Chapter 324
Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, one-car garage. 2000 square feet, though the real estate listing failed to mention how much of that was closet space. Behind the peeling eggshell paint and suspicious dark spots creeping down from the roofline—mold or otherwise—lay what passed for prime real estate these days. In the suburbs, even a rat's nest could be gold, for one reason alone.
I'd gotten a deal on the property through a contact but it still cost a solid chunk of selve. Pre-dome dwellings had to be updated within system stipulations to be bought and sold for selve, and while the houses and properties with system add-ons could be quite luxurious, civilians, who couldn't interface with most of those user-styled luxuries, preferred houses like this one, the only real update coming in the form of registration. Which unfortunately, also wasn't cheap.
It was a scam, but let's be real, to some extent, the housing market always was.
Jackson was still alert in the driver's seat, though he'd relaxed enough to pull an old-world magazine out of the glove box while we waited.
Leaned against the hood of the car, I lit a cigarette—the third that I'd bummed so far from Jackson since we met—and smoked it down to the filter, orange corona hovering at the edge of my vision, mirroring the sun as it bled out over the horizon, threatening to slip behind the cookie-cutter rooflines. Nothing special about it, except that it might be the last time I'd draw breath to see one.
Annoyed at the thought, I dropped the cigarette to the cement and stamped it out.
Rubber ground concrete as a large white-panel van came to a full halt at a T intersection fifty feet away and turned towards me. Jackson clocked it immediately in the rearview, then looked over his magazine at me, eyes asking a silent question.
I pushed off the hood and made a "we're good" gesture to him. Jackson folded the magazine as the van approached and started the car. I'd told him to wait at the nearby 7-11. Close enough that he could pick me up easily if there was a problem, far enough to give a semblance of privacy. Once the taillights disappeared around a distant corner, I removed my mask, then my hood.
The door opened and a man's head popped out, dreads trailing with the movement as he examined his surroundings with a great deal of trepidation.