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You could, of course, get to Oldpeka by way of the sewers - but that way was dark and smelly and had a tendency to ruin whatever shoes you happened to be wearing. Sally was not in the mood for this - instead, she was making the extended trek across the fields, weaving her way around soccer matches and baseball diamonds, lingering in the occasional shade of a grove of oak trees.

The July heat was oppressive and dry in Central, and Sally was sweating in her drooping knee socks. You had to suffer for fashion, and even if her zettai ryouiki had gone from Grade B to Grade D over the course of the afternoon. She was headed for the gap in the wall, pausing at the outcroppings of comfort stations to make use of the water fountains and wax poetic about desert oases.

It was at one of these that, while waiting for use of the faucet, she found herself behind an Indian girl with four arms.

"Oh, oh!" exclaimed Sally, eyes wide as she tapped the younger girl on the shoulder. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to intrude, but I saw you with my friend Ashlyn the other day in Oldpeka - you're with the circus, aren't you?"

She jumped, which made Sally jump. "Oh," she exclaimed, "Oh, my god, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you-" And she was such a young thing, too! Maybe her whole family was in the circus, or was she an orphan? Maybe she'd been sold, but then that was the conspiracy theorist getting the better of her.

She stuck out her hand for the girl to shake, and wondered momentarily which hand she would use to reciprocate the gesture. "I'm Sally Linkletter," she introduced herself, though how someone as obviously oriental as she had wound up a Linkletter was left up to the imagination. It was a professional name, one she used for the paper.

Introductions completed, Sally leaned over and drank from the water fountain before stepping away. "So you're from Vegas?" she asked the girl. "What's it like there, I've never been?"

She dug around in her shoulderbag and produced a notebook. She pulled a pen from her ponytail elastic. "Do you mind if I take notes? I write for the Central Inquirer. It's an independent paper, strictly underground, only the coolest people read it."

She pursed her lips and concluded, "Very, y'know, hush-hush."

"Vegas? Just liked any other city?" scoffed Sally. She was being very loud, and would continue to do so. "But I've heard so many things about it!" Most of it about the place being all sorts of crazy, liberal-loosy goosy, freaks in the streets, but that didn't matter - the only thing it came down to was the place sounding nothing like Central.

"How are you finding Central?" she asked, pen poised above a blank page in her notebook. "Is it a lot different than you're used to?"

They walked and talked, striding across the rolling hills of this part of the Fields. It was a golf course, technically, but no one ever used it for that and mostly people just wandered around it. "What do you do in the circus?" she asked, tapping the end of the pen on her lips. She bet the girl was an ace juggler, with all those arms, but maybe there were surprises to be had. All in all, it was very intriguing.

"Your gene mod must've been done when you were really young, or was it pre-natal?" she asked curiously. "'Cause that's illegal here in Central, but is it allowed in Vegas?"

Well, not strictly illegal - you could mod out cystic fibrosis or sickle cell or whatever if you had the cash, but sticking an extra set of arms on your baby was unheard of. Sally leaned in and gave Padma's arm a tentative poke.

"Yup," she nodded. "They're real."

Sally nodded. "I bet they were," she agreed. She didn't know much about gene modding, but she knew it was risky business. The mod could have not taken, and one so fancy, too! They must have been glad it worked and their daughter wasn't born with some kind of horrible deformity.

She scribbled something down in her notebook in neat, narrow writing. "So it was intentional of them, yeah?" she asked. It was pretty clear - your parents kind of had to elect to do a pre-natal mod. It wasn't like doctors went around knocking out pregnant women and messing with their fetuses genetic codes.

"Are your parents in the circus, too, then, Padma?" she asked. "How old are you?"

"Oh," nodded Sally, and longed to ask the girl how and when her parents had died, but clearly it was still a sore subject. Hinduism was a religion, she knew, but religion was almost unheard of in Central. Some people still clung to their old gods, old cultures, old beliefs, but cautious agnosticism was the tone of the day. Other cities, she'd heard, though, were more diverse. She scribbled something down.

"Ask me questions?" she asked, taken aback. Usually she was the interviewer, and only the interviewer. But the girl had been cooperative and Sally had nothing else to offer in return.

She chewed her lips for a moment, and then replied, "Sure. Ask away. It's the least I can do."

Sally had sort of shrugged the whole 'my parents purposely had a four-armed baby' as a bit of Vegas weirdness, religious fervor and all that. She'd ask more about it later. But now it was time to answer questions about herself! Sally hmmmed for a bit before saying, "Well, I guess I always just like knowing what's going on," she laughed.

"I worked on the school newspaper in high school," she continued, "That's how I got in touch with the Inquirer, they contacted me, actually--

The less that was said about the Central Inquirer's reporting practices the better. "I write about anything interesting I see going on around here," she explained. "Sometime's my boss will give me an assignment, but lot's of times I decide what I want to write about and hope they run it."

That certainly explained it, she thought. Technically she hadn't given away too much about the paper's practices, which could get her in trouble. Not that they had much of a hierarchy, it was just a printing press in someone's basement in Oldpeka, but still...

"Oh, I've known Ash since... About a year now. We go to university together, live in the same building." She quirked her head at the girl. "Does that answer it?"

She looked momentarily quizzical and then asked, "How do you know her? What's she got to do with the circus?"

Sally quirked an eyebrow at the girl, confused over how she'd worded her last statement. Everything else held up well enough, plenty of people went to private school, and Ashlyn had said she was just showing them around, but... "When you're allowed out?" she asked.

She chewed the pen, deep in thought. "Who are you living with?" she asked. "The rest of the circus? Have you got a manager, or something?"

Who took care of you when you were a four-armed orphan in a traveling circus? Sally gave the girl a sidelong glance. "Hey, as long as it's not some child trafficking ring," she said with a shrug. "It's not, right?"

She scribbled down some more notes. This was going to be a good article. "Hey, if this gets published, Ash knows where to find you, right? So she could get you a copy?"

"Not so much," Sally shrugged. "Every few years they bust one up, but it's not... it's not a crime wave or anything." They were in public. You had to be happy to live in Central when you were in public, at least most of the time.

She scanned quickly over her notes and smiled. Looking up, she saw the exit to Oldpeka was only a little way's off. "I think this is enough," she assured the girl. "It'll be a great article - if it makes it into the paper I'll be sure to get you a copy."

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder to the wide expanse of the fields behind her. "You can find your way back okay? We kind of walked a long way."

Sally then gestured vaguely to the hedge ahead of them that lined the wall. "I've got places to go, or I'd stay and chat longer. It was good to meet you, Padma!"