The following day Anita and Cleo went shopping. Quite a successful shopping trip by Anita’s standards. As Cleo had been in charge, they’d gone to Temple Mews, the most expensive area in Empire, obviously. Temple Mews was a beautiful cobbled street, lined with shops selling the kind of things that made you feel you were living in a surrealist painting. There were florists with displays that took you to a secret garden, tea rooms selling cakes so tall that they seemed to defy gravity and so light and fluffy that you felt like you were eating a cloud. The perfumers’ shops smelt like heaven with scents of bay, lavender, rose, rosemary and grapefruit wafting from their doors. The coffee and chocolate shops evoked daydreams of sailing off into the Wild Lands to explore, and the outfitters had displays that made you wonder if you had accidently walked into the land of the Gods, the beautiful swathes of silk hanging in ways that could only have been designed for a Goddess.
Anita and Cleo found what they were looking for in the third outfitter they entered. Cleo had already bought her dress, so the trip had been entirely for Anita. It was the seventh dress she’d tried on and it was perfect, even Anita had to admit. It was a rich blood red silk, cut straight across the front with a deep, seductive v that showed off her perfectly toned back. It had a band around the front that fitted Anita’s athletic waist as though it had been made especially for her and dropped straight to the floor, kicking out at the bottom so it swished beautifully as she walked. They had both stood and stared for what must have been a full minute before either of them said anything.
‘Well I think this is the one,’ Cleo eventually piped up, in a mock business like declaration. ‘Seductive yet sophisticated. Exceptionally elegant, and it will match lover boy’s cloak like a charm.’
‘Shut up,’ Anita hissed, ‘someone will hear. And he is not my lover boy,’ she rushed the words as though they were painful. Anita bought the dress along with some gorgeous, sky high, black stiletto sandals with silk satin tie straps, and then dragged Cleo out of the shop and back to her grandmother’s before she was responsible for any more damage to Anita’s bank vault. Thank the Gods her mother had left her some money when she’d died, as shopping in Temple Mews would not have been possible on her salary from the Observatory alone.