“I’m Nora—Eleonora.”
Red-haired Eleonora adjusted her grip on the warm cup several times, as if it was a precious jewel. Now that I saw her up close, I figured she was probably my age, although strangely, she seemed younger. As I’d learned from my acquaintance with Stasia, women could change the whole impression they gave just by putting on a new outfit. The one distinctly adult thing about her was the delicate chain I could see around her pale neck where it peeked out of her collar.
“That’s my little sister’s name,” I said.
“Oh my, what a coincidence.”
Then again, she’d gotten it from someone she admired and was quite proud of it.
The woman had quietly said she would come with me, and now she was crouched beside me, sipping her coffee.
It was no problem for me to treat her to real coffee—the problem was finding a place that served the stuff. After a lot of searching, we found a moving café, and I ponied up the kopecks to get us each a cup.
So we sipped our coffee by the Moscow roadside. A man and a woman. One sitting, one standing.
Nothing unusual there.
I looked at the gaggle of identical, gray concrete buildings and the crowds of people going by them. Then at the gray sky.
I never knew how to broach the subject at moments like this.
Are there any cute girls there? What’s the place like?
There are girls like me there. It’s a lively place.
That was it, just snippets of idle conversation.
This was all about knowing what you were good at. I was a Janitor who ran around with a submachine gun, not Captain Ilya Murometz, suave chatter-up of women.
“But isn’t it rough there?” I asked.
“How so?”
“I mean with the cyborgs. Can organic girls handle the weight?”
“Oh,” she said, her eyes widening as if she hadn’t expected me to ask that. Then her lips drifted open slightly, and she said, “That’s a fair question. But I don’t service them.” She laughed, smiled, all innocence. “They’re not really to my taste.”
It shouldn’t have been that surprising. Did I think all the women who didn’t exist on the CRT monitors were pitiful and frail? That was just a convenient fantasy men dreamed up for themselves. Women were strong, and proud, and could walk on their own two feet. They didn’t need my help.
“So, well… I guess you could say it’s rough and that I’m not very enthusiastic about it.”
“Huh.”
Eleonora brought her cup to her lips and blew on it. White fog drifted up, and I let my eyes follow it.
“Hmph… They say a rat can be as proud as a lion in his own home,” she said, her lips pursed but still lovely. Even when it was prickly like this, her voice was pleasant on the ears, the chirping of a little bird. “They do have tongues in their heads. They say I’m long on hair but short on brains—they say all kinds of things. I can’t stand it.”
“That’s pretty awful.”
Eleonora blinked, then looked at me. “Were you there for fun?”
“Nah,” I said. I wasn’t. Was I? I thought about it for a second, then the corners of my lips turned up. “Maybe.”
It was just like Madam Pisken said: All I did was put on my balaclava, pick up my toy, and rush in shouting. Could I really call that a job? Especially when I was talking to a woman who had proper employment?
Then again, it was a bit too rambunctious to call it playing around.
“I’d be thrilled if you’d play with me,” Eleonora said.
I shrugged. When a woman sounded that happy, you couldn’t take what she was saying at face value. I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to make her scream uncontrollably in bed.
“But there’s nine of those metallolom in there, right? Scary place to go for some fun.”
“You think? They’re not all that.”
“Really?”
“Most of them have just had an arm replaced or similar. There are only three of them who are really battle ready, plus a couple of ex-military types.”
“Eto kak zhe <Come again>?”
“Most of them have just had an arm replaced or similar. There are only three of them who are really battle ready, plus a couple of ex-military types.”
That seemed awfully important to me, but Eleonora said it with a smile.
To be fair, if I looked at this from an unbiased angle, Mariya and Nora were outliers. Ordinary girls didn’t care how much outlaws had mechanized themselves, as long as they weren’t Janitors themselves. For Eleonora, it was probably the difference between scary, frightening, and absolutely terrifying.
If you weren’t planning a frontal assault, however, it didn’t really matter. Picking a fight with a cyborg was for idiots.
An idiot like me could only groan. “Koshmar…”
Eleonora looked up at me. “If you drop by for some fun, try not to let them notice you, okay?”
I nodded. “Believe me… That’s the plan.”
No choice. I was a Janitor, and a Janitor’s job was to clean up whatever dangerous thing they had been requested to deal with. Anyone who would claim that there was something wrong with whoever gave me this job was under the illusion that being a Janitor was somehow safe.
Above all, I had already accepted the assignment. Now I had to reap what I had sown.
I slugged down the brewed coffee. I felt like the stuff at the Cherkizovsky black market was better.
“Anyway, I’ll be by soon,” I said.
“Hee-hee! I’ll be looking forward to it.”
✦ ✦ ✦
If I’d never met Stasia, I bet the way she said that would have taken me right in. Instead, I remembered Mariya’s little remark and smiled grimly to myself. I let the last drop of coffee linger on my tongue.
“That thing. Around your neck,” I said.
“What?”
“I like it. It looks good on you.” I crumpled my paper cup as I spoke.
Eleonora blinked, then she giggled, smiling like a young girl. With a nod, she said, “It was a gift. From…a teacher, I guess you could say.”
“Yeah?”
Good. It was good to have someone like that in a person’s life. I nodded and started to head out.
“Sorry to have taken up your time,” I said.
“Not at all.” Eleonora shook her head, sending ripples through her red hair, and fixed me with a smile that could have made a man melt. “Spasibo, vsyo bylo vkusno <Thank you, the coffee was delicious>.”
Even as I shrugged and started walking away, she stayed crouched there, obviously enjoying sipping at her drink.
I thought I could feel her gaze drilling into my back as I went—but I was just being self-conscious.
Yeah, that must be it.