Chapter 237
He went back to his room, grabbed his jacket, and checked his comm for the nearest transit station. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from the house, which wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t great either. He pulled up his credit balance while he was at it and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The number staring back at him was depressing. Not emergency-level depressing, but the kind of depressing where you started doing mental math on whether you could afford both the round-trip fare and food this week.
He obviously didn’t need to buy food, so the answer was yes, technically, but only if he abandoned any hope of buying Phantom Collapse when it dropped next month. He’d been looking forward to that game for weeks. It was supposed to be the best tactical RPG released this year, and the pre-order reviews were incredible, and now he was going to miss launch day because Princess Athea, his biological mother, a woman who controlled more wealth than most people combined, had apparently never once in eighteen years considered the concept of an allowance.
Not a single credit. Nothing. Viora probably had a discretionary account with more zeros than Zaeryn had seen in his entire life, and here he was counting fare money like a broke student on the last day before payday.
"Pocket money," he muttered as he walked down the path from the estate. "Would it kill her? Even just a little? Even monthly?"
The evening air was warm and the streets of Sector 7 were quiet in that pleasant residential way they got after sundown. Most of the homes along this stretch were large, set back behind privacy barriers and garden walls, the kind of neighborhood where people had private transports in personal hangars and never had to think about things like public fare prices.
Zaeryn walked past all of it with his hands in his pockets and his mood somewhere between mildly annoyed and reluctantly amused at his own situation.
The transit station was a sleek, open-air platform at the intersection of two main roads. It was well-lit and mostly empty at this hour, just a handful of women scattered across the waiting area, some on their comms, others reading or staring at nothing the way people did when they were waiting for something to move them somewhere else.
Zaeryn walked up to the automated kiosk, tapped his comm against the payment scanner, and watched the fare deduct from his already pathetic balance. The machine chirped in confirmation, completely indifferent to his financial suffering.
He found a bench near the platform edge and sat down.
It took about four seconds for the looks to start.
A woman near the schedule display glanced over, did a visible double-take, then quickly looked away. Two others sitting on the opposite bench had been in quiet conversation, and the talking slowed as they noticed him.
They both studied him with open curiosity. But after 10 seconds only one was still looking at him, while the other looked away with a tight expression, the kind that said she’d noticed a male sitting alone on a public platform and wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
Further down the platform, a tall woman in a fitted civilian jacket saw him and her face went through something complicated. Interest, then irritation at herself for being interested in a filthy male, then a deliberate decision to look somewhere else entirely.
Zaeryn was used to it. A male out in public alone, without a female escort, was already unusual enough to draw attention.
Plus a male who looked like Zaeryn, with that physique drew significantly more than that, and not all of it was friendly. He knew he was handsome. He’d figured that out pretty early, and the women of sector 7 had been confirming it on a near-daily basis ever since, some with appreciation and some with visible resentment that they’d noticed a male at all.
The cruiser arrived with a low hum, its hull catching the platform lights as it settled into the docking lane. The doors slid open, and the handful of waiting passengers filed in. Zaeryn stood, adjusted his jacket, and stepped aboard.
The interior was about half full. Rows of molded seats lined both sides of the cabin, and a handful of standing passengers held the overhead rails near the doors. The lighting was a soft neutral white, and there was that faint smell of recycled air and cleaning solution that every public cruiser in the Queendom seemed to share.
Zaeryn found a seat near the middle of the cabin and dropped into it.
The reaction was almost immediate, and it was the usual spread.
A group of three women standing near the door had been laughing about something before he boarded. Two of them noticed him and went quiet, their eyes doing that quick up-and-down assessment that women in this world didn’t bother hiding.
One of them had a mischievous look and said something under her breath that made her friend’s eyebrows shoot up. "Marea, must have spent her sweet time on that one."
The other friend, a girl with short cropped hair, let out a soft breath. "Oh? wow!!"
A third woman in their group leaned in, squinting at him like he was a math problem she couldn’t solve. "Are you sure that’s not a female pretending to be male?"
The short-haired friend shook her head. Her gaze dropped to his chest before flicking back up. "No. That’s a male physique. Plus I don’t see any boobs.... But goddess he looks like a straight up fantasy," she finished, practically drooling.
Zaeryn let out a quiet sigh, leaning his head back against the molded seat and staring up at the ceiling panel. He heard every word. Of course he did. Subtlety was not exactly a strong suit for the women in Sector 7 when it came to spotting a rare, unaccompanied male.
Honestly, you would think they had never seen a guy before. Then again, considering the state of the male population in this world, maybe they hadn’t seen one who didn’t look like he was one bad day away from catching the Fade.
He crossed his arms and closed his eyes to feign sleep. If he engaged with them, it would just turn into a whole ordeal. He just wanted to get to his destination, keep his head down, and maybe figure out a way to magically generate some credits before the new RPG dropped next month.
But the whispering didn’t stop. It actually got louder.
A woman across the aisle glanced over, saw what they were looking at, and let out a soft scoff before turning back to the window. Whatever she thought of a male riding public transit, she wasn’t impressed.
Near the door, a woman in what looked like a medical uniform looked up from her comm, saw him, and her expression shifted into something cold and dismissive before she went back to her screen. She didn’t look again.
Further down the cabin, a woman with the bearing of someone who’d spent a career in uniform was watching him with narrowed eyes. Not hostile exactly, but assessing, the way a Warlady might evaluate an unfamiliar variable in a controlled space. She didn’t look away when Zaeryn caught her staring. She just held his gaze for a second, decided whatever she’d been calculating, and returned to the data-slate in her lap.
And then there were two women sitting together a few seats ahead of him. One of them, a girl with fiery red hair and a restless energy about her, had noticed him the moment he boarded.
She kept looking over towards him every once in a while. Not in the obvious, whispering way the group by the door had been doing, but in the quieter way of someone genuinely trying to figure out what they were seeing.
Her eyes kept drifting back to him every few seconds, studying him the way you’d study something that didn’t fit into any category you knew.
It wasn’t just that he was a male on a public cruiser. It was how he carried himself.
He wasn’t hunched or nervous or trying to disappear into his seat the way most males did in public spaces. He sat like he owned the chair, arms crossed, head tilted back, completely unbothered by the small hurricane of attention swirling around him.
She’d seen males before, obviously. Frail looking ones with bad posture and dull eyes that looked like they already faded, who moved through the world like they were apologizing for taking up space. This one looked like he could walk into a room full of Warladies and not flinch.
Her companion, sitting beside the window, hadn’t noticed any of this. She had purple hair cut at a sharp angle that framed her face in a way that looked effortless but was probably anything but, and a collection of tattoos running down her left arm in clean, precise linework that spoke to someone who understood art as a discipline, not a hobby.
Her jacket was cropped, dark, and fitted in a way that made it look expensive even though it probably wasn’t, and a small silver stud sat on the curve of her nostril, subtle enough to look elegant.
She had the kind of style that made other people feel like they’d gotten dressed wrong that morning.
The redhead finally tore her gaze away from Zaeryn and leaned slightly toward her friend. "There’s no way that’s a real person," she said, keeping her voice low enough that it wouldn’t carry. "Look."
The other girl didn’t look up from her device. "What."
"That guy. Over there. He has to be a humanoid or something."
Her friend glanced up just long enough to look in Zaeryn’s direction. Amber eyes found him, moved over him once with the speed of someone cataloging something they’d already decided wasn’t interesting, and returned to her screen.
"It’s a guy on a cruiser. Nothing impressive."
"Yeah, but look at him. Since when do males look like that?"
She scrolled to the next thing on her device. "I don’t know. Since whenever. I’m not his biographer."
The redhead looked back at Zaeryn one more time. He had his eyes closed now, head resting against the seat, completely at ease despite the fact that half the cabin was either staring at him or pretending not to. Something about that bothered her in a way she couldn’t pin down. Males didn’t do that. They didn’t sit in public spaces and close their eyes like they felt safe. They didn’t take up space like it belonged to them.
"I’m serious, Cel. Look at his build. Look at how he’s sitting. That’s not how males sit."
"Maybe they finally allowed humanoids then, and he’s one of them."
"You’re not even looking."
"Because I don’t care." She locked her device and dropped it into her jacket pocket. She stretched her legs out in front of her and leaned back in her seat.
Zaeryn opened his eyes and checked the route display. His stop was next. He reached over and pressed the request button on the panel beside his seat, and the display blinked in confirmation.
The cruiser slowed and settled into the next docking lane with a soft hydraulic hiss. The doors slid open.
Zaeryn stood up and walked toward the exit. He didn’t rush, didn’t hurry, just moved at his own pace the way he always did. Eyes followed him the entire way, some of them the same ones that had been tracking him since he boarded, others that only now seemed to notice he was leaving.
Near the window, the girl with the purple hair glanced up from her device as he passed. She watched him step off the cruiser with an expression that held no particular interest.
"A thousand credits he’s a humanoid," the redhead said.
Her friend didn’t respond. The doors closed, and the cruiser pulled away.