The waiter at The Tombola seated them on a pair of tough rectangular benches and a matching table. By the window, as requested. It was a rather robust place on the whole, putting Sao in mind of an olden-style tavern. It even had a stone fireplace (though dusty with disuse). A cozy joint, but most definitely not a soft one. The single public room accommodated both dining and a very long bar, lit by windows covered in diamond lattice in the daytime, and honey-colored sconces in the present night.

Rai was astonished that they weren’t the only ones there. “It was hell to drive and park. How did all these people get here?”

As if in response, a gathering of after-hours businessmen at the far end of the bar roared over some sort of board game. The bar offered cards, games and other novelties.

“I like it when this place looks alive.” Sao slid Rai a menu. “It’s a little intimidating when you aren’t with someone.”

“Is that why you invited me?”

“Maybe. Due to recent developments I was reminded of its existence. I found management is rather active on Neocam…”

While Rai analyzed the menu, Sao looked out the window. Beyond the cloudy glass he saw the small dock and channel just a few meters away from the edge of the restaurant’s patio. A smattering of houseboats floated on the water. On the other side of the channel, glittering with neon lights and blinking signage, were the towers at the edge of Mainline’s financial district, the South Bank. Where the biggest, best and strangest thrived.

He wondered if the place he was looking for was even still there. Central’s nightlife bored easily; businesses opened and shuttered like clockwork and were just as quickly replaced, as if they’d never been there at all. But he didn’t wonder for long - there was that emblem, lit bright red, large as the moon, plastered to the side of a building facing the waterfront.

Even when he turned his head, he felt its crimson glare prickling against his back.

Rai gasped. “Snow frog? That’s why you wanted to come here?”

Sao smiled. “It’s why I thought you might be interested, yes.” Rai’s apocryphal favorite dish, snow frog (which were allegedly, actually, a sort of rare mushroom), had become something of a joke among them due to its elusiveness. Sao had never seen the stuff in person.

“It’s not even the right season.”

They waved down a waiter. Coffee and soda water, fries and two snow frog cutlets. The waiter was very apologetic. Their pantry was out of snow frog.

The two ended up settling for a fish burger and a steak.

“I didn’t know you liked steak rare,” Rai commented limply.

“I suppose I’m craving blood at the moment.” Sao sighed. “Sorry. I can’t believe they advertised it when it wasn’t available. I’ve had enough of Neocam. It’s all falsehoods, when it’s not pain and tragedy.”

“I’m not sure if you’re kidding, but people hurting themselves on camera has always been more popular than it should be. It’s pretty bad among kids. Peer pressure, trying to shock the parents, trying to stand out. But they want to be around to see the views roll in; the pranks aren’t actively suicidal. For being literally stressed to death, exam season’s a driving factor.”

Sao tapped at his phone.

“I thought you had enough of Neocam,” Rai said. The waiter came with their fries and Rai began collecting his share with his fork, keeping his gloves on.

“Yes. But I’ve always lacked willpower. Talk of exams reminded me of Sapphire. And Jasmine. School was a major stressor in their lives.” Sao looked up. Rai was drowning his fries in vinegar and offered to do the same for Sao. “No thanks. I’ll help myself later.”

“Sapphire’s exams would have been almost ten years ago.”

“Her sister taking on the magic exams and passing, and having Sapphire pay her way in, whether it was voluntary or not, was a trigger.”

Rai sat back, chewing fries. “I needed to cool my head after that talk. I didn’t think of why Sapphire might choose to give money to her family on her own.”

“Kindness, I suppose,” Sao said, readily accepting a retort.

“It’s all about the facade. All these girls were really adept at building an image. That was their job.” Rai pondered the window, but he wasn’t inspecting the waterfront. He seemed to be frowning at his own reflection. “Convincing the family’s as important as convincing the followers. Once they all believe you’re good and calm and free of spite, then you’re as good as cured. That’s what recovery from a bad place is, isn’t it? Building the right image.”

“Surely what’s internal matters. We’re talking about mental conditions after all.”

“I always thought that was overstating it. Outside forces will grind you down again unless you fix up an outer wall first.”

Sao grazed him with a look and didn’t respond.

“Sapphire’s posts before the last one; the suicide message; were all very positive. Too positive. Like all her problems were solved. It wasn’t about herself getting better anymore, she was lecturing her watchers, as if she were an expert.” Rai was rambling at his reflection now. “The inevitable relapse hit and it would have been embarrassing as hell. Nothing gets cured that fast, if at all. Grandstanding as if you’re the special exception means more people around to watch you fail…”

“Hm.”

“The ones like Hazel and Orchid are a little more respectable, ironically. Being miserable or apathetic is a reliable schtick, at least. Looks humble. Keeps expectations low. Well, maybe Hazel acting like she wasn’t afraid of death wasn’t that humble.”

Sao willed the kitchen and waiters to make haste.

“Although, even when it’s a sad face, it’s still just a fake face. I wonder if Sapphire influenced Hazel enough to....”

Their food arrived, tearing Rai away from his monologue. “Where’s the coffee?”

The waiter assured him it would come in a minute.

Sao cut into his steak. He felt like a jeweler, splitting open a geode to behold the gem within. The piece was faintly charred, a warm dark layer wrapped around gleaming reddish pink. Absolutely worthy of a Neocam posting. He became a bit more sympathetic toward the snow frog situation - the recipe have been very good to have sold out. “I shouldn’t have brought her up. We came here to leave behind that miserable Neocam business for a while.”

“Forget it then. I’m starving.”

They ate. Without speaking, but without acrimony, either. Listening to the huddle in the corner brag and berate each other over their board game, Sao appreciated that he and Rai were able to sit in companionable silence. He’d always been terrible at board games himself.

When the coffee came, Rai brightened considerably, though it perplexed Sao how he’d worked himself into such a state to begin with. While it was not exactly something to be proud of, he and Rai had both witnessed several deaths, including suicides and attempted suicides, on and outside the job. Rai typically managed to be the more objective of the two in those situations, sometimes bordering on uncaring while Sao waxed poetic. Had something happened to Rai when he wasn’t looking? Or worse, had something happened while he was looking, but been too ignorant to notice? Once again, Sao's mind flooded with questions and condolences.

“I could use another coffee,” Rai said. He began pawing at his phone.

Sao called the waiter, asking for another coffee, and a tea for himself.

“With their final broadcasts deleted by the admins, all of them were really able to maintain their image,” Rai said. “A hell of a marketing trick, though they wouldn’t be around to see it… I wonder if I should look into how the families might be profiting.”

“Sapphire’s text announcement.” Sao sipped his soda water. “Honestly, I think that was the dignified way to go. Orchid broadcasting the goodbye, as well as the act itself… I don’t know. It’s like an indignity.”

“Dignity is if you want to blend in. Nothing wrong with that. But if you're trying to draw eyes... it's all about standing out. A shocking stunt is gonna have more traction. Jasmine had something like 30 thousand viewers on her last stream. Orchid pulled more than that, and over a million eyes in the following days on the recording.”

“Even so, it makes little sense. They were about to leave their channels forever - why try to amass an audience they'd never get to appreciate?”

“I was thinking they wanted to give back to their followers. I don’t know. Out of kindness.” Rai put in the last suggestion without much commitment.

“Or punishing them with a traumatic display.”

“I don’t doubt their audiences stressed them out all the time. Could be a final cathartic release, just a wild lashing out, sticking it to as many people as possible when you know you won’t be around to see the fallout.”

“I suppose there was no way of knowing, but the fallout didn’t seem to hit their followers. It was mostly the family, the friends, those who knew them offline who suffered. Perhaps a final rallying of followers was to punish those close to them instead.” Sao began preparing his tea. All the fixings, as he liked it. It was the process of adding the sugars and cream that relaxed him more than the taste. It cleared his mind. “Wait a moment - there is one of the suicides who gets to see the aftermath. Orchid. She didn’t die.”

“And we’re back to the zombie issue. I’ve heard of faking death for drama or sympathy, but there’s no way she literally lopped her own head off expecting to live.” Rai downed his coffee. “I keep telling myself, we gotta stay focused. We can’t do anything for the ones already dead, but Orchid - we need to find out what’s going on there.”

Sao looked out the window, again.

After a stint of vigorous scrolling on his phone, Rai slapped it down. “The places they visited. Do you think something’s weird about them?”

Sao glanced down at the screen, the photos of the girls in the room with the checkerboard table, the neon palm tree. “How so?”

“This looks like a diner. On the same day - here they are in some kind of arcade. A day later, it looks like grass here but it’s an indoor facility…”

“Quite the spread.”

“But look at the ceiling. It’s all this… concovered sprinklers, industrial pipe. I think all these pictures were taken in the same building. A meeting spot. Maybe someone there knows something.”

“Yes. I see what you mean.”

“Damn.” The next thing to hit the table was a plastic bag containing the napkin and pill wrapping from Hazel’s room.

“You brought that here?”

“I moved everything from my pockets into this jacket.” Rai gave his little oddities a hard examination. A knot in Sao’s stomach tightened. Perhaps he wouldn’t have to say anything, Rai was so close, there’s no way he wouldn’t deduce…

“I gotta call Cad about getting someone to look at this.”

The knot went slack. “I don’t — now?”

“It’s more or less the only lead we have.” Rai picked up his phone and dialed. “Cad. It’s me.”

Sao watched the lightshow beckoning them on the other side of the canal while Rai hit Cadmus with some banter, before turning simpering in his request for an expert to inspect a suspicious drug they’d found. He became serious again when Cadmus launched into some long explanation on the other end of the phone. The creased brow remained after he hung up.

“No trouble, I hope?”

“No. But he said he might remember something about a black physical enhancement-kinda pill from the past. A scandal, and a court case. Juicy stuff - okay, those are my words, not his. He’ll ask Lem if it rings any bells - she’s got a foot in all the activist groups in Central, she’s been on the scene since the 70s. Oh, right – Lem is Cad’s wife.”

Sao smiled at that. “Grandma, then?”

“I guess. She looks the part more than he does.” Rai double-checked his coffee, and didn’t seem too frustrated to find it empty. “Cole questioned Orchid about the other girls. She said she knew them, but not closely. The deaths were upsetting for her, she said, but not the final straw. Her mom’s death was more at the forefront. Huh, and Cole couldn’t find the picture of Sapphire at the weird restaurant. He had to use Sapphire’s shiny profile pictures instead. Orchid wasn’t sure if she recognized her.”

“Pictures of Sapphire were buried rather deep on Hazel’s profile, if I recall. I can dig up and send him the pictures if it helps.”

“Go ahead. I might try to see her myself when I drop off this later tonight.” Rai dangled the plastic bag and stuck it back into his pocket. “Should we get the bill? It’s on me.”

“No, I’ll pay. We can split afterward.” Sao waved his onyx-colored Chimera privilege card, one his landlord had assigned to him. The discounts he received with it were so heroic that it easily blew back Rai’s attempt at courtesy.

As they made for the car, sweating from the darkened but ever loathsome heat, Sao scrolled through Hazel’s posts for the image of Sapphire he’d been showing around. A dull ache began in the back of his head when he saw Hazel’s bloodied wrists, and he went to Jasmine’s profile instead. “A moment, Rai…”

He looked across the water, at his phone, then at Rai, who’d stopped to wait for him. Rai was staring back at him with unusual attentiveness. Half swallowed by the dark there was an echo of the vulnerability he’d been showing all day, which had put him in a rut until just minutes ago. If only Rai had directed that receptive energy out the Tombola’s windows, at some point during the meal.

And on the heels of that observation was the inexplicable sorrow Sao felt seeing him in that state.

The questions began churning again, frothing, thickening. Sao closed his eyes. No, there might still be a different path to take. He needed to clear his head, and that was impossible in the suffocating heat, and with Rai’s interminable staring. “I haven’t given up. I’ll keep an eye out for any other places serving snow frog.”

—

In the cool and lonely confines of his apartment, surrounded by mirror-white tiles and the snowdrift of linen and pillow, Sao tried to imagine he were on the moon. Maybe somewhere further, even less known. Far away from the scorched and savage earth and all its tragedies. His borrowed apartment was so spacious, yet so insulated it wasn’t hard to believe he really had succeeded in drifting off to some distant plane.

At the same time, he knew if he pulled back his curtains and looked out, in that million dollar view (that being Rai’s valuation) he could probably see the south side of the estate where they’d visited Sapphire’s family. At least it wasn’t the place where she’d jumped.

He halted that train of thought. Why should he be allowed to forget? Besides, it was unfair to think any place was immune to sadness.

He took out his phone. He’d only been home an hour.

The apartment air conditioning, a unit so sleek and flat it looked appropriated from a fantasy spacecraft, graced him with its chilly waves. The thing was sublimely quiet, even more than Rai’s. It was a little sinister when he thought about it. He somewhat preferred the slight hum of the setup in the office. Of course, he slept like a baby either way.

Rai. He felt some lingering aggravation - there really was no other word for it - at his supervisor’s lack of perception. All throughout dinner that familiar symbol had been beaming at them from across the slow-moving waterway.

But then, Rai’s mind had been elsewhere for much of the meal. Something about these girls, these deaths and the one non-death had touched him. It wasn’t just some fascination with zombification. He knew Rai loved his horror thrillers, but the case of Orchid and her friends were pecking at a different nerve. In reflection, Sao realized really didn’t know that much about Rai at all.

This must have been how Rai felt all those times he’d come close to nosing into Sao’s business and had to wrestle his curiosity back. Rai framed this as hedging his bets against Sao reporting him to HQ, at least in the beginning. It was courtesy, at this point.

Outstanding courtesy, considering the things Sao had actively opted to hide from him.

Sao sat up in bed and pulled his phone from the pearl-top bedside table, opened it, opened the Neocam profiles he’d been searching.

He wasn’t quite up for the mire of darkness and self-loathing that was Hazel’s feed, so he wound up scrolling through Jasmine’s page for a photo of Sapphire, to send to Cole. Perhaps he should wait until morning. The comments below the photo were making his heart heavy, and he didn’t want Cole to be distracted at work - it was far more important work than Sao would ever be doing. He hit the heart icon to log it to his profile’s favorites.

Said profile was still a blank slate, though the placeholder graphic, a smiling gray facsimile of a person, represented him pretty well, he thought. He had three followers who all appeared to be advertisers, and only followed one person, Rai.

Give the word and I’ll stop following, Sao had said. And Rai told him it didn’t work like that.

What did a person owe their followers? Furthermore, what did one call the person being followed?

And why share the last moments of your life with people you didn’t even know personally? Why involve them at all? They weren’t owed a goodbye, surely. He and Rai both proposed the same answer, as a joke.

Kindness.

Sao went back to the post, to Jasmine’s profile, panned through it. Past the soothing walls of floral studies and still lifes. Soft focus photos of cakes and trees and the skies in better days, and quickly past the pictures she’d taken of herself alone. Smiling. Dresses, shoes, plush toys. Ushered up, above the fold.

He only slowed when he hit the set of photos showing the girls’ favored meeting spot. Checkerboard table. Neon palm tree. Arcade closet. Fake turf. A logo made of red dots.

The Rock Pool. He couldn’t stall it out any longer, hoping they’d stumble there by accident. He’d have to tell Rai. His supervisor’s focus was scattered; he would never work it out on his own. It should be fine - as long as Sao gave the place prior warning. Management wasn’t stupid. But that was another reason to be apprehensive.

A wave of lethargy washed over him. Sao was a follower. And what obligation did followers have to their leaders besides open eyes, ears, and the willingness to trundle behind? Sao supposed he was looking out for himself. He couldn’t knowingly follow a leader down a dead end…

In truth, Rai didn’t feel very much like a leader to him.

All of a sudden, his aggravation returned. Not at Rai, this time. He opened up a message box - not on the photo itself, not on Jasmine’s public profile, but in a direct message, that could only be seen by her. And thus would not be seen at all.

I know where you are.

Then he set his phone down and mashed his head into his pillow. He was asleep within minutes.