“Hello?” she called. “Hello? Is anybody there?”
Oh God, what if nobody was in the building? What if the pimp had already taken Keelah to the spaceport to sell her to the other Clan for their awful party? What if—
The door swung open suddenly, revealing a Saurian woman wearing a lot of dark green rouge on her flat cheeks and sparkly yellow shadow on her eye ridges. She had on a dress that was split high enough to show her vaginal slit, which had been bedazzled with two rows of tiny, flashing pink and blue lights to draw attention to it.
Like a runway at the airport! Bobbi thought. It was an interesting cultural display, but she didn’t have time for research at the moment.
The Saurian woman—obviously a Pleasure Girl—looked down at Bobbi with apparent surprise.
“A mammalian?” she said, her voice hoarse and low—possibly from breathing in the clouds of blue smoke Bobbi saw swirling behind her. “The fuck are you doing here?” she asked, frowning.
Bobbi had practiced what she would say all the way here. Now she lifted her head and spoke in a cool, professional tone.
“I’m here to speak to Rep. Wheezler about a business deal. Please tell him if he’ll see me at once, I can make it worth this while.”
She pushed up the sleeves of the oversized coat and showed the many golden bangles adorning her arms.
The Pleasure Girl’s eyes widened and she gave a short nod.
“Well, mammalian or not, Rep. Wheezler does love his gold. Come in, come in.”
She held the door open and Bobbi entered. They went down a short hallway, past a dark staircase leading to the second story, and into a front room that was filled with smoke. Several other Pleasure Girls were sitting in the middle of the floor around a large hooka-like contraption. It had four flexible arms coming from its fat silver body and the Saurian women were sucking on them and then releasing plumes of blue smoke from their nostril slits.
“Stop with the dream weed for a minute,” the first Pleasure Girl called to them. “Rep. Wheezler has business and he needs to be able to see who the fuck he’s talking to!”
There were some mutters of discontent from the other women at this pronouncement, but the first Pleasure Girl seemed to have some authority over them. After several angry looks at her and Bobbi, they hung their pipes on hooks on the sides of the hooka-thing and left the room, climbing the staircase she’d seen on her way in.
The smoke still lingered in the room and Bobbi accidentally breathed some in and then coughed it out again. It had an odd flavor—bittersweet and acrid—that lingered at the back of her tongue.
“Wait here,” the Pleasure Girl with the landing strip vaginal slit said to her. “And try not to breathe in too much of the smoke if you don’t want a case of the echoes.”
“The what?” Bobbi asked, and coughed again. But the girl was already gone, presumably to go get Rep. Wheezler.
Bobbi wandered around the room, waving at the lingering clouds of smoke and trying not to breathe too much of it in. When a bit of it cleared, she was able to see the room more clearly. To her surprise, it looked familiar.
“I’ve been here before—I know I have,” Bobbi muttered to herself. “The walls…I’ve seen these walls.”
But how could that be? She shook her head but couldn’t get rid of the odd sense of déjà vu. Waving more smoke out of the way—it was denser that normal smoke and stayed together in big clouds until she broke them up with her hand—she looked more closely at the wall tiles.
“That’s it—it’s the tiles!” she muttered to herself. They were dark blue at the top of the wall, near the ceiling, but they got lighter as they went down. Near the middle of the wall, they turned from pale blue to lavender and continued getting darker until they were a deep purple down near the floor.
Now that she had recognized the tiles as the familiar element, Bobbi finally remembered where she’d seen them before.
“The dream!” she exclaimed. “I saw them in the dream I shared with Dragon!”
She got so excited, she accidentally breathed in another big lungful of the dense blue smoke and started coughing again.
This coughing fit was worse than the previous one and Bobbi ended up doubled over, hacking like she had a three-pack-a-day habit. When she finally stood up again, she felt light-headed and woozy.
And then she realized there was someone else in the room with her.
It was a tall Kindred man with flames dancing in his eyes and a woman with long, brown hair.
“I don’t like it here, Taurex,” the women said. She shivered and crossed her arms over her breasts tightly. “It’s so cold and I don’t trust these people.”