So when Ema told him, “I don’t give out my number,” he gave her his number instead. But she had never called. Until now.
“It’s Ema,” she said. “From the clanless meetings.”
“Ah, hey,” said Bero, frowning, but suddenly excited. “You called.”
“Listen, I know that I haven’t been all that nice to you. I . . . have a hard time letting other people get close to me. I know it must make me seem rude sometimes.” She paused. “Anyway, I was wondering if you’d like to get together tonight.”
Bero thought about saying no just to spite the standoffish bitch, but the impulse only lasted for half a second. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m not doing anything right now. Where do you want to go?”
After a moment of silence, Ema said, “I don’t feel like going out. Not tonight. I have a bottle of hoji here at my place. Do you want to come over?”
Bero went over. On the way, he stopped to buy a bag of hot fried bread from a fast food stand and a packet of condoms from the drugstore. Ema lived in an old, three-story apartment building behind an adult video rental shop in the Coinwash district. Bero climbed to the top floor and knocked on her apartment door. She opened it, smiled wordlessly, and held the door open for him to come in. She was wearing only a white bathrobe and no clothes underneath. The air in the apartment was damp and smelled of orange blossom; it seemed she’d just gotten out of a bath. She hadn’t waited for him to arrive to open the bottle of hoji.
“Fried bread, thank the gods,” she said, and took a stick of it from the bag.
Despite his eagerness to get started, Bero took a moment to walk around the one-bedroom apartment curiously. It was tiny, even smaller than his, but the things inside of it were expensive. Ema had an LCD television, and a stereo with a cassette tape deck. Her open closet was filled with brand-name clothes, handbags, and shoes, and the jewelry lying on her dresser was real gold. Bero couldn’t think of why, if she had enough money to buy such nice things, she would be living in this neighborhood.
He sneered. All her belongings must be gifts from rich men.
Resentfully, he remembered that his Espenian handlers would want him to take this opportunity to gather information. There didn’t seem to be many obvious clues about Ema’s personal life besides a framed family photograph on top of her dresser. A man and woman with three boys and two girls, standing on the deck of a boat with the ocean in the background. Ema was a teenager in the photograph—the second-oldest child. She was standing beside her elder brother, a Green Bone.
“Come here,” Ema said, patting the sofa cushion next to her. She poured him a glass of hoji. Bero took off his jacket and sat down next to her, accepting the drink.
“Why do you hate the clans so much if your brother is a Green Bone?” he asked.
Ema tipped back her drink, her throat bobbing as she swallowed. The soft skin of her neck and chest was flushed from the bath and the liquor. “My brother’s dead,” she said, putting the glass down and refilling it. “He was executed.” She turned to Bero, eyes bright and glassy. “What about you? Do you have family?”
“No,” Bero said.
“You don’t have anyone you’re close to?”
The hoji burned down Bero’s throat and warmed him. He thought about the people he’d associated with over the years, especially the ones he might’ve said were something close to friends. Sampa. Cheeky. Mudt. All of them dead or gone. Bero’s relationships did not last. “Something always got in the way,” he said. “Jade. Jade always got in the way.”
“I’m sorry for you.” She didn’t sound as if she were mocking him, just being honest. She moved closer to him. Her robe fell open and he saw her breasts and dark nipples. “Do you think the gods exist?” she asked unexpectedly. “Do you think they see and judge us, the way the penitents say they do?”
Bero’s cock was pushing uncomfortably against his pants. He frowned at the question. It wasn’t one he thought about deeply. He’d had enough close calls and strange swings of luck in his life that at times he thought surely some bigger force loomed over him, watching him, batting him around like a mouse.
At other times, he thought there was nothing out there, that desperate people were deluded and strived in vain, that they saw patterns and signs when there were none to see. In his own life, nothing he’d ever done truly added up to anything greater. There was no bigger picture; his runs of fortune and failure canceled each other out. Sometimes he skimmed above the water and sometimes he floundered below it, but still he was just a fish in the unknowable and merciless ocean.