Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 962: Arcade Fun

”She’s running errands.”

”Of course. And the Flame Monarch is scouting the food court.”

If she was, the food court gave no sign of it.

Somewhere among its four hundred tables sat one of the most famous women alive with her heat banked to nothing and her face angled away from every camera in the building, working through a carton of fries, and not one person looked at her twice. The fries were real. The errand was not.

Deeper in the concourse, two plainclothes Eclipse members had been comparing the same two scented candles for forty minutes without buying either, and a third had walked the food court perimeter so many times that a kiosk owner had started offering him samples out of pity.

The arcade happened because Calypso saw the lights.

Yuna Park got there first. She came off the mezzanine rail without using the stairs and was inside the arcade for nine full seconds before the family reached its threshold.

By the time Calypso laid her hand on the punching machine, a small artifact the size of a coin had been passed over its cabinet, its coin slot, its power cable, and the four machines adjacent.

”All clear, guild leader,” said a small voice through the comms bead in Kaiden’s ear.

He didn’t answer, and he didn’t look anywhere in particular, because answering was how a man told a watching crowd his security was live. He just steered the family in, one hand at the small of Bastet’s back.

The punching machine negotiation took three parties. Calypso’s opening position was a full swing, which Kaiden vetoed on behalf of the structure of the building. Her fallback position was a light tap, which the machine’s owner, had he been present, would also have vetoed.

The settlement, brokered by Kaiden, was one finger, extended slowly, pressed against the pad as gently as she knew how.

It registered 999 of a possible 999, played its full jackpot fanfare, and dispensed every ticket it owned in a single continuous stream that pooled on the carpet for forty seconds while the arcade’s teenage population lost its collective mind.

”I barely touched it,” Calypso told her audience, delighted, tickets accumulating around her sandals. ”It’s a very generous machine.”

The claw machine, by contrast, was not generous, and that was how the war started.

Bastet had dismissed the entire arcade on entry as a room of flashing beggars, and then her eye had caught on a fat caramel cat in the glass box of plush toys, and an old hunting instinct had locked on.

She fed it a token with icy elegance. She worked the claw with two fingers, precise as surgery. The claw descended on its chosen plush, gripped it, lifted it two inches, and dropped it with the mechanical insolence built into its species.

Her ears went flat.

”It released intentionally,” she said. ”That was intentional. This machine is dishonest.”

”It’s rigged, yeah,” Kaiden said. ”That’s the whole business model.”

”Then its business model has made an enemy.” A second token went in.

The claw dropped its prize a second time, and the temperature around the machine climbed by a degree that had the nearest teenagers stepping back.

Kaiden watched his desert queen stare down four dollars of Chinese polyester with the full attention she usually reserved for monsters her own size. A third token was produced and held between two fingers.

”Your majesty, we can buy the same plushie downstairs for six dollars.”

”It is no longer about the plushie. It’s war.”

It took two more tokens.

On the fifth attempt the claw, its rigging schedule presumably exhausted, surrendered the caramel cat into the chute. Bastet retrieved it, held it up, and examined it, satisfied, the war concluded on her terms.

Then, without any change in expression, she tucked it into the crook of her arm and kept it there for the rest of the day.

Calypso had watched the entire campaign while running the basketball hoops one-handed, to a score the cabinet’s designers had never planned a display digit for.

Now she went back for the mountain of tickets still pooled at the foot of the punching machine, gathered the whole mass up into both arms, and dumped it on the nearest cluster of teenagers.

”Split it fair,” she instructed her stunned beneficiaries, ”or I will hear about it,” and the arcade erupted, and the crowd filming from the entrance made a sound usually reserved for fireworks.

The smoothie stand came after.

Three smoothies were ordered, paid for, and set on the counter.

While they waited, a thread finer than a hair and clear as water dropped from somewhere above the stand, dipped once into each cup, and was gone. The server noticed nothing. The crowd noticed nothing. It was in and out of all three drinks in the time the register took to print the receipt.

”Drinks are clean,” said the bead in Kaiden’s ear.

Calypso took her smoothie off the counter with a cheery thanks, none the wiser.

But Bastet had gone still with her mango smoothie halfway to her lips, ears turned up toward something far too quiet for anyone else in that food court to catch. Then her whole bearing softened, warm and pleased and edged with ceremony, and she turned to him.

”You gave me a food taster, Master,” she said, quietly, close in against his shoulder where the crowd could not have any of it, and there was wonder in her voice.

”There is a sworn blade above us who has been a step ahead of my hands all afternoon, your mother is holding the shadows at our flank, and the Flame Monarch is sitting in this food court pretending to be nobody. This is a royal progress. You arranged me a proper one and let me believe it was errands.”

Her tail wrapped his wrist, and she looked up at him with her golden eyes heavy-lidded and glowing.

Kaiden, who had arranged a security detail, sipped his smoothie and said nothing, because a wise man does not correct a happy queen.

”I will be kissing you at length later, Master. Be prepared,” Bastet informed him, and walked on with her cat and her smoothie, gold chiming, the happiest creature in four floors of commerce.

The photo booth was Calypso’s idea, on the grounds that she had seen one in a drama Bastet made her watch.

The booth was engineered for two humans. It received a guild leader, a demoness whose horns scraped grooves into the ceiling padding, and a felinid queen arranging herself across both their laps as the only dignified use of remaining space.

Four flashes fired, and four frames printed.

In the first, Calypso’s horn eclipses half of Kaiden’s head.

In the second, Bastet’s tail has crossed the lens like a censor bar.

In the third, all three are laughing at something that in no frame is visible, Calypso open-mouthed, Bastet caught mid-purr with her crown of an updo knocked loose, Kaiden between them looking like the richest man alive.

In the fourth frame, all three subjects are perfect and nobody in it is laughing. Calypso’s hand has come to rest on Kaiden’s shoulder, and Bastet has turned her face a few degrees off the lens, toward him. It is the warmest of the four.

They ordered two copies of the strip. Nobody said what the second one was for, and Bastet put it somewhere queens put things.

...

Two states away, behind windows boarded from the inside, Olga carried a tablet down a corridor, past the people who had been waiting along the wall since morning for a decision, and set it on the desk without a word.

The footage on it was vertical and shaky, filmed by some teenager near a fountain: two monster queens on a guild leader’s arms, a crowd parting ahead of them, four floors of commerce wrapping around the three of them like a gift.

Viktor Thorne watched it through once with a grandfather’s smile. He watched it a second time, and the smile stayed exactly where it was while his eyes went to work on the crowd behind the family, the mezzanine above them, the doors, the sightlines.

”He takes his family out for smoothies,” Viktor said, ”and I’ve been through this twice now and can’t find one gap a man could walk through. The lad turned a food court into a fortress and made it look like a date.”

He slid the tablet back across the desk. ”No rush, everyone. No rush at all.”

Olga adjusted her glasses and typed.