Page 63 of Blightfall

I sputtered. Couples? “Oh, we’re not—I mean, it’s not like we’re, we’re not—”

Both Dayan and Nedd looked at me, waiting to see how this sentence would end. Nedd had a smug look on his face that told me he knew exactly what I was thinking.

Well, hopefully not everything I was thinking.

“We’re just friends,” Nedd said calmly, as if it were the easiest sentence in the world to form.

Okay, I liked it a lot less when he said it like that.

“We grew up together,” he added.

“Ah,” Dayan said. “Sorry, didn’t mean to assume.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “We get that all the time.”

Dayan looked doubtful—probably because if it were true, I wouldn’t have sputtered so much about it. Scud. I was not the world’s best liar. I wanted to live in a universe where Nedd and I regularly got mistaken for a couple. I hoped that didn’t show too much on my face.

“We’ll have to check out those apartments,” I said. I doubted we could afford one on day-labor janitorial work, but it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for us to have come to the city with only today’s wages. I sipped my drink, but my straw slurped at the bottom.

“Which farm did you say you were from?”

We hadn’t. Because we hadn’t covered that part of our backstory. “Rice farm,” I said. “Downriver.”

Dayan nodded, thoughtful. “And you both grew up there.”

“Yep,” I said. “Born and bred.”

“I’ve always wondered,” Dayan said, “about the rice-farming process. Would you tell me about it?”

I turned to Nedd, the genius who decided no one at this pub would interrogate us about rice farming.

“I’d tell you,” Nedd said, saving me from trying to guess how the vat-growing process translated to actual soil, “but if you can believe it, the process is incredibly boring. I put myself to sleep every time I think about it.”

Dayan didn’t look convinced. I was half tempted to tell them we were liars who had obviously not grown up on a rice farm and instead were from another planet, but I definitely didn’t want to be known as the one who blew the whole mission by opening her big mouth after Arturo had trusted me to talk.

“Hey, we shouldn’t take up any more of your time!” I said. “It was so great to meet you. Hopefully we’ll get to watch you fight again soon.”

“Sure,” Dayan said. “I’ll be in the final championship tournament.”

“Great!” I said, standing abruptly and pulling on Nedd’s arm.

Dayan looked a bit stunned, but gave us a wave and turned back to the bar, where an eager fan was already sliding a stool over to bend their ear.

“That was a disaster,” I said to Nedd as we fled the bar. “Did we learn anything?”

“We learned that people are interested in rice farming after all,” he said. “Maybe we should pick up a farm job to earn money.”

“I joined the DDF to get away from farms,” I grumbled, but Nedd slung his bio arm around my shoulders as we walked along the street, which raised my spirits.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Arturo wouldn’t have done any better. And Jorgen would have done a lot scudding worse. Remember the time he tried to have a diplomatic conversation and instead he blew up the room with his brain?”

I did remember, though I hadn’t been present in the actual meeting. “You ever feel like everyone is just making this up as we go along,” I said, “and no one has any actual idea what they’re doing?”

“All the time,” Nedd said.

I sighed. Nedd’s arm did feel good around my shoulders though, even if he only meant it in a friendly way. I glanced over at his hand, fingers brushing my arm—

—and caught sight of someone walking in the shadow of the buildings across the road, avoiding the reach of the streetlights like they didn’t want to be noticed.