Page 56 of Blightfall

The woman laughed. “No, definitely not. I think Ephraim’s last name is Amos. They take stage names because it gets the crowd riled up.” She looked at me quizzically. “Where are you from?”

I was asked that a lot, which probably meant I was not doing the best job at being inconspicuous.

“Rice farms,” Nedd said over my shoulder.

“Ah,” the woman said, though she still eyed us strangely before she turned her attention back to the gladiators. The crowd was getting thicker, everyone clamoring to buy them a drink. I didn’t love the idea of trying to elbow my way through, and it didn’t sound like anyone was getting into a very personal or deep conversation with either of them over the hubbub.

We needed answers, but these circumstances were not ideal. I wondered if the crowd would thin out when it got late, and if the gladiators would stay long enough for that to happen.

When the bartender came our direction, I flagged him down.

“How long before you close?” I asked.

“Close?” the bartender asked. “What do you mean?”

“For the night,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were wrong. The bartender clearly had no idea what I meant.

“Do you mean how long before the shift ends?” he asked. “A couple hours.”

“I meant how long can we stay?” I tried again.

“Long as you keep buying drinks,” the bartender said.

The woman who’d talked to us earlier looked over her shoulder at me. “They don’t close,” she said. “Always open. All the restaurants are. Do you not work in shifts on the farms? I thought the harvest ran constantly.”

Oh. Apparently here, not having night meant they…didn’t have night. They ran Epiphany around the clock, with everyone sleeping and working on different shifts.

That made sense. There would be plenty of people to keep the city running with a population this size, and there was no darkness and therefore no reason for the city to stop. Just because we simulated nighttime in the Detritus caverns didn’t mean that was the only way to run things. Even we had a night shift, since algae grew all the time.

“We do!” I said. “I didn’t know it was the same here, thanks.”

The woman turned away again. Hopefully she didn’t notice my cheeks burning, but I was pretty sure Nedd did.

“I’m bad at this,” I said quietly to him.

“No way!” Nedd whispered back. “You got us information. Now we know they run their society at all hours.”

It wasn’t the biggest discovery we’d made today. “We do,” I said, “but that lady thinks I’m a weirdo.”

“You are a weirdo,” Nedd said. “What’s wrong with that?”

Okay, that did make me feel a little better. There wasn’t anything wrong with being weird, as long as no one decided to arrest or attack me. People looked at me strangely on Detritus sometimes too.

Oh stars. Had Arturo picked me for this job because I was awkward in every situation?

I took another gulp of my drink, trying to console myself with deliciousness.

“If this place is open all the time and there is no night in the city,” I whispered, “then the crowds may never die down. It’ll also make Arturo and Alanik’s infiltration more difficult.”

Nedd took a drag of his drink. “Yeah, but they’ll figure it out.”

He sounded confident. Then again, he also said I wasn’t messing up my job, so I wasn’t sure Nedd’s opinion could be trusted.

Seventeen

Arturo

“These people never seem to sleep,” I said.