Milo felt and looked better than he had in some time.
The Zeus' skipper didn't hold with booze on board, and Higgs had ridden him hard for the entire five-week voyage. He swabbed the rusty deck and painted flaking handrails futilely and endlessly with red oxide primer when the tramp was underway, and hefted nets of crates in and out of the hold in each port. That left a little time to eat plain food and work on his suntan, not much else.
Mercifully, Callie and Furlonger stayed in absentia the whole trip It gave him time to think.
What he thought was that his now-unaccustomed sobriety felt too real. The rest of his life had turned decidedly unreal. So he decided he really needed to stay wasted, to deal with what he had decided to call, in capital letters, the Famous Fractal Fusion Fuckup. It made twisted sense.
But as Milo rolled down the splintering gangplank into a warm San Francisco night, clutching a miserly-but-adequate paycheck intent on repickling a maximum of brain cells in a minimum of time, a splenetic, smoking motor scooter pulled up. A dark face look up at him and grinned wide.
Milo looked back up. Bosun Higgs stood at the top of the plank, arms crossed and hard-eyed. Milo felt his own eyes start to roll white in panic. He had nowhere to go but down, down.
Down to Molina.
If you're going to San Francisco...
