Peppermint

Interlude 1 - Don't Mistake Coincidence For Fate

To make it look like they weren't at Joey's strictly to keep an eye on Alex Snow and his friends, Ahmad and Firdaus stayed in their seats for a good long while after he and the curly-haired boy (Luca, Ahmad thought his name was...unless Luca was the transgender boy and Gideon was the curly-haired one? He'd have to check again with Josh at some point) had left the place.

Eventually, they took off themselves, blending in with the onslaught of customers coming through the door despite going against the current, as it were. Normally, they left one after the other, because even in this place that called itself "Heaven," there persisted the stereotype that Middle Eastern women weren't allowed to travel without a man as her chaperone. (Incidentally, Ahmad also felt ticked off every time some stranger, like the innocently insensitive concierge he'd met yesterday, insisted incorrectly that Pakistanis were Middle Easterners too.) At least once, they'd walked together and been asked by some passerby how long they'd been married, which would never stop being incredibly awkward. But seeing that night was falling, safety in numbers was paramount, and in the event that anyone asked (not that they would, but still), they would say they were brother and sister.

The whole walk back to the hotel room up the street, Ahmad wondered, as he often did, why Josh needed him and Firdaus to keep an eye on that one Snow twin. He knew there were two, though the whereabouts of the second, he didn't know them. When asked, Josh merely said he had another couple of trusted friends keeping watch over the other twin.

As for why Josh himself couldn't do the watching...well, Josh never liked to talk about his own life. But Ahmad long suspected that there were things Josh was hiding. Reasons why he almost never appeared to him and Firdaus in person.

Those reasons, Ahmad was unsure he wanted to find out, though if he were right about them, he wanted to help purge Josh of those reasons.

When they reached the hotel, they parted ways so as to make it appear they were returning separately - and it helped that they had separate rooms, which they'd acquired about fifteen minutes apart the day before. Upon reaching his own room, he checked his phone to see if Josh had sent any message. Nothing. A quick text to Firdaus confirmed that she hadn't received anything either.

Still worried, Ahmad tried to distract himself by turning on the TV. The very first thing he tuned to was yet another Walking Dead marathon - didn't that show ever get shot in the head in any dimension? Change the channel - an old episode of The Magicians where everyone was singing an inane Taylor Swift song for no reason. Change again - Dark Angel. Huh - they actually remembered Dark Angel. Who knew? Maybe "Heaven" wasn't so bad after all.

But then he found the channel he really needed to watch - CNN, where Anderson Cooper was interviewing Kristoff Scoville about his company's experimental driverless trucks. An experiment they were going to conduct on Bay Area roads that very night, and Scoville was poised on a stage overlooking Highway 101 down in San Jose.

The man actually had the money to build a temporary stage over the starting line of his invention's delivery route? Obscene. Recent events on Earth, especially, had instilled a mistrust of the 1% in Ahmad, and that included Scoville.

Ahmad's phone buzzed again. He finally had word from Josh. "Kristoff Scoville's gonna have a livestream on his company's website. Watch it for me."

He was about to navigate there on his laptop, but first, he sent Josh a question. "Anything I should be looking for?"

"Not unless I can keep the demo safe. But...my father's got other plans."

Ahmad swallowed, unsure he wanted to know what those "other plans" were. But again, he was savvy enough to have his own ideas.

But at the same time, he had more questions in his mind.

Most importantly, who was the real enemy here?

Kristoff Scoville?

Or Mr. Graziadei?