1

When she reaches the main street Phineas is covered in dust and deeply annoyed. The dirt back home had felt good under her feet; when she’d come home with tree twigs from the woods and mulch from Jo’s garden sticking in her hair it was always a fight to get her in the bath. But this dirt is miserable, somehow, abrasive and joyless.The air bites her skin and cracks her lips, her hair feels scratchy and it irritates her windburnt face. At least it’s only windburn. Phineas doesn’t get sunburns anymore and can’t even remember what one feels like. Not the normal kind, anyway.

It’s brighter out here than she’d expected it might be once the sun went down, and colder too. There’s a full moon keeping an eye on things tonight, menacing and cold and bleaching out the color of everything it touches. Phineas has never thought those kinds of things about the moon before but the way it hangs in the sky over this town demands new and unusual descriptions. The light it casts is thick and mawkish, walking under it is like trying to move through deep water. The hot sucks, the cold sucks, now the moon is acting up. Phineas decides right here in the empty street that all deserts everywhere suck ass. She’s going to sail straight over every one of them after this.

Eventually the place she’s been inching towards does begin to creep closer. She’d dragged her feet through the dust outside every gloomy window lining the main street and now she’s a stone’s throw from a yellow square splashing across the dirt road, the one warm thing she can see in the dark. The cheerful shaft of light is visible in the air against the moonshine, like a sunbeam warping around the jagged edge of a broken window. It’s pouring around a set of wooden saloon doors, set in the middle of a building that matches the rest of the town in looking like every cartoon western Phineas has ever seen, though this place isn’t as cleanly designed. Along with the other structures, this one with the light seems to have piles of junk haphazardly affixed to it; layers of wavy sheet metal skewer over the edge of the roof, steel pipes tied tightly over splitting wood beams squeal against the wind, and Phineas can even see a loose candy wrapper fluttering around the second floor balcony. Slowly clicking like a bicycle tire, a tiny windmill made of a dozen disparate parts spins atop a miniature radio tower growing out of the roof. It is, possibly, the most fun-looking building Phineas has ever seen. They probably have not-cartoon food in there, which sounds good enough already, but she’s jonesing to touch those doors to see if they cartoon-creak.

There’s also something cool in there, someone cool maybe. She isn’t sure which, but she can sense something bright enough to be more interesting than both the doors and the food. Phineas pauses outside and gives the saloon one more look, trying to figure out what’s waiting in there. Aside from her commander’s perceptions she only sees electric light, aggressively golden against the monochrome of everything else but otherwise normal. When she looks upward, scanning the balcony again, the silver moon glares too brightly in her eyes to see anything significant.

Oh well! It’ll be a surprise then.

The doors do creak.

When she steps inside Phineas is immediately assaulted by whiny country music coming from a set of wired speakers, nailed straight into the four corners of the dining room like what they did for music at church.

(That tweaks something down in Phineas’ animal brain— shouldn’t she have been able to hear it through the open doors, out in the quiet street?)

The wires wind through a doorway with a beaded curtain at the far side of the room, at the end of an aisle dividing an empty bar setup from a scattering of high-top tables. The walls and even the ceiling are a dense collage of trinkets, and photos, and paintings and tools and flags and anything else that could be attached to a flat surface. One of Careful Pete’s lost palm fronds hangs in the rafters, spanning the entire length of the dining area.

There are three other patrons, dull and drunk, and to her immense disappointment Phineas doesn’t care about any of them. None of them had even looked over when she creaked so cinematically through the entryway. Struck out again. Maybe she’d been wrong about finding something worthwhile in here.

A musical voice over the noise coming from the speakers.

“Be right out! Have a seat!”

Phineas has a seat, at a smaller table on the bar side, away from everyone else so she can sulk by herself.

The bad music, the air of failure and boredom puts Phineas’ teeth on edge. She plants her feet on the floor under the table and tries to ground herself, her spirit reaching under the floorboards to find some connection with the earth. Once she’d gotten closer to the settlement her sense of it had changed dramatically; after days of following unassuming veins of sparse, quiet feedback leading in this direction she’d finally found the pulsing heart they feed into, deep in the earth under the town. Despite the odd, spoiled quality of the heart’s energy, it’s alive, a pleasant counterbalance to the mucky-mire feeling of the moonlight. But here in this restaurant there’s a basement between Phineas and the soil, just wide enough to make her feel unmoored. Cellars are always awkward to try and ground through, they’re like opening a door that leads out the side of a building into thin air. She heaves a sigh, toys idly with a crusty salt shaker and gives up her half-assed attempt, focuses in on the other patrons instead while she waits.

There’s one who is so bland there’s nothing to notice besides the fact that he’s wearing sunglasses indoors, at night, and there’s a pack of cigarettes shoved up under one shirt sleeve. Phineas only twigs that because Jocasta rolls her own, when she doesn’t use a pipe, and she’d told Phineas once it was because premade cigarettes are basically sawdust. If you want to have a smoke you should take the time for it properly, she always said, and also she said not to take up smoking at all.

The other two are brighter. One is a bulky, dark-skinned man taking a nap in a corner booth, dreaming about something soft and golden that overpowers whatever else makes up his halo. At the table with the sunglasses guy, drinking from a frosted,out-of-place martini glass and staring at a radio in her hand is a woman who looks like glass herself. She’s wearing a bright blue feather boa and her hair is swept back in a severe style behind her head, secured with a pretty lotus comb Phineas can’t stop staring at. The color of it won’t stay still in her eyes. If the woman has a discernible halo Phineas can’t see it, but she is so frosty-pale just looking at her makes Phineas feel cold.

Even more dishware appears in the form of a sweating plastic cup tapping down on Phineas’ table, shaking her back to herself. A lady in an apron is here.

“Oh,” Phineas blusters. The lady smiles. She is very pretty.

“You looked real thirsty,” the lady says. Warm bread, yellow bells, sunshine pouring from somewhere inside those gorgeous curls; on the heels of the other woman’s ice, she is like stepping out of the snowbank and into the balmy air of a bustling pub, hot food and ruddy faces. Phineas briefly considers a timeline where she gets to kiss her for an hour behind that empty bar.

“Uh-huh,” Phineas mumbles. “Thank you.” She manages to tear her eyes away, and when they land on the brimming glass she realizes she is real thirsty. The angel briefly forgotten, she throws the whole thing back in one long transcendent go. Not thumping the bottom of the glass against the table would be an insult, after that.

The woman giggles, a yellow ribbon.

“I’ll get you some more,” she drawls pleasantly. “Want somethin’ to eat? Kitchen’s closed already but we got some ribs left over from today.”

“I don’t have any money!” Phineas says, just to get it out of the way. The waitress’ perfect face twitches in preemptive exasperation, but she levels it out quickly. She’s been doing this a while. “I am hungry though, I’d work it off if you got anything that needs lifting or washed, or..?”

The exhaustion eases at the mention of work.

“Well-” She’s interrupted by the rattling of ice in another glass.

“Ellieee~”

Ellie The Waitress doesn’t bother suppressing her annoyed expression this time. The man in sunglasses shakes his rocks glass at her again.

“What are you foolin’ with that for?” he whines. His voice is devoid of personality and fills the room in a desperate sort of way. Phineas used to hear that voice from middle-aged men in suits who would come in to negotiate at the diner, bad haircuts and silly voices, like they all took lessons on leadership from the same frustrated little purse dog.

Ellie closes her eyes and takes a breath. Her nose scrunches up a bit and Phineas realizes belatedly that she’s an anthro. In addition to her freckles there are spots closer to her dark, round nose that might mean whiskers, and her coppery skin is actually fine fur. It’s not the first time Phineas had managed to ignore something obvious about a person right in front of her. Commanders spend so much time looking at things through the lens of suresight, energy and impressions outside the perception of less spiritually-inclined folks, that physical details often take a back seat. Phineas recognizes halos more easily than faces, most days.

The scrunch smooths away as Ellie wrestles her customer service face back into place.

“I’m so sorry, do you mind-”

“No no, go ahead,” Phineas says, instead of telling Sunglasses to go fuck himself. Ellie straightens out her apron and crosses the floor. Phineas settles back in her seat, hands in pockets instead of fidgeting out on the table while she keeps watch.

Or she tries to, but her fingers brush against something small she’d already forgotten about. There’s more light here in the bar than there was outside.

She retrieves the mystery item the hare gave her and turns it over in her hands, peering through the array of tiny holes. Sure enough, more light or not it’s like the darkness inside it is a physical thing blocking out the view through to the other side. No stars, nothing.

There’s a pop and a yelp that snaps Phineas’ attention back up to the other table, but by the time she looks Ellie is heading back to the kitchen again. Sunglasses is laughing loudly, trying to get the glass woman to laugh with him. Phineas doesn’t like her vibe very much, but does appreciate that she seems to be completely ignoring him.

The man looks at Phineas instead.

“What?” he slurs. His movement is sluggish, trailing a half-second behind him. “What’s your problem?”

Phineas fixes him with an expression that, historically, makes people like him uncomfortable. It had been described to her as dissecting by folks who read that sort of thing into commanders, but that sounds awful smart for her tastes. Really she’s just working out if there would be some unseen downside to decking him.

Sunglasses shifts in his seat. It makes the woman’s eyes flit up from the fancy radio she’s been immersed in, the kind with a big expensive touch screen. With her gaze, an icy feeling slinks up Phineas’ neck, but the glass woman isn’t actually all that interested and returns to her browsing before Phineas can get a real read on her.

The song oozing from the speakers ends and drops a quiet curtain over the space. There are sounds coming from the kitchen but they’re unhurried, heedless of the drama threatening to splatter all over the dining room.

Sunglasses is still glaring like he really does want to know what Phineas’ problem is, so she smiles.

“You should be nice to waitresses,” she tells him.

“Mind your own fuckin’ business,” he says in that embarrassing, overcompensating voice from earlier. The beaded curtain rustles and the waitress returns with a tray of drinks, either unaware of or choosing to ignore the new tension. Maybe she’s already tense. She passes by the other table, plunking down a new glass in front of Sunglasses without breaking her stride, and he’s too drunk to collect himself enough to catch her. Ellie doesn’t stop until she reaches Phineas on the far side of the room. She brought the pitcher this time.

More music jangles through the speakers, something in Russi. It makes a comfortable cushion in the space between the parties and things loosen like a sigh. A terse, frustrated sigh, not a relieved one, but a release nonetheless.

“Thank you for waiting,” Ellie says, automatic in a way Phineas doesn’t love. Phineas tips way back in her chair to watch Ellie’s face while she pours more water, just barely catching herself before she plants her foot up on the table, settling for resting her shin against the edge instead. It’s still grody, given her shins are covered in filthy, worn bandages to match the ones between her heels and toes, but Jo never could get her to interact normally with furniture. Ellie meets her eyes when she’s done pouring, and a bizarre flash of camaraderie passes between them; Phineas had felt it more often as she’d traveled out of the hard to reach places, through the easier ones and finally into the impossible parts of the Sprawl. Even a dirty, unsettling commander who can’t operate a chair looks like a friend if you’re two (mostly) women listening to a loud man under the only speck of light in the desert.

“You want me to do somethin’ about him?” Phineas asks, grinning a grin she hopes is cute and sly. Maybe even mysterious and alluring, that would be cool. “I could.”

“Is he bothering you?”

Phineas tilts her head to see behind Ellie and finds the man staring directly at them, listening in.

“He’s pissing me off,” she says, louder. He makes to stand but the woman with him snaps something shrill and he settles, seething. Phineas turns back to Ellie. There’s a plaid yellow kerchief keeping her long hair out of her face, and she’s reaching back to the nape of her neck to tighten the knot there.

“Ray does that,” Ellie affirms quietly between them. “Best not to start any trouble, hard to replace broken furniture out here.”

In Phineas’ vision, the golden glow coming from the waitress dims a fraction.

“Fair enough.”

“Thank you, though.” Ellie means it. Phineas smiles at her again, but it’s just a regular smile this time.

“Can I ask you somethin’? About here, I mean,” Phineas says.

“If it keeps me at this table longer, absolutely.”

Phineas offers the hare’s trinket to Ellie.

“Do you have any idea what this thing is?” she asks.

Their fingers almost touch when Ellie takes it, and Phineas tries to remain normal. The disappointing lack of backbone doesn’t make Ellie less pretty, or Phineas less catastrophically queer. The pretty waitress sits down on the other side of the table to examine the item. She’s doing the same thing Phineas did, trying to see through the holes.

“Where’d you get it?” Ellie asks. “It kinda-”

“Some rabbits, in the desert.” Phineas thinks better of it. “Hares? They might have been hares, those are different I think.” Ellie smiles at that, shining like a sunrise again. Her eyes are the same yellow as fresh buttercups.

“You ran into some hares!” Ellie says. “That’s s’posed to be lucky.” Gosh she’s lovely, even if she’s not a fighter. There’s a scattering of freckles across the fine fur of her face, animating her expression while she speaks. “We love ‘em, people think hares born here in this desert can tell the future. They hand stuff like that out to folks a lot…” She reaches into her apron, digging for something in the pocket while she talks. “You know ravens’ll do that too?”

Phineas nods excitedly.

“My ma’s a witch, a healer,” Phineas says. “Ravens show up around her farm and bring her stuff all the time. We got all kinds of junk, we kept it in its own drawer.”

Ellie retrieves what looks like a big marble, like the ones you hit the other smaller marbles with, except it’s sort of chalky and metallic on Phineas’ fingertips. It’s sticking its tongue out at her.

“They brought me this a while back,” Ellie says.

“I like the little face painted on.” Phineas giggles before she remembers herself, but Ellie doesn’t seem bothered by the tiny shower of sparks that turn up the ends of Phineas’ hair. Ellie sets her elbow on the table, her hand a long line up the side of her face, pillowing out her chubby cheek and all those freckles.

“It’s cute ain’t it?” she muses. “I dunno why this one seems different. I usually end up just throwing their stuff in a drawer too, but I kinda get the feeling this little guy’s special. I’ve been carrying it around with me.” She shrugs. “Some people think they’re omens, like somethin’ bad is coming and you’ll need their gift to help you avoid it, but I like to think they’re lucky.”

“Maybe this one is, have you felt luckier lately?”

Ellie smiles again, but by now Phineas’ eyes are adjusting to her light and it’s becoming clear how tired she is. As the thought happens, ice rattling in a glass is loud enough to be heard all the way across the room. Ellie’s eyes flutter closed, frustration dousing her halo to a dull sheen, and Phineas wants to hit something.

“Hey!” Ray slurs, having already finished another drink. “Are you gonna leave me thirsty like this?”

The Look passes between Phineas and Ellie again, but Phineas isn’t going to push. They don’t say anything while Ellie stands and gathers her tray.