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Confirmed!”
    She looked into the shelter. “Empty shelter!”
    I did the same. “Empty shelter! Confirmed!”
    We followed the coughing, choking workers down the tunnel to safety.
    “Good work,” said Bob. Other volunteers were already fitting oxygen masks on the singed employees. “Jazz, we have three moderately wounded—second-degree burns. Give them a ride to Doc Roussel. The rest of you, shove that tent and tunnel into the room and reseal the fire door.”
    For the second time that day, Trigger and I served as an ambulance.
    In the end, the oxygen tanks didn’t blow up. Still, Queensland Glass was destroyed. A shame—they’d always been solid on fire safety. Never even had a single infraction. Bad luck, I guess. Now they’d have to rebuild from scratch.
    Still, their well-maintained air shelter and regular fire drills had saved a lot of lives. Factories can be rebuilt. People can’t. It was a win.
    —
    That evening, I hit my favorite watering hole: Hartnell’s Pub.
    I sat in my usual seat—second from the end of the bar. The first seat used to be Dale’s, but those days were over.
    Hartnell’s was a hole in the wall. No music. No dance floor. Just a bar and a few uneven tables. The only concession to ambience was noise-absorption foam on the walls. Billy knew what his customers valued: alcohol and silence. The vibe was completely asexual. No one hit on people at Hartnell’s. If you were looking to score, you went to a nightclub in Aldrin. Hartnell’s was for drinking. And you could get any drink you wanted, as long as it was beer.
    I loved the place. Partially because Billy was a pleasant bartender, but mainly because it was the closest bar to my coffin.
    “Evenin’, luv,” said Billy. “Heard there was a fire today. Heard you went in.”
    “Queensland Glass,” I said. “I’m short so I got volunteered. The factory’s totaled but we got everyone out all right.”
    “Right, well the first one’s on me, then.” He poured a glass of my favorite reconstituted German beer. Tourists say it tastes like shit but it’s the only beer I’ve ever known and it works for me. Someday I’ll buy an intact German beer to see what I’m missing. He set it in front of me. “Thanks for your service, luv.”
    “Hey, I won’t say no.” I grabbed the free beer and took a swig. Nice and cold. “Thanks!”
    Billy nodded in acknowledgment and went to the other end of the bar to serve another customer.
    I brought up a web browser on my Gizmo and searched for “ZAFO.” It was a conjugation of the Spanish verb
zafar
, meaning “to release.” Somehow I doubted Mr. Jin from Hong Kong brought something with a Spanish name. Besides, “ZAFO” was in all-caps. Probably an acronym. But for what?
    Whatever it was, I couldn’t find any mention of it online. That meant it was a secret. Now I
really
wanted to know what it was. Turns out I’m a nosy little shit. But right at that moment, I didn’t have anything else to go on, so I mentally set it aside.
    I had this bad habit of checking my bank account every day, as if compulsively looking at it would make it grow. But the banking software wasn’t interested in my dreams. It gave me the dismal news:
ACCOUNT BALANCE: 11,916 ğ
    My entire net worth was about 2.5 percent of my goal of 416,922 slugs. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I
needed
. Nothing was more important.
    If I could just get into the damned EVA Guild, I’d pull down serious income from then on. Tours are big money. Eight customers per tour at 1,500 ğ each. That’s 12,000 ğ per tour. Well, 10,800 ğ after I pay the guild their 10 percent.
    I could only give two tours a week—a limitation enforced by the guild. They’re cautious about their members’ radiation exposure.
    I’d be making over 85,000 ğ a month. And that’s just from tours. I’d also try to get a job as a probe wrangler. They’re the EVA masters who bring the probes to the freight airlock and unload them. Then I’d have