Acomia.”
That was the last thing I’d expected to hear. In all the known universe, there was only one thing associated with that particular name. “You mean we’re going to the Marketplace?”
The Acomian Interstellar Marketplace was totally unique in the universe. It was a curiosity, a rarity in interplanetary trade that had been often imitated, but never reproduced. It was like a mall, a bazaar, and a city, all rolled into one, with peddlers, traders, shopkeepers, and some even said smugglers and pirates seeking to sell their wares. You could walk down any given street, so they said, and either buy your wildest dreams or at least rent them for a few hours. The fact that even I had heard of it on my little backwater colony was a testament to its fame.
I wasn’t sure if I was excited or afraid. Whatever I felt, I was fidgety. When we landed, it was late at night, and I was a little disappointed. I’d hoped to see the Marketplace in all its glory, but nearly everything was sure to be shut down. According to Puck, it was well past the middle of the night by their schedule, even though I couldn’t see much of anything from the enclosed landing strip we navigated into.
As we stepped out of the ship and prepared to leave the landing pad, Puck linked his arm with mine in an unexpectedly gallant (and irritatingly archaic) gesture. “Stick close, princess,” he warned. “Don’t let yourself get separated, okay?”
I rolled my eyes, but I nodded. “I’ll try.” I was privately pretty sure I could at least manage to walk without messing anything up.
Once the doors slid open, I probably would have been left behind right then and there if I hadn’t been holding on to him.
Even as late as it was, the streets were lit up almost as bright as day by all the signs…I’d realize later that there’d been no streetlights. There was no need for them, the surrounding businesses provided more than enough light. Crowds of people filled the walkways in both directions, air transports darted and zipped past overhead walkways as ground cars puttered along the streets. Anything Puck might have said was utterly lost in the din that assaulted my ears.
“It’s a little much at first.” I would never have heard Biv’s soft voice if he hadn’t been leaning right next to my ear. “But you get used to it.”
I stared mutely at the teeming mass of activity in front of me until Puck tugged me along impatiently.
By the time we’d gone only a few blocks, I was a little dizzy from trying to turn in every direction at once to see what was going on around me. Across the road, there was a tentacled being waving its multitude of arms around attract attention to the gaudy jewelry displayed on each limb. A little way in front of us was a woman with four arms and very little clothing who was hawking some sort of glowing, floating orbs that hovered and spun around her in an array of colors, lighting her pale skin in a fascinating, shifting rainbow. A few yards down from the tentacled creature, a very human looking man was trying to sell what appeared to be an equally human woman to a handful of what appeared to be soldiers, although I couldn’t tell what branch of the military they were from. To my relief, I finally saw that the “girl” was an android when the salesman popped a panel in the back of her head to allow one of the soldiers to peer inside. I was still mildly disgusted by the leers they were giving her, though.
“Young girl want to try a memory orb?”
The heavily accented voice caused my head to whip back around suddenly, and my world was filled with a blinding pink light.
