Driftwood Orphans

by Paul Krueger

Genres: Asian American

Synopsis

Before she was betrayed and left for dead, Tenny was many things: prodigal daughter of the Driftwood City underworld. Leader of the Thorn Orphans, the gang fighting for a better tomorrow. City shaman, able to bend her home's boroughs to her will. Partner-in-crime to Cole, the runaway rich boy with powers just like hers.

But that was all before.

Four years later, Tenny is an exile, sleepwalking through life and waiting to die. But a chance encounter puts her on a bloody path back to the life she left behind. Friendless and powerless, she returns to Driftwood City, only to find a world where the Thorn Orphans have finally won. A better tomorrow, today.

And all that progress tethered to the heartbeat of the friend who ordered her death.

Her city. Or her vengeance. It's an impossible choice.

But if Tenny wants to survive, she'll have to choose.

A meditation on friendship, greed, and the uneasy intersection between justice and vengeance, this standalone fantasy puts a magical spin on pulpy revenge sagas like JOHN WICK and KILL BILL.

Release date: June 23, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 512

Sample

You are Cheza Tenlonghari, blood-daughter of Daning Tenlonghari. Heart-daughter of Benilda Lacanilao. Sister of Diwata and Dalisa Lacanilao. Chosen heir to the greatest criminal empire Driftwood City has ever seen.

You are the Red Rose, fearsome vigilante, protector of the downtrodden, warrior without peer. With your comrades, the Thorn Orphans, you patrol my streets, beating down gangsters and protecting workers on the picket lines.

You are my shaman. Blessed by me with incredible powers, and charged to use those powers in the service of one mission: protecting your ailing city and the thousands who call me home.

You are Tenny.

And you’re about to die.

Anyone with a map will insist that there’s no such place as Driftwood City. Challenge those people to get out their best globe or chart, and they’ll gladly oblige you. Smugly, they’ll jab a finger at the spot in the Porcelain Sea, tracing a line beneath the inked characters that label it Meyongphirin. You would likely label these people assholes.

Not for nothing did I anoint you my champion, Tenny.

But as it happens, these assholes have a point, or at least part of one. Meyongphirin is the name that appears on the sliding oak doors of my city hall. It’s splashed on the hood of every police car in my four boroughs. It’s the name on the arching front gate of the Unified Utilities Plant, where the people get all the power and water and food it takes to make me a city, and not a glorified shipwreck. It’s printed on my blue paper money, and stamped on my shiny zinc coins. On none of these things will you find the name Driftwood City.

But asking a map—or a building, or a piece of valuable paper—is not the same thing as asking a city.

In the eight years you’ve fought for me, you’ve bled all over me. You’ve taken bullets. Knife blades. One time, you didn’t give a gull a piece of your kelp roll and it pecked the shit out of your hand. At some point or another, all four of my boroughs have tasted your blood. But only the borough of Birchbarrel has ever gotten to drink this much of it.

Beneath the spot where your prone, chewed-up body has just fallen, my wooden floor runs red. More blood flecks the cracked lenses of your glasses, or runs in streams down your sweaty forehead. A trail of it leads to you, with more of your blood outside your body than in it. If someone were to follow that trail back far enough, they would see still more of it sprayed all over the walls. And at the very start of that trail, they would find the place where your blood mingles with the pool around Pham Binh Cong’s lifeless body.

Binh is dead

Through all your pain, that thought is like a dog on the wrong side of a door, clawing to be let in.

Binh is dead

There was a time when you would’ve been paralyzed by the thought of him lying there, bloodied and ruined.

Binh is dead

But right now, you have to focus on other things.

Like the fact that you, courtesy of your closest friends and comrades, are heartbeats away from joining him.

Depending on who you ask, I am either four boroughs, or two. Always, there is the Rock: a sea-born mountain with beautiful manors and estates bolted on to its craggy face. And below it all, there’s a collar of streets that extends miles out into the sea, every floating inch of it constructed from sturdy, weathered wood. For those who like maps, these are the other three boroughs of Meyongphirin: Oakyard, the Shoots, and Birchbarrel, each named for the wood from which they are built.

But for those who actually live in Driftwood City, these are all a single borough: the Slats.

I begin as a group of sailors who blunder into the Rock when it’s just that: a rock in the middle of the ocean. I don’t live there yet. The barest idea of me doesn’t even live there yet. I am a city, and a city is nothing without its people.

It’s only by luck those sailors find sapphires in its crags, enough to justify building a mine. There’s no real shoreline, so the crews sleep on the ships that have brought them there. In time, they build gangways from one deck to another. In more time, those ships drop anchor, and the gangways become bridges, then decks in their own right. By the time the last mine runs dry, wooden streets spill out a solid mile into the chop in every direction. But dry mines aren’t enough to stop what those sailors started.

They keep building, out and out and out. The Porcelain Sea is a big, empty place, and suddenly here is somewhere for ships to stop on the long crossing. The crews make good money trading. The people on the Slats make good money serving the crews. And the bastards up on the Rock get rich off all of them.

In time, industries are born: tourism; fishing; even water. At some point along the way, those buildings and industries and people melt together into something new: Meyongphirin. A city.

Me.

You scream for me to save you.

Normally, I move through you like a song you were born humming. With my walking bass, you can reshape streets. With my trilling horns, you can open any door. In the dancing of spectral fingers across my keys, you can hear every secret the Slats keep. But now, you listen to that song as if it’s coming to you on a tinny radio with a bad signal. Teeth of static bite through every measure and phrase. You can feel me trying to reach for you, too, but there isn’t enough of you left for me to grab on to.

Something else catches hold of you as five shadows fall over your body like the fingers of a dark, grasping hand. And when they do, your connection to me goes off the air for good. With what little power you have left in your muscles, you roll over to face my other shaman. If this is it, you figure, you want to go out looking your death in its familiar face.

With the exception of one, they all wear the uniform of the Thorn Orphans: black longcoats, black flatcaps, black carpenter’s masks, and roses in their lapels. But your tired eyes find the details within their familiar silhouettes. Roulette Wu’s wide-brimmed cattleman hat and glowing cigarillo, his hands clutching gleaming revolvers with handles of yellow bamboo. The clanking form of Anjali the Armored, wrapped in a new cocoon of gleaming blue steel. The elegant composure of Knife-Edge Ngo, lit by a pair of glowing pink crystal blades. The inky sprawl of black tattoos spread across the muscular, shirtless frame of Mhap the Monster. You wonder when Cole gave them those new toys. Is that how he bought their service?

But as you reflect on how efficiently they’ve set to killing you, you wonder if he needed to buy them at all.

You want to hate him for it, Tenny. But even lying in your own lifeblood, you can’t hate him for buying their service with power. After all, as a hard and mercenary part of you knows, I bought your service the same way.

Flanked by two on each side is Cole himself: short, skinny, and stiffer than a starched shirt. Even in the scant light, the slick, silvery blaze of his hair is unmistakable when he takes off his flatcap. In the lapel of his long black coat, he’s pinned his signature white rose. Your bloody teeth grit at the sight of the thing. Wearing it to your execution is the final insult … at least until the next one.

As he strides to you, the heels of his boots click against the boathouse floor. Each step brands itself into your memory.

“Tenny,” he sighs. Click, click, click Whether it’s real or not, the sadness in his voice is fresh salt on your countless wounds. “I admit, even with my powers of foresight … I never saw us ending like this. But I suppose I’ve always respected and admired your bottomless ability to surprise me.”

You hock up a bloody glob of spit. It sprays ugly across the floor between you. It’s all you have for him now. He’s taken your city. Your powers. Your love. Your friends. And when you are gone, the flower you gave him will become his, too. He’s truly left you with nothing.

He regards the bloody spit, unimpressed.

“That,” he says, “wasn’t a surprise.”

“Cole,” you rasp. Your throat is still raw from a few minutes ago, when Mhap punched it. A thousand threats leap to your mind, each more exquisitely foul than the last, and each an emptier promise. But your mangled lips can’t form any of them. So instead, all you have is his name. You hope you’ve made it sound like a curse.

“What do you want us to do with her?” rumbles Mhap, no doubt hoping to play with his food.

“I’ll make it quick,” says Anjali. Armor plates clank as she raises one of her arms. It’s cold comfort, knowing at least one of your betrayers wants to be nice about it.

“No,” Cole says. Has his voice always sounded this cold, you wonder? Is it something he’s putting on for the occasion, or just something you’ve never let yourself notice before? “This business is mine to conclude. The most regrettable board to lay in the foundations of our new Driftwood City.”

You can’t even find it in you to feel despair anymore. You already know nothing you could say would make him change his mind. Apparently, it was made up a long time ago. But you glare up at him all the same. You have so many questions: how is he suppressing your powers? Why did he murder your boyfriend? Why is he doing this to his own best friend?

Were you ever really his friend at all?

Sorrow flickers through his deep brown eyes. His whole body draws up even stiffer, as if you’ve pulled a knife on him. But the moment passes, and his stare burns into you like a low, patient flame.

“Tenny,” he says again, but you can tell he isn’t talking to you anymore. He speaks up, like he does whenever he gives his big, grand speeches as a fiery crusader, as the White Rose. “What we do to you today brings none of us any pleasure or satisfaction. Driftwood City gave you powers so you could serve it. It was my regrettable duty to take them away. You’ve demonstrated that when forced to choose between the city’s welfare and your own, you chose yourself.”

Your addled brains whirr like out-of-control machinery as you try to parse what he’s saying. How have you failed me? How can your own best friend be so sure? And how did all that lead to them dropping you and Binh like this?

You reach for me one last time, but you can’t even hear the bass of my music anymore, no matter how loudly I play it for you. He really has taken it from you, somehow, even though this isn’t a power you ever knew I’d given you. It never would have even occurred to you to try. And you can’t puzzle out the how, not with fresh fear clawing at you from the inside. Ah, Tenny, you’ve grown so used to having my power that you’ve forgotten what it means to be without it.

Lying there, you realize your last moments in this world will be quiet and cold.

He gestures grandly, and beneath you the floorboards begin to pry themselves up out of place. Their slats curve up around you, as if you’re falling into the ribcage of some huge beast. You would’ve called their bending unnatural, but you’ve seen similar feats for years now. Done them for years now. Wood isn’t meant to bend this way, but that’s never stopped you and Cole before.

“You’ve incurred a sizeable debt at the expense of the people of Driftwood City,” he declares. “And with your life … I consider it paid.”

He clenches his hand into a fist.

The slats wrap tighter around you. Darkness closes in as those bending boards slowly form your coffin.

“Cole …” Your mind isn’t all there anymore. It feels like a balloon tied to your body, straining against its string to fly away. “What are … you doing …?”

Through the groaning of the wood, you hear him speak again. His words slip through the shrinking gaps like a knife between ribs, and just as sharp and cold.

“Everything.”

You catch one last glimpse of the five Thorn Orphans: your comrades. Your partners. Your friends.

And you promise that if you survive this …

The steamship mortally wounds me. The airship finishes the job.

Just like that, the world doesn’t need places between places anymore. There’s the start and the end. Everything in the middle is just time to kill. But when the tourist and tariff money dry up and trade routes shift, the folks on the Rock find other ways to keep themselves above the rest. Things get more expensive. Wages stay the same. People turn to bootleggers just to get some drinkable water, because the stuff coming out of their faucets is too pricey.

I cling to life, my grip eroding more with each passing year. But no matter how bad things get, every year there are still people who live on my Slats and call me home. People whose faith in me changed me from some place into somewhere.

And for those people, I have one pair of dice left to throw.

You don’t get to finish your promise. The driftwood coffin plunges itself straight through my lowest deck and drops you into the huge, dark ocean.

You are lost beneath the waves.

And above you, your city moves on.

Hey, Cole. Wanna hear something I’ve never told anyone?

I hate sharing a birthday with you.

It’s been four years since you killed me, and in that time I finally managed to get myself to a point where my thoughts wouldn’t automatically drift back to you, and the Thorn Orphans, and the bloody full stop you put on our story. But on my own Bird-given birthday, what choice did I have except to think of you?

However you celebrated your thirtieth, I knew I was gonna read all about it in tomorrow’s papers. Even though you were a foreign head of state, the press over here in Biranba couldn’t get enough of you. You were young, you were magnetic, and you were making big moves in a town the whole world had written off. And your story was irresistible: high society’s wayward son, who single-handedly burned it all down so he could give the city back to its people. That kind of thing gets someone a lot of column inches.

I don’t know what was more frustrating about seeing that version of you: how often I had to put up with it, or all the ways it was almost true.

It curdled my stomach to think of you living it up at some gala, dressed your best and throwing back champagne, while I sweated to death in a greasy diner kitchen. Surrounded by the friends that’d been mine in another life, while I was surrounded by strangers in matching aprons. Dancing through life to the sweet music our city played to us, while I got to listen to Chef’s bellowing. It shouldn’t have mattered so much to me that your lives all didn’t freeze in the moment you did for me in that boathouse.

And yet.

It was a hot night, even for a sweat-trap town like Malañong. Folks crowded into the diner so they could park themselves under our collection of poor, overworked ceiling fans for an hour or two. The work had been non-stop since I’d hopped on the line that afternoon, and it’d only ramped up as the sun went down. Now we were at the height of dinner rush, and it seemed like every three seconds that damn order bell was ringing. Knives flashed, pots roiled, and Chef barked orders like she’d missed her calling as someone’s scary, shitty dog.

I, on the other hand, had ducked into the walk-in ice closet.

Officially, it was to grab another sack of rice so I could get back to washing. But by now, Chef had to have noticed that I ducked into that walk-in every chance I got. I savored the cold, rare in a steamy country like Biranba. I savored the quiet, rare in the vibrant capital of Malañong. But I left the door open, because when I found myself in the dark my mind had a funny way of sketching in details I didn’t want it to.

Standing in that chilly gloom, I didn’t look like the Tenny you remember. I’d grown my hair back out, and tied it up in a tight black braid. That swaggering brawn that’d made me so good in a fight? Long gone. In just four years, I’d wasted away to a broom handle with legs. I still wore glasses, but the eyes behind them had dulled from topaz to dishwater. And instead of my slick Thorn Orphans blacks, I wore a dingy, sauce-stained apron, currently folded at my waist so that my carved birchwood necklace could dangle free.

I’d snagged a lumpia from the frying tray a few minutes back. It was only the one, a far cry from the huge platters Benilda had made me every birthday. But I’d take it. It was long cold from its stay in my apron pocket, but at least the shell was still a little crispy as I took my first bite. I’d gotten good about tamping down my hunger while I was on the line, but the moment I tasted that room-temp pork and cabbage, my whole body screamed out for more.

“Happy birthday to me,” I muttered.

You’ve seen me demolish a feast in five minutes, Cole, so you’d have been impressed by my restraint. I savored each bite, as if letting it linger on my tongue long enough would turn it into a genuine Driftwood City kelp roll. And if I focused hard enough, I could almost dredge up the taste, and pretend I was—

“Cheza! Hoy!” Chef roared from outside.

The lumpia tumbled from my fingers. Before I could stop it, it rolled right into a puddle of … well, it didn’t matter what. When it comes to the backs of restaurants, there’s no such thing as a good puddle. I hung my head, kicked the lumpia under a shelf, and shrugged my apron back on over my necklace. Then I shouldered a fresh sack of rice—the fragrant Samnati kind, with an elephant stamped on the bag.

“The fuck are you doing in there?” Chef snapped the moment I emerged. She was a small, meaty woman who I’d once watched cleave a whole hog down to its chops in three minutes flat. Intimidating enough, unless you’d grown up in Nanay Benilda’s house. “I don’t pay you to kick your feet up!”

“Wasn’t kicking my feet up, Chef,” I said. My Biranese had gotten better over four years, the language sanding off the hard edges of my natural Driftwood City accent. Between memories of the lessons I’d had as a kid and what I’d picked up since washing ashore here, I now sounded like a grown-up and not just a smart kid. But no one with an ear for Biranese would mistake me for a local. “I was just getting more rice.”

“It takes two seconds to get a new bag of rice, and you don’t have to let the cold out while you do it!” Chef said. “Now get your ass on the line and back to work!”

In my last life, I’d sent entire gangs to their deaths with a wave of my hand. I had made the powerful sink to their knees as they felt true fear for the first time in their lives. I’d grown up in the house of the Slats’ most feared criminal mastermind, learning everything she knew about how to command respect. Most people wouldn’t have even wanted to talk to me this way. And the ones who might’ve, never would’ve dared.

But that was my last life. In this one, I was Cheza the line cook, and all Cheza the line cook could do was mutter, “Yes, Chef,” into her collarbone and get back to work.

“Fucking right,” Chef muttered, then turned from me to scream about someone’s pancit plating.

I’d been washing rice for hours. My fingers were pruned and swollen, and they ached every time I so much as twitched. I could think of nothing I wanted to do less than wash more, least of all on my birthday. But it’d been hard enough for me to get this job in the first place. If I got tossed out, where was I supposed to go? Rent would be due soon enough, and I had to eat. I was an immigrant with no papers. The only thing I had going for me was that I looked like the locals, and that illusion went away the moment they heard me try to talk.

As I headed for the basin with a big old sack of rice over my shoulder, it was hard not to think about the other ways I stood out. The kitchen was balmy, but no one else was sweating as much as me. They’d all grown up here, where you practically needed gills to breathe in the summer. Me, I’ve always been the kind of person who would walk around the Slats on the chilliest night of the year with my coat open.

I know you know that already, Cole. I’m gonna end up telling you a lot of shit you already know before my story’s done. Settle in. You just might like the way I tell it.

So I sweated more than them. I talked funny. And when we went for drinks after a hard shift … I mean, sure, I was there with them. I sat at the same table, drinking the same beer they drank. But they’d spent a life in Biranese culture, and I just hadn’t. It was like I was playing the same song they were, but in a different key, in a different time signature, while making up my own lyrics on the fly. And the few times they’d thrown me a bone and tried to let me play a solo, I could feel my notes hitting theirs at all the wrong angles. Eventually, I stopped piping up. And now, it’d been more than a year since they’d roped me into after-work beers.

Feeling bad for me, Cole? You have no idea.

When I washed up here, my first thought was to head straight for the underground fighting rings. After all, I’d gotten everywhere else in life by hitting the right people. My nasty little life had left me with only one real skill, but it’d also made me the best at it. I knew how to play in the crooked game, and the Great Bird knows I’ve always loved to scrap. Whatever future I had, I was gonna write it with my fists. I wouldn’t change the world anymore, but I could at least do what I’d always loved, and do it for me.

Except, funny thing about my first and only time in the ring: instead of fighting, I froze. And instead of a sweltering auto garage, I just found myself back on the boathouse floor, blood fleeing my body as mercy fled your eyes.

I know you meant to kill me that day, Cole. And you did. But even though my heart’s still beating, you have no idea how well you succeeded.

The water finally ran clear on the rice, so I set it aside and started prepping a new batch. Everyone else just left it running the whole time, but I made sure to shut the faucet off between washes. That was the other big tip-off to the rest of the staff that I wasn’t from here: I didn’t treat water like there’d always be more of it.

Suddenly, I was thinking of my twelfth birthday. Benilda had broken open her stores of bootleg fresh water for the whole neighborhood. All day long, a line of grateful folks stretched out the door as they stopped by to pick up their bottles and pay tribute to me and Benilda. Afterwards, I’d asked her why. Water was more valuable than gold on the Slats. Wasn’t it bad business to give it away for free?

She’d clicked her tongue, like she always did, and adjusted her elaborate, flower-brimmed hat. “No investment returns better than loyalty.”

That was all it took to buy loyalty back home: water.

And here, I’d pissed away gallons of it by myself just to wash some rice.

Other birthdays followed, dragged behind my twelfth like a chain of memories. Benilda’s elaborate dinners. Whiskey with the other Thorn Orphans on a rooftop as we watched the sun come up over the Slats.

And of course, the eighteenth—our eighteenth—when you and I were reborn in fire and water.

Now instead of friends, I only had co-workers and neighbors. If I disappeared tomorrow, not a one of them would remember what my face looked like after a week. But better that, I figure, than let someone get close enough to my heart to put a knife in it. And besides, there was no point in celebrating a birthday alone. It was just a day where someone got older, and people did that every day.

So I washed rice on our thirtieth birthday, Cole. I weathered a dinner rush. I guzzled down a gallon of water at least, and sweated and pissed out half again as much. When the last guest left and the cooks started shutting down the line for the night, my clothes were ten pounds heavier from all that sweat. And I wasn’t done; now, it fell to me to wash the dishes from service. More sweat from my pores. More water down the drain.

“Cheza.”

I set the plate I was washing back into the basin. Killed the water. “Yes, Chef?”

She waddled up, jerking her thumb back toward the dining room. “Got a guest. Need you to take the order.”

“What?” I said, forgetting myself for a moment. “I’m not a waiter.”

“Kulima went home,” Chef grunted. “You take the order.”

With a wrinkly hand, I gestured at the gleaming pile of dishes I’d just torn through.

“You can rewash one,” said Chef, ignoring the pots and pans I’d also have to scrub again, too. She pointed to the dining room again. “Go.”

I made sure to face away from her before I let myself grumble. I took off my apron and did my best to smooth out my clothes. Pointless, especially this late in a shift, but I had to at least try. And once I was kind of presentable, I hurried to the dining room, muttering darkly to myself about what kind of soulless, worthless, good-for-nothing, entitled piece of shit would walk into a restaurant five minutes before close and demand full service.

The kitchen’s dented metal doors swung open with their usual creak, and I stood in the humid dining room for the first time that night. The fans were still working at full speed, but all they did on nights like this was push hot air from one place to another. The lights were down, but I could see across the floor to our sole guest.

He gave a small wave. “Howdy,” he said in decent Biranese. A lit cigarillo bobbed in his lips when he spoke. “Thanks for seating me. It’s a pain, I know, I know.”

I froze.

I’ve been hit in the head a lot, Cole, and my vision’s always been shit. But my memory ain’t completely worthless, and I could still see across a dimly lit room.

And that’s how I knew without a doubt that I was talking to Roulette Wu.

I know I looked like life had chewed me up good, but he hadn’t aged a day since I last saw him in that boathouse. He was still dying his hair blond, his bangs a jagged diagonal line across his handsome face so that only one eye glinted at me. His limbs were still long and rangy, and he didn’t sit at his table so much as lounge at it. He was only missing two of his trademarks: the revolvers that usually hung at his hips, and the yellow rose that had adorned his lapel for the years we’d fought together.

Roulette Wu.

The Yellow Rose.

Was here.

Fuck.

I hadn’t moved since I’d spotted him. He didn’t seem to have clued into why. “Sorry, sorry, my Biranese ain’t the best,” he said, even though it was almost as good as mine. “I say that wrong?”

This had to be a trap. Somehow, from that throne where you sat so comfortably across the Porcelain Sea, you’d gotten news of a down-on-her-luck prep cook stashed in the back of a Malañong greasy spoon, and sent her a birthday present. There was no other logical explanation.

Except, a little voice in my head said.

Except back at the boathouse, you hadn’t given any of the other Thorn Orphans the honor of killing me. You’d wanted to save me for yourself. If you knew I was here, you wouldn’t have sent one of the others to do this for you. And if you did send one of them, you sure as hell wouldn’t have sent a fast-and-loose player like Roulette Wu.

But then … why was he here?

I’d stood still too long. I had to make a move now, or get closer and figure out more. The old Tenny wouldn’t have even hesitated to make her choice.

Lucky for Roulette that I was Cheza these days.

“Sorry,” I said, putting on my best Biranese accent. It wouldn’t have fooled anyone in the back of the house, but I didn’t need it to. I just needed to file off all the textures in my speech that could’ve marked my first language as Slatspeak. “End of a long shift. I’ll be right there.”

A pitcher of cold water stood on a little cart by the door, and I fetched up a glass and filled it. As I took my time pouring, I glanced at a nearby window. The reflection was imperfect, but from what I could see he wasn’t making any moves toward me.

“That’s some kinda thing to see,” Roulette said, chatty as ever. “You know, growing up where I come from, a glass of clean water was harder to come by than a six-suit hand in pektong. You ever been out Driftwood City way, darlin’?”

“No,” I said carefully.

“You ever get more’n a day off at a time, you should take the flight,” he said. “Hell of a town, hell of a town.”

I gripped his glass hard as I brought it over. “You don’t talk like the people I’ve met from there.”

“Did some time fighting on the Tsunese coast,” he replied. “A couple years like that’ll change a person. Hell, you’d know.”

I froze. “What?”

“I talked to two cabbies, eight street vendors, a shoeshiner, and one idiot who went and tried to pick my pocket on my way here.” He stretched out lazily, but I searched for any sign of tension in his muscles. Roulette only moved at two speeds: slow, and too fast. “You don’t sound like a one of ’em.”

I found myself slumping more as I neared him. I couldn’t help how tall I was. But he was used to seeing a straight-backed warrior, not a shambling garbage pile in a blotchy uniform. Maybe he really was just luring me in. But if he hadn’t figured out who I was yet, I wasn’t gonna make it easy for him.

“You have a good ear, sir.” My smile was bland and submissive: alien on Tenny’s face, right at home on Cheza’s. “I’m from the outer islands. Here to make a new life.” I set his water down next to his hat, which he’d placed upside down to air it out. Sweat daubed its liner; clearly he was having the same trouble here that I did. “Have you looked at our menu?”

“Nah,” he draw