Free Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) by Lydia Chelsea Page B

him, stepping onto slide ten, the closest to his keeping, “but it’s a little too much right now.”
    He’s quiet until we’ve changed slides three times and are on the first street that doesn’t look like every other street we’ve walked along.
    “This looks like Bricktown,” I tell him as we reach a store and the meld automatically opens.  “It’s a shopping district in Oklahoma City.”
    “That’s a neat coincidence,” he replies in a hushed voice.  Too late, I remember that I’m not supposed to do anything that will make it obvious I’m not from around here.
    “It’s not, actually,” a woman with deep burgundy spikes calls out from behind a display table.  With hoops in her ears and studs in her nose and below her lip, she looks like she could be one of the Goths from Touchstone.  She finishes folding a blouse and drops it on the display, looking me up and down with storm cloud grey eyes.
    Ritter’s face colors as he looks away. It dawns on me then why he doesn’t want me advertising that I’m an outsider.  People might correctly guess that he’s violated the standard.  The thing I don’t understand, though, is why he assumes people would jump to that conclusion.  I could just as easily be a tourist from any open world, couldn’t I?
    At any rate, the clerk doesn’t notice his discomfort.  She finishes looking me up and down and her blackish-red lips curve upward. “So…size eight, are you?”
    I nod.  Without asking if I need help, she moves quickly through the store, plucking this or that off a shelf or rack, zig-zagging through the place until she  reaches a bank of dressing rooms and begins stocking one with the armfuls of clothing she’s collected.
    Finished hanging the clothing, she beckons at me to come inside.  She slips easily around me, hesitating in the doorway. Meldway.
    “Attero?” she asks, seeing my empty wrist as I reach up for the first shirt.
    Now my face goes red, too. I pull the sleeve down over my bare wrist.  She steps quickly back inside and closes the door.
    “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you or your friend.”  She lifts her arm, gesturing at the familiar silvery mirror tattoo, and her face brightens.  “I got my Idix last week. I forget that not everyone from Attero sees this rite of passage as a good thing.”
    I look up at her, at her heavily lined eyes and her dark lipstick and the hardware twinkling from various parts of her face, and I want to cry.  It would be so much easier if the thought of living here forever made me as obviously thrilled as it makes her.
    “What happened?” I ask.  “I mean, why are you here?”
    “A happy accident,” she says, pulling a logger out of her pocket, which is the actual name for the handheld device Ritter had been using earlier.  He showed his to me on the slide. It’s like a cell phone on steroids, capable of keeping in touch with friends and family who move to other open worlds.  The touchscreen is similar to the one on my now abandoned iPhone.  She swipes through some screens before turning it toward me.
    “My fiancé,” she says, and I glance down at the smiling face of a guy dressed in what I’ve learned is the guardian uniform.  Concordia does not differentiate between its police and its military, so he could be either.
    I frown. “But isn’t he in trouble for breaking the Agreement?”
    Her head shakes. “I met him in a bar.  He got drunk, started talking all kinds of crazy about how he wished he’d met me on Concordia, and the next thing you know he’s looking all sorts of horrified.  Way, way too much to drink.” She winks and nudges me with her elbow. “He went a little overboard, you know, being set free from the constraints of breath chemistry for a few days. I didn’t know what the cuckoo monster was going on about, but I was worried he’d try to drive, so I followed him outside. He went for something in his pocket, and I thought it was