Chapter Twenty
September 29th, 2228, Neo Southern California Metroplex, The Big One Bar
Erik settled into a chair that had probably been new before flitters had taken to the sky. He was in the small back office of the Big One, the bar he’d first come to when visiting the Shadow Zone.
Jia sat beside him, eyeing Alicia, the owner, with faint disdain. The other woman gazed at them, a faint look of suspicion on her face.
He wasn’t surprised. Despite her face, her gray hair betrayed the same truth his did: de-aging. She wasn’t some young woman still learning the world. She might have grown up on Earth, but unlike the coddled men and women of Uptown, Alicia knew first-hand how corrupt the homeworld was, and she’d made a career of profiting from that corruption without directly participating
