Inyanga's Star and Other Constellations

IV. Cielo's Star Finale

While Cielo and Samura toured the dream apartment, Jayanti talked a mile a minute, describing everything they could plainly see.

She walked the price back twice, at one point saying, "Did I say 37,000 before? Oops, it was supposed to be 37,500 a month. I misspoke, but I will honor what I said before."

And she kept hitting on the same point: "Better if I don't have to come back and show it to someone else." Better if the first prospective tenants to see it snatched it up. It would save her time.

Then she offered them an extra move-in week before the first of the month, rent-free. "If you want to take it, we'll send you the lease to sign, and you'll make a 5,000 solidae deposit. Once we get the deposit, we don't show it to anyone else, and we run background checks. If you're approved, it's yours!"

The couple left with nervous butterflies in their bellies. If they didn't jump on this place, someone else might take it. Two more housing appointments that day underwhelmed. Samura hadn't even wanted to go to them. "We have to make the deposit. We'll get it back if we don't get approved. We need to pay the deposit and lock this place down. I've never wanted anything so much in my life." Then she laughed at her own drama, but there was a tension on her face, like she was only partly joking now.

Like she had never wanted anything so much in her life.

#

It would be foolish not to think it over. Returning to the Shade, Cielo and Samura stopped for a meal, hungry for something that wasn't food. Both wanted that place, bad. It made them nervous not to make the down payment immediately, but they had to think it over. It was the mature thing to do. The smart thing.

Amazingly they got a patio seat at Las Arepas de Luz, out on the sidewalk where the panhandlers would come by every three minutes to ask for spare solidae. No sooner had they sat down quietly, out of things to say out loud, thinking the same thing we need to pay the deposit, we need to lock that place down, we want that place, than another couple sat behind them at the next table with plenty to say, plenty for Cielo and aer esposa to overhear.

"It's shitty here," said a voice whose face neither could see, because the speaker had her back to them. "Straight up, I can't take the shit smell in the street and the cold weather every day anymore. If we lived in Breeze Edge we could link to Ely's. But who am I kidding, the rent's too high here, and it's higher everywhere else. It drives me crazy being here, the city doesn't do anything about the panhandlers, and the homeless problem, and it's like all the poor people in Soliara live in this one neighborhood, and we're here with them for some reason. Do you think they bus all the homeless people back here every time they try to move somewhere else? Is that the city's solution to poverty? I just can't."

Eating in silence, Cielo and Samura listened to the tirade that was all anyone ever talked about in the Shade anymore. The drugs, Story getting rampant, the dirt, the grime, the cold. On and on. Eating slowly, listening, they waited until the pair, in a hurry like every other Shadeslicker these days, had finished and left before speaking.

Samura said, "You can't stop change from happening, but I don't want to be here while it happens. Maybe we'll be back one day, once it's over."

She took Cielo's hand. Cielo said, "Don't worry. We don't have to make a decision right this second. It sounded like Jayanti doesn't want to bother going back today to show the place to anyone else. It's unlisted. No one else has seen it. We can take our time. We'll sleep on it."

Samura's eyes looked worried.

Going home to sleep on it, the worry was tainted with an enthusiasm, the couple feeling ecstatic about what the future would hold if they got this place. Over a simple magic cast speghetti dinner in Cielo's microstudio in the Shade, Samura said, "Come on, let's do it! We have to give them the deposit. We can't let anyone else snap that place up!"