“Are you coming, Aqua, or do you expect me to walk inside geek hell by myself?”

I had stopped walking with Bobby because something caught my eye down on the first floor. Bobby joined me at the edge of the balcony and immediately caught on to what I was staring at.

“Whoa. I know they had this blocked off, but has that tent always been there?”

I shook my head.

We were looking down at the spot where the mall customer had died from his heart attack. For some reason, there was a massive dark purple tent covering the investigation site. What was stranger, I didn’t see anyone around who looked like cops or even normal detectives. There were a lot of people though. Workers dressed in strange waxy black uniforms and tinted goggles.

“Are these people from the future or something?”

I rolled my eyes. “Bobby, stop joking around. It’s probably just a sanitation thing.”

“Aqua, just look! There’s smoke coming out from under the tent. What the hell kind of an organization–”

One of the workers looked directly up at us.

I clasped a hand over Bobby’s mouth and yanked him back from the railing.

“I don’t think we were supposed to see that,” I whispered into his ear as I walked us both backwards into the Final Dungeon. 

Once we were protected by the darkness of the arcade, I let go of Bobby and apologized for startling him.

He mumbled something back, cleared his throat and gingerly touched the spot on his mouth where my hand had been.

“You all right?” I asked, hoping he wouldn’t ditch me after we’ve come this far.

Bobby nodded and averted his eyes. “Let’s go find someone who works here.”

I agreed, wanting nothing more than to run back to Elliot’s shop where I felt safe and comfortable. Even though this was just an arcade, I couldn’t help feeling like I was intruding on someone else’s territory.

Bobby and I walked, silently appreciating this retro gamer’s paradise. It was also a claustrophobia-inducing icebox. As Bobby and I traversed deeper into the dark, wall-to-wall carpeted space, I wondered how in the heck they fit so many arcade machines in there.

Finally we reached a spot in the room where the ceiling rose a bit higher and the arcade machines thinned out in order to make room for a sea of magazine racks.

“Can I help you?” a youngish worker with dark hair crowding his eyes called from the extra tall register. Someone else was hanging out at the counter too. A regular if I had to guess by the way he had pulled up a barstool and was shuffling a deck of Monster Go cards. 

“Oh snap!” Bobby waved happily. “Is that Monster Go? I used to whoop my cousins in that all the time when we were little.”

The card-shuffler perked up a little and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Meta game’s evolved a bunch since then. Probably not the same game you remember.”

“You got a minute to show me?” Bobby prompted. “Kinda want to see if I can catch up.”

“Sure thing. Pull up another chair. I have an extra deck you can borrow.” 

That’s when Bobby basically left me to fend for myself under the spotlight of cheap fluorescent lights amidst swiveling wire cages of old and new comic series.

The cashier guy hadn’t forgotten about me. Once again, he asked if I needed help with anything. From the corner of my eye, I spotted Bobby encouraging me with his expressive eyebrows.

“Um… yeah, actually.”

I approached the counter and said, “Do you know if or when Sean Mori is coming back?”

Both the guys at the counter kind of froze and swapped glances before looking back at me strangely.

“He does work here, right?” I said, fighting the urge to fiddle with the ends of my hair or outright shiver in this freezing den of games.

“Yeahhhh. He does…” the cashier guy said real slow, looking everywhere but me.

I didn’t know what to say to that. Why were these two making things so damn awkward?

Then to make things worse, the cashier asked, “Sorry, but who are you?”

Oh boy. How was I going to explain this? Sean and I weren’t technically dating, but we had kissed. Not that I wanted them to know that. I could just say that we were friends, but how would Sean’s real friends take that since they hadn’t even heard of me?

“Oh!” The guy with the glasses piped up. “Are you that girl who’s going to be in this?”

He pointed to a bright, waxy flyer on the wall. I felt like I could suddenly breathe. That was the one of the edited runway show flyers that Bobby and I worked our butts off to post all over the mall.

The cashier turned his head and pushed some of his hair back so he could read the flyer.

“Oh yeah. Sean did mention talking to a model with blue hair the other day. That’s you?”

I nodded. “That’s me. Aqua.”

The guy with the glasses said, “Aqua, that’s right. I remember him saying you had a cool name. Sorry if I was staring too hard at you earlier. I was trying to put those pieces together.”

I told him it was okay and felt the tension drip a little from the muscles in my back.

The guy with the glasses introduced himself and his friend. “I’m Anthony and this is Rex.”