Tasha felt a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“If you hurry and run the entire way, you can catch them in the act.  But you can’t waste a second.”

Holy shit.

“How do you…?”  Tasha asked, but the girl was already looking through jackets again, clearly not listening.  Tasha glanced at the door.

“Go!” the girl suddenly barked at her.  Startled, Tasha moved toward the door, and then she kept moving, running.

Hehe. I guess it’s hard to not take her on her word.

As the saleswoman left the store, the door banging closed behind her, Daniella stared first at the door her coworker had just escaped through, then at the ratty little girl. 

“What the actual fuck just happened?”

The girl turned her head, pretending to examine a jacket, so she could hide a vulpine smile that spread across her face.

■

Heh, and there’s the cue for anyone who didn’t pick up on it before now.

So! It seems we’re in for an Interlude focusing on Lisa, unless that changes on the other side of this separation square (which would be odd).

Hell yes.

“I really hate being called stupid,” the girl spoke, meeting Tasha’s eyes with a glare.

“You could try.”

“You must be new around here if you aren’t-“

“Shut the fuck up,” the girl interrupted her, with enough force and hostility that Tasha stopped mid-sentence.  “Breathe in my face again and I’m gonna gag.  Your breath smells like vomit and a halfhearted attempt at covering up the smell with candy.”

Damn, she’s got some mad burns.

Unconsciously, Tasha’s hand rose toward her mouth.  She stopped and folded her arms, as if to prevent her hand from straying again.  She tried to gather her composure, tell off the girl, but the girl was already speaking.

(There’s another girl we know who doesn’t like insults to her intelligence and has a way with words, but nothing else about the behavior here is fitting.)

“Your boyfriend is cheating on you, Tasha Fowler, sleeping with your best friend.

…never mind.

I guess Lisa was a bit more… brusque and blunt back then.

Pretty fucking ironic, given how unattractive your friend is, and your continued attempts to puke yourself thin and make yourself pretty for him.” 

Oof.

Tasha pursed her lips, glanced at the other customers in the store.  A pair of college-age girls, a woman and her boyfriend.  Nobody seemed to have heard the vulgarity, or the crass insult.

I guess this is at least half the reason Tasha and Daniella want Maybchel out – it just doesn’t look good for their store to have a scruffy kid like this in there.

Leaning close, Tasha hissed, “Do I need to call security, you little idiot?”

‘Security’ served as a euphemism for the enforcers on the Boardwalk, paid uniforms who patrolled the streets and the stores, keeping an eye out for the homeless, gang members and shoplifters.

Ah, right, I remember those. Not sure that really counts as a euphemism when that’s literally their function, but fair enough.

Their methods were as blunt as methods got.  Victims generally weren’t in a position to go to the cops and complain, or the police simply overlooked the enforcer’s activities.

Well.

Kinda their function.

“I think we’ve got a stray, Tasha.”

That’s a new name.

If they’re talking about a person, I’d venture to guess that Tasha and whoever is speaking aren’t the nicest of people.

Tasha frowned as she looked up from her cell phone, and looked to where Daniella, behind the register, was pointing.  Her lip curled in distaste.

Hm. A register implies this is a shop of some kind, I guess. Still not sure if they’re talking about a person or not, but it’s absolutely a possibility that they’re not, and an animal has just entered the shop.

It was a girl, fourteen or fifteen, with dirty blond hair – both in the sense of being greasy and in color – tipped with streaks of blue.

Nope. Person.

Dirty blond with streaks of blue? Interesting.

Her clothes looked like they had only barely made the cut for the goodwill bin, and had been worn for weeks or months since she’d gotten them.  The girl was pretending to look through a collection of jackets that were still left over from last spring.  People like that weren’t supposed to be able to walk around the Boardwalk and bother people. 

Hmm.

I briefly considered the idea of this being Rachel in the past, but that doesn’t seem too likely. The hair color is easily explained since this girl either dyes it or has had it changed by a power (much like Canary), but there’s also the issue of her age and the timeline.

Whoever this girl is, though, we’re definitely in the past, which means we’ll presumably be drawing out of a flashback later in the Interlude (because that’s how Wildbow tends to do this kind of thing – the non-flashback part of Interlude 7 is the most he’s gone back in time between chapters so far). And while the girl seems to be important, we’re seeing this through Tasha’s POV, so it’s probably her flashback… hm.