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all the remaining payments on it by default.”
    His face was blank as a ship’s hull, reflecting her own anger right back at her, but giving away nothing of its own. He knew he could keep pushing her. He knew she would do almost anything before she had to break her sister’s heart and tell her what, exactly, Marcus Tully had turned into. That fact had nagged badly at Al Shei for years.
    “Tully,” she said softly. “You don’t get it. As long as you continue to play the lone rebel, the ship is mine, because you have already crossed the line. I can take it away any time I want. Your petty temper tantrums have already taken your freedom. I’m trying to give it back to you. Your freedom, and my sister’s.” She got up and walked away without looking back.
    Something hard collided with her back, sending her stumbling against an empty table. She caught herself with both hands, gasping at the sudden pain.
    “Oh, sorry,” said a man’s bland voice. “I didn’t see a person there. I thought it was just a pile of rags and shit.”
    Al Shei pulled herself upright and turned around slowly to face the chestnut-skinned, auburn-haired, totally unshaven, can-gerbil.
    She drew herself up to her full height. “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah.” Reciting the first pillar of Islam loudly was her standard tactic. Bigots seldom knew how to reply to a declaration of faith as a response to an insult. During the Slow Burn, when the fires were cooling and the survivors were starting their own wars, thousands of Muslims turned from their religion to save their lives. Al Shei’s family had remained unmoved. Drawing on those generations of pride gave her the strength she needed to stand up to the bigotry that still dogged Islam.
    The gerbil sneered, and for a minute she thought he was going to spit, but he just turned and shouldered his way out through the crowd.
    Burn-brain , thought Al Shei after him. Some people had never let up. A Muslim named Faraq Hakiem started the Fast Burn. Never mind that he was Khurdish and she was an Arab from Dubai and that three hundred years had passed since the last ashes had cooled; she wore the veil, and that was enough for those who thought there was still something to be settled. Al Shei suddenly felt very much in need of a shower.
    A flash of pink drifted past the corner of her eye and Al Shei looked involuntarily towards it. A blob of yellow floated down and was nabbed out of the air by a quick brown hand and replaced with a scrap of emerald green. The green was nabbed and replaced by the pink. The scene cleared up and Al Shei realized she was looking at Dobbs juggling silky scarves; snatching them out of the air as they fell and replacing them into the cascade so they could fall again. The Fool had a ridiculously intense expression on her face; grab, drop, drop, grab. She saw Al Shei staring and blushed a deep umber.
    “Sorry, Boss,” she said with a twisted grin. “Dropped my napkin, and I can’t… ” drop, grab, drop. “ps. Darn it… ”
    Al Shei felt a chuckle well up out of her throat and she let it go. Dobbs grinned back, snatched all her scarves out of the air and gave her little flourishing bow from her seat.
    “Your contract says you don’t come on duty until tomorrow.” Al Shei watched, bemused, as Dobbs stuffed the colored scarves into her fist.
    “At times discretion should be thrown aside and with the foolish, we should play fools.” Dobbs opened her fist, and, as Al Shei expected, the scarves were completely gone.
    It was ridiculous and showy and simplistic, but Al Shei found herself smiling anyway. The filthy feeling lifted itself off her skin.
    “See you tomorrow, Boss.” Dobbs looked down at her meal total printed out on the table top. Her eyes bulged in their sockets. She let her head fall back until she was staring at the ceiling, opened her mouth and broke into song. “Let’s vary piracy…   with a little burglary!”
    Al Shei