you,” Neela said, matching Persey’s smile with one of her own. It felt genuinely warm, and Persey fought against the (unfamiliar) sensation of friendliness bubbling up from within. Maybe in another time, at another place, she and Neela could have been friends?
But not here.
“THIS WAY.”
Lime-colored Greg turned abruptly and strode toward the exit, exhibiting all the joy of a prison guard escorting the new inmates to their cells. Not that Persey could blame him for his lack of enthusiasm. She’d be sullen, too, if her job were to pick people up from the airport looking like the Grinch who stole Christmas.
She followed him in silence, Neela falling into step beside her, not-so-silently.
“So where did you fly in from?” Neela began, though she didn’t actually wait for an answer. “I was on flight four-twenty-two from Nashville, which was supposed to be three hours and thirty minutes of flight time, but ended up at three hours and forty-seven minutes due to a heavy headwind. Not that I’m one of those people who obsessively check to see how long their flight is but I am interested in the effects of weather on aircraft, so I was doing some calculations in my head based on that flight info they show you on the screen at your seat to see if I could pinpoint our exact time of arrival. I’m kind of a math person and I always love a good ‘one train leaves the station at four o’clock traveling at fifty miles per hour with a steady acceleration of one mile per hour per minute and another train leaves a station thirty-five miles away traveling half that speed with twice the acceleration, et cetera, et cetera’ kind of equation.” She paused for a quick breath. “I was three minutes off.”
“Wow.” Persey wasn’t sure if she was more impressed (terrified) by Neela’s math skills—those narrative problems always left Persey’s head spinning, her brain paralyzed—or if she was more awed by the fact that Neela got all those words out in one single exhalation.
“I know,” Neela said with a sad shake of her head. “I can’t believe I fudged it up that badly.”
If Neela had been a different sort of person, that comment would have rubbed Persey the wrong way: false modesty was one of her major pet peeves. But in casting a quick glance at her travel companion, she realized that Neela was being 100 percent genuine. Which Persey appreciated.
Neela had just opened her mouth to start another monologue when the words converted into a gasp. A monstrous lime-green Hummer was parked on the ground floor of the lot, straddling two spots, as fugly as it was unfunctional. Despite its size, the sport utility vehicle had almost no trunk space for their bags, and it was so high off the ground that Persey had to step up on a platform, balancing herself on Greg’s outstretched arm, in order to climb into the back seat behind Neela, doing so with about as much grace as a sumo wrestler trying out ballet.
“Interesting,” Neela said, latching the safety harness over her lap. The interior was decked out in soft black leather, muted by tinted windows, and though it wasn’t a limousine, the driver and passenger areas were separated by a glass panel for total privacy. “I didn’t realize Hummers came in this color. Was this customized in-house? Or was it a special order? Or is it—”
“No,” Greg said sullenly as he slid into the driver’s seat. It seemed his response was meant not so much to answer any specific one of Neela’s rapid-fire questions, but to end the conversation, as he punctuated it by yanking the privacy window closed.
Sorry, Neela mouthed, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling.
Traffic was slow going as they edged out of the airport and onto the I-15, the massive hulks of Vegas’s casinos flanking both sides of the freeway, each sporting their own thematic ambiance from the Old West to the Far East and everything in between. The older, less ritzy offerings stood more sparsely on the west side of the interstate while the gleaming gold-and-jewel-toned behemoths of “new” Vegas hugged the east side, packed in so densely it was sometimes impossible to tell where one casino ended and the next began.
Neela had pulled out her phone, which should have been a welcome sight to Persey, who wanted to avoid conversation in the world’s most awkward ride share, but something about Neela’s stream-of-consciousness style was oddly soothing, and as they crawled down the