Nina had made what she could from what they had.
That was the truth of it, and Mara June Hollow was choosing to receive it as a miracle.
The dress had started as three things: a length of deadstock silk recovered from the back of a fabric cooperative on East Cesar Chavez, a structural underlining Nina had deconstructed from one of Rook's old tactical vests, and approximately nine hours of work that Mom had not been permitted to watch. Nina didn't like an audience when she was constructing. She said it changed the decisions. Mom had sat on the other side of the curtain and listened to the sound of scissors and the low noise Nina made when something was going exactly right, and was occasionally subjected to a bit of measuring.
The result was midnight blue, fitted through the torso with a structured shoulder that didn't need a boning insert because Nina had engineered the seam tension to do the work instead. The hem fell perfectly. The back sat beautifully. It looked expensive to anyone who didn't know fabric.
Mom stood in the alley behind the Mothership and touched the hem and thought: "I look like a person who has somewhere to be." She thought it twice, because it had been a long time since that was true, and the second time felt better than the first.
Nina's own jacket was different work. It was sharper, and constructed from a men's wool blazer she'd taken apart at the seams and rebuilt, the lapels narrowed to a knife edge, the sleeves shortened and re-cuffed with a strip of something that caught the light. She'd sourced optical dampeners for both of them, styled as reading glasses and tinted enough to frustrate most iris-scan arrays. Mom's pair sat slightly crooked on her face. She didn't care.
"Stop touching the hem," Nina said.
"I'm appreciating it."
"You've appreciated it six times since we left."
"It deserves seven times." Mom looked down at herself again. "You made this from nothing, Nina." Mom straightened the glasses. "When's the last time you made something just because it was beautiful?"
Nina considered this. "I'm not sure, truthfully." She blushed a bit. "We need to look like we belong. It's technically functional."
"This is functional and beautiful." Mom smiled. She let herself have the smile fully, which was something she didn't always do.
"It's been a while," she said, not to Nina specifically. "Since I had occasion to dress like a person rather than a problem to be solved."
Nina smiled wide, her thermochromic crystal fang caps flashing a deep violet. "You look gorgeous."
The alley opened up to the Mothership's front entrance and it was at capacity. Three security officers funneled guests single-file, each one pulsing amber before clearing to green. The robot dogs sat at the base of the steps where they had been all week, heads rotating and logging. Two surveillance drones held altitude above the marquee, also logging. Rangers flanked the door in five pairs. Their giant star badges caught the sun and sent a blinding ray into the crowd at different times.
What the door was not doing was admitting the approximately one-hundred people currently arranged in a loose, agitated cluster on the sidewalk behind a corded barrier line, all of them pointing cameras at the entrance.
"Independent media has a right to document public cultural events," a man in a homemade press vest was explaining to a Ranger who clearly never asked. He had three personal drones running three different camera angles to his live stream. "This is suppression of journalistic—"
"The event is on private property," said the Ranger nearest to him, not looking up.
"The street is not."
"Correct."
"So my drone coverage of the exterior—"
"Is fully permitted on the exterior."
"But the interior ban—"
"Applies to the interior."
The man opened his mouth, reconsidered, and opened it again. "I have two hundred thousand subscribers who deserve access to—"
"We have a designated observer zone set up on the east corner," the Ranger said. "You're welcome to it."
Nina leaned in. "He thinks he's press."
Mom watched this from thirty feet away, leaning against the wall camouflaged like she was waiting for someone. "He is. Just not the kind with access. NLT claimed the room. What he actually wants is to compete with their feed. He's not defending speech. He's defending market share."
The man in the press vest had been redirected to the observer zone and was now loudly informing the other observer zone occupants that this was exactly what the consolidation of media had looked like in 2060s and they should all be very concerned, which they were, primarily about their engagement metrics.
Mom had spent enough years reading rooms to understand that the people outside a velvet rope were never just one thing, and this crowd was several things badly disguised as one.
There were the influencer's, of course. They ran active feeds from one or more drones that captured as many angles as they could afford. Their bodies were optimized for the camera. One woman near the entrance had skin displays running brand marks in a slow pulse up her forearms, each sponsor logo rotating on a five-second loop. She kept checking her wrist. A counter implant was tracking her engagement.
Another man sat very still, his ocular implants pushing content into his vision that he couldn't pause. Advertisements, probably. Low-tier implants came with non-optional ad tiers baked into the service agreement. His eyes tracked something two feet in front of his face while his body stood here in the present. He looked like he was watching a film only he could see, and from the tension in his jaw, it was not going well.
A group of three near the barrier were dressed better. They held physical invitations in protective sleeves, embossed with a golden font that shone brightly through the crowd. A class signal so subtle most of the people hadn't registered it, but Mom knew gold when she saw it. These were made with the real thing.
"Those three are real guests," she whispered to Nina. "They really went all out."
"Do you think anyone needs a +2?" Nina added. They couldn't help but crack up laughing at the idea.
The dogs immediately looked in their direction. An NLT guest-relations employee materialized from the front entrance without appearing to have used the doors at all.
Mom nudged Nina. "Did you see that?"
The woman was dressed in lace that was luminous and high-collared, a structured garment that moved as if it had been poured rather than sewn. The lace itself was semi-architectural, a skeletal overlay that shimmered faintly when she moved, each thread catching and releasing light in sequence, the frame of something biological rendered in something that was not. The collar was the strangest part: it hovered at her throat without touching it, suspended like a ring around a finger that hadn't been inserted yet, held in place by some magnetic logic Mom had never seen before.
The woman moved in their direction.
The New Life employee's expression didn't change when she approached, as if the two of them didn't register as human. The employee arrived already having decided what they were. Everyone in the crowd was something before they ever got to defend themselves.
But with Mom and Nina, she arrived asking.
"Good evening, ladies." Her eyes moved between them, faster than human. "Are you on the guest list for this evening, or are you interested in exterior viewing?"
"We're waiting for someone," Nina said.
"Of course. Is your party inside, or are they expected to arrive?"
"Expected." "Expected." They both answered at once.
"Wonderful. If you'd like, I can check whether they've arrived already. Could I get a name?"
"We'll wait," Mom said. "Thank you."
The employee nodded, but didn't move.
That was the second thing Mom noticed. She had completed the interaction by any conversational logic and she hadn't moved. She was processing something, or waiting for something, or both.
"It's a lovely evening for the event," she said. Which meant nothing. Which meant she wasn't leaving.
Mom put one hand lightly on Nina's arm. Nina felt it and understood. Someone told this woman to ID them.
"We're fine," Mom said. "Really."
"Wonderful." She repeated. "Wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful wonder—" The employee lifted her tablet.
Then two Rangers appeared from either side.