Ever since I fled Singapore something as simple as lunch has become an irony. As a Renraku scion, I'd been able to get just about anything I wanted to eat back at the arcology but I hadn't been observant and routinely ate forbidden things. On board the ship, though, I made my decision to follow Allah's strictures but had been given no choice in what was fed to me. Eat what was offered or quite literally starve. I asked Allah's forgiveness and ate.
While one would expect Seattle to offer as many options as I'd had in Singapore, those options existed to people with means. Not some unknown little girl scraping by from the leavings of the Yak. Still, rice was plentiful. Hydroponic lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots were freely available, although they could stretch my budget. And soy - all the soy I could...or at least should...eat. Soy technically was as halal as any other vegetable, grain, or fruit, but the devil was in the additives. It had taken me weeks, even with my Erika, to find reliable food content sources for all the low-scale restaurants found in America. The experience, though, polished my skills related to snooping around North America's networks. As long as I'm connected to my deck, I can pretty confidently now eat halal (more or less) wherever I go...assuming the local staff don't take liberties with the franchise food preparation rules. There is only so much I can do about such things, though, which is why I beg forgiveness from God five times a day.
At this particular restaurant, I'm safe ordering the beef-flavored soy teriyaki. There isn't an animal cell to be found in it.
Yelena=-sensei and I make small talk about body art and what it represents in different places of the world. I love that Yelena and I share some frames of reference. True, I visited these places years after Yelena, but still we can discuss the light of the full moon flickering on the waters of the Rhine River or the glow of starlight on the first snow in Moscow having both seen such things with our own eyes. It's easy to lose myself in the magic of selective memory. But Yelena drops the hammer on the reminiscing once the server shows her backside to us after delivering our plates.
"Decker mage turn talk. Yelena feel something bother Firefly. Yelena listen then talk. Please?"
I sigh as I spend long moments picking at my food, suddenly not very hungry.
"I messed up, Yelena-sensei," I admit to a sliver of carrot I push around the sea of brown sauce and rice with my chopsticks. I look up into the elf's violet eyes as I continue. "I tried to pay off my debt to the Yak and I messed it all up. My father's friend who has been my contact with them jumped to the conclusion that I must have sold Yak secrets or some such nonsense to make that much nuyen. They're going through my background since coming to Seattle with a fine-toothed comb. I have to believe they'll find my visits to Arc's garage and that might lead to you both. I don't think they'll find out about the warehouse or the operation at the Sound, but I can't be sure. I don't know what resources they can pull. If they make problems for you and Arc-sensei I don't know what I'll do. I feel like a grade A idiot for not covering my real-world tracks. I had people do that for me with Renraku. All I had to do is be invisible on the Matrix." There. I got the words out. Now for the axe to fall.
