The gunnery range was loud enough that the attendant handed them both ear protection before saying anything else. Finn took two pairs, passed one to Ciri, and led her to a free lane at the far end.
Ciri turned the ear protection over in her hands. "Is this necessary?"
"Unless you want to go deaf," Finn said, and she put it on without further comment.
He walked her through the basics: feet apart, one forward, body angled to the target. She fell into something close to a combat stance before he'd finished explaining, the years of Witcher training taking over, and he told her it was good and moved on to the grip. Both thumbs forward, dominant hand high on the handle, support hand wrapped around the outside. She got most of it but her support thumb was sitting wrong and he reached over and moved it into place with two fingers, adjusting slowly to make sure she felt the correct position.
She didn't pull away from it. He didn't move his hand immediately either. Then he stepped back.
"Arms out but don't lock the elbows," he said. "You want them to absorb the recoil."
She adjusted. He came in again to correct the left elbow, setting the angle with one hand on her arm, and she turned her head to ask him something and found him much closer than she'd registered. Close enough that she could see the faint mechanical ring in his eyes from the implants. She held what she was going to say for a moment, and her cheek went a shade warmer, before asking what she wanted to ask.
"L-like this?"
"Almost." He shifted her elbow a fraction more, his hand still on her arm. Then he stepped back. "Now: when you aim, you have a front sight and a rear sight on the barrel. You want both of them lined up with the target at the same time. Your eye can only focus sharply on one thing at a time and it wants to focus on the target. You have to make it focus on the front sight instead, let the target go slightly soft."
"So I am aiming without fully seeing what I aim at," Ciri said. Her voice had come out a little quieter than she intended.
"Your body knows where the target is. Trust the sight."
She turned to face downrange. Her breathing settled on its own. Finn moved in behind her left shoulder, close enough that she was aware of him being there even without turning her head.
"Safety off," he said. "Trigger pull is lighter than you expect. Press it back slowly."
She clicked the safety. Inhaled. Pressed. The shot cracked out and the paper jumped, two inches left of center.
"You flinched," Finn said, close to her ear to carry over the noise.
She didn't answer him. She fired again. Closer to the target now. He said nothing, stayed where he was, and she worked through the magazine round by round, adjusting each time, until they were landing where she wanted them. When it emptied she set the gun on the shelf and pushed the ear protection up.
"Less recoil than I expected," she said.
"It's still a .45. You adapted fast."
"I have been hitting the pendulum ever since I was a child," Ciri said. "A stationary paper target is not a great challenge."
"Fair," Finn said. She turned to hand the gun back and he reached for it and their fingers met on the grip and stayed there a beat longer than the handoff required. Ciri pulled her hand back first. She turned to face the lane again.
"The rifle," she said. "Show me."
The Ajax needed more explaining. He walked her through the stock against the shoulder, cheek down on it, how the muzzle wanted to climb in automatic fire and how to use body weight rather than arms to chase it down. He fixed her grip once, moved her left elbow twice. At one point he crouched beside her to get his eye level with hers and show her what the lined-up sight should look like from her position. She had to shift her weight to keep it and her hand came down on his shoulder to steady herself, and she left it there while he talked her through it, and when he finished neither of them moved for a moment.
He stood back up.
She brought the rifle up without looking at him. He stepped in behind her left shoulder again, the same position as before, and she was very aware of exactly how close it was. She fired a burst, chased the muzzle down, connected all the way up the paper. She fired again tighter. When she finally lowered the rifle she kept it at her side and didn't turn around straight away.
"I liked it," Ciri said. "Though I still prefer the finesse of swords."
"Most people who are good with swords say that."
"Most people who are good with swords are correct." She set the rifle on the shelf. When she turned to him she didn't quite meet his eyes, her cheeks a bit pink. "What now?"
Finn picked up the guns. "Now we get out of the city for a while."
—
They grabbed a cab, and that cab dropped them where the road ended and the desert started. Finn had the two chairs and the folding umbrella under one arm and the grocery bag in the other hand, and he got everything set up while Ciri released Kelpie and Chip from their balls.
Kelpie was already twenty meters out before Finn had the umbrella open, running hard across the sand, mane out behind her. Chip pressed both palms to the ground, felt the heat coming up through it, and settled himself into the sand with his eyes closed. The sun was doing something to him that looked close to contentment.
Ciri dropped into her chair and reached for the grocery bag. Finn had gone through the store on the ground floor of the megabuilding that morning with steadily lowering expectations, and the bag reflected that. She pulled out one of the containers, turned it over, opened it, and pushed two fingers into the contents.
"What in the hells is this?" she said.
"Synth-protein meal pack. Standard grocery option here apparently."
She brought it to her nose. "It smells like nothing."
"It doesn't, but it does have a taste. Synthetic flavoring apparently. Nutritionally though it is supposed to have everything you need."
Ciri took a small bite, chewed, and set the container on her armrest with the deliberate care of someone putting something dangerous down. "This is what they eat here? In a city that large?"
"Most of them."
"It is horrible." She moved it further away from herself. "How do they live like this?"
"Poorly," Finn said, and kept eating his without much enthusiasm.
Kelpie came back in a wide arc and went out again, too much energy and too much space to burn it in. Chip hadn't moved. The heat pressed down on the umbrella and came back up off the sand and the city sat on the horizon behind them, towers hazy, noise of it almost gone entirely from out here.
Ciri leaned back and left the food where it was. She looked at Finn's face for a while as she thought about the shooting session from before.
"...Your eyes do that thing," she said, after a while. "The zoom. I can tell when you are doing it."
"Does it bother you?"
"Hm." She was quiet for a moment. "It is strange."
Finn set his container down beside the chair. "Better or worse?"
Ciri didn't answer that directly. "I said what I said about it yesterday."
"You said it 'detracts' from something and then stopped."
"I know what I said," Ciri said. "And I know I stopped."
Finn left it there. Kelpie slowed somewhere off to their left, moving at a trot now, the first run out of her. Chip made a low sound and pressed himself flatter into the sand.
"I do not dislike it," Ciri said, quieter. "I want to be clear about that. It is just going to take some getting used to."
Ciri reached over and picked the food container back up, took another bite, and her expression said it hadn't improved. She put it back down.
"This is genuinely terrible," she said.
"Let's find something better for dinner."
"Please." She pushed the container off the armrest entirely. "I would eat Kelpie's feed before I finish this."
Kelpie, hearing her name, changed direction and came back toward them at a full run across the sand, and Ciri's mouth turned to a smile.
—
The sun was mostly gone by the time the cab dropped them back near the megabuilding, and Japantown looked different at night. The neon lit up the surroundings, and the street had filled up with people who hadn't been there in the afternoon.
Joytoys lined the block in both directions, calling out to anyone passing within earshot, and the way some of them dressed left nothing to work out. A woman in nothing above the waist leaned against the wall to their right. Across the street another had her skirt hiked up for a potential client's inspection. Ciri registered all of it before she could decide not to and pulled her attention away.
Then she saw the woman at the corner, the erection straining visibly under her underwear, standing there as if it were nothing at all.
Ciri said nothing for two full steps. Then: "They are just…" She started again. "In the street. All of it. Out in the open. And how can she have a penis?!"
"Yeah… like I said, medical science is advanced in this world…" Finn said.
"I have seen brothels. I know what they are." She stepped around a joytoy who directed something at Finn as they passed. "But this world is so… debauched. They simply put it all on the street like a market stall."
"Sex sells," Finn said. "Whichever world you're in."
Ciri kept her attention forward for the next stretch and didn't comment further.
Finding food took longer than either of them had patience for. Two vendors selling packaged things got ruled out by Ciri immediately. A place that smelled promising turned out not to be on closer inspection and Finn steered them past it. Eventually they found a Chinese stall tucked between two larger storefronts, actual pots on actual heat behind the counter, a short queue of locals in front of it that suggested it was worth waiting through.
They ate standing at a narrow shelf along the wall outside, and Ciri worked through the first few bites with caution after being taught how to use a chopstick. She braced for another disappointment. The caution quickly faded though and she kept going as she tasted it.
"It tastes a little bit weird," she said. "But the experience is miles better than whatever that kibble was."
"Most of what's in it is probably synthetic," Finn said.
Her chopsticks paused. "You keep saying that word. Synthetic. What does it mean, exactly? In this context?"
"Made in a lab. The flavor, the texture… manufactured to imitate the real thing rather than grown or raised."
Ciri turned this over for a moment, her chopsticks still. "They make food in a laboratory and eat it?"
"Most of the population here doesn't have access to much else."
She cast her eyes over the queue of locals getting their dinners, ordinary people after ordinary days, then picked up her chopsticks and kept eating.
"Well," she said. "There is not much else on offer."
"That's usually how it goes," Finn said.
She finished the bowl without complaining further, though she ate the last few bites with quiet resignation.