Chapter 29: ch.29 [Tokens]

Astrid looked at the hand.

It was a very ordinary hand.

Long fingers, a callus from a pen, a faint blue stain near the knuckle where a cheap ink cartridge had lost an argument.

It was held out in the moonlight and it did not move.

It did not pull back, either.

Take it, said something in her chest.

Assess it, said everything else.

Eleven years of rooms with other people’s hands in them.

Hands that shook hers for cameras.

Hands that held out contracts, schedules, glasses of water she had not asked for.

Not one of them had been held out for nothing.

She looked up.

He was not smiling.

He was just waiting, with his sleeve pushed back and his bare wrist cold in the air, as if he would wait all night.

She put the can down on the bench.

She set it precisely upright.

Then she took his hand.

Too fast.

Her fingers closed around his, and they did not close gently.

They closed like a lock.

He drew a short breath.

She heard it.

She loosened by a degree and the thing in her chest said no, and she tightened again.

Mine, it said, quite clearly, in a voice she did not like.

She did not let go.

She did, however, look at him.

"Is this too tight?"

It was the first time she had ever asked a hand that question.

Seth looked down at their fingers.

"No," he said.

A beat.

"Okay. A little."

She eased her grip a degree.

He turned his hand over, and laced his fingers through hers, and the hold between them stopped being a lock.

It was only a hold.

She did not know what to do with the difference.

She walked beside him with her hand in his and her face turned very carefully toward the road.

? ? ?

The arcade was called STARLIGHT.

The T had burned out.

It said S ARLIGHT in pink tube, buzzing like a trapped wasp, above a glass door that stuck.

Seth pushed it with his shoulder.

It gave.

Light and noise hit them like a wave.

Neon in every color the human eye had been warned about.

Bleeps, drums, a synthesized voice shouting PLAYER ONE over and over to no one.

A carpet printed with tiny galaxies, worn to a gray path down the middle by thirty years of sneakers.

And nobody.

Not a single customer.

Behind the counter, a boy of maybe twenty lay folded over his arms, face down on the glass, snoring into a cash tray.

One sneaker had fallen off.

Seth lowered his voice by reflex.

"That’s Tomas. He’s here till six. He won’t wake up."

"Has he ever?"

"Once. A fire alarm."

"And?"

"He turned it off and went back to sleep."

Astrid looked at the room.

Threat. Utility. Disorder.

She could not file it.

There were too many categories at once, and all of them were blinking.

Seth let go of her hand.

For one half-second the loss was enormous.

Then he came back, with a small plastic cup.

It was full of coins.

Gold, chunky, stamped with a tiny star.

"Tokens," he said. "Twenty."

She took one between her fingers and held it to the light.

"How many does a game cost?"

"Two."

"Then I will need..."

"Astrid."

"...a minimum of..."

"I’ve got it."

She stopped.

She closed the token in her hand.

"Then I am keeping a tally," she said.

"You don’t have to."

"I do. Seven tokens is the figure so far. I have not yet touched a machine."

"That’s not how..."

"It is exactly how."

He opened his mouth.

He shut it.

"Okay," Seth said, and the corner of his mouth went up. "Seven."

? ? ?

The dance machine was first.

It was a giant, humming platform with four glowing arrows and a screen the size of a door.

"I’ll go first," said Seth, "so you can see how it’s done."

He stepped up.

He chose a song.

He regretted it within four seconds.

The arrows came.

He moved.

It was difficult to say what he was doing.

His left foot attempted the left arrow and landed on the right one.

His arms, for reasons of their own, came up like a man fending off a swarm of bees.

At the chorus he turned entirely around, lost the screen, and came back facing the wrong way with enormous confidence.

MISS.

MISS.

MISS.

MISS.

The machine began to sound concerned.

Astrid stood at the rail with her hands clasped behind her.

She watched in perfect silence.

When the song ended, a red letter filled the screen.

F.

Then a smaller one.

TRY HARDER.

Seth stumbled off the platform with his chest heaving and his hair wrecked.

"I want it noted," he panted, "that I did that on purpose."

"You did not."

"I did it as a warm-up."

"The machine called you a failure."

"It said try harder! It’s encouraging!"

She stepped onto the platform.

She did not choose a song.

She let the machine choose.

The arrows came.

Her boots hit them.

Clean. Exact.

No wasted motion, no extra breath, every step landing on the beat with the same flat authority she brought to the endgame.

PERFECT.

PERFECT.

PERFECT.

Her face was set like a woman defusing something.

Then, around the second chorus, something happened.

The tempo doubled.

Her mouth went to a line.

Her shoulders came down.

She started to move.

It was still precise.

But the precision had begun to bend, the way a very strict sentence bends when it is said with a little joy.

Her hair swung.

Her sleeves flared, red as flags, on every turn.

She hit a spin that the game had not asked for and landed it on the next arrow.

Seth stopped breathing for a moment.

He had watched her at a board.

He had watched her give a speech to a hundred cameras.

He had never seen this.

She looked...

He did not have the word.

He looked for it, and every word he found had the weight of a world title.

Free.

That was the one.

She looked like someone who had been carrying a piano up a mountain for eleven years and had just been told she could put it down.

She did not know.

She had her eyes on the arrows and her jaw set and a small, ferocious line between her brows.

"Ninety-eight percent," she said, as the screen exploded in stars.

"That is unacceptable. I wish to go again."

"Okay."

"You are smiling."

"Am I?"

"You look unwell."

"I’m fine."

He was smiling like a lovesick fool.

He did not say it.

He did not say any of it.

He held out two tokens instead.

"Eleven," Astrid said, and took them.

? ? ?

The fighting game was in the corner.

Two joysticks.

A screen split between two cartoon men in leather pants.

"I should warn you," Seth said, sitting.

"I’m actually, genuinely terrible at this."

"I will take that into consideration."

"No, I mean, I just mash it."

"Then it should be a short game."

It was not.

The first round, he mashed every button at once, and his man spun like a ceiling fan and knocked the other off a rooftop.

K.O.

Astrid stared at the screen.

"That should not have worked."

"I told you!"

"That has no structure."

The second round, she tried to be careful.

He mashed.

His man did something that involved a fish.

K.O.

Astrid sat back.

She looked at the screen for a long time.

"Two," Seth said, very gently.

"I am aware of the number."

"I’m just saying. Two."

She cracked her knuckles.

Both hands.

One at a time.

Then she leaned forward in her seat, and her red eyes narrowed, and he realized, with a small delicious dread, that he had made a mistake.

Round three.

She watched his first three moves and did not touch a button.

Round three, again, and she watched the next three.

Then she began.

Jab.

Block.

Jab.

Throw.

His man hit the floor.

K.O.

"That was a fluke," said Seth.

Jab. Sweep. Jump. Throw.

K.O.

"Okay, that was..."

She did not answer.

Her lips were pressed tight, her eyes on the screen, her whole body leaning into the machine like it was a board with a world title riding on it.

She was pattern-reading him.

He could actually see her do it.

Third loss.

K.O.

PLAYER TWO WINS.

She sat back.

A silence.

Then, slowly, she turned her head and looked at him.

"You are my student," said Astrid, "for a reason, after all."

And she laughed.

Not the short, startled one.

Not the one she cut off.

This one came out of her loose and low and a little rusty, like a door in a house that had not been opened in a long time, and it did not stop when she told it to.

She put the back of her hand against her mouth.

It kept going.

Her shoulders shook.

Her eyes had gone bright and creased at the corners.

Seth sat in the neon and watched her, and the whole noisy room went quiet around him.

Remember this, he thought, very carefully. Remember the exact sound.

? ? ?

They ended up on the floor.

Nobody decided it.

They had come back from the last machine, and her legs had simply folded, and then his had, and now they lay side by side on the galaxy carpet with their shoes still on.

Above them hung a ceiling of black foam tiles and one long crooked tube of purple light.

Somewhere, a game was playing its demo loop to nobody.

PLAYER ONE.

PLAYER ONE.

"I have not lain on a floor," Astrid said, to the ceiling, "since I was nine."

"How is it?"

"Dusty."

"Yeah."

"Remarkably, I do not mind."

Tomás snored on the counter.

His other shoe fell off.

It hit the floor with a small, defeated thump.

They both looked at it.

They both looked away.

Seth’s shoulders began to shake.

Beside him, hers did too.

They lay there, laughing at nothing, for a long time.

Then it faded, the way it does.

Quiet.

The purple light buzzed.

Her hand lay on the carpet, an inch from his.

He did not move it.

He did not need to.

Her fingers crossed the inch on their own and closed around his, lightly now, with no lock in it at all.

"Seventeen," she said.

"What?"

"Your tally. Seventeen tokens."

"You’re still counting?"

"I am always counting."

He turned his head.

Across the room, past a row of dead cabinets, one machine was lit alone in the dark.

Glass box. Soft pink light. A silver claw hanging on its cable over a heap of small round shapes.

He had seen it when they came in.

He had been looking at it, on and off, for an hour.

Astrid had not seen it yet.

She was looking at the ceiling, her hand in his, white hair spread across the carpet like spilled milk.

"Seth."

"Yeah?"

"I would like to do this again."

His heart did something complicated.

"Next time," she said, "it is my turn to choose where."

The claw swung gently in its case.

He did not say a word.

He only held on.