Echo in an Open Field

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Earth loomed brightly in the night sky, making the streetlights along Gunther Road almost superfluous. The sky was clear, though the air was just short of muggy; summer was almost in full swing, and this year it promised to be exceptionally hot. The water park in Ichiba.jp, a Japanese city to the south, would be getting plenty of business later in the season, if it wasn’t already. Elle hoped to go there herself, if she and Robbie could save up enough for them to go together. They almost always took their vacation time together, though usually they didn’t go to tourist attractions that cost more than twice their monthly rent. Euphonia.usa was big enough to keep them entertained usually—but there was no water park, and if there was anything Ellysia wanted to do on her next vacation, it was go down a giant water slide at Nishida Water Rides.

The Web was two blocks from Elle’s apartment building. In her imagination she was just being jetted from the slide into the pool when she came to the club’s entrance. It was a tall, long industrial drop gate, made of wire mesh and corrugated steel. A black burlap screen shielded the goings-on inside from passersby on the sidewalk. Barely visible at the center of the drop gate was a wicket door—a smaller door embedded in the gate, which upon closer inspection was no more than a hologram emitting from the threshold of the real door. The owner of the Web had found out when she opened the club that secrecy would make her establishment more popular—it was the prize at the end of a treasure hunt. Business boomed at the Web when it seemed to be forbidden fruit; mystery brought inquiring barhoppers and the sense of exclusivity made them regulars. Egos fed off the air of privateness that secrecy afforded, though the Web was never intended as a private club. Robbie had shown Ellysia the place for her eighteenth birthday; he interviewed Dahlia Balswick when she started hiding her club with the holographic gate, and had been going there himself years before Elle was old enough to drink. That had been almost five years ago, and Ellysia had been coming to the Web ever since.

Elle slipped into the Web, barely opening the door and quickly shutting it behind her. This was the custom, so as not to ruin the quest for people who’d come from as far away as the other side of the moon to find the elusive ginmill. The lights were flashing so that the club changed colors every five or ten seconds, and the music was turned up as loud as it ever was. For the crowd at the Web that Wednesday night, the smell wasn’t unbearable—the stench of stale beer didn’t flood into Elle’s nostrils the way it sometimes did even on slower nights. She shouldered her way toward the bar and took up a stool, setting her purse on the counter next to a digital blackjack machine. Elle waved her hand until she got the attention of the bartender, who was unabashedly watching a woman in Daisy Dukes make her way onto the dancefloor, his eyes trailing up from her firm thighs and butt up to the jiggle of her breasts as she walked. “Oi, Hezekiah, can I get a Disaronno on the rocks before you start drooling?”

Hez snapped out of his reverie, and didn’t look the least bit happy about it. “Coming up, sweetheart.” he said, almost bitterly.

Ellysia wasn’t the type a man would drool over, and she was well aware. She was a bit on the short side, shapely but always more modestly dressed than it seemed any man appreciated; her pretty face and bright green eyes really got Elle nowhere with men. It had taken her six years to accept this, but that didn’t make responses like Hezekiah’s any easier to swallow. “Actually,” she called after him, “just bring me a glass of ice and I’ll buy the whole damn bottle!”