Carnival

“I’d like that.” He looked away from the wall, which was a mistake, because it put him face to face with Kimberly’s murdered angel. “I’d like that very much.”

9

VINCENT’S WARDROBE COULDN’T KEEP UP WITH THE sweat. It slicked his neck, rolled in beads down his face, and soaked the underside of his hair and a band where the borrowed hat rested on his head. His hands were still greasy from a lunch of some fried starchy fruit and tubers, served in a paper wrapper, and his wardrobe was too overwrought to deal with it.

He mopped his face on his sleeve, further stressing foglets already strained by the jostling crowd and the press of his escort on either side, and tried to regulate his breathing. The nausea was due to the heat, he thought, and not the food; his watch didn’t report any problems beyond mild dehydration and a slightly elevated body temperature, which he was keeping an eye on. It wasn’t dangerous yet, just uncomfortable, but Miss Pretoria was tireless. She tugged Vincent’s sleeve to direct his attention to a Dragon costume operated by two men, the one managing the front limbs walking on stilts and operating paired extensions from his wrists that simulated the beast’s enormous wings. “How could something that big fly?” he asked, checking his step to let the puppet shamble past.

“They must have been somewhat insubstantial for their size,” Miss Pretoria said. “The khir, which are the Dragons’ closest living relatives, have a honeycombed endoskeleton that leaves them much lighter than an equivalent terrestrial mammal. So the Dragons would have been about the same weight and wingspan as the largest pterosaurs. And we think they soared more than flew, and may have been highly adapted climbers.” She turned to watch the puppet proceed down the street, bowing and dancing, bells shimmering along the span of the wings.

Her eyes widened as she turned to him. “Miss Katherinessen, you should have said something.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I think we’d better get you out of the heat.” She turned to Shafaqat, gesturing her forward. “Would you call for a car, Miss Delhi? And get Miss Katherinessen something to drink? We’re going to find some shade.”

“I’m fine,” Vincent said, as Pretoria latched onto his wrist and tugged him toward a side street where the buildings would block most of the glaring light. “Nothing a cold shower and a glass of ice water wouldn’t cure.”

Pretoria clucked her tongue and bulldozed over him. “You’re not adapted to this climate, and I’m notexplaining to my mother why it is that a Coalition diplomat suffered heat exhaustion under my care, no matter how manly you need to prove you are.”

He checked over his shoulder. Shafaqat moved through the press of bodies efficiently, her height, bearing, and uniform gaining a certain deference even from costumed, staggering merrymakers. Vincent had never seen a crowd like this on a Coalition planet: jostling, singing, shouting, raucously shoulder to shoulder and yet decorously polite. He wondered if it was a side effect of living packed into their alien cities, encircled by the waiting jungle, or of their rigid social strictures and their armed obeisance to the code duello.

Pretoria’s hand cooled his skin as she pulled him into the shady side street, which wasn’t any less crowded than the square. She pulled his wrist out and up as he made the choice to let her touch him without resistance. It was foreign, invasive. His skin crawled and stung when she pulled back, steadying his hand with her other one, and bent over it.

“You’re burned,” she said. “Not too badly, I think, but it’s going to hurt by tonight.”

“That’s impossible. My wardrobe should filter UV–”

But his wardrobe was overstressed, and of course he’d had to dial it down to keep it from zapping pedestrians–or Miss Pretoria, with her frontier touchiness. She squeezed his wrist, and the cool pressure of her palm turned to shocking heat. He yelped and yanked his hand away.

“Sunburn,” she said. “Good thing you wore long sleeves.” And then she reached out and caught his shoulders, pushing him against the wall, and he would have shrugged her away but the blood roared in his ears and the orange status lights flickered in his watch. The street swam around him, aswarm with people who might have been staring at him curiously if he could have focused on their faces. “You know,” he said, uncertainly, “I don’t feel too well at all.”

Her hand closed on his wrist again, searing, as she tugged him into motion. Shafaqat reappeared on his other side. “Miss Pretoria?” Something icy and dripping touched his hand.

“Drink that, Vincent. Miss Delhi, did you call the car?”

“I’m fine,” Vincent insisted, even though he couldn’t quite lift his feet. He broke Pretoria’s grip, more roughly than he had intended, and ducked his head, blinking, as he tried to get a good look at the display on his watch. Nausea made him gulp. “I don’t think I should drink anything.”

They ignored him. “It’s on the way,” Shafaqat said. “Where are we going?”

“Redirect it to Pretoria house. We can get him there and into a cold shower by the time it could reach us and find a place to land in this crowd, and it’ll be a huge flap if we have to send him to the clinic.” Miss Pretoria cursed. “I’m an idiot. I thought he would tell me if it got to be too much.”

“Men,” Shafaqat said. Vincent could picture the twist of her mouth from her tone.

“Angelo would tell you it’s Vincent in particular, not men in general,” Vincent said.

“Vincent, can you walk a little way?” Pretoria said, concerned, carefully pronouncing his given name.

“I can walk.” He wove slightly, but steadied. “How far?”

Shafaqat answered, pressing the cold, sweating thing into his hand again. He closed fingers that didn’t want to tighten around the coolness of the globe. “Less than a kilometer. And you have to drink this.”

“I feel sick.”

“You feel sick because you’re dehydrated. You need fluids. If you can’t keep it down you’ll need an IV. Slowly, just a sip at a time. But drink.”

Her tone reminded him of Angelo’s. Not exactly hectoring, but assured. Somebody steadied his hand as he raised the globe to his mouth, found the straw, and sipped.

Once the fluid–something tart, with bubbles–flooded his mouth, it was an act of will not to gulp it all. Temperature shock chilled his teeth in the bone, replacing the dizzy headache with a stabbing one. He found his footing. “Better.”

Now that he’d become aware, the prickle of warmth across his shoulders and back and thighs took on new significance. He’d worn long sleeves, but if his wardrobe’s UV blocking had failed, those sleeves wouldn’t have protected him.

He was going to have one hell of a radiation burn.

“Drink more,” Pretoria reminded, keeping him on the shady side of the street. He obeyed, the sugary fluid a relief. He finished the globe quickly despite his attempts to regulate his intake. They’d stopped walking, pausing in a much smaller side street–more of a service access route, too narrow for a hovercar and tight even for ground transport–without the press of foot traffic. As Shafaqat pressed another globe into his hands–this one a little warmer, but also dripping condensation–Miss Pretoria turned aside and placed one hand on the wall of a nearby structure.

“House,” she said, “I need cold water, please, in a basin.”

He still felt unwell–disco

“It’s the back wall of a marketplace,” Miss Pretoria said, and a cubbyhole appeared about a meter up the violet‑gray wall.

Shafaqat urged Vincent toward it. He went, finishing the second drink before relinquishing the spent globe into the security agent’s hands. She crushed it and made it vanish.