Chapter 1. Fun and games in a transit mall

Shadith, Shadow to her friends, ignored a determined holoa singing its jingee in her ear, flashing its busy images in her face, and glanced at the stretch of plate glass that fronted the shop the loa was trying to entice her into. He's still there.

The canted glass reflected the heavy dark figure of the Transit Guard leaning on a fauxstone wall, half hidden by the leaves of the young willow growing from the squat ceramic tub beside him, flickering in and out of the electric blues, acid greens, and hot pinks of the wandering holoas that drifted like feathers along the walkways and fell in slow spirals down the vast cavern of the atrium, their pitches silent, confined to color, glyph and image until proximity to a warm body triggered their tunes and jingees and whispered enticements. In and out, bare and veiled, the guard was there, always there. Every time he looks at me, his eyes leave prints like dirty hands. Inchling! Stinkard! If I smashed you, slug, the air would turn so foul we'd all die of it. Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.

Angry and upset, she eeled through a pack of big-eyed Froskans playing etherial patti-cake with a loa singing the praises of a sensaroo for nocturnals, ducked under the lower elbows of a pair of three-meter Bawangs stilling along ignoring with angular dignity noise and color, adhesive loas and intrusive shoppers, picked her way through a family swarm of arachnoid Menaviddans dressed mainly in stiff black hair 'and multiple loops of the shimmering translucent monofilament they were famous for, edged by a Clove' Matriarch with her gaggle of sycophantic attendants and stopped in the middle of a crowd of Nayids, Kakerans and assorted though less spectacular bipeds belonging to the Cousin Races gathered about a troupe of Xhenagoa acrobats moving to the beat of tenor drums and flutes and the pulsing color flows of a szimszim mixmaster, wheeling about and about slowly shifting jugglers contorting their bodies through impossible curves to pass from hand to foot to hand to head in all possible combinations small glass bowls filled with water and bright-colored fish.