IN THE HEAT, FOREVER WAS A LOT SHORTER THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE.

Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped My Russian’s blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me, How many men have you killed, for yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didn’t know. I’d lost count. I was dead. I’d died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky, all of it in strange, muffled silence as my ears rang.

Well, shit, I thought, sitting up on my elbows. That’s fucking strange.

By JEFF SOMERS

The Electric Church

The Digital Plague

The Eternal Prison

Copyright

Copyright Š 2009 by Jeff Somers

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S.

Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Orbit

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First eBook Edition: August 2009

Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group.

The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-316-05292-4

Contents

COPYRIGHT

IN THE HEAT, FOREVER WAS A LOT SHORTER THAN YOU MIGHT IMAGINE.

BY JEFF SOMERS

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

I: AMERICAN MURDER

II: JUST STILL ALIVE

III: I WASN’T SURE I WANTED TO RESIST

IV: EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST CROWD

V: HARD PEOPLE DOING A HARD JOB

VI: A HEAVY BOLT OF FABRIC STRETCHED ALL AROUND US, SUFFOCATING

VII: YOUR ONLY CHANCE OF SURVIVING ME

VIII: THIS WAS ENTERTAINMENT

IX: IF YOU WANTED TO KILL ME… THERE ARE FASTER WAYS

X: THE LITTLE MAN AND HIS FREAKS

XI: IT’S ALL RIGHT. YOU DID LOOK KIND OF SAD ABOUT IT

XII: SOME MIRACLE OF SHITHEAD PHYSICS

XIII: A LITTLE GOD

XIV: ROLLING ALONG TO SOME INEVITABLE DISASTER

XV: A MARKO ORIGINAL

XVI: WONDER WHAT HE USES NEEDLES FOR

XVII: FLAMES WHERE THEIR EYES SHOULD HAVE BEEN

XVIII: I’D BEEN DIGESTED A LITTLE

XIX: I DON’T HAVE A SCREEN TO REPRESENT PAINFUL DEATH

PART TWO

XX: CRAZY WAS GOING TO HAVE TO WAIT

XXI: DESPERATE FOLKS, I FIGURED

XXII: EVEN THE HUMAN ONES

XXIII: YOU’RE GONNA NEED THE HAND

XXIV: FLOAT BACK TO SAFETY ON MY BLOATED, BUOYANT CORPSE

PART THREE

XXV: SURVIVES THROUGH MYSTERIOUS MEANS

XXVI: A FUCKING PERSON OF IMMENSE INTEREST

XXVII: STILL STANDING IN DEFIANCE OF THE KNOWN LAWS OF THE UNIVERSE

XXVIII: I THINK OF HIM AS LITTLE DICK

XXIX: AN ESTIMATED LIFE SPAN OF UNTIL THE UNIVERSE CONTRACTED INTO A HEAVY DOT

XXX: I WAS FOURTEEN AGAIN

XXXI: THEY ALWAYS CAME BACK

PART FOUR

XXXII: STARTING TO BLACKEN ON THE EDGES

XXXIII: AND YOU DIDN’T EVEN KNOW IT UNTIL A FEW MOMENTS AGO

XXXIV: THE BEST IDEA I’D HAD IN YEARS

XXXV: NONE OF THAT PRETENDER BULLSHIT

XXXVI: I WANT TO BE ERASED

XXXVII: AND THOSE WERE MY ADVANTAGES

XXXVIII: TWO, I’D BEEN FUCKING LUCKY

XXXIX: ALL ITS LIFE, ONLY WAITING FOR ME TO ARRIVE

XL: I’LL PROBABLY HAVE YOU CRUSHED INTO A CUBE AND CARRY YOU AROUND AS A SOUVENIR

XLI: REACTING TO THE POWERFUL RADIATION OF THEIR THOUGHTS

XLII: BECAUSE YOU’RE A MISERABLE BASTARD

XLIII: IMAGINING THAT I ALWAYS GOT TO DECIDE WHO I KILLED WAS JUST ARROGANCE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MEET THE AUTHOR

THE TERMINAL STATE

To my Danette, whose wrath I fear, whose support I require, and whose affection I treasure

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

SHORT WORK OF A FILTHY JOB

“Stay down,” the tall System Pig with the precise, fussy beard said in a reasonable tone of voice. Gentle pressure on my shoulders guided me to my knees, my wrists bound behind me. “Or I will cut a few tendons and hobble you, capisci?”

His partner was shorter and older, standing in front of us, cigarette dangling from his lower lip. His face was red and blistery, like he’d fallen asleep in an oven, and he hadn’t said a fucking word since I’d been dragged out here. After a moment he scanned us quickly, nodded once to himself, and stepped around to join his partner behind us.

I was soaked and shivering, the steady rain drumming down onto my shoulders and finding its secret ways inside. The street outside the remnants of Pickering’s bar was half-flooded, inches of water in spreading pools. I was one of four assholes kneeling in the damp; I wouldn’t have suspected four people remained anywhere below Twenty-third Street these days. Not alive, anyway.

The two System Pigs who’d scooped me up with their list of Very Important People had moved on down the block, taking their team of Stormers into a sagging old tenement. Every few minutes there was a gunshot or a shout, but otherwise it was peaceful, kneeling in the water, feeling the cold rain make its way down my back, my hands bound and no more decisions to be made. I’d been ready for my execution, but I was just as happy to kneel here and think about nothing.

I hadn’t been myself for a long time. The Plague had sucked everything out of me.

The guy next to me started murmuring something; it took me a moment to recognize it as praying, old ritual language. I remembered my mom praying when I’d been a kid, her singsong voice, her tightly shut eyes. I opened my eyes and looked at my fellow Very Important People: none of them looked so important to me. They were wet, thin, and all three sported the ugly scars on their necks left by the Plague; a few months before, they’d been coughing blood and croaking, inches from death. And I’d saved them. These three assholes. I’d scratched myself bloody crawling around the fucking world, and it was because of me they were still here, still breathing.

I looked around dreamily, this block I used to know so well. The System Security Force had already torn down half the buildings, flattening everything into rubble and then sending in Droids to crush everything into neat little cubes. I had no doubt more Droids would eventually roll in to collect the cubes, picking the whole place clean until you’d never guess that any of this, any of us, had ever been here.

The thought slipped off the shiny, smooth surface of my brain and disappeared.

A block or two over, a huge Vid screen glowed silently, bright and frantic, beaming the mime-news to everyone within a few hundred yards. The clips were short and edited to convey most of the message without audio. Most of the stories were upbeat testimonials to how the System was recovering from the Plague, but I’d been tuning into the underground Vid nets out of the Appalachians for the last few weeks, and I silently translated as the clips flashed by.

First, fifteen seconds on how casualty numbers from the disease were still going down as more and more surprisingly tough and scrappy citizens emerged from hiding places, shaken but alive. Translation: the entire East Coast of North America was a fucking graveyard, and places as distant as Brazil had seen upward of 10 percent of their population killed. Two more days and the whole fucking world would have been dead, jiving and singing, doing dance moves.

Then, a happy story about the citizens of the System of Federated Nations African Department discovering they had a food surplus and electing voluntarily to send huge shipments of organics and nutrition tabs to other areas of the System more affected by the Plague. This with lots of clips of smiling, celebrating people, people just fucking delighted to be living in the System. Translation: everyone, everywhere was starving before the fucking Plague, and the way things were going n-tabs were going to be the new goddamn currency any day now. And if you didn’t have any n-tabs, you could cut off a finger and pay—feed—someone with that, and we’d all be eating each other, over and over again, the System gnawing itself raw.

The rotten tenement down the street suddenly exploded, a plume of fire and masonry shooting out into the street below, the world shuddering and leaping. The skinny guy kneeling next to me cursed under his breath. I turned to watch the smoke and fluttering debris for a moment. It was beautiful.

“They’re okay, Silvie,” Fussy Beard behind me said, getting his report in his earbud. “The rats are holed up in a secret room, packed in like fucking roaches, and blew a charge when Solly came sniffing around, but they tripped it too soon and killed two of themselves, and we didn’t even get a scratch.” The two cops laughed. I smiled, too. This was fine. Everything was fine.

The Vid was now showing Dick Marin, the Emperor himself. Director of Internal Affairs of the System Security Force; no one was telling Dick what to do these days. Dick was discussing the need for a reorganization in the wake of the Plague, in order to make things more efficient. Translation: his nominal bosses the Joint Council Undersecretaries, who thought they ran the System, were starting to give Marin flak, and he’d decided it was time to forcibly remind them of the real pecking order. From what I’d heard, he was going to find out they hadn’t been sitting on their hands, waiting for him to send his cops after them. I thought about the fucking mess things were going to become soon and for a second almost wanted to stick around, just to watch the fireworks.

“Here they come. Look at those shitheads!”

They came stumbling out of the dust and smoke, three more of us coughing and bleeding, followed by a knot of Stormers in their grimy, flickering Obfuscation Kit that struggled to map itself to the swirling smoke and rain they passed through. Then the two officers, the bald one and the stiff, good-looking smiler that had taken me down and checked me off their list of People of Interest, people too important—for whatever mysterious reason—to just kill.

The three prisoners were young kids, teenagers. They were all wearing long oily-looking coats and bright red pieces of cloth around their necks, black, homemade ink around their eyes melting onto their faces in gummy streaks. I’d seen that a lot recently. It was a fashion. The one in front was tall and skinny, with deep cavernous cheeks and bright, wide-open eyes. He had a big scar on his forehead, old and leathery, and some fresh cuts all over his face. Even with his wrists laced up behind him, he walked steadily and with his head up. He was staring at me, and when the Stormers brought them over to us, he took an extra two steps and landed next to me as someone swept his feet out from under him, sending him to his knees.

“Fucking manners,” the kid hissed.

“You okay with these chumps?” Baldy shouted.

“Fuck, Mage,” one of the cops standing behind us shouted. “Yeah. We can handle babies and gramps, here.”

The kid next to me sucked in blood from his nose and spat it onto the street in front of us, where it was immediately washed away. “Babies, fuck,” he muttered.

This was fine. Everything was fine. I didn’t have any outrage anymore. I knelt there feeling nothing but cold and wet. No anger, no sadness, nothing. I was just waiting for the next thing, and not feeling terribly interested about it, either. I wondered, idly, if they would shoot me in the head if I stood up and started to walk, or if I’d just get another beating. I wanted the bullet, but I didn’t want another beating.

The two cops in charge signaled their Stormers, and the whole herd of them marched off to clear another building on their list. After a moment it was just the rain and wind again, the sucking noise of the System Pigs’ boots as they stepped under a scrap of roof still clinging to the building behind us.

“I’ve got a blade,” the kid said suddenly, his eyes locked on the street in front of us and his voice steady. He knew better than to whisper—the cops couldn’t hear him, but I could. He knew better than to look at me or to move or to do anything except talk in a steady, controlled voice. “I can get my fingers on it, saw myself loose, and pass it to you.” I remembered when I’d been sixteen, running the streets with a blade and nothing to lose. I’d pulled some demented shit back in the day—it had been all about survival, from one day to the next. Then I got some yen and some standing, and it became commerce and reputation. And then one day a pair of System Cops had come to make me an offer I wasn’t allowed to turn down, and then I’d been angry. I’d been angry for years.

I saw Gleason, cold and dead, changed by the Plague into something terrible. I wasn’t angry anymore. I wasn’t anything.

“My two guys will jump in,” the kid said, spitting blood into the street again. “Well… one of them will. I dunno about the other one. We take these two cocksuckers out. Fuck, I was willing to take my chances alone, but you look like you’ve seen some shit, huh? A player. That’s luck. I’ve always been lucky.”

I closed my eyes. The kid was probably nicknamed Lucky or Chance or something fucking ridiculous like that, probably had it tatted onto his chest in big block letters with some fucking dice or playing cards or something. He was right, though; the two Pigs weren’t paying us much attention—to them we were just shivering assholes who’d gotten a foot up their ass, who’d gotten the point. If we moved slow and secret for ten seconds and then fast and furious for ten more, we had a good shot. If their Stormers and bosses didn’t pick that moment to return. If I let the kid take most of the chances. And if our two minders didn’t turn out to be like some of the cops I’d known, like Nathan Happling or Elias Moje, mean and tough and full of unpredictable tricks.

Or Janet Hense: inhuman, unbeatable.

All this I thought by rote, mechanically, some programmed part of my brain just clicking and whirring along the usual routes, slamming into hardwired decision trees onto new paths and arriving at the expected destination. None of it was connected to my body. There was no flood of adrenaline, no familiar spark of rage and terror. There was nothing. I knew I wasn’t going to move. I wasn’t myself anymore: I’d become a ghost. And it felt good to be a ghost.

The kid waited for me to say something. He didn’t move. The kid had discipline. He wasn’t going to be impatient and blustery, wasn’t going to threaten me and waste time. I liked him. I wished him luck. I thought about telling him I would go for the smaller cop first, if I were him, because the tall one liked to talk and threaten, which probably meant he was all bullshit. The short one just stared at you, and that made me nervous. But I didn’t say anything.

“We got like a minute here,” the kid said. “Those other bitches come back here, we got a problem. We gotta move right now.” His shoulders rolled, and I could tell he’d sliced himself free. It was impressive. “Here,” he hissed at me. “Take it.”

I closed my eyes again. Fuck you, I thought. You don’t tell me what to do, when to do it, or when to give a fuck. I’d be happy enough to keep kneeling here until I died of hunger. A few heartbeats ticked by, ragged and lurching. Opening my eyes, I saw the kid turn his head to look at me.

“What the fuck, man? Take it.”

A few months ago, I would have reached out and grabbed this hunk of snot by the ear and pinched until he cried, and fuck, I would have enjoyed it. Now I just wanted him to volunteer to shut the fuck up and let me die in peace. It wasn’t that pinching his ear wouldn’t have solved my problem. And I still would have enjoyed it. But it would simply require way too much effort. I was old, and I’d survived things no one should have to. Survive, that is.

“Don’t tell me you’re going pussy on me. Fucking hell.”

A spark of something, something molten and corrosive, flared up in my belly, flickering on for an instant and reminding me of… and then it was gone, snuffed out, drowned in a black inky flood of who gives a fuck and I just smiled, looking up at the Vid hovering above the rooftops. It was showing a bright, clean, pure white nutrition tab factory in Brazil, smiling tan people in clean white jackets processing raw protein and minerals into tiny white pills that guaranteed no one was going to starve to death. The tag line informed us it was the fifteenth new factory opened this year, and n-tab production was at a record pace.

I closed my eyes, smirking. Translation: you are all going to starve to death, probably sooner than later. Shit was falling apart. Marin’s snatch of People of Interest was just the beginning, I figured.

“Shit,” I heard the kid mutter. “Fucking bitch.”

He fell silent, and then it was just the rain again and the sucking noise of one of the cops behind us on the move. Bitch. The word sank into my neck and made swallowing difficult.

“What are you two fags jawing about?”

The cop’s breath smelled like dead fish and cigarettes. He knelt down between us with the casual ease of someone who’d been in charge of every situation he’d encountered, ever, his face almost close enough for his trim little beard to scratch my cheek. He plucked the cigarette, damp and cold, from his mouth and put a hand on each of our shoulders, pulling us toward him.

“No fucking talking, okay? You two want to suck each other off, wait until you’re alone. Be decent about it.”

I wondered why every fucking cop I’d ever met was afraid of the queers. Me, I’d worked with plenty of them, and they were just as dirty and apt to shiv you in the back as everyone else, but no more so. Then, before I could even think to tell him that this wasn’t right, this was too soon, the kid jerked his elbow hard into the cop’s face, crunching his nose into a pulp and knocking him back onto his ass. It was an easy move, a surprise move with the cop off balance and in a dumb position, and it had been hard to resist, but I knew better. The easy move wasn’t always your best move.

The rest of it happened outside my peripheral vision. I didn’t turn my head to see, but I could hear, and I knew exactly how the choreography went—it was a short, unhappy skit. The cop was on his back like a turtle, nose a fountain of blood, and the kid leaped on top of him with the blade, swinging it down in a dramatic, stupid arc to slice the throat presented to him. I could see the kid’s face, the same face I’d made a million times—not ecstatic, not excited. Grim. Twisted up in concentration, trying to make short work of a filthy job.

And then the gunshot, and the kid sailed into my field of vision like a cannonball had hit him in the stomach, landing a foot or two away with a big spray of dirty water. He lay there in the street clutching his belly as blood poured between his fingers and blended into the ocean around him.

“Moda-fucka!” the first cop hissed, lurching to his feet and into my sight. I didn’t look up at his face. He stood there next to me for a few seconds, just panting through his mouth, and then half twisted around. “Danks, Silbie.” He stepped out into the street, sinking into a puddle up to his ankles, and approached the spluttering kid. For a few seconds he stood over him, hands curling and uncurling. “Moda-fucka,” he repeated more softly. He breathed in through his smashed nose violently, his whole body shaking with the effort to suck air and blood through it, and then spat a prodigious glob of blood and snot onto the kid, followed by a solid kick to his stomach that made him scream and flip over.

“You piece of shit,” the cop hissed, kicking the kid again. “You know what, Silvie? Upon further fucking reflection,” he huffed, landing another kick to the kid’s side, “and study of the fucking lists”—another kick—“I don’t think this particular shithead is all that fucking important after all.”

One more kick. The kid started to crawl, pulling himself feebly forward through the puddle of rainwater with one hand. The cop drew his handgun and pointed it lazily down at him and waited.

From behind me, the other cop, the one with the blistered face, spoke up. “Not to me, that’s for sure.” He sounded sad, like he’d seen this little play before and hadn’t liked it the first time.

With a nod that sent a little mist of blood spray around, the other cop squeezed off a shot. The kid’s head did a quiet little explosion and he sank down into the water as if relieved. The cop stared down at him for a moment and then nodded, holstering his gun and yanking a handkerchief from his coat to press against his flattened nose as he stepped back behind the rest of us without even a glance. I stared at the kid, slowly joining his ancestors in the sewers of Manhattan Island.

“There’ll be heat for this, because of the lists,” Blisterface said without emotion. “You’re fucking filling out the Incident Report.”

“I’ll fill out the fucking SIR,” Fussy Beard snapped back. “That’s you all over, Silvio. Afraid of fucking paperwork.”

I kept my eyes on the kid for a few seconds, watching. He was just dead, though, like I should have been years ago, like everyone I’d ever known—give or take a few shitheels I didn’t care about—was dead. The cops’ talk descended into murmurs behind me, indistinct and predatory. I closed my eyes, and it became just the rain and the wind. I was a ghost.

I

AMERICAN MURDER

Las Vegas was a scrub of a town, an electric grid in the middle of the fucking desert, guarded by the burned-out husks of ancient hotels. You could walk through the inhabited town in ten minutes and be in the extended graveyard that was the old city, and I was getting the fifty-yen tour following the Russian around. You could get anything you wanted in Vegas—easier if it was illegal. There were no cops in Vegas; I wasn’t sure if there had ever been, but now that the cops and the Spooks were at war, there wasn’t a cop within five hundred miles of the place.

Romanov’s was a dump from the outside—pink-gray stucco, bars on the windows, and weak, jittery neon—set between happy-ending bars and burlap-window opium dens. Inside, it was plush, red velvety material everywhere, brass on the bar. Although the waiters were all Droids on wheels, skimming across the floor with terrible efficiency, the bartender was a human in a black suit, bright eyed and pasty faced, speaking English like he’d memorized it off cards. He didn’t like the look of me but took his cigarette from his mouth long enough to saunter over and toss a napkin onto the bar. There was music in the air, a tinkling piano, and I could see my Russian in the mirror across from me, which was good enough.

The bartender stopped in front of me, his dark hair hanging in his face. He picked tobacco off his lip and spat it onto the floor. “You have yen?” he asked.

I smiled, tossing my credit dongle onto the bar. “Sick with it.” One thing I still had was yen. Problem was, you needed a fucking wheelbarrow of it to buy anything.

He looked down at the dongle for a second but didn’t bother to pick it up and scan it. He sighed, almost in disappointment. “What will you have?”

I liked his accent. It was hard to understand, but it sounded nice. He was Russian, of course, of some sort—maybe he was Bulgarian or maybe he was a fucking Cossack, but it didn’t matter: he was Russian for all practical purposes. Everyone in Vegas was a fucking Russian—they owned the city, if you wanted to call it a city. Mainly because no one else wanted the piece of shit out in the middle of nowhere. The Russians were keeping Vegas going through sheer determination, though things had gotten easier recently since the army had moved into the Southwest. I hadn’t seen a System Cop in months.

“Doesn’t matter, I can’t taste anything anymore anyway. Gin,” I said. “Warm.”

He snorted, producing a glass and dropping it in front of me. “Gin. Fucking prole, yes?”

I winked, pulling a cigarette from my pocket. “Fucking right.”

My Russian was an old guy, short but broad in the shoulders, with the tight look of a man who’d been lean and tough his whole life. He was old, silvery hair thick and short on his head. In the mirror he was sitting at a table crowded by two tall, plump baldies who sweated freely in their standard-issue leather coats. My Russian was clasping the hands of a tall, thin man with waxy skin and a shiny suit: the owner. They were beaming at each other so forcefully, pumping hands, I wondered which one hated the other more. The dining room was pretty full, lots of swells out for a nice meal, mostly fat men in suits so fucking pretty they were almost gowns. There was a nice buzz of noise in the air.

The bartender poured my drink, and I lit my cigarette, sending a cloud of bluish smoke into the air. I picked up my glass and swallowed the drink in one gulp, ticking my head down toward the glass before he could put the bottle away.

“Another,” I said.

“You really can’t taste anything, eh?” he said, squinting at me and pouring another.

“Or feel anything.”

“Bullshit.”

In the mirror, I watched the tall, waxy guy walk away from My Russian and plucked my cigarette from my mouth. I pushed the red coal against the top of my right hand and held it there, white smoke curling up. I counted five, watching My Russian in the mirror sweep the room with his tiny, thin eyes, and then put the butt back in my mouth, waving my hand at the bartender to show off the blackened welt. “Not a fucking thing.”

“That’s impressive.” The bartender nodded, leaving the bottle on the bar as a sign of good humor. “Nerve Augment?”

I shook my head, picking up my glass and staring into the cloudy liquid. “Something that happened to me in prison,” I said slowly, one of my moments coming on me, a strange, slow feeling in my thoughts. I shook my head a little and let it slide past me—it only got worse if I tried to force a memory. “I don’t like to talk about it.” I toasted him and drank my shot off as he spun and walked away. As I was setting the glass down, I felt the air around me getting crowded. In the mirror, My Russian and his two sweaty bodyguards had suddenly gotten much nearer.

“My friend,” My Russian said, “I have been seeing visions of you all day.” He spoke with the weird precision foreigners brought to English, every word bitten off, newly minted, invented a few seconds ago. “Why is that?”

I returned my cigarette to my mouth. Without looking around at them, I shrugged. “I’ve been hired to kill you.”

In the mirror, My Russian shot his cuffs, and I caught a glimpse of a dark, blurry skull tattoo on his wrist. Fucking Ivans and their bullshit: the Russians had been just about the only organization to survive Unification, and it had made them fucking batty with the symbols and rituals. It wasn’t pretty, of course—they made most of their yen through drugs, heavy shit sold to the bottom rung of the System, mostly designer, unstable, and as likely to pop a vessel as get you high. The cops had no patience for narcotics—Dick Marin, the Director of Internal Affairs and pretty much king of the cops, set the tone there—and they beat up on the Russians every chance they got, and the Russians were quick to put a bullet in the head of anyone who looked like a weak link to them.

They’d never made much of a dent in New York, back when there’d been a New York. The locals had closed ranks against them, and the System Pigs owned New York the way the Russians owned Vegas. There’d been a couple of attempts over the years, but it had ended in tears. But the Russians had survived.

Everyone in that organization had done terrible things. Terrible Things was their fucking initiation rite.

My Russian cocked his head at me for a moment and then burst into laughter. His two bald friends joined in after a second of hesitation. Their boss looked around as if he’d made a terribly funny joke, soaking up the room.

“Come have a drink with me, my ghost,” he chuckled, turning away. “Talk to me.”

One of the bald giants leaned down, but I forestalled that bullshit by standing up, blowing smoke around. “Touch me, Boris, and I will break a finger.”

He grunted, straightening up. “Name not Boris.”

I nodded. “Finger will still be broken,” I advised, pushing through them. I jerked my head at the bartender, who was back to leaning against the wall, watching me walk by with slitted eyes and smoke curling up from his own cigarette. He flicked his hand from his waistband, and my credit dongle leaped at me. I snatched it from the air.

“Spaaseeba,” I said, just a collection of sounds I’d learned. I tucked my dongle away into a pocket.

“Nice knowing you,” he said to my back.

I grinned.

The place was air-conditioned aggressively, but I imagined I could still sense the heat out in the desert. It had been 113 at noon, though it was expected to cool down to a manageable 104 by midnight. I hated Las Vegas. It was like living in someone’s armpit.

They led me toward the back, passing the packed tables, and kept walking past all of the heavy-looking red padded doors marked private and took me through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The black, humming cooking unit took up an immense amount of space, swollen within the tiled room, just a cube of rough black metal with neat, tidy conveyor belts inching out of it. It was idle at the moment, there being more activity at the bar than the menus, but I didn’t like the way it hummed, an almost silent vibration that reached inside me. I pushed my hands into the loose pockets of my ill-fitting suit, too heavy for the weather and full of my sweat, soaked up lovingly and held jealously. I wasn’t made for this town. Too hot, too empty, too old.

My Russian kept walking through the empty kitchen and out the back door into a fenced-in lot that smelled like rot, the wet, heavy smell hitting you in the face and settling down to soak into your clothes and skin. Weeks from now I’d be smelling like this fucking parking lot. I kept smiling, though, trying to look my new friends over. All of us thought we knew exactly where this social call was ending, and all that remained was to see who was right.

I put my eyes on My Russian and ran them up and down his shiny suit, deciding he wasn’t carrying a barker. The Russians—the higher-ups, at least, the real old-school Ivans—had a fetish for strangulation, a wire shining out in the darkness. I’d heard they regarded any murder that didn’t require you to get right up close to the mark—a knife, a piano string—as pussy work. American murder.

Pussy or not, the two bald mountains had two guns each, big ones, under their arms. They didn’t look fast, and their coats were too tight for that kind of move—it would bunch up if they tried to pull both at once, and if they were going to pull them one at a time they were fucking morons for carrying two anyway. The two bodyguards stopped and let My Russian and me take a few steps more, so that I ended up between him and them, the two huge balls of flesh between me and the door.

My Russian stopped and turned to smile back at me. I squinted around, the dark heat settling on my shoulders and pushing. It was bright out, a big moon shining down onto us. The fence looked high, a serious fence. Not impossible to scale, but not something I was going to leap over while people shot at me. The sky was a dark blue canopy over us, empty, clear, just filled with evaporating heat.

“I take meetings here,” My Russian said, spreading his hands and grinning. His suit shone expensively in the dim light leaking from the sky. “It is quiet. So,” he said. “You have been hired to kill me, yes? Who has hired you? Why?” He cocked his head. “I know your face. I know your name. New York, yes? Lots of you New Yorkers out here these days. Rats fleeing the sinking ship.”

“New York’s gone,” I said. “They’re tearing it down and replacing it with a goddamn shopping mall.”

“Yes. I know you—a big gun, yes? How many men have you killed, for yen?” He said it as if there were better things to kill for. Then he squinted one eye at me owlishly. “You were in Venice recently, yes? The World Banker. I forget the name.”

I shook my head. “Haven’t been to Europe in years, Boris. You’re thinking of some other desperate old man.”

My Russian frowned and pushed his hands back into his pockets. From below his collar a smudge of ink was visible—a star atop what I assumed was a crown, the symbol of high rank. I reached up and scratched my shoulder where my own prison tattoo used to burn. Prison had been good for me. I didn’t like to think about it too much, about Michaleen and Bartlett and the others. It hadn’t been a good time, an enjoyable time, but it had been a necessary time, for me. It had boiled me down, and I’d come out of it the better man.

He saw me looking and smiled. “You know what it means?” He suddenly jerked his sleeve up, revealing two and a half of the blurry skull tats on his arm. “And these?”

“Prison work,” I said, keeping myself still, feeling the bodyguards’ eyes on me. “Where’d you get the art?”

“You know what it means, my friend?”

I smirked, figuring that would annoy him. “I know what it’s supposed to mean, Boris. Anyone can slap some ink on you.”

“My name is not Boris,” he complained. Maybe he wasn’t as smart as me after all. I wasn’t used to being the smartest guy in the room. “And where I come from, they kill you for false emblems like that. Buy you a drink somewhere and slit your throat, you fall back onto a plastic sheet, five minutes later it is like you were never there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How many? Five? Ten? You think ten is a big number?” If I’d had a skull for every person I’d killed, I’d be a fucking shadow. I’d be nothing but ink.

“Numbers do not matter. You New York boys, always counting.” He peered at me. “You are sure you did not work the Venice job? I heard your name, very clear.”

“Then someone is lying to you,” I said. I’d been sucked into Chengara Penitentiary and hadn’t made it too far away since getting out. “The last two times I made it to Europe, things didn’t go so well for me.” The two big boys behind me hadn’t moved, not even to loosen up their coats.

He nodded, crimping his lips as if to say, yeah, okay, whatever. “You know my people?” he said suddenly, voice soft and casual, like he was asking me if I liked his shirt. I didn’t. My own shirt was white and scratchy and a little tight around the neck, like it’d been made for a different man. “You know who I work for?”

“Sure,” I said, nodding. “You’re connected. You’re a high roller. You run this town—for your boss. You live in a fine suite in an ancient hotel; you go from an air-conditioned room to an air-conditioned mini-hover—it’s fucking cute, like a little toy—to an air-conditioned room every day and probably haven’t sweated in ten years.”

He chuckled, nodding and stepping around me. “Da,” he said jovially. “Da! And you were sent to kill me. It is funny. Now, if you will excuse me, I must have my dinner. Lyosha and Fedya will finish our conversation.”

I turned to watch him walk back into the restaurant, the door shutting behind him as if on a motor of some sort. I looked at one of the big guys and then at the other. They were slightly different in the shape of their rounded heads and the angle that their mouths hung open but were essentially the same person occupying different space. I wondered idly if there would be an explosion if they accidentally touched.

The one I was looking at—I thought he was Lyosha but wasn’t sure why I thought that—grinned. “You break my finger now?”

I sighed, feeling tired. “Sure, why not,” I said. I could do the math: two of them against one of me, alone in a back lot, their friends inside and everywhere, fuck, the whole damn city. They hadn’t frisked me or tried to take my own gun away. I chose not to be insulted. I reached up and took my crappy cigarette from between my lips and held it carefully between my thumb and forefinger.

Lyosha flicked his own cigarette into the air and exhaled briskly, shrugging his shoulders, getting loose. The butt fell limply to the ground as if the air were too thick to travel through, the coal bright on the dark, shadowed ground. For a moment we all stood there, hands hanging free, each of us waiting to see who would move first. First move was a losing move—it telegraphed your intentions, and when you had more than one person to deal with, it guaranteed at least one gun was going to find its way onto you and make some painful alterations. The air around us was completely still, like hot jelly, and I was reminded of the yard back at Chengara, where I’d gotten a free but excellent education on how to fight when outnumbered.

Rule number one was, sometimes making the first move made sense.

I launched myself at the one I’d decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side. I wasn’t worried about the noise; My Russian expected a few shots. A few more and he might send the waiter out to see if we needed anything, but not yet.

I came up into an unsteady crouch and fired three times, quick, where the other bodyguard had been a second before. He was still there, for a moment, and then toppled over, hitting his knees and then falling over face-first. I stayed low, listening to the sudden silence, feeling the heat on me, straining my senses.

Rule number two was to never assume. It wasn’t nice, but I turned and found Lyosha, put my gun against his head, and made sure he was dead. Then I stepped over to his buddy and did the same, warm blood spraying me lightly. You assumed people were dead, they had a habit of coming up behind you at the worst times. I’d been assaulted by dead people so many times I’d become paranoid about it.

I turned and jogged back toward the door in a wide arc, approaching from an angle, taking soft, easy steps. I knew I didn’t need to worry about getting the door open—I had magic. By sheer force of will the door was going to pop open. After five steps it did just that, and a big, thick-necked woman with a goddamn shotgun held across her body, a streak of absolute darkness, stepped halfway out into the yard. She peered out into the lot, muttering to herself, not seeing me coming at her. I just kept approaching, holding off; you couldn’t shoot someone in the back. I wasn’t a big believer in justice, but everyone deserved to at least see it coming.

I was just a few feet away when she suddenly turned, hissing something I couldn’t make out and swinging the shotgun around, slow and clumsy. I squeezed the trigger, and she whipped around, sending one blast from the shotgun into the night air and falling awkwardly against the door, propping it open with her body. I leaped forward and plucked the shotgun from her loose grip; studied the wet, ugly wound I’d created in her chest; then looked into her staring eyes. With a quick glance into the bright, empty kitchen, I broke open the shotgun and let the shells drop out, then tossed it away to my right, the shadows swallowing it. After putting an insurance shell into her, I edged into the humming kitchen. The crank air being pushed out of the vents above rushed past me like someone had opened an air lock out in the desert. I stopped right inside and wasted a moment or two, listening, watching the swinging doors that led to the dining room.

As I stood there, the doors swung inward and admitted a pair of serving Droids, skimming along the floor bearing dirty dishes. As the swinging doors snapped closed, I caught a glimpse of the busy dining room, all reds and browns, plush fabrics that looked heavy and old. My Russian was sitting back toward the front of the place, laughing and holding a drink up as if making a toast. I looked straight at him as the doors swung shut again, gliding slowly on their tiny motors, but he never looked up at me.

I raised my gun and let the clip drop into the palm of my hand; it was difficult coming by hardware these days, most of it coming out of scavenge yards down south, Mexico generally, where the SSF’s grip was getting a little sketchy under pressure from the army. For six yen a week kids sorted bullets into calibers and hand-filled clips, which were then sold to assholes like me for a thousand yen a clip. I wasn’t sure where the fucking bullets came from, loose and sometimes ancient as hell, and I generally expected my gun to blow up in my hand every time I pulled the trigger. It kept things exciting.

I exchanged the old clip for a fresh one and snapped it into place as quietly as I could. I wasn’t paid to scamper around waiting for the safe moment—I was paid for results, and now that My Russian was aware of me, there was no better time than the present, before he called his people and brought the hammer down—a wall of fat guys in leather coats, a team of idiots with garrotes in their pockets and my picture on their little handhelds. Besides, my instructions had been pretty clear: My Russian had to die tonight. I’d agreed to terms, and terms had to be upheld. I took a deep breath and racked a shell into the chamber gently, deciding that the best way to do it would be to be fast—no wasted movements, no wasted time.

I put the gun down low by my thigh and pushed my way into the dining room. I walked quickly and steadily toward My Russian, my eyes on him the whole time. Momentum was the key—no one paid me any attention as I crossed the room, just part of the blur of motion around them.

When I was halfway to his table, My Russian glanced at me, then looked away, his face a pleasant mask of polite enjoyment. Then he snapped back to me, his expression tightening up, his hands jumping a bit on the table like he’d thought about doing something and then killed the idea. It was too late by then; I was at his table. I should have just brought the gun up, killed him, and walked out. But I stood there for a moment with my gun at my side. I wasn’t sure he could see it.

“Lyosha and Fedya will have some explaining to do, yes?”

I shook my head. “No. And neither will the kitchen help.” I gave him another second, but he just sat there staring at me, his hands balled into fists. Macho asshole, no gun because he was tough. Fuck tough. Tough got you killed.

I raised the gun and there was no reaction at first—I’d expected a hubbub from the crowd, some noise, chaos. But I’d been away from civilization for so long I guess I’d forgotten the rules, how it worked. I raised the gun and put it a few inches from My Russian’s face—not close enough for him to grab it easily or knock it aside—and nothing happened. There were people just a few feet away, eating their dinners, but no one was even looking at me.

My Russian stared at the barrel. “You know who I am, my friend,” he said slowly, licking his lips. “Maybe you wish to be rich?” His eyes jumped up to my face and then tightened up. “No, I see you do not wish to be rich. Perhaps you don’t wish to live, either. You are not a young man. You know who I work for. This will not be forgotten.”

I nodded. “You draw a lot of fucking water out here. And now it doesn’t matter. I don’t know what you did, but you pissed off the wrong people, and here I am.” Talking was for amateurs, but I wanted to give him his say. When you killed a man, you had to let him have his last words, if you could.

He was shaking now—with fear or rage, I couldn’t tell. “You do not care who I work for, then? But you do not understand.

It is not like the old days, where we run from the fucking cops and they chase us behind the furniture. We are part of things. We are partners. You do not fear us, but do you fear Cal Ruberto? Ruberto, the Undersecretary.”

I blinked. Now there was a sudden shout from across the room, and the whole place got quiet for a second, followed by a hissing wave of whispers. Cal Ruberto was Undersecretary for the North American Department and, nowadays, a major general in the New Army. The Undersecretaries had been running things—as much as Dick Marin and the System Cops would let them—since the Joint Council had gone senile years ago, but now they had some muscle. Ruberto wasn’t just an Undersecretary anymore. He was a fucking general.

“You do not fear my boss,” My Russian continued. “But maybe you fear Ruberto. Maybe you fear the whole damn System behind him.”

I stared down at him a second longer, then cocked the hammer back. “Cal Ruberto,” I said, “is my boss.”

I squeezed the trigger, the gun making a thunderous crack, My Russian’s face imploding as he was knocked backward, spraying me with a fine mist of brains and blood. I stood still another moment, thinking that I was almost at the point where I felt nothing when I admitted that.

Then I spun around, bringing my cannon with me, and stood there dripping blood, running my eyes over the crowd. Most of them ducked down as I looked at them, crouching in their seats. There were some shouts, but no one was moving. I let my gun drop to my side again and stepped quickly toward the entrance. There would be no cops, but you didn’t kill a man with a crown on his chest in this town and just walk away whistling.

I crashed through the doors and into the hot, empty desert night, slipping my barker into my pocket. I imagined My Russian’s blood baking onto me, turning into a shell. The street was busy, crowds of people who made up the infrastructure of the Russians’ private city out for the night. I just pushed through bodies, looking up at the dark, hulking shapes of the ancient hotels on the horizon, huge complexes rotting in the sun, marking the outer edge of a rotting city slowly filling with sand and choking sunlight. A man could get lost in the darkness there forever, if he wanted. In the heat, forever was a lot shorter than you might imagine.

Walking steadily toward the horizon, I wiped My Russian’s blood out of my eyes and heard him asking me, How many men have you killed, for yen? I shook a cigarette out and placed it between my lips. I didn’t know. I’d lost count. I was dead. I’d died back in prison. As I leaned in to light up, there was a deafening boom behind me, and I was lifted up off my feet for a second by a warm gust. I staggered forward and steadied myself with the street, lying there for a moment, my cigarette crushed into my face. When I flipped over, the restaurant was on fire, pieces of its roof sailing down in fiery arcs from the night sky, all of it in strange, muffled silence as my ears rang.

Well, shit, I thought, sitting up on my elbows. That’s fucking strange.

II

JUST STILL ALIVE

My leg ached.

I figured it would ache for the rest of my life. It was amazing I could even walk on it, really. My lungs still burned when I walked too fast or if I smoked, too; the fucking Plague was going to be on me forever.

The Plague. I thought of Gleason, saw her face, smudged with dirt and giving me that sarcastic smile. At first I couldn’t quite place the feeling that soured inside me, and then I realized that I missed her. I missed her making fun of me, and I missed showing her things, teaching her. Thinking of her made me angry, so I pushed her away.

I wanted to shift my weight, ease up off my bad leg and let the blood flow a little, but I couldn’t move. I was strapped in standing up, inside a skeleton of blackened metal that smelled like rust, held stiffly and painfully upright. I could move my fingers some and my toes and my eyes. Not that my eyes were much use to me. I had a half million subtle angles of the sweating head strapped down in front of me, about two inches between us. The whole train car was packed with bodies, each of us pumping unhappy heat into the air. Sweat poured down my face into my eyes, making me blink madly.

“This is why,” someone muttered from a few spots behind me. “Democracy. Fucking democracy. Revolution. This shit right here.”

“We got democracy,” a deep voice boomed from further back. “No one’s got a vote. We’re all equals.”

There were some subdued snickers at that, and then the first voice came back, screeching at throat-searing volume. “Fuck you, you fucking Pig! I know you’re a Pig! Burned Pig! I’m gonna slit your fucking throat!”

I closed my eyes as everyone on the fucking train started shouting, the noise blurring into a sludge of hoarse white noise. I was thirsty. I’d woken up strapped in and had no idea how long I’d been here, smelling my fellow prisoners and wishing I could somehow will my own leg to just wither and drop off. Every now and then there was some indication of speed, a sudden yawing as the train took a curve, but for the most part it was as if we were standing still. From what I could tell we were moving just slightly slower than the goddamn speed of light.

After a moment the voices all shut off at once, leaving behind a trail of dry coughing and muttering. I kept my eyes shut and enjoyed the relative peace for a moment.

“Cut your fucking throat,” the first voice muttered again, sandpaper on rotten wood.

We’d all been collected in the cleanup of the East Coast after Squalor’s Plague. I didn’t know how many people had died—if New York had been any indication, it was all of them—and the cops had brought in reserves from every tiny little shithole of the System and banged on every door left standing in the whole fucking city, putting bracelets on wrists and bullets in ears, following an executive order by Dick Marin, Director of Internal Affairs. Some of us had been shoved onto the trains. Whatever the reason, instead of an execution in the ruins of Pickering’s bar, I’d been checked off a list and loaded onto transit. I guessed Marin was still my own personal guardian angel.

“We got a fucking cop here?” someone new shouted. “For fucking real?”

“Not anymore, he ain’t,” croaked a woman who sounded like she breathed whiskey and cigarettes.

“That’s what stinks in here,” another one bellowed. “I thought it was me.”

Laughter, rusty and weak, drifted past me. I opened my eyes again, sweat immediately flowing into them, stinging. The head in front of me hadn’t changed. It was a little shorter than me, round and bald with a fuzz of fresh whiskers growing on it. The upper edge of a dark tattoo appeared just above the neck restraint, a complex pattern of swirls and crosses. I’d been staring at it forever and I had no idea what it meant, if it meant anything.

“Hey,” the man behind me whispered. “Hey, what’s your name?”

I blinked, unsure if he meant me.

“Hey,” he hissed again. “What’s your name?”

I licked my lips with my dry tongue. I’d give all the yen I still had in anonymous accounts, trillions of it, for a fucking drink of water. “Cates,” I said, my own voice thick and raspy, unfamiliar. “Avery Cates.”

There was a pause. “No shit? Damn, I thought you was fucking immortal.”

I tried a grin as an experimental expression. “Nope. Just still alive.” I thought about asking his name but discovered there was nothing I cared less about.

“How’d they get you, man? Shit, it must have been a fucking bloodbath.”

I smirked for my own amusement. “Yup. A bloodbath.” I remembered sitting there, letting them put the bracelets on, feeling the gun against my head and wanting it, just feeling so tired.

“Were you sick?” the chatterbox came back. “Hell, I almost shit the bed. Lying in the street just fucking bleeding out of my ears, you know? I thought I was dead.”

I didn’t say anything to that. I couldn’t take a deep breath without pain, but I didn’t need to prove anything to this guy. I could feel a change in our momentum, a slight pressure against me. We were slowing down. For a second, I wanted to move so badly I would have kicked and screamed and rattled my cage, just to stretch my fucking leg out for a second. I’d heard stories about Gunners standing still for hours, for days—all bullshit, I’d decided. No one could do it. Not even Canny Orel, who if you believed just half the shit about him was the baddest ass there ever was. Even he had to scratch his ass now and then.

The deceleration was getting more pronounced, pushing me forward, and everyone noticed all at once, a buzz of chatter sweeping up and down the train car. They all sounded excited, like this was some fascinating trip. Like the bracelets and the gun barrel against your head, the sap against your skull, and the involuntary train ride where you couldn’t even stretch your fucking bum leg was all the System Pigs’ way of telling you you just won the fucking lottery.

Everything started to happen fast.

The lights came on, super bright and terrible, clicking on with a sizzle, one bulb exploding into sparks just about over my head. The light burned my eyes, making me squint and try to turn my head as much as I could.

A door far up at the front of the car snapped open, a fat man framed in the entrance. He was tall and round and wearing a baggy police uniform, a Crusher, a low-level cop. A gun was strapped to his hip, riding low because he had long arms. I peered at him with dry, scratchy eyes and considered: his face was flat as if he’d been stepped on in the womb and outlined by a black beard that was trimmed to a neat point.

He stepped into the car and stopped. He looked around, his expression gaining a hint of amusement. The train was moving so slowly now I could feel every bump and twitch.

“Welcome to Chengara Penitentiary,” the not-Crusher said in a booming voice, a great voice, deep and rounded and with precise, particular enunciation, like he’d been to school. This was, I thought, either the System’s most overqualified Crusher or not a Crusher at all. Or something else that I’d never encountered before. The thought was depressing.

“This is your orientation,” he continued, putting one hand on the butt of his gun, an easy, nonthreatening gesture that drew my eye and made me nervous. I stared at his hand for a moment and forgot my fucking aching leg and remembered I couldn’t move, not even to turn my head away. “It will last thirty-six seconds and will not be repeated.”

He looked around again, satisfied with the impression he was making.

“Chengara is an EOT installation. EOT stands for end of term. You do not get released from Chengara; you do not move on to any other location.”

He smiled. “There is no escape. Should you choose to take your chances, we will not break much of a sweat to stop you. There is a wall and towers, and we will snipe your ass in a second if we can, but if you scale the wall and run for it, good for you! There is nothing but hundreds of miles of desert around you, and you will be dead within a day. This is not idle bullshit. One day. It’s even worse in the winter.

“No one is being paid to protect you or keep you alive. You want to fight each other? Kill each other? Go ahead—I don’t get paid enough to stop you.” He shrugged. “We log you in alive when you get here, and it’s just paperwork for me if you die. A Standard Incident Report. I can fill one of those out in one minute. So feel free.”

He paused to look us all over. “Some of you think, I’m sure, that because some cunt of a paper-pusher put your name on a list, because some asslicker in an office somewhere decided to classify you as a Person of Interest, you have achieved some sort of protected status. Indeed, some of you may have been spared execution on the spot precisely because you are POI. Well, fuck that, and fuck you: there are no interesting people on this train.”

He drew his gun with impressive speed and flair. Before I could shout or twitch or do anything, he turned to the poor sap strapped in to his left and shot him three times in the goddamn face. I saw the guy’s arms and legs jiggle with each shot, and then he just hung there, the liquid sound of blood dripping onto the floor clear in the sudden, mean silence.

“There are no fucking paper-pushers here. None of you are special, and none of you will be seen outside of this facility again. Remember that, punks.”

And with that, the non-Crusher smiled, holstered his gun, and turned for the doorway. It snapped shut as he stepped through it. The silence clung to everything. When the train stopped moving altogether, the restraints all snapped free at once, and everyone sagged to the floor with a groan. My legs buckled under my sudden weight, and I went down onto my knees, catching myself on my palms, my face staring into the asscrack of my fellow prisoner. I spent a profitable few seconds staring at the rubbery black material of the floor. It felt damp and smelled like piss.

“Everybody up!”

The voice of our new friend, the non-Crusher, crackling and tinny over the train’s PA system. I looked up, my head shaking slightly, my neck cramping up. We all struggled to our feet, shaky and rubbery, stretching painfully. Both my calves seized up into iron-hard cramps, dropping me back to the floor. I bumped the guy behind me as I curled up, grabbing my legs and massaging the muscles, grimacing, clenching my teeth.

“I said everybody up,” the voice snapped.

Panting, I rolled onto my knees and slowly got to my feet. My calves ached to match my leg, each flaring up in a distinct rhythm. The moment I was upright again, the PA clicked on.

“Good. Row by row, exit the fucking car.”

No one moved for a moment, and I knew we were all thinking the same thing, thinking maybe we don’t move, maybe we put a stop to this taking-orders bullshit right here. But there was no play there—we were on a bullet train car, with no access to the pilot’s cabin, rubber legged and unarmed. You could almost see the realization going from head to head: we’re fucked. Someone near the front of the car started moving, and one by one none of us could think of an alternative. When the guy in front of me started to stagger forward, I twisted my head until my neck gave me a satisfying pop and staggered after him.

“Hey, Cates,” the guy behind whispered. “You remember everyone you killed?”

I blinked. “Yes,” I said, without hesitation. I saw them all, flashing through my head. I saw them with perfect detail, every pore, every blown pupil and ruptured vessel. I didn’t know all the names, but I knew enough of them.

The end of the car was an impossibly bright square, just pure white. Heat blew in, a dry steady wind. It felt good after who knew how long being frozen in the train’s crank air, and I shambled toward the exit with something approaching enthusiasm. At the edge of the train car, I stopped and squinted around, reaching up to shade my eyes from the bright, painful sunlight, my throat deciding it didn’t like the hot, dry air and seizing up, making a choking noise that fell dead at my feet.

We were in the desert all right. A few feet down, the ground was sandy and cracked, with little scrubs of sad-looking grass here and there. In the distance I could see mountains, so far away they looked like a painting, a backdrop. The sky was a pale, light blue that looked thin and delicate. Sweat popped up all over my body. I forced a breath into my lungs and it burned all the way down.

The train had stopped inside a gated area, the chain-link fencing rising up on either side about twenty feet, topped by barbed wire, just wide enough for the train to pull in with an inch or so on either side for clearance. The only way to go was forward, and I saw the prisoners who’d exited ahead of me stumbling, blinking, and panting, along a path that forced you into a spare-looking cinder block cube looking like a single room, no windows, just a small, darkened doorway. Stretching off to the left and right of the structure was a massive wall of the same material, as tall as the chain link and with its own barbed wire. Glancing up, I could see a tower in the near distance, blank and gray and topped by a railing. A single figure stood atop it, tiny and vague.

Suddenly, I was pushed hard from behind. I stumbled, lost my balance, and fell, hitting the hard, hot ground hands first, scraping skin and sending a shock of pain down my back and leg. I shot my breath out of my nose and blinked my eyes to clear them, listening carefully, all my old instincts rushing to the fore. Running with the snuff gangs in Manhattan, I’d taken plenty of beatings, but you learned over time how to give as good as you got. And you never forgot.

I took a handful of the warm dirt in one hand and started coughing, stretching it out until I heard the scrape of his shoes as he dropped down and stepped toward me. I stopped coughing and waited for instinct, then whirled, sweeping my bad leg out as I did so and catching his ankle. I didn’t knock him down, but I threw him off balance so he was backtracking as I lurched upright again, swinging my arm around and aiming the dirt for his face. I didn’t get a bull’s-eye, but I made him turn his head away long enough for me to rush forward and crash into him—a tall, wiry Asian guy with tan skin like coffee and long black hair tied back into an impressive tail. He went down and I went down with him, landing with my knees on either side of him and showing him a close-up of my fist, asking his opinion on it. He didn’t like it and spat a bloody tooth back at me, grinning nice and red.

“You fucking remember them all, Mr. Cates?” he slurred, laughing. “You are sure?”

I stared down at him, running his face through my memories, trying to match him up with someone. What were the fucking odds? But I guessed we’d all been sucked up out of New York, and I’d killed a lot of people in New York.

I rolled off him, and he was up immediately, spitting a glob of red phlegm onto the ground and walking off without a glance back, strutting. I lay there and watched him go, perplexed, and slowly climbed to my feet, dusting myself off. After a moment, I realized someone was standing on the other side of the thick chain-link fence. I looked over at him, squinting against the glare. He was the shortest man I’d ever seen, old and wrinkled, his snow-white hair wispy and thin and dancing on top of his head. He wore a bright orange jumpsuit of sorts, grimy and tattered, and grinned at me, yellow teeth and chapped lips. He was so small I thought I could slip him into my pocket. He nodded at me, smiling.

“Welcome to Chengara, Mr. Cates,” he said in a rolling accent, stressing all the wrong syllables like he was reciting a poem. “You’ll do well.”

III

I WASN’T SURE I WANTED TO RESIST

“Walk with me, Victor.”

Vic rolled the toothpick around in his mouth for a second or two, thinking it over, and then sighed heavily and peeled himself from the wall. We took a few steps along Las Vegas Boulevard in silence, Victor’s sweaty, broad brow wrinkled up in anxiety, and his yellowed eyes shifting from side to side.

“You sure it’s a good idea to be walking around?” he said in a low whisper. Victor whispered everything. He figured that by whispering and not looking at anything directly, he was sort of invisible—and the strange thing was, it seemed to work. Victor knew everything, because people forgot he was there and talked in front of him. “Word is you’re a dead man. Word is, you popped someone high up on the ladder, and the whole fucking organization has your DNA in their handhelds.”

I shrugged. “I have friends, too.”

He snorted derisively. Vic was shorter than me, but his torso was wider and deeper, and he lacked a neck. He was just naturally burly. He wasn’t much of a fighter, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. Vic’s first choice of self-defense was to run away and find a nice Dumpster to hide in, but he looked tough, and most people didn’t mess with him. “I don’t have your friends, man—why come here and make me be seen with you? The fucking Ivans sometimes get crazy ideas.”

My hands twitched at my sides, but I forced myself to be calm. I wanted badly to grab Victor’s nose and remind him what our working relationship was, but I needed Victor’s goodwill. I was on the Russians’ shitlist, and Victor was one of the few people who hadn’t just walked in the other direction when I’d shown up.

“I need a loan, Vic,” I said simply, trying to sound casual. “I need to get out of this shithole.”

Vic snorted again. “You’re loaded, man. I’ve seen your credit.”

I nodded, keeping my face a mask of good humor, everything pleasant. “No one wants my credit next to their name, Vic. I’ve been blackballed. Someone sells me a seat on a hover out of here, next week they’re being tuned up. I need insulation.”

Vic’s head was aimed toward the cracked, baking sidewalk. I was wearing my suit, stifling, so hot I was like an oven at night, radiating the day’s heat I’d absorbed. Vic was in a lightweight shirt that gave you a misty view of his hairy, blubbery chest and belly, and a pair of loose dark pants that had been cut off above the knees unevenly. He was a hairy man, coarse dark hair over-flowing every part of him, and looking at him made me itch. His eyes flicked this way and that, and when he responded, he didn’t look at me or move his lips, pretending to ignore me.

“So I’ll end up getting tuned up.”

I shook my head. “Cover your tracks.”

“Shit, the Ivans hear you’ve skipped town, they’ll just find out everyone who bought a fucking trip out of the desert recently and have a chat with each of us.”

I nodded, keeping my cheerful mask in place even though he hadn’t looked at me. “I’m laying off the risk for you, so stop worrying.”

What the fuck. It was only yen. It cost 200 yen for a cup of coffee these days. I braced myself for his price while he considered, chewing his lip and pretending to read the strip-club ads pasted on the plywood wall between us and a deep, ragged pit where a building or buildings had once stood.

“Three and a half, then,” Vic finally said, flinching away from an imagined blow.

I clenched my teeth and counted three. “Three and a half,” I said slowly, stopping and letting him twitch a few feet ahead of me, “is fucking murder, Vic, and you know it. You’re gonna step on my balls, Vic? I’m in a jam, and you’re gonna charge me three and a fucking half?”

He flinched again, even though my hands were still in my pants pockets. I’d known Vic as long as I’d been banging around Vegas, ever since I’d crawled out of the desert mostly dead and burned to a crisp, my yen—linked to me by fingerprint scan no matter what else happened—the only thing that kept me alive. I’d twisted Vic’s nose a few times, so I didn’t blame him for acting like I was a live grenade next to him.

“Three, okay?” He turned away from me suddenly and stared at the ancient wall. “Come on—you’re making me a fucking target if I help you out. I’ve got to —”

We both stopped as hover displacement boiled up around us, like someone had turned a knob. We both twisted around to look over our shoulders and squint into the blast of hot air sent our way by the shiny silver hover—a small, compact model with military markings—that was sinking down into the street. The people on the sidewalks didn’t run or even look particularly concerned; they just watched blandly.

“Looks like you got a free ride, huh?” Vic said.

I nodded without looking at him. “Okay, Vic,” I said, turning to face the hover as it settled onto the street. “We’ll finish this up later.”

I glanced over my shoulder, but he was already gone, ten steps away from me and hustling, head down and eyes everywhere. I watched the hover come to grips with gravity, settling into an impressive hold about one foot off the street, the ground under me vibrating with a rapid, subtle rhythm. The three massive turrets mounted on the hover’s chassis were aimed at me, each one firing an armor-piercing shell about the size of my fist. I decided not to move. For a few moments it was a still life, me standing there and the hover just floating a few feet away, and then it slowly set itself on the street, neat as a pin, impressive flying. There was an electric sizzle in the air and a curt, electronically filtered voice boomed out in a low, reasonable volume that pinned my ears back against my skull.

“Approach the vehicle,” it suggested.

I sighed, looking around. As I walked over to the hover, I shook out a cigarette and put it in my mouth. I had the lighter in my hand when the hatch slid out and up, revealing a tiny cabin, big enough for maybe three or four people if they didn’t mind touching knees. In the tiny cockpit, separated from the cabin by a half wall, there were two men in the bright white uniforms of the shiny new System of Federated Nations Army. They looked like twins with their shaved heads, big mirrored sunglasses, and humorless expressions. You couldn’t tell by looking at them, but they were both Augmented to the hilt—night vision retinal grafts, ultrasonic auditory implants, bone-strengthening DNA treatments, Sleep-Deprivation Neuron Stimulators—shit, they were more gadget than human. The SFNA spared no expense, but they’d had to get up and running fast, and they’d skipped training in favor of the best Augments yen could buy, even though almost all those Augments were still illegal for regular citizens.

I leaned in and lit my cigarette, putting one hand on the hull for balance. You couldn’t afford to look weak, especially when every other person you saw on the street was probably plotting to kill you for reward money. “What can I do for you, buddy?” I said with a puff of smoke.

The copilot turned his head toward me for a moment, held those mirrors on me, and then looked straight ahead again. “Ruberto,” he said tonelessly, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. Sometimes I actually preferred the psionic whiz kids who made up the high bureaucracy of the civilian government. The Spooks were creepy with their ability to Push you into doing things or lift you off your feet with just a thought, but at least they weren’t half-robot and crammed full of designer DNA.

I took my cigarette from my mouth and squinted down at it. I didn’t have any choice, of course; Ruberto was sitting on top of the pyramid these days, and the turrets, I reminded myself, fired shells that would turn me into something resembling powdered milk. Besides, I wasn’t sure I wanted to resist—I needed out of Vegas, and here was the safest ride you could get.

Taking a deep drag from my cigarette, I flicked the butt into the air and swung myself into the rear of the cabin. “He have you flying all over the goddamn city this morning looking for me?” I said with a grin. Neither one responded. The hatch slid shut with a hiss of pressurization, and the hover immediately powered on, lurching up into the air.

I settled back in my seat and studied the symmetrical backs of their heads, a hole opening in my stomach as we rose into the air and then the slight push backward as the little hover leaped forward, cutting through the overheated air. It was cool inside the cabin, and I was about as safe as it got as long as we didn’t cross paths with any cops. The whole System was a patchwork of authority now, with things shifting slowly one way or another. New York had changed hands five or six times in the last year, from what I’d heard.

Ruberto was Undersecretary for the North American Department, of course, which was a lot of territory, but the front line in this hemisphere was pretty much Mexico and the Southwest, so he’d set up camp near Vegas, out in the desert. It was a short, quiet flight, and when my two new friends wordlessly opened the hatch again, we were on the roof of Ruberto’s temporary Southwest headquarters, a six-story building in the center of a Second Army encampment, powered by sixteen generators. It was airtight, climate controlled, earthquake resistant, and rumors said it had been built with walls thick enough to withstand a direct missile hit or two. They’d built it in six weeks, prefab.

I pulled myself out and stood on the roof for a moment, looking down at the camp, ringed by a tall chain-link fence. Ten thousand troops, divided among armored units and hover squads, all at Ruberto’s command. The camp went on and on, tiny people moving this way and that. I lit a fresh cigarette and contemplated having the power to just summon something like this out of thin air. Two years ago when I’d been scooped up and sent to Chengara, there hadn’t been a System Army—Earth was unified, after all. Ruberto and his fellow Undersecretaries waved their hands, and here the army was, as if it had always been.

I headed for the elevator, where a broad-shouldered black man with shiny, curly hair stood stiffly in a decent gray suit, deep sweat stains the only sign that he must have been suffering. I nodded at him, but he ignored me, gesturing the elevator doors closed and then just standing there with his big hands folded at his groin. We rode it down one floor in companionable silence. I studied him, and he studied the opposite wall of the cab, both of us sweating freely in the heavy air it had brought down from the roof, and when the doors split open again, admitting a blast of frozen air, I simply stepped into the foyer without a word.

Two soldiers with gleaming, polished sidearms stood on either side of the formidable-looking black door. They didn’t look at me or appear to move at all, even to breathe. I didn’t waste any time playing with them—I knew from experience there was nothing I could do to them that would get a reaction. I just blew smoke around and stepped up to the fingerprint scanner bolted in next to the door and jabbed my thumb onto it. After a moment it lit up green, and the door clicked open. I pushed it open just enough to slip through it.

It was frigid and white beyond the door, holographic projectors making the office appear to be snowbound, huge drifts of snow blown gently around by the wind. Springing up in the midst of this winter scene was a long white bar, without stools, that stretched off to my left, ruining the illusion. The wall across from me was a huge window, floor to ceiling, in front of which sat the only furniture in the room, a massive dark wooden desk, a plush-looking black leather chair gleaming behind it. Two deep upholstered chairs faced this, the sort of chairs you sank down into and never escaped. The sort of chairs you got killed in, struggling halfway up out of the pit before they got the wire around your neck, the knife into your belly, the gun against your skull.

There was no one else in the room. There was one other door off to the right of the desk, and I could hear water running. Ruberto loved his water. He had it hovered in every day from up north and used most of it in the fucking bathroom. Feeling gritty and suddenly chilled in the crank air, I reached over the bar and retrieved a bottle at random and one of Ruberto’s cube glasses, the glass thick and custom cut. I poured a few fingers of something brown into the glass and turned to lean back against the bar, swirling my drink around and enjoying the scene. If you stayed still and just used your eyes, the trick was pretty good.

The door opened, admitting a thick cloud of steam into the room, and then the Undersecretary himself emerged, a tall black man with a round head shaved close, his feet emerging from beneath a thick, white robe at a sharp angle to each other, duck feet. He was rubbing his head with an equally bright white towel, his belly jiggling impressively. I could smell him from where I was, like he was perfumed. The bit of chest exposed by the robe was puckered and scarred, an old wound that looked like it had taken years to heal completely.

“Ah,” he boomed, his voice deep, like it was coming up from the floor, like lava. “Good. I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

I pushed off from the bar as he headed for his desk. “I see you’re still a fat fuck.”

He laughed. Cal Ruberto’s laugh started in his belly and erupted upward until he threw his head back and let it burst out of him, his whole body shaking. He tossed the towel onto the desk and dropped heavily into the plush chair, sweeping his arm at the chairs across from him by way of invitation. I ignored him and sipped my drink: rum, it turned out.

“I enjoy that sort of ribbing,” the Undersecretary said, patting his midsection. “Keeps me honest. I started out in the force, did you know that? The SSF. I didn’t do well and mustered out. At any rate, I got quite used to friendly abuse. Police are a rough sort.” He glanced up at me. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, is there some sort of Gunner’s code that you can’t sit down?”

I shrugged, swirling my drink like I’d seen some of the swells in Vegas do it. “You going to tell me everyone who’s come into this office has walked out?”

His smile thinned out, and he leaned back, lacing his fingers across his stomach. “Someday we will have to teach you how to behave, my friend.”

I winked. “If I behaved, I wouldn’t be useful to you. Thanks for getting me out of Vegas.”

He looked down at his desk and began gesturing busily, the surface glowing softly with awakened data streams. “I didn’t do you any favors. I have a new assignment for you.”

“A new job offer, you mean,” I said, draining my glass and heading back for the bar. “I’m not on fucking salary, Cal. I take your jobs because you pay well. And I enjoy my work.”

Behind me, he chuckled, sounding distracted. “Of course. Now, would you kindly attend to me? I don’t have much time.”

I refilled my glass and knocked it back, tasting nothing. I could drink all day and not feel a thing. I filled it again anyway and took it with me back to the desk. “Go ahead, Cal. I won’t be much use to you in Vegas anymore, though. I’m burned in that town after the Russian.”

He didn’t look up from his desk, his fat hands moving in intricate patterns, his eyes following the glowing icons and text streams. “Not Vegas.” He suddenly looked up and smiled at me. “Rejoice, my friend! You’re going home.” His hands finally stopped, and he cocked his head as if considering something. “We are at war. With the police, the SSF. And, frankly, it’s not going as well as I would have hoped—it is taking too much time. So a drastic, dramatic act is required.” He looked down again, hands moving. “And I wouldn’t worry about being burned—if you pull this one off, despite your small role, you’ll be burned everywhere.”

I watched his hands in fascination. “Uh, yeah? Who is it?”

This time he did pause and look at me from under his thin eyebrows. He didn’t say anything for a second, and then he smiled a little—a tiny, cold smile that conveyed exactly the opposite of what smiles usually conveyed. “Dick Marin, my friend. The King Worm himself.”

IV

EVERYONE ELSE WAS JUST CROWD

“Oh, now, this is a fucking shame, a fucking shame,” Michaleen muttered, handing me a cigarette produced from some secret place as we watched Bartlett.

I accepted the cigarette wordlessly with a sweat-slick hand. I was already thirty-nine cigarettes in debt to Michaleen. Who knew where he got them from, and so far they’d been offered freely, but I was waiting for his pitch. Michaleen Garda was the name he’d given, and he had adopted me. Why the little man had so much pull in Chengara was still a mystery, since as far as I could tell, he was a funny little guy who kept book on anything with doubt in the outcome. But he pretty much ran the fucking prison.

Bartlett was a tall black guy, old but still in good shape. He stood in the middle of the yard, shirtless and shining with sweat, surrounded by a screaming crowd and taking on all comers. He turned his head a little and spat bright red blood onto the sandy ground, his swollen face twisted into a mask of purplish rage. He stared around at the crowd of inmates and extended his hand, curling his fingers in invitation. I could see his tormentors pretty clearly; the only one that caught my eye was the girl—tall and burned to a crispy red by the sun, which just made her body art look like complex veins of green rot crawling through her skin. She wasn’t pretty—no tits to speak of, and a nose that should have been broken a few more times in an attempt to get it back to its roots—but she was interesting, the way she’d sold off every acre of her skin for ink, all the way up to her neck and down to her ankles. Her face, unfortunately, was free and clear, and her broken, snaggly teeth crept out in a sneering grin far too often. She was wearing a pair of super-short pants and a top of stretchy material and nothing else, barefoot, her short, self-cut black hair tied up in several messy knots. I wanted to ask her what all the art meant, but I hadn’t gotten a formal introduction yet, and I didn’t know if she was the sort to kick you in the balls for asking.

Everyone else was just crowd.

“Come on!” Bartlett shouted, his hoarse voice like molten lead bubbling up out of that barrel-chested body. “Come on, you fuckin’ dogs!”

I leaned over and let Michaleen light my cigarette. “The Pig’s got heart,” I said. “You got to admit it.”

“Fucking cop has heart, yes, yes.” Michaleen nodded, lighting his own cigarette, his sharp eyes squinted and hidden beneath his bushy white eyebrows. “Heart indeed. I have no sympathy for the System Police, you know, Avery, but this is uncivilized. No one can take on five hundred men and live. They want the cop dead? Fine, fine—but do it civilized-like, you see?”

I nodded. I agreed in principle. Bartlett had been a captain in the System Security Force, burned for some unknown crime against Internal Affairs—the Worms, the cops called them. For some reason known only to Dick Marin and his gear-and-silicone brain, Bartlett had been sent here instead of just being killed. Though the way things were going, it was going to turn out to be pretty much the same thing. I held Michaleen’s cigarette in front of me as we sat on the dirt, watching the festivities.

“You want to help him out?” I suggested, curious where the little man was going with this. “You think he needs some friends?”

The little man turned and offered me a comically horrified face. “Help out a fucking Pig, man, are you insane?” He jerked his head toward Bartlett, who’d fought six men bare fisted so far and put them all down, and now stood panting and sweating, arms up weakly while the crowd voted who took him on next. “Whatever he did to bring Marin’s ire down on him, that’s on him, eh?”

I shrugged, looking around. “Okay.”

Chengara wasn’t much of a prison, I didn’t think. It was basically a huge yard surrounded by admittedly high walls. In the middle were two simple, cinder block buildings: a big cavernous one filled with cots and some tables where we lived, and a smaller one where the administration offices were. I’d never been inside the smaller one, which was a pretty formidable-looking structure, complete with some serious security systems—it didn’t even have windows. Each corner of the wall had a guard tower, where a single Crusher was always stationed with a high-powered rifle. The only thing that made Chengara hard to get out of was the desert. Just sitting there next to Michaleen, the heat was wearing me down, beating me into the ground. We received a nutrition tab and four pints of water every day, which meant we were all more or less dying very slowly as we baked in the sun—the idea of walking any distance without more water, food, or shelter was madness.

“You’re a bloody pill, Cates, you is. You want to help the Pig? Go ahead.” He swept a tiny hand around the yard. “No one’s stopping you.”

I shrugged. “It’s a fair fight,” I said. “He takes his chances, just like the rest of us.”

“Very wise, kiddo. That’s what I heard when I heard the name Cates, out of New York: Smart. Smarter than your average Gunner at least, which maybe ain’t saying so much.”

I nodded absently. Michaleen liked to talk. I was already bored with listening to him all the time. He was an endless stream of information, though, about the prison; over the last few days he’d filled me in on the way things were in Chengara Penitentiary. He’d told me there was no program or schedule—the Crushers barely appeared, and if they did, they did so in force, overwhelming and unforgiving—that we were more or less left to shift for ourselves, with no work, no activities, no structured time at all. And he’d told me that if you misbehaved enough to bring the Crushers out of their hidey-holes, you were carted off to solitary. And so far no one had ever returned from solitary.

“Let me ask you something, Mickey?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shift and squint; he didn’t like being called Mickey. “Certainly, Mr. Cates,” he said, exhaling smoke through his wide, flat nose. “I am at yer service.”

“Why are you treating me like your long-lost son? Ever since I got here you’ve been fucking glad-handing me.”

He sat smoking, and I turned my attention back to Bartlett, giving the little man time to consider his answer. A new champion had been elected from the crowd, a broad-shouldered white guy with the flabby look of an Augment junkie who’d been away from his stabilizer meds, long dirty hair hanging down past his shoulders. He looked like he smelled pretty bad, and I considered it a rare talent to look like you smelled a certain way. The crowd of identical orange jumpsuits was shouting a hundred things at once as Bartlett watched the new guy circle around him, waiting for the first move.

As I watched, something in the longhair’s hand glinted brightly in the sun, and I narrowed my eyes, my heart picking up speed. He was taunting the ex-cop, circling around like a moon caught in the black man’s orbit, but he was keeping his hands down and back a little. I saw the glint again and struggled to my feet, my bad leg reluctant to move. I plucked the cigarette from my mouth and walked in my uneven roll toward the scrum, trying to will some life back into the leg, some flexibility. The longhair kept circling and shouting abuse, a fucking punk, trying to look tough but afraid to lean in and start it off unless he saw an opening for him to use the shiv. The crowd got louder as I got closer, and when I reached its outer perimeter, I took one last deep drag off the cigarette and tossed it aside, grabbing two shoulders in my hands and pushing my way through.

As I stepped into the empty space around the two men, the crowd noise died off, collapsing into a low murmur and then whipped away by the dry wind. The sun was like a lamp held over my head, an inch away, burning a circle onto the thin skin of my skull.

The punk noticed the silence just as I got to him and half turned as I reached out to grab his arm. He cursed in some language I didn’t understand, all consonants and clearing his throat, and tried to dance back from me. I caught hold of his jumpsuit and yanked, smacking my fist into his stomach as hard as I could and snatching at his wrist as I let go of his suit. His breath exploded out of him with a grunt and he tried to go down to his knees, but I twisted him around—liking the familiar feel of the move, like pieces of me dropping back into place—until his arm was bent back toward me and he was hanging from his wrist. I reached up and took the shiv from his weak grasp, a pretty thing made from a piece of sharpened stone and some dark, coarse fabric.

He smelled as bad as I’d expected.

I leaned down and put my mouth next to his ear. “You want to fight, you fight,” I said, panting. “You pull a pot sticker like this, you better be sure no one can take it away from you.” I gave his arm a yank, and he screamed, dropping limply to the ground when I released him. I turned, and there was Bartlett, staring down at me. He was fucking enormous. I’d never seen a bigger un-Augmented man in my life.

“Thanks,” he said, a grunt of a word, and spat at my feet, just missing my cracked boots.

I looked him up and down. Behind him, I could see a fresh trainload of Interesting People being unloaded behind the thick, electrified chain-link fence, including a tall, fragile-looking old woman with white hair cut very close to her pink scalp, her face deeply wrinkled, her eyes tiny, unhappy slits. Her black coat was too heavy and looked expensive, though it had seen some rough treatment on the train. For a second I imagined our eyes met, though at that distance it was impossible to tell, and I thought I recognized her—a face from the Vids. She was ancient and looked like a strong wind would blow her away, but in that instant I had an impression of strength that disturbed me. I wasn’t used to old ladies freaking me out.

“Fuck you,” I said to the cop without looking back at him, and stepped around. The crowd didn’t exactly part, but it was easier getting through it the second time. As I walked back to Michaleen, I examined the homemade knife and liked it—it was light and looked lethal, decently balanced, and easy to hide. I slipped it into the big pocket of my jumpsuit and resumed my seat next to the little man. A new combatant had already stepped forward, and Bartlett was beating him to a pulp with brutal, red-eyed efficiency.

Michaleen turned to squint at me, his fleshy face folded up into a mask of perplexity that was almost amusing. “That was an odd decision, Mr. Cates,” he said.

I shrugged. “He deserves to get killed in a fair fucking fight,” I said, accepting yet another cigarette as it was held out for me. “Besides, I spent years killing cops, and look where it got me.” I ignored the proffered lighter and slid the cigarette behind my ear. “Maybe I’ll see what happens when I save their lives.”

“Well, you’ve brought attention onto yourself, ain’t you?” he said after a moment. “You’ve led a blessed life, Avery, my boy—not a lot of prison time logged. Let me give you a lesson: attention’s the last thing you ever want.”

“I don’t learn easy,” I said with a sigh, feeling tired, sweating freely. Fuck his tiny air of midget wisdom.

The little man cackled. “Oy, that’s right, ain’t it, ain’t it. No one tells the great Gunner what to do, eh?” He sobered and looked down at his feet. “Which is why, Mr. Cates, I ain’t gonna tell you to do anything. I’m gonna ask you to listen to a proposition.”

I cocked my head but didn’t look at him. This was it; this was the pitch. I had a feeling my first three days in Chengara had been softened quite a bit by Michaleen, in unseen ways. I was interested to see what he thought all that was worth.

“What can I do for you, Michaleen?”

“Oh,” he sputtered. “What can you do for me, you murderous bastard. Why, you can help me break out of this shithole. That’s what you can do for me.”

V

HARD PEOPLE DOING A HARD JOB

I awoke suddenly, opening my eyes and completely online in a split second. It was always like that now; I’d never been a heavy sleeper—heavy sleepers woke up with empty pockets and slit throats—but now I lit up from a complete blackout kind of slumber like a switch had been flicked. I’d gotten paranoid back in prison, where I’d been a pretty popular target, but I didn’t think I’d ever get used to it.

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” I heard Ruberto say. “Did I tell you this guy could sleep? If I had that much blood on my hands, I would lie awake screaming all night. Mr. Cates shuts down like he doesn’t have a worry in his head.”

I blinked around. I was sitting in a comfortable leather seat that spun silently in response to any shift in weight. As I was turned around, I saw I was in a sumptuous hover cabin done up to resemble a luxurious hotel room—wood paneling on the walls, expensive furniture bolted into place, low music in the air. When the two men came into my view, I stared at them stupidly for a few seconds before I recognized Ruberto, sitting plump and primped in a beautiful pink suit behind a tiny built-in desk, his fucking lady hands still moving in silent, complex patterns over his work space.

The other man I’d never seen before. He was deeply tan, with shiny black hair cropped close to his head except for the top, which flopped around in an uneven wave. He was tall, too, uncomfortably squeezed into the seat, his legs stretched out as far as he could get them. His suit was dark blue and just as snazzy, a few ten thousand yen of fabric on his back shimmering in the light, and he wore several gold rings on his long, slow-looking fingers. He had a familiar young-old look about him, and piercing, unblinking eyes that were familiar to me. A psionic, I decided. I’d seen enough of them to know, and they all worked for the civilian government—the Spooks. For a moment we sat and stared at each other.

“Maybe he cries himself to sleep,” the psionic said.

I smiled. “I cried, once. Didn’t enjoy it.”

This earned me a smirk, which I also didn’t like much.

“We are currently over Ohio,” Ruberto said distractedly, not looking up. “We will be near New York City in about half an hour.” He looked up at me from under his eyebrows. “Can’t get you too close, unfortunately. Director Marin owns New York, and we won’t get into its airspace without an incident. Neely, give our boy the rundown.”

Neely and I looked at each other again. I didn’t recall agreeing to the job, but of course, I had: I’d been hoping to have a shot at Dick Marin for years. Problem was, most of the Dick Marins you ran into on the street were avatars, Droids with digital brains, controlled like smart puppets from diverse locations. I didn’t even know if there was a real, human Richard Marin left or if he was totally digital. You could kill hundreds of Marins and he’d still be there, like mold.

“This is the guy?” Neely said, staring at me. “He looks like a fucking slug, boss.”

Ruberto smiled down at his desk. “Play nice, please.”

Neely shrugged, arching his thick black eyebrows. The hum of the hover was lulling, a steady rhythm that tugged at you. “Okay,” he said, turning back to me. “Marin is the cops, right?

I mean, we don’t have anything against the System Security Force—good people, just about every one of them.”

I smiled wide. “Speak for yourself,” I advised.

“Hard people doing a hard job,” Ruberto murmured softly, like he was cooing to his lap desk.

Neely spread his huge, supple hands, the sort of hands that would be good at strangling you. “It’s Marin. He’s the poison. He’s the problem here. He’s fucking power mad—excuse my language, boss.”

Ruberto nodded absently.

“He thinks he got elected mayor of the whole fucking System,” Neely went on, shooting his cuffs and shrugging his shoulders inside his expensive suit. “Cut that motherfucker’s head off, and the cops go back to just bein’ cops, right? Sorry again, boss.”

I leaned forward, putting my elbows on my knees. “You can’t kill Marin,” I said slowly. “You kill him, three more crawl out of the shadows to shoot at you.”

Ruberto chuckled, but Neely just gave me those blank eyes. “Right, if you go after the fucking avatars like an asshole.” He leaned over to his side and extracted a sheet of shiny electric paper from a thin briefcase. He handed it over to me, the sheet catching the light and reflecting a shimmering silver back at me. As I took it in my numb hands, it made a metallic, flexible noise, the print blurring and refreshing at odd angles. I snapped it back into shape but didn’t look at it, keeping my attention on Neely, who was the sort of guy who lunged at you when you were distracted.

“You need to go after the Prime,” he said, nodding at the sheet. “Kill the Prime, and every fucking avatar on the streets of the System will hit the bricks.”

“Problem solved,” Ruberto said, nodding his head slightly.

“The avatars have a complete template of the controlling intelligence, of course,” Neely said. “But they don’t have any kind of real-time backup—they’re flat templates. Snapshots. Everything gets fed back to the Prime, and the Prime issues all the commands. The avatars can function on their own, of course, but without the Prime there is no coordination. You’d suddenly have a thousand Director Marins scattered everywhere, little puddles of authority.”

“Chaos,” Ruberto murmured.

“Anarchy,” Neely echoed.

I glanced down at the sheet, flipping through the specifications quickly with curt gestures. “Why can’t you go after the Prime remotely? Hack it?”

“Independent network,” Ruberto muttered, hands moving delicately.

“Independent network,” Neely echoed, spreading his hands, jewelry flashing. “Dedicated infrastructure; unique handshakes and encryption; heavy-duty, rolling security. The rest of the System could go dark, and Marins would still be running around. Marin doesn’t share bandwidth. You have to take out the Prime.” He leaned back. “Take out the Prime, and the SSF is headless.”

“Order is restored,” Ruberto said quietly.

“Problem solved,” Neely finished.

We all sat there in silence for a moment. I flipped through the specs again. “This Prime unit is in Moscow. Fucking Russia?” I was never going to be free of the Ivans.

Neely nodded. “Fucking Moscow. SSF HQ is New York; Marin decided it was best if Internal Affairs was headquartered as far away as possible. The Kremlin was fortified during Unification; it’s as tough a nut to crack as you’ll find, so he settled in there, when he’s not on the move.”

“A man after my own heart,” Ruberto muttered.

My eyes kept sweeping the sheet. “That’s a huge storage and UPS. I’ve never seen an uninterrupted power supply that heavy.”

“The Prime is not mobile,” Neely said immediately. “Its hardware demands keep it stationary.”

I nodded and looked back at them. Ruberto was smiling and nodding his round head a little, as if something on his desktop amused him a great deal. Neely had his dark little eyes locked on me, those brutal hands steepled in front of him. Fucking government. They all thought they were civilization itself, salvation in human form—the cops, the Undersecretaries, and now their fucking flunkies the Spooks. They were all just gangsters.

“How do I kill the Prime, then?”

Neely gave me a flat, unimpressed stare. “You can’t just waltz in, put a bullet into some black box, and that’s it. The Prime is a fucking complex, it’s a building unto itself, several floors below ground. Server banks, big pieces of tech. Generators, signal boosters, an army of Techies. The Prime is Moscow, practically. There’s, of course, ancillary security.” He shrugged. “In the form of his Worms, the Internal Affairs elite officers. The Worms.”

“Also avatars,” Ruberto said softly.

“Also avatars,” Neely agreed without expression, his dead eyes staring at me. I stared back for a moment, the words hanging there between us.

“Excuse me?”

“That’s what Marin’s doing. That’s what this is all about,” Ruberto said, his eyes popping open while the rest of him remained perfectly still. Around us, the whine of displacement shifted down a bit, which meant we were near our destination. “That fucking insane dictator is making the System Security Force into an army of avatars—digital intelligences ripped right out of the brains of real, actual cops. He can mass-produce copies, each one with all the skills and memories of the original. Plus —”

“Programming,” Neely said.

“Programming,” Ruberto echoed. “They’re like the original cops—look the same, act the same—but the fucking maniac can insert instructions into their templates. So not only are his cops—his fucking army of cops—inexhaustible and replaceable, but he can control them.”

“This is what the prick’s doing,” Neely interjected.

“We estimate that about half the force has so far been transformed,” Ruberto said, suddenly standing up, his plump little body almost bouncing as he began to pace, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. “This is what we’re fighting against. He has displayed bad faith.”

Neely stared at me for a moment, silent. I looked around, knowing this was not going to end well for me. They weren’t going to send any of their own into the saw blade—why not send Cates? We keep throwing him into the fire, and he somehow crawls out.

“So the Prime is the installation,” I said slowly, feeling my way through it. “It’s not just a single fancy avatar. It’s the whole fucking—what, building? City block? City?” Silently, I fervently hoped they did not tell me Marin’s Prime was an entire fucking city.

“The Kremlin,” Ruberto said, sounding distracted as he paced. “The whole building,” Neely offered. “Whole thing has to be fucking nuked to take him out.”

“We’re launching an offensive to take Moscow,” Ruberto said briskly, returning to his seat. “The general staff is not optimistic. Moscow’s defenses are extensive, and it’s historically been a tough nut to crack.”

I took his word for that.

“So you’re insurance,” Neely finished. “We’ll try to get in, bomb the fucking place to hell. In case we can’t, you go in, tear him down local.”

It was curious, how stupid they thought I was. “And if I’m sitting there with my thumb up my ass when you break through the lines and start bombing?”

“You are being compensated,” Ruberto said, sounding exasperated. They always thought it was all about yen.

Neely smiled as if it were all settled. “Marin’s in the process of converting his cops into avatars,” he said. “It’s not complete yet. He’s started with the street cops and now he’s moving into the upper ranks—and he hasn’t touched the Technical Associates at all. He’s worried.”

“The spark,” Ruberto said, standing up.

“Whatever,” Neely said, sitting forward and clasping his hands in front of himself. “He’s moving slow, being careful. This guy, name’s Gall”—he reached over and tapped the sheet of paper, making it shimmer—“is in charge of Marin’s Kremlin security. Internal Affairs, old-school, one of Marin’s original recruits. Draws a lot of water, gets a lot of leeway from Marin, and pretty much does what he wants. He gets around, has his fingers in a lot of pies, most illegal, but Marin gives him a pass. You name it, this bastard does it: protection schemes —”

“Large scale,” Ruberto said, pacing.

“On a huge scale. Political favors, fuck, he even bodyguards VIPs for a million yen a week. This guy directs all Kremlin security. Get to him. That’s step one. Get to him before Marin tin cans him, and you’ll know everything there is to know about the security situation.”

I studied the digipaper for a moment. A big-shot Worm, all right, living the high life. Not easy work. I snapped the sheet again and the data flowed up from the bottom, his public SSF record—more fucking redactions than text—a grainy old picture that almost looked pre-Unification.

“You in, Cates?” Neely spread his big hands, each finger like a limb of its own. “I know you suffered terribly in prison, ass-rape and silent, private tears and all that shit. You don’t have the nerve for this, just say so.”

Ruberto crossed over to stand behind Neely and put a hand on the sitting man’s shoulder. “Trust me, Neely, this man has done amazing, terrible things. This is our man.”

I looked up at the fat Undersecretary, numb and feeling one of my fuzzy moments coming on like glue filling my head. “Why are we going to New York if my mark’s in Moscow?”

“Gall is in constant motion; we don’t know exactly where he’ll be,” Neely snapped, sounding impatient. “You’ll need to make contact, get some fucking intelligence, not just go tearing ass into the wilderness.”

Ruberto looked down at his small feet for a moment, then directly at me. “Well, what do you say? I realize this is a bit more complex than our usual arrangements, and once you’re behind their lines in New York, we can offer you no more direct resources, unfortunately. Here and there we may be able to pass information or other aid to you, but it will be unpredictable.”

“The fucking cops kill our people when they find them,” Neely said. “But there’s one name we can give you: Krajian. Cop, but she’s clued in on what Marin’s doing —”

“First the cops, then everyone,” Ruberto said. “All of us, taking the King Worm’s invisible orders.”

“— And she ain’t happy about it. We don’t manage her as an asset, so you take your chances, you contact her. But it’s all we can give you for now, as long as the city’s basically under siege.”

“So!” Ruberto snapped, suddenly jolly. “Name your fee. This is an unusual assignment. Name your fee for your assistance.”

I looked from Ruberto to Neely and back again as the hover began to slow. I figured my odds of death had just shot up tremendously, but felt nothing. “My fee? Shit, Cal, if this puts Marin in a grave, I’ll do it for free.”

Neither of them seemed surprised.

VI

A HEAVY BOLT OF FABRIC STRETCHED ALL AROUND US, SUFFOCATING

I was dying of thirst, and I was about to be stabbed.

I hadn’t been in prison since I’d been a kid, three months in a juvie center in New York a lifetime ago, before the rules had changed removing the juvenile distinction. I’d been lucky, then, caught out by some loafing Crushers instead of some hardcase System Pig—it was the difference between juvie and just being beaten to death, or worse. It had been easy time, and I’d made my first big-deal contacts back then, older kids on the cusp who introduced me around, put the first knife in my hand, pointed me at someone’s jugular and the big money. Easy as it had been, there’d been chores, and bored Crushers with electric prods to get your ass in motion, and I’d gone to bed every night sore and exhausted from cleaning the fucking bathrooms until they glowed and a million other backbreaking chores.

Chengara Penitentiary was something completely unexpected. I’d been in-house for a week and so far hadn’t been given a single chore, command, or beating. There were Crushers around, sure, but we only saw them when something went seriously off the rails, when a riot seemed to be brewing. Then they were everywhere, all at once, but only as long as it took to get things back in order, and then poof! They were gone again.

Mainly, they used water to keep us quiet.

The heat was like a heavy bolt of fabric stretched all around us, suffocating. Twice a day we got our nutrition tab and water ration. We lined up, meek and quiet, took our share, and did our best to make it last, to make it seem like it was enough. It wasn’t. It was just below enough, making us all shrink. And when we acted up, the next ration got canceled, and you spent a sleepless night feeling your own body chewing on itself. In my week it had happened twice, and already I’d been trained to just get on line and keep my mouth shut.

Meanwhile, there was no work detail, no required activity, no schedule at all aside from the dole. We lounged around, we got into fights, we worked a primitive economy, and we talked a lot about the jobs we’d pull when we got out, and the Crushers let us. As long as we didn’t cause too much trouble, they let us do whatever we wanted and didn’t seem to care.

I eyed my two admirers while the dole line moved forward a step. In front of me were five or six soft-looking middle-agers, two men and a woman in their thirties who’d aged considerably since arriving, their faces haggard, their posture slumped. They wore their jumpsuits like they hurt them. When they’d arrived a week before they’d been plump and sleek, if a bit ruffled. Politicos, support staff for some Undersecretary—now just People of Interest, like the rest of us. It was the strangest prison I’d ever heard of, but some things were universal, like having people who wanted to kill me.

The skinny Asian kid who’d jumped me off the train and the long-haired asshole I’d disarmed out in the yard a few days ago had made friends and were out of line a dozen feet ahead of me. They leaned against the wall in their bright orange suits, staring at me. When I’d first noticed them, I’d been incredulous—was their plan really to just stand there waiting for me to come within reach and then jump me? It seemed impossible. The line moved a foot at a time toward the little booth where the single Crusher stood, taking his damned time about issuing each prisoner’s ration. I kept my hands in my jumpsuit’s pockets, one wrapped around the shiv I’d taken from the longhair, the other curled into a fist.

The line lurched forward, and suddenly someone was at my side. Since he only came up to my elbow, I knew it was Michaleen, and didn’t even look down at him.

“Fucking morons,” I muttered. “You see this?”

It was amazing how quickly I’d taken to the little man. His wrinkled, loose face was folded around an unlit cigarette, as usual, and his hairy, short arms disappeared into the deep pockets of his own jumpsuit. “The youth of today,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a fuckin’ tragedy.”

I nodded. “Give me some room, Mickey.”

He pulled one short arm from his suit and laid a calloused, gentle hand on my arm. “Not here, Avery, not here. You can get away with a lot, but you don’t fuck with the dole. Copy? They get all bent out of shape if you mess with the dole. You fellows start a scrum down here and you’ll end up in solitary.”

I turned my head until my neck cracked. I couldn’t just let it go. I was an old man, and I’d been pinched. If I started to walk away from fights, I was as good as dead. “I can handle solitary.”

“Avery,” Michaleen said in a low, intense voice. “Listen to me. I’ve been here in this fucking hell a long time. No one ever comes back from solitary.”

I took my eyes from the geniuses and put them on Michaleen’s upturned face. I wondered how exactly he’d managed to remain here a long time. Everyone else seemed to be here on a strictly temporary basis. He gestured and a stooped, round-shouldered man with peppery hair and nervous, quick eyes that tried to be everywhere at once stepped forward.

“Avery, this is Guy,” the little man said, pronouncing it, unfortunately, as Gee with a hard g. “He was in the banking line until a few weeks ago, when the Pigs plucked him outta his plush little apartment in Washington. He’s graciously agreed to take your place in line and collect your ration in exchange for some… considerations.”

Guy didn’t look at me, though he flinched away from me as if I’d made a move at him. “And you said I’d be protected on line,” he whispered.

“Yes, yes,” Michaleen said soothingly. “No one’ll touch you because I say not to. Now, you’ve heard of the right honorable Avery Cates, yes? So you know what happens if you screw him out of his ration, yes?” He leaned in to mock-whisper in Guy’s ear and winked at me. “Here’s a hint, boyo: he kills people. Yes?” The little man slapped him on the shoulder and waggled his eyebrows at me. “Okay?”

I glanced at the geniuses again, still glaring at me with undiminished hatred. Where’d they get the energy? How in the world did they just keep it up like that? I wasn’t where I’d been back in the ruined shell of Pickering’s when the cops had picked me up—I’d come back up for air. But I still wanted to nap half the fucking time, just let everything wash over me.

“Why do I want to leave the line, Mickey?” I said, letting the knife slip from my hand inside my pocket. “I like it here.” I realized that I was still holding on to one thing from the Plague, from shuffling through the burned remains of New York: I didn’t care about dying. Everything else had come back to me, but I thought of dying and felt nothing.

Michaleen nodded as if he agreed with everything I’d said, wholeheartedly and without reservation. “We’re havin’ a meeting, concerning the escape project.”

He started walking away at as brisk a pace as his short legs would take him, and I cursed a little under my breath, stepping out of the line to follow him. “All right,” I muttered, falling into step beside him. “All fucking right, you little runt, is this question-and-answer time? We’re gonna talk?” A lump of corrosive anger formed in my belly, suddenly there fully formed. I reached out and grabbed the little guy by the shoulder. He paused and… almost moved, his body twitching familiarly beneath my grip. Then he went still and closed his eyes.

“All right,” he said after a moment, opening them again and looking at me. “All right, Avery. You are irritated, I can see. Let’s have a quick chat then, on our way to the others.”

I stared down at him. I’d had the craziest feeling—an instinct, feral and speechless—that he’d been about to turn on me, to come after me. A man two feet shorter than me, a hundred pounds lighter. Thirty years older, if not more. For a second, every alarm in my head had lit up bright and worried, and it didn’t make sense—I wasn’t worried about Michaleen. I could fit Michaleen in my fucking pocket.

We looked at each other for a long moment. It was a familiar flat stare, one I’d shared a million times: Michaleen was a pro. He was an old hand, and suddenly, we understood each other perfectly. I let my eyes slip past him, and there was the old woman I’d seen arriving the other day, sitting fiercely erect at one of the bare metal tables provided. Her hair was mussed, standing up crazily in several directions, but she didn’t look too bad for an old bag in prison. She was smoking a cigarette and looking right back at me. I still couldn’t place her face.

“All right,” I said, nodding and looking back at Michaleen. “Let’s go.” He turned to start walking, and I put my hand out again, once more feeling him stiffen in that oddly familiar, primal way, like he was forcing himself to stay calm, let it pass. I grinned suddenly. I wanted to see this little man go apeshit. I wanted very badly to see what the old bastard could do.

“No more fucking cigarettes,” I said. “I’m not your fucking performing monkey, and I’m not being trained to drool every time you whip one out, okay? If I’m in, I’m in for myself.”

He stood there for another moment and then nodded, turning his familiar, fake-as-hell grin on me. I saw through it now. His eyes were hard and dead, even if his face was twisted up comically. “All righty, then, Mr. Cates. You fucking owe me three packs of good cigarettes. You can work it off, eh?”

“Fine. Why are you my best friend, Mickey?”

There was some movement behind my shoulder, and I cursed myself for turning my back on my two fans. As I started to hunch down and move my shoulder to take whatever impact was coming, Mickey dived under my arm.

The tall, skinny prick from the train was right behind us. A grin spread across his face as Mickey stepped up to him, but the little man didn’t hesitate or say anything, lashing out a solid punch right at the kid’s balls with one calloused hand. The kid’s breath shot out of him, and he bent over double with a grunt, cupping his crotch. Michaleen slapped an arm around his neck and jerked him up, hooking one little leg around one of the kid’s and bending him backward harshly. The kid seemed to swallow his own tongue, his face instantly turning a shade of purple I found worrying.

“Lad,” Mickey said in a calm voice, not sounding out of breath at all. “I see your shadow again today, and you won’t be waking up tomorrow, eh? If you understand me, roll your pretty eyes for me.”

The kid’s eyes began rotating spastically. Mickey nodded and released him in a graceful motion, spinning away as the kid, hacking and coughing, fell to the floor like a sack of shit. The whole thing had lasted ten seconds and produced almost no noise or fuss. I stared at the kid, replaying the scene—it had been a professional little takedown, the sort of ballet moves that took skill and lots of practice. Michaleen, I realized without too much surprise, was a fucking dangerous man, and I felt like clown shoes next to him.

And then the little bastard was on the move, and I had to hurry a bit to catch up.

He led me out into the yard. The Crushers on the towers were distant, but I could feel their tiny eyes on me. My second day some asshole who referred to herself as a Master Thief, whatever the fuck that was, started scaling one of the walls like a fucking insect, somehow finding cracks in the mortar and clinging to it, rising up incredibly fast. One of the Crushers had taken his time, making a show of setting the rifle against his shoulder and taking aim, and then the Master Thief’s skull had exploded silently, a neat little plume of red. She’d left a nice red stain on the wall. It was brown and flaky now, slowly eroded by the endless sandy wind.

“Didja know your father at all, son?”

This with breathless casualness, like it had just occurred to him. A thrill went through me, and I grinned at the air in front of me.

“He’s dead,” I said. “This I know for a fact, so don’t tell me you’re my dear old pa, okay?”

He laughed—and I thought it was probably the first real laugh I’d ever heard the little bastard allow, his head shooting back and his shoulders rolling joyfully. “Oh, Mr. Cates, I got hundreds of ’em. Bastards, I mean. I been doin’ my part. But”—he bent over briefly, guffawing, staggering as he walked—“but none of ’em are as fucking gigantic as you, yeah?”

I couldn’t stop a smile from twitching onto my face. “All right. What about him?”

He straightened up, wiping one surprisingly small hand down his face. “I knew him, a little. Not long and not deep, but I knew ol’ Aubrey.”

The thrill kept vibrating within me, becoming a buzzing electrical current making my skin itch. I had very few memories of my father. I remembered him in a greasy black uniform, a waste disposal worker, and I remembered him shrinking in a huge hospital bed, getting smaller every time I looked at him. A few other random things—him drinking beer from a bottle, a fucking bottle. Him laughing, missing one tooth. Him screaming at my mother, once, terrifying. That was it. “Bullshit,” I said. “He worked. He had a job.”

“Shit, Avery—before Unification, everyone worked. At something.” He waved one hand in front of him. “I’m not saying we exchanged love letters and shared our deepest souls. Our paths crossed. We shared the neighborhood for a while. That’s all. I just wanted to say, he was a good man, Avery. Every son deserves to hear that. He had his opportunities to turn away and sink low, and he resisted.”

I swallowed thickly. “And?”

He sighed. “Where I come from, Avery—the time, you understand—knowing someone from the neighborhood meant something. It was a bond. It wasn’t just a grudging greeting when you passed in the street, it was being from the same area.”

My mind was suddenly racing, flipping through my small stash of memories. “You don’t sound local to me,” I said, licking my dry lips.

“I didn’t say I was born there, Avery. Anyway, I can’t convince ya of shit if you’re suspicious. Just wanted you to know. You want to know why you. Two reasons. The first is because I knew yer people, okay? I ain’t leavin’ you behind, Avery, and I ain’t gonna stand by while Aubrey Cates’s son gets his brains sucked out of his skull, okay?” He looked down at the dirt for a moment, grimacing, and then glanced up, sunny again. “Now, here we are.”

I wanted to ask him questions, to grill him about it all, the fucking liar. Because I wanted to believe him. But he’d stopped purposefully where three other prisoners sat baking. A few pockets of prisoners sat around here and there in the sun, sucking down their water rations, chewing their nutrition tabs, looking weak and dejected. Every day weaker and more dejected, I guessed. Nearby, the cop, Bartlett, sat gleaming, his jumpsuit undone to his waist, his torso and face a maze of fresh scars and ugly, purple bruises. We looked at each other as I approached but said nothing.

The two of us stood there for a moment with nothing but the sun burning us to ash and the hot, heavy wind pushing lethargically against us. I wasn’t impressed. The toughest one of the trio was definitely the illustrated girl I’d noticed before. Her ink was faded and blurred, amateur prison work all of it, but it was colorful and it was everywhere. Birds and dragons with long, stretched-out feathers of green and red and gold intertwined with each other, circling around her limbs and up her torso to her neck, where actual figures were abandoned for a more monotone set of bluish patterns that crawled up and disappeared beneath her short, dark hair. Only her face, sharp and angular, was spared. She was scrawny-thin and looked older, I guessed, than she actually was.

She eyed me up and down in a frankly sexual way that made me a little nervous, lingering on my crotch with a raised eyebrow. I gave her a steady look until she brought her eyes back up to my face, but then she held my gaze with no hint of worry until I looked away. She reminded me of the tough broads that had always hung out in Pickering’s in the good old days. I felt like I knew her immediately.

Sitting on the hard-packed sandy ground a little removed from her were two others. The first was a skinny older man in affected, ancient wire eyeglasses. One of the lenses was cracked, and he looked about as tough as a flower.

“This is Grigoriy, Avery,” Michaleen said.

The old man grinned. “Call me Grisha.”

I grinned back. “Fuck, what in hell did you do to get in here?”

“I stole some things,” he said in a thick Russian accent. He smiled at the floor. “They would like them returned but cannot get to them.” He tapped his head.

To the side, Bartlett suddenly guffawed, rich laughter booming into the still air. We all ignored him. He was a burned System

Pig in a prison. He was already a ghost, and we were treating him accordingly.

A Techie, I thought. Hell, the old man’s putting together a team. Like he’d been hired to do a job.

“Grigoriy also has a knack with explosives. I see you’ve introduced yourself to Marlena Niks,” Michaleen continued, gesturing at the illustrated girl. She twitched and a knife was in her hand, a real knife, smuggled in somehow. She danced it across her knuckles once, showing off perfect balance, and then it disappeared again. I nodded, more impressed that she’d gotten it inside than with her bullshit tricks.

“I’ve heard of you,” I said, memory blooming. “Niks, out of Philly. Call you Skinner. A Taker—you find people.”

She grinned. “People who don’t want to be found. Wanna fuck?”

Michaleen and I ignored her with the same slight tick of our heads, turning to regard the third of the little man’s recruits, a young black girl who was lying back on her elbows, basking, her dark skin gleaming with sweat. Like Bartlett, she’d stripped down her jumpsuit to the waist, unconcerned about her tiny, bare breasts. She looked like she’d last eaten about a year ago and held herself with an exaggerated carelessness that told me she was terrified.

“And this is the Christian,” Michaleen said. “I don’t know her real fucking name. She’s —”

“She’s our Snake,” I said, eyeing her skinny, flexible body. I let the question of why Michaleen thought he needed someone skilled at squirming through small openings and getting out of locked rooms drift, and kicked the kid lightly. “What’s your name?”

The Christian opened one eye and studied me for a moment, then closed it again and stretched luxuriously.

“She don’t talk,” Michaleen said. “Only heard her once, and she was fucking praying. To god.”

I nodded at her. I’d never met anyone who believed in a god before. “What are you? Catholic?” It was a word I’d heard, long ago, in ancient times. Had it been my mother? A female voice. Catholic.

She just stared at me. I gave her a few seconds and then sighed. “All right,” I said, losing patience. “You want to break out of this hellhole. Fine. You’ve got yourself a Taker to steal necessaries and find out info for you, a Techie to hack security systems, and a Snake to get inside tight spaces—pretty fucking handy for an escape, and glory be it’s like a fucking criminal hall of fame in this place, so recruiting’s easy.” I jerked my thumb back at myself. “I’m old and stiff, I don’t move fast anymore, I need a lot of space, and I don’t make friends easy. Why am I here?”

Michaleen smiled, putting a cigarette into his mouth, his eyes dead and flat as always. “Well, shit, Avery. That would be reason number two, as we were discussin’. Escapin’s likely to be a messy business, and no doubt we’ll need to kill a few people.” He winked. “And no one in this place is better at killin’ people than you.”

VII

YOUR ONLY CHANCE OF SURVIVING ME

I watched the kid sprint out of The Rock like she was being chased by a swarm of bees. I didn’t blame her; I didn’t want to be that close to the System Pigs, either. I couldn’t enter SSF HQ easily; my face would be scanned upon entrance and moments later I’d be flagged—I was supposed to be in prison, or dead, not standing outside with a cigarette and a fairly new set of clothes.

I watched the kid duck the rare pedicab and the thin foot traffic, running at me with the sort of malnourished energy I hadn’t felt in twenty-five years. Her features were vaguely Asian, and she had pale, fish belly skin, tight against her bones. She was wearing an old coat too large for her but in decent shape. Compared to Vegas, New York was fucking freezing, though I couldn’t feel it. And empty. And smelled vaguely like something was burning in the distance.

“They take the message?”

She nodded, her round face grim and serious. I’d found her down near the old Stadium—one of the last bits of old New York, of my New York, that was still there. Squatters were still living there, if you called that living, but even I could tell their time was coming. Under the Emergency Powers Act that had been in force since I’d destroyed—or thought I’d destroyed—Dennis Squalor and the Electric Church, Dick Marin had ordered most of downtown bulldozed since the Plague. It was a wasteland, rubble and cleared lots, some with the beginnings of new construction in place, some just weeded and abandoned. Fresh, new Vid screens proclaimed new luxury homes were coming. As soon as Marin could get the pesky civilian government and their not-so-civilian army off his back, I guessed.

Who was going to live there was another question, since New York was pretty empty. The Plague had killed three-fourths of the old population, rich and poor alike, and the cops had cleared out most of downtown enthusiastically afterward. Even standing right outside SSF Headquarters, in the center of everything, I thought I could hear my steps echo against the buildings.

“Fucking Pigs,” the little girl snarled, wiping her nose. “Lookin’ at me like I done somethin’. I’ll cut their fucking throats.” She squinted at me. “Fifty yen. You said.”

I nodded. At first I’d thought she reminded me of Gleason, but she didn’t. I held out my credit dongle, and she stared at it suspiciously before producing her own. We swiped and she glanced at the tiny indicator on hers, finally nodding. “Okay,” she said and took off at a run. I didn’t blame her. She stood out uptown—and shit, all of Manhattan was uptown now. I watched her dashing through the dribbling traffic until a roar of speeding hovers took my eyes up to the gray sky, a formation of a dozen silvery bricks busting ass overhead.

Uptown wasn’t the same anymore, either. As empty as it felt, there was still a crowd—but it was all cops. Cops everywhere, all of them—even the officers—in riot gear, big sweaty gas masks and shiny black armor that made them look like bugs. You could pick out the Crushers, still; they slouched and held their shredding rifles like they were afraid they’d explode in their hands. If you squinted you could pick out the pips on the officers’ collars: One for a lieutenant, two for a captain, three for a colonel. Four, I assumed, would mean a major, but you didn’t see many of those on the ground. Pairs or triplets of cops were on every corner, and I figured they had Optical Face Scanners wired into their masks, passively snapping every face that came into range and running it by the SSF database, just in case. There were no people, just cops, scanning each other. I kept my head down and my sunglasses on and tried to keep moving, to keep transporting my cigarette from my mouth to my hand and back again. Mobile OFR scans were state of the art, but they needed precision. Give ’em blur and they spat out garbage.

I waited, pacing and staying in motion. It was exhausting.

It was a wide avenue, the pavement cracking and a couple of sinkhole-sized ruts threatening the spokes of all the pedicabs. There were still some posh restaurants spilling out onto the street, sparse groups of bored-looking pretty people in expensive suits toying with a glass of wine or a portable Vid. Interspersed were some empty buildings; one narrow sliver of old stone had gray boards stamped over all the windows, making it look blind. Some of the restaurants had signs posted announcing shortages—one had no more coffee, another could offer no fresh vegetables. I stared at that one for a moment, trying to remember if I’d ever eaten a fresh vegetable in my life. I didn’t think I had.

The people, what was left of them, had changed a little, too. Right outside Cop Central, Rockefeller Center, and some of the folks staking claim to a few feet of pavement were a little rough around the edges. Not exactly my sort of folks—not downtowners, most of whom had died in the Plague—but still, not the shiny, artificially young swingers who usually populated uptown. I watched one skinny guy on the other side of the street for a few minutes—he was professionally eyeing everyone who walked by, performing thirty-second appraisals. His coat was pretty nice, expensive and in good shape, but his shirt was ancient and patched, and his shoes had no soles. I stared at his feet for a while—the illusion was fucking amazing as long as he stood flat-footed, but every time he lifted a foot there was a flash of bare, tough skin. A Pick, I decided, looking for someone with a loose pocket and a credit dongle they wouldn’t miss for a while. I smirked and looked around more carefully, smiling to myself when I spotted his partner, who was actually wearing the same coat, standing just halfway up the block, engrossed in the Vid screen looming over the intersection. Soleless Joe snatches the dongle, walks briskly past his handler, and drops it into a pocket, and even if the Pick gets sussed he walks away, blameless. Unless the System Pigs wanted to get some exercise. Uptown had alleys, too.

I looked around again and had to force myself not to stop and stare at the two men casually not enjoying cold cups of coffee while sitting on the very edge of a café half a block from me. Even if their supernaturally calm, stone-faced demeanor hadn’t screamed cops, the fact that they were identical twins in every way, including their striking, overtailored suits, would have caught my attention. The fact that they performed every gesture, movement, and weight shift almost simultaneously, one lagging a second or so behind the other, just strummed my alarms a little harder.

On a street that boasted about two dozen System Pigs of various ranks standing around, these two were suddenly the only ones I was worried about.

They were young, good-looking men, hair cut painfully close, square faces red and clean shaven. White, generic, with decent builds—though their suits had so much padding in the shoulders it was hard to judge—and big, nimble hands. I watched them both spinning their coffee spoons with dexterous twitches of their fingers for a few seconds, entranced. They each wore narrow tinted glasses with lenses that glinted purple in the hazy, cloudy light.

For a moment, I thought they might be after me, but I was clearly in their line of sight, and if they’d been looking for me it seemed likely I’d already be in the back of a hover with plastic laces around my wrists and a hood over my head. They were staring fixedly at Cop Central, watching everyone come and go, so I concluded that I was the last thing on their mind.

As I turned away, imagining myself innocent and preoccupied, my contact stepped out of Cop Central, moving fast. At first glance, she was your typical old-school System Cop: all slick clothes and hard edges, moving arrogantly and gracefully down the street. She was wearing a purple pin-striped suit, with matching long coat perfectly cut for her lithe figure. Her dark hair was swept back and up in a complex, fashionable style, and her face was made-up, porcelain in appearance. She wore a simple black patch over one eye, her one good orb glinting with a soft golden glow—an Augment. System Pigs with Augments—the fucking world had turned while I’d been in prison and then in Hell, Nevada.

She turned her head once to scan the street as she walked, and for a quick moment she was looking right at me. She turned away and kept walking, but in that flash I’d seen her face full on. She was terrified.

When the fucking Pigs were frightened, I started to worry.

As one, the twins stood and started after her, moving past me without a second glance. As they passed they each produced cigarettes and placed them between their lips with one hand while flipping open a lighter with the other, then cupping their hands around their mouths to light up, all in sync. It was like an invisible mirror followed the one around, reflecting him back to us.

I gave them half a block and watched my contact turn west down Forty-ninth Street. Moving fast but with controlled, easy motion—nothing tight and worried that might trip a crowd analysis Droid—I cut across the street and then in the opposite direction toward Fiftieth Street. If the city hadn’t changed too much, I’d beat her to our rendezvous by half a minute or so.

The cops were everywhere in their riot gear. I was used to cops layering uptown Manhattan like a fine grit, but this was beyond my most paranoid imaginings: blobs of them every half block or so, standing around with their faceless masks on or pushed up onto their heads while they smoked. They didn’t chat or interact, they just watched everyone as they passed, silently staring at you with those blank plastic goggle eyes. I kept moving past boarded-up storefronts; even the businesses that were open were festooned with multiple signs concerning what they didn’t have, squatting empty and ominous on the sidewalks, often with gangs of Crushers hanging about outside. Overhead, every few minutes I could hear displacement as hovers sailed by, and I looked up at each and every set, keeping my face in motion.

A block and a half down Fiftieth Street, there was a narrow alley between buildings, not even wide enough to spread your arms across. I sidestepped into it in one fluid motion, then pressed myself back against the wall for a count of five, listening carefully for any sign anyone had taken notice of me. Satisfied, I sprinted down the length of the alley and found the old fire escape ladder, rusted and creaky but still attached to the masonry. It shuddered and lurched as I jumped onto it, but I pulled myself up rapidly, crawling onto the gravel-lined roof.

I paused for a moment. Sitting with its back against the lip of the roof was a Monk.

You didn’t see Monks much anymore. After the Plague the System Pigs had made it a special project to clean up the Electric Church’s mess once and for all, and for a few months all you saw were Monks getting flushed from their hiding places and executed. They were still people, in a sense, still had human brains inside their chassis, still were citizens of the System, technically. But where once that had meant something to Dick Marin—back when he’d been controlled by the programmed limits of his own digital existence—it hadn’t stopped him from ordering their mass execution. Every now and then a Monk showed up somewhere, and it usually ended with a bullet in its brain. And most people shed no tears.

This one was obviously out of commission: rusted and tattered, it slumped there with both arms stretched out at its sides, stained white palms up. My guess was it had been there for a year or two.

I turned away and ran for the opposite edge. I leaped the gap to the next building easily and took that roof running as well. Three jumps later and I was descending another rusted ladder, this one missing several rungs and leaving me dangling off the ground a good eight or nine feet. I dropped into a steady crouch and popped up again, sprinting for the edge of the alley and skidding to a halt before stepping calmly out onto Seventh Avenue, thirteen steps or so from the huge Vid screen bolted to the side of a run-down old brick building. The reporter on it was a plastic-faced blond girl whose cheekbones were so sharply defined they would cut your hand if you tried to touch them, and the scroll beneath her cleavage was informing us that—in case we hadn’t noticed—the illegal siege of New York by forces under the command of Joint Council Undersecretaries continued. It then segued into a lengthy list of shortages and associated conservation edicts that had been enacted. I took up position under the Vid and watched my cop approaching. When she moved past me, I didn’t turn or look at her.

“Any reason you’ve got two Worms on your ass?”

She fooled me. For a second she kept moving forward, just long enough to lull me, and then she whirled viciously, snapping out a telescoping prod and slapping it hard against the back of my knees. I didn’t feel a thing, but the joints buckled and I went down onto my knees with a teeth-chattering thud. She was already coming down hard for my head with the rod; I dodged to my right and took the blow on my shoulder, reached out and gripped her ankle with my left hand and yanked, throwing myself off balance but knocking her onto her ass in the process.

I twisted myself up onto my knees again, and she hit me on the nose with her fist, cracking something and knocking me onto my back, my vision flashing purple. I still didn’t feel anything, my consolation prize from the System for stealing six months of my life, but I put out a decent muffled scream and played dead, slumped on the cold, damp sidewalk. I snaked my hand under myself and took hold of my Roon automatic, the best handgun ever made. I heard the scrape of her boot and the snapping sound of the rod shrinking back to handheld size, and I let instinct direct me. Springing up, I grabbed blindly, finding a handful of her coat. Pulling as hard as I could, I let my own weight take her down until she was lying on top of me, my gun jabbed into her chest. Her gun was thrust painfully into my belly.

All around us, shouts and boots on the pavement.

“Ruberto,” I hissed into her ear. “I’m from Ruberto.”

She smelled good. Light perfume—not perfume, I decided. Soap. She smelled clean. She panted into my neck once, twice, and then she was pushing herself up, staring down at me, her Augmented eye flat and artificial, like it had been animated on her face. She still looked terrified.

“I know what you are,” she said. Then she climbed off me, dragging out her gold shield and whirling, showing it to the Crushers who’d surrounded us, shredders aimed, impassive plastic faces steamed from their heavy breathing.

“Back the fuck up,” she hissed, spinning, holding her badge out like a talisman. “I’m Captain Helena Krajian, and I said back the fuck up!”

The Crushers hesitated. I lay panting on the ground, numb, and my head swam for a moment. I never thought I’d see the day Crushers didn’t shit their pants when an officer told them to. It was fucking disturbing.

Krajian didn’t like it, either. She paused and then took two fast steps toward the nearest one and reached out, tearing his serial number from his uniform with one violent yank. She held the hunk of fabric out toward him.

“What’s your name, asshole?”

The Crusher looked around, but the moment had passed and his buddies were all lowering their weapons. He reached up and popped his mask up onto his head. His face was red and unshaven, with dark, thick eyebrows. He licked his lips two, three, four times. “Mikkels,” he said, his voice phlegmy. “Andrew —”

“You’re a fucking dead man, Mikkels,” Krajian hissed, stuffing his serial into her pocket. “I’m filing a nine eighty-nine on you and you will not survive, understood?” She glared around as Mikkels stood there looking stupid. “Anyone else? Any other of you mental giants want to defy an order from an officer? This man,” she said, gesturing at me, “is my prisoner and you will not do even a fucking OFR scan of him without my permission. Now back… the fuck… off.”

The world snapped back into normal focus, and the Crushers fell over each other to spin and vacate the area. Krajian stood there for a moment, panting, her gun in one hand pointed at the ground. Mikkels stood there gaping at her.

“Sir,” he started to say, but Krajian raised her hand and he shut his mouth.

“Your only chance of surviving me,” she said in a suddenly low, tired voice, “is to walk away right now. I make no guarantees.”

He blinked once, suddenly startled as if someone had poured invisible cold water down his pants, and then turned and jogged after his comrades. Krajian stood for a moment with her back to me and then turned, slamming her gun back into her holster and stepping past me. I didn’t feel anything, and my nose didn’t even seem to be broken. Everything was coming up Avery.

“Come on,” she snapped. “Surprise me again and I’ll blind you.”

Dripping blood onto the sidewalk, I struggled to my feet and holstered my own gun. “I think I’m in love,” I said, limping after her.

VIII

THIS WAS ENTERTAINMENT

“Slow down, you fucking cable runner,” I groused, dragging my stiff leg in the sandy dirt, blinking sweat out of my eyes.

Grisha spun and walked backward for a few steps, peering at me through his stupid, affected glasses. His narrow face was bright red and his jumpsuit sported a dark V-shaped sweat stain that appeared to be more or less permanent. He had his hands thrust deeply into his jumpsuit and a damp-looking cigarette, unlit, clenched between his teeth.

“You look like shit, yes?” he said without a grin. “Look like you fell into a bucket of razors, huh?”

I nodded, panting. “I’m popular around here.”

He nodded, swiveling the cigarette to the other corner of his mouth. “Yes, popular. I see.” He shrugged. “Someone does me dirt, my friend, I do not forget. I have my revenge. I do not forget.” He winked. “So please remember this, yes?”

I frowned. “What did you steal, Grisha?” I liked the skinny little bastard. He was unlike any Techie I’d ever met. “To get here, I mean.”

“As opposed to bullet in head, yes? It does not matter. It is worthless now, though apparently this fact escapes Director Marin’s attention. This data that has ruined me is safe anyway. In The Star.”

The Star: I’d never been in it, but of course everyone on the streets of New York knew of it. A star-shaped building a hundred feet high, solid stone, on an island off Manhattan. A data haven, now—for a few million yen you could store all sorts of things in secure servers. Some people even maintained entire labs inside it. Miles Amblen, maybe the most famous Techie in the System after Dennis Squalor and Ty Kieth, had done a lot of black market work in The Star, or so it was said.

Rumor was it had been a fortress before Unification, but rumors were worthless—whatever it had been, it was long gone. Some people liked to say the SSF couldn’t breach it, which was why someone like Amblen could hide up in there, but that was bullshit. If the System Pigs wanted inside a place, they got in.

Grisha spun around again and didn’t slow down. All at once every fresh cut on my body stung me, my own sweat sizzling on my skin like alcohol. My two new fans had woken me up right before sunrise, trying to stab me with the most pathetic shivs I’d ever seen. As a professional, I’d been offended, especially since it would have taken them a couple of really irritating, painful hours to actually kill me. As I walked, I jiggled my three shivs in my pocket and scanned the yard. For some reason I hadn’t killed them. It would have been easy, but I just… walked away.

Grisha led me out into the sun, making for the walls in the distance. “This place,” he said, spinning around again, “is very strange. A prison, yes?” He smirked. “Worst fucking prison I ever see. And I see a few, unfortunately. The Pigs, yes, they send you to prison, it is usually for one of two reasons: One, you irritate them, piss them off, so they want to kick you in the balls for a few months. Two”—he pulled one hand from his pocket in order to thrust two fingers up into the air—“they need something from you. Otherwise, just a shell in the ear, yes?”

He twisted his head around to squint back at me, and I gave him a curt nod. It was one thing we all had in common here, that memory of a cop’s gun barrel against your head.

“This place,” he continued, facing forward and pushing his hand back into his pocket. “This place is strange. Oh, yes, basic security. Walls, yes. Razor wire on top, of course. Guards with amazing skill in towers, able to put a hollow point into your eye from this distance—superhuman. Electric fencing that will turn you nice and crisp if you try to cross. Anti-tunneling measures—the usual. But, nothing special. Nothing good. Nothing I could not get around easily, with a few weeks to study and plan.” He shrugged. We were halfway to the walls. I raised my hand to shield my eyes and squinted up at the tower, the sniper on station there a black dot. I imagined I could feel his red eye on me.

“Ah.” Grisha stopped and turned. “But then there is the sun.” He looked up into the sky. “Based on stars at night, Cates, we are in fucking Death Valley, desert. North of Mexico. Hot. Nothing nearby for a hundred miles. This is the true prison. The rest is for show, the rest is just crowd control, to keep us in manageable spaces, yes? I could get out of here—my goodness, Cates, I could slip out for groceries and be back before dole and no one the wiser, yes? Except, then what. Then I die in the desert. I starve; I dry up.”

I nodded, turning to look back at the main complex. “What’s your point, Grisha?”

“Michaleen asks me to give you the rundown, since you are latest recruit to our little team.” I turned back to the Techie, who grinned again. “He is a very smart man, in his way. He is going to get us out of here.”

I nodded, hearing the little man saying, Not long and not deep, but I knew ol’ Aubrey. “Mickey’s a genius, okay. What about getting everyone else out?”

“Everyone else? Fuck everyone else.”

I nodded again. “Okay, so run it down.” I turned back to him, a man who looked so thin and dry he couldn’t possibly exist out here in the sun. “Where do the Crushers come from?” I’d seen two disturbances so far, fights that had pulled dozens into their gravity, threatening to become bedlam. Each time, the guards had been there instantly, dozens of the fuckers, as if they’d been hiding under our fucking bunks, ready to spring. I’d seen the fat, bearded man from the train, the non-Crusher, each time, looking fresh and clear, like he’d been napping and eating right in preparation for just such a contingency.

Grisha shrugged and started walking back toward the main complex. “That I cannot explain. Where do they live? There are no guard quarters. Under our feet? Possibly. There may be a huge complex underground, yes? That is the most likely explanation. But I cannot say for sure.”

I nodded. We barely saw guards when things were quiet. There was the one at the dole, there were the five or six we could see on the towers, and that was it. No one walked the yard to keep order; no one made sure we weren’t conspiring or plotting.

“This is mysterious,” Grisha muttered. Four people had emerged from the main prison building. I recognized the broad-shouldered form of my admirer, the longhair, and the skinny brown shape of my first-day attacker. There were two other men with them. I played with my three pot stickers and tried to make my leg bend a little as we walked. The thought of beating those two idiots off one more time almost made me want to lie down in the sun and bake until I passed out.

“This whole place, mysterious,” Grisha continued. “Why bring us all here? For what purpose? This is why we must escape. Before we discover the purpose the hard way, yes?”

I nodded absently. A crowd was forming behind my two idiots and their new friends, a casual, spotty crowd moving slowly and easily. An audience. I closed my eyes and imagined myself in the desert, empty and vast, the wind the only sound. I imagined a distant roar, so loud the sand vibrated beneath my feet. It felt good.

Opening my eyes, I blinked the glare out of them and took another look at my fans. The skinny kid had gotten improbably skinnier, shrinking under the murderous diet and smothering heat. The longhair was still limping from our last encounter, his jumpsuit spotted red. Their new friends were big, tall Augment freaks—bigger than the longhair had been but looking a little saggy after their time in Chengara. I wasn’t sure why all Augment addicts looked exactly the same, but they did: stiff and bulging, almost hairless, with thick, ropy veins traced under their thick, leathery skin. These two were burned pretty dark, so I figured they’d been here for a while. I ran the numbers in my head as we closed the distance: malnourished, bird boned, and willing to kill someone in return for a fucking nutrition tab and some cigarettes.

“Ah, you have some business, yes?” Grisha said, sounding almost happy. “Michaleen says you are a Gunner. That you have killed many people. That you are skilled.”

I took a deep breath of hot, dry air. It hurt my throat. My leg hitched painfully. “What I am,” I said with a slight smile I couldn’t suppress, “is old.”

“Yes,” Grisha said. “As are we all.”

My new friends had stopped about twenty feet away. Behind them was most of the prison, I thought, spreading around us to form a loose circle. There were no Vids; this was entertainment. It was difficult to be sure, but I thought some of the faces I’d gotten used to seeing were gone, disappeared. It seemed like each morning there were more missing faces, but new trains arrived every other day, so it was impossible to say for sure.

I kept walking as Grisha veered off and joined the crowd. With the sun like a fist pressing down on the back of my head, I continued until I was a few feet away and stopped.

“Well —”

They came at me all at once, all four just charging at me. Our audience let out a cheer, and I leaned down over the hot ground, putting my head down and my stiff leg in front of me, letting the longhair crash into me and rolling him over my back. Taking a fistful of sandy dirt almost unconsciously, I pushed myself up and tottered backward, off balance as the four skidded to a halt, spinning.

The crowd let out a cheer. I heard my name.

They came at me again, without even a hint of finesse or plan, just superior numbers. Assholes always thought superior numbers meant everything. I forced myself to stand still until they were right on top of me, then spun to my left, tossing my fistful of dirt into one of the big guys’ faces and bringing one of my shivs from my pocket. He cursed and went down onto his knees in a stumble, and I fell against him, my leg screaming out in sharp, sudden pain, and dragged the blade across his throat.

“Asshole,” I muttered, pushing myself back onto my feet.

The crowd cheered.

The other three spun and then stood there, staring from their dying fellow as he choked up blood into the thirsty ground to me. For a second, none of us moved, and then the other big guy let out an anguished screech and leaped at me. The crowd roared—but the roar transformed into something else. A puff of dust erupted silently at my feet, a sniper’s bullet.

The big guy suddenly jerked backward, a spray of blood hitting me in the face as his head turned into a sculpture of blood and bone. The crowd erupted into noisy chaos as the Crushers appeared, Taser sticks in hand, shouting and smacking everyone in sight. Again, they’d come out of fucking nowhere. If someone told me they’d blinked in from thin air, I’d fucking believe it.

I hesitated, picturing the puff of dust. I could feel the sniper on my back, but I didn’t know if he wanted me to stay put or get moving. Just the day before I’d been Tasered until my stomach had tried to crawl up my throat, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience, so I chose to move. I dodged clumsily to my right and then threw myself into a stagger to the left, my leg sending a sharp stabbing pain up my side. I scrambled for the edge of the crowd, hoping to skirt around the main body of ass-kicking and limp into the shadows. Fuck it. I was an old man, and there was no glory in pissing your jumpsuit twice in two days.

Panting and wincing, I swung through the thick cloud of hot dust and then skidded to a halt as my favorite Crusher, beard as neatly trimmed as always, loomed up in front of me. As I tried to shift direction, my leg twitched painfully and went dead under me, spilling me onto the ground.

The non-Crusher grinned. “I knew we’d manage to train you soon enough,” he shouted, raising his stick up dramatically. As I lay there trying to decide if I should just piss my jumpsuit now and get it over with instead of waiting for my nervous system to be lit up like a fucking power grid, someone appeared behind him and grabbed him around his thick neck. With a jerk, the non-Crusher’s head was twisted around much further than I thought possible as his legs left the ground. He kicked and jiggled for a moment and then there was a sudden violent stiffening of his limbs, and he dropped like a rag doll and lay still.

I stared at Bartlett for just a second, and then struggled back to my feet. The big black ex-cop surged forward, and before I knew it his bruised, sweaty body was right on top of me, his big hands wrapping themselves in my jumpsuit and lifting me up off the ground. He fucking carried me about twenty feet through the dust and noise and then slammed me down into a shady spot where the ground sloped downward, forming a shallow trench against the cinder blocks of the bunkhouse. A moment later he slammed against the wall next to me, panting.

“Gotta make sure you twist ’em all the way,” he huffed. “Gotta keep it up until they disconnect.”

“So we’re even?” I breathed.

“Even?” It was the first time I’d heard him speak at a normal volume. He had a deep, rich voice that sounded like a minor earthquake going off next to me. “Fucking rat. Fucking copkiller. You think you lift one shiv off an asshole for me, and now we’re fucking buddies? Motherfucker, I’d slit your throat right now—I’d probably be avenging what, a dozen—two dozen—dead cops just like that.”

I blinked. “Then —”

“She gave the order.”

I followed his jerking thumb. Sitting calm and composed in the narrow shadow of the dorm wall, her ridiculous, heavy coat still hanging off her thin shoulders, was the old woman I’d seen getting off the train. She stared back at me with those clear, dry eyes and then looked away. I felt the dismissal like a physical force buffeting me.

Before I could ask a question, the tide of the scrum intervened. I turned and Bartlett was gone.

IX

IF YOU WANTED TO KILL ME… THERE ARE FASTER WAYS

I stepped into the bar and stopped, the hair on my arms standing up. Krajian kept walking, the smoky gloom swallowing her, and I forced myself back into motion, stepping down and letting the door swing shut behind me. The sounds of the street disappeared, instantly replaced by the buzz of conversation and the clink of glasses.

I forced myself to keep moving and stay calm. It was a small, old place, sunk into the ground and almost windowless, the gloom feeling permanent, smeared onto everything like a stain. The walls were rough stone and the bar and tables were substantial, huge hunks of wood, polished with use and expensive looking. Everything felt close together, as if the furniture shouldn’t have been able to fit through the door. No one looked at me, but they didn’t have to—every cop in the place had noticed me the second I appeared in the doorway.

I followed Krajian to a table in the back with my head down. It was one thing to have half the System Pigs in the place know you were a criminal with just a casual glance; it was something else to have your face scanned by a fucking OFR handheld and have a dozen open cases pop up like hot coals, along with your name.

Sliding into the booth across from Krajian, I kept my coat on and hunched my shoulders to try and minimize my profile. Everyone seemed to be laughing.

“If you wanted to kill me,” I said slowly, growling, “there are faster ways than parading me through a fucking cop bar.”

She leaned forward savagely, putting her face near mine. “The fucking Worms won’t come in here, okay? It’s the safest spot for me. I don’t recall giving a shit about you, Mr. —”

Before I could stop myself, I pounded the table with my fist. “Do not say my name here.”

She leaned back, and for a moment we just stared at each other. In the dim light her patch melded in with the shadows, and her exposed eye glowed dully as if some nonexistent light was shining behind me. She wasn’t a bad-looking woman, though her face was hard and angular, with a sharp nose and prominent cheekbones. She had a mean mouth, thin and severe, probably turning cruel when she smiled. I wasn’t sure if I would ever see her smile. I was sure I didn’t really want to.

“I thought Augments weren’t allowed in the SSF,” I finally said.

She started to respond just as a serving Droid arrived at our table on its silent wheels. It placed a gleaming glass of something clear and flat in front of her and then sat politely, waiting.

“Gin,” I said. “Warm.”

The Droid rolled away, and she leaned forward. “Don’t presume to ask me questions,” she said, suddenly calm. “You’re here from our mutual friend, yes?” Her eye locked on me; she picked up her glass and took a sip, surprisingly dainty. “Call me Krasa.” She leaned back, seeming to fold herself up into half the space, one leg curled under herself. “You do not look as I expected.”

I grinned as my drink was delivered. “Better looking?”

She snorted. “Shorter.” She leaned forward again, but this time there was an air of intimacy about her, as if we were about to share secrets, as if we were on some sort of horrible date. “What do you want, then? I’m about three days from following my partner down Marin’s fucking rabbit hole. Better talk fast.”

“What’d you do to get the Worms upset at you?”

She squinted at me and leaned back, regarding me with a slight kinking of her mouth that I decided had to be her smile. It was every bit as heartless as I expected. “I didn’t do anything, did I? I learned something I’m not supposed to know. My partner and I. Look around—every cop in here is still a fucking human being. I think. The new and improved ones don’t drink anymore.” She nodded her head toward the crowd around us. “Avatars. That’s what we found out. My partner’s gone. Burned.” She winked. “I will be going, soon.”

“So you just sit around and wait for it?”

She shrugged, leaning back again, settling in as if the booth had been molded to her body at the factory. “I’m a cop. Where the fuck do I go?”

I let that hang for a moment, letting it breathe. Then I looked up at her from under my eyebrows. “Can you get me inside The Rock?”

Her smile dripped over her face in stages, widening and getting colder as it went, until I thought my eyebrows might catch fire. “Why?”

I tried to match her smile, but I suspected I was completely outclassed in the fucked-up department. “I need information. Our mutual friend asked me to do him a favor.”

For a moment she kept that crazy grin on me, her patch a black hole that was sucking at me, making me lean forward slightly. Then she put both hands flat on the table, making our glasses rattle. “Okay,” she said brightly. “What the fuck. I’ve got nothing to lose. These cops in here”—she jerked her head to indicate the rest of the bar—“are maybe the last fucking real cops left in this city. Who knows? Maybe the world. We’re being burned, one by one, carted off and never seen again.” She winked. “I’m on the short list. So what the fuck. You want in The Rock?” She nodded once, curtly, and then stood up.

“You’re under arrest,” she said, loud, snapping a pair of silicone bracelets from her coat with a crack. I hadn’t had time to process this before she leaned in and grabbed hold of my arm, pulling me up with surprising strength and bending it back behind me, shoving me down until my head cracked against the tabletop. With a practiced, efficient jerk the straps were around my wrists and pulled numbingly tight, and then her fist was curled in my hair and pulling me up. I was spun around and found a silent bar of shadowed, soundless men and women staring back at me.

This had taken a second. This had taken no fucking time at all.

I closed my eyes and tried to be outraged, but it wasn’t in me. I was amused. I’d let my guard down around a fucking System Pig, after all, and this is what I got—I deserved this.

She frisked me professionally—one hand on my neck the whole time, in case I got ideas, one hand pushing and patting, checking every possible spot for a concealed weapon. She took my gun and blade immediately and eventually found the small pot sticker I kept in my boot, snorting in triumph.

I kept my head down, smiling at the floor, to try and stop any of her colleagues from getting a good scan of my face. I took a few glances around, to see how we were playing to the audience, and was surprised—they all looked bored, unhappy. Like none of it mattered anymore. I could hear distant rumbles, like thunder but more regular: bombing. The Undersecretaries were doing their usual announcement of intent, endlessly softening up New York’s defenses. The low wail of an alarm rose up, distant and everywhere, making my ears twitch.

“Move,” she snarled, giving me a good shove. I stumbled into motion and walked toward the exit. Behind me, I heard her talking low into the air, her earbud catching everything.

“Control, this is Krajian H-U8-9 calling in an OFR negative for peace violation,” she said, giving me occasional encouraging taps on the back. “I need a transport.”

At the front door I obliged by pushing it open with my head. Outside it had gotten darker. The rumbling of big guns had joined the bombing, both fat and faint, a little twitch beneath your feet. People were moving rapidly up and down the narrow street, well-dressed folks obviously in a rush to get off the street before whatever was happening in the distance got any closer.

“What the fuck do you care why?” Krasa hissed, yanking once on my coat to make me stop moving. “Control, I need transport home. Since when do I have to explain why? I have a fucking shithead in custody. I need transport, and I need to book a Technical Associate consult with badge number 7-OI-4. Read that back? Confirmed.

“There,” she finally said, her voice falling to normal volume. “You wanted in The Rock? Easy fucking peasy.”

I turned to say something, but her fist, traveling at approximately the speed of light, changed my mind. And whipped my head around, knocking me off balance and sending me staggering into a small knot of horrified swells, most of whom ended up with a little blood splatter on their nice clothes for their trouble. A woman shrieked, and I was pushed roughly back at Krasa by several sets of hands.

I probed a loose tooth with my tongue, feeling nothing. “What the fuck was that for?”

Krasa’s smile was equal parts cruel and hopeless. “Realism.”

Our hover, a dented, rusty piece of shit from another century, rattled and wheezed its way through the air, low to the ground due to wartime airspace restrictions, and set us down on the roof of Rockefeller Center without any serious mishaps, which I attributed to the skill and patience of the pilot. Krasa pushed me very realistically into a large elevator that smelled like a magical combination of blood and piss. There was a large, crusted bloodstain on one wall of the elevator car, a dent in the exact middle of it as if some overenthusiastic System Pig had once literally beaten someone’s brains out on that spot. I stared at it as the door shut behind us.

“Ten, check in,” she said in a monotone. “Krajian H-U8-9.”

The elevator started to move. “You’re checking me in? Isn’t that a little too much goddamn realism?”

“Don’t cream yourself,” she said without looking at me. “I’m checking you in as an OFR negative, no positive ID. Gotta check you in. New directives—no one enters unless they’re checked in. Apparently there was an embarrassing moment a year or two ago.”

I nodded. I remembered it well. “Why are you helping me?”

She shrugged, still staring ahead. “This time next week, I’m disappeared. If you’re going to shove something hot and sharp up the King Worm’s ass, it’d be something to keep me warm wherever I’m going.”

The elevator doors opened, and I squinted into the bleached, bright light. The elevator disgorged into a small, shallow room, all white. There was room for maybe four or five people to stand uncomfortably in it. There was a round indentation in the wall, the only feature I could see. The light was eye searing.

“Krajian H-U8-9,” she said, and there was a soft ding in the air. “Place subject’s face in scanner,” a feminine voice said softly. I glanced at Krasa. She didn’t look at me but shook her head.

“Wait a sec,” she said. After another moment there was a flat, unhappy sound.

“Scan failed. Place subject’s face in scanner.”

The unhappy sound rang out again. “Scan has failed.”

“Override, enter as negative ID,” Krasa said. The happy ding sounded again, and suddenly a panel in the wall snapped open with an automated, smooth motion.

“Entered,” the voice responded. “You have been assigned Interview Room seven-seven-eight-nine. Technical consultant is en route.”

Krasa jerked me into motion again, pushing me through the narrow doorway, and we were inside The Rock proper. It was just as I remembered it: white corridors, harsh lighting, near-complete silence. A short corridor led to another elevator. Krasa dragged me into it with such vigor I thought she’d probably be able to just carry me the rest of the way; I slammed into the back wall and stayed there, breathing the heroically filtered air and studying her back. She had good posture.

Then another of those antiseptic halls, this time with a few helpful signs posted here and there, too small for me to glimpse. More people, too—desk cops, they looked like, their knuckles free from scabs, their clothes a little finer. Some were even carrying metallic mugs of coffee, like they lived in this whitewashed building. This while getting a cup of coffee on the streets of New York was almost impossible, even for the richies. We cut through them easily enough—none of them paid any attention to me at all, even when they gave Krasa a curt nod of recognition. At what appeared to be a random door, she jerked me to a stop and gestured. The door unlocked, drifting inward slightly.

“All right,” Krasa said. “You’re in.”

She shoved me against the door and it gave, admitting us into the familiar sight of a Blank Room, shielded from all signals and devoid of any kind of recording equipment, the System Pigs’ favorite place to encourage their prisoners to do some talking. I’d been in plenty of them. It was home.

For a second, I had one of my moments—my mind going blank, everything seeming to recede into shadow. It only lasted a second, and then I was blinking my eyes and trying to focus. Sitting at the small table that adorned every single Blank Room I’d ever been in—simple metal table, scuffed and scratched—was a pudgy young guy in a pricey but ill-fitting suit, his face just small, nervous eyes and a long, thick beard that completely covered his neck. He glanced up from his handheld as I entered and froze for a second. Then he shot up onto his feet, the hand-held dropping to the floor with a crack, and staggered backward until he hit the wall.

“Fuck me,” he said in a tight, dry voice.

I smiled and stepped aside to let Krasa in. “Relax, Mr. Marko,” I said, feeling good. “I’m not here to kill you.” I winked. “Yet.”

X

THE LITTLE MAN AND HIS FREAKS

I lay half-upright on the cot and stared at the ceiling; the moon was bright and shadows pushed their way around, fading whenever one of the high clouds passed overhead, then clarifying silently. Marlena snored softly next to me, naked, her inked flesh black and gray in the weak light, her mouth open and slack. She always fell asleep next to me, snoring to make my teeth rattle. I wanted her to go away because I was getting to like having her next to me.

My shoulder ached a little where she’d inked me up. It was a surprisingly detailed sketch of a skull in profile, all black and gray, a garish black crown sitting on top and a cigarette burning between its grinning teeth. Underneath she’d laboriously spelled out tempus fugit, mors venit. I’d asked her what it meant and she’d said, “Time passes, death comes.

“Alcatraz tradition,” she’d explained. “I don’t know where it comes from, but when I was penned up there a few years ago, that’s what they gave anyone in for murder. Murder a cop, you got a crown on the skull.”

Skinner had been getting around. If you were sensitive you’d say she was hooking, selling off sexual favors in return for whatever she needed that day. I got the feeling, though, that Marlena just liked sex, and getting something in return was incidental, something she did when she thought about it. I was turning out to be the only one she spent the night with, though. I liked her. She didn’t take any shit, and I’d never known anyone more comfortable in their skin. Just looking at her and you relaxed, felt normal.

It never got quiet. We didn’t have a lights-out—there were no lights—or a curfew. Half the people I’d arrived with were gone, and I had no clue how it happened. I would suddenly realize that I hadn’t seen a face for a while, and that was it: they were gone. Before they got vaporized or whatever, they were free to do whatever they pleased at night, which mostly meant gambling. Everyone had something they’d managed to smuggle in or take from someone else. I had six shivs already, taken from people who’d tried to stick them into my guts—my only possessions. Others had mysteriously brought dice or knives or cigarettes. One good-looking kid with perfect skin had brought his credit dongle, like a talisman. After he’d been beaten into a coma and left out in the sun for a few hours, it had been passed around, amusing everyone to discover that he had fifteen thousand yen in his account, enough for a good meal or maybe a haircut.

He’d been gone the next day, as mysteriously as everyone else.

“You ever know your father?” I’d asked once, surprising myself.

“No,” she’d said immediately. “Mother, either.”

Above the usual hushed murmur of games, fights, and conversations all around, I heard the unmistakable rhythm of a confrontation. I ignored it at first, two tight voices hissing like snakes and weaving in and out of the other sounds, two more assholes impatient to get wherever Chengara was taking them. Then I heard one word in another voice, impossible to catch but the voice was clear enough: an older woman’s voice, uneven but the syllable bitten off fiercely.

I sat up, Marlena sliding down from my shoulder and grunting. I listened for a moment, but it was just the first two voices again, jumping all over each other.

Swinging my feet onto the still-warm floor of the dorm, I eased up off the cot and stepped as lightly as I could toward the voices. My leg throbbed suddenly, making me hitch as I walked. The old woman was sitting at the same table I’d seen her at before, still painfully straight, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. A touch of bright red had come to her old, dry cheeks, but she sat perfectly still, her eyes flashing from one of the men leaning over her to the other in rhythmic, mechanical ticks.

“C’mon, ya hag,” the one on the left growled.

“Give it or we cut it off,” the one on the right finished.

She pulled the coat tighter around her. I’d never seen her take it off, despite the soul-crushing heat. Her friends weren’t anything special—two kids, teenagers, shaved heads growing in, scars on their arms, and deep curves to their spines. Clouds of kids like that had infested New York at one time, and you had to swat them off you like flies.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” the one on the left hissed. “It’s just a fucking coat!”

I cleared my throat. “You all right, lady?”

“Who the fuck —” the one on the left started to bark, twisting around. He stopped when he saw me, his right eye sagging under a thick yellow scar. His friend turned, and for a moment they both stared at me.

“Uh,” the one on the left said, blinking, his whole face twitching. “This ain’t your worries.”

The other one just stood there mute, mouth hanging open.

I had one of my confiscated knives palmed and crossed my arms to keep it obscured. I looked at the woman. She stared back at me, her hands still clutching the damn coat tightly to her throat. “I worry about a lot of things. The worries of the world keep me awake at nights.” I shifted my eyes to look back at the two kids. “You want me to worry about you?”

They looked at each other, and then the one on the right closed his mouth, turning fully around to face me. For a second or two we studied each other. I had a foot or more on him, and I’d managed to eat better for the past two decades. He didn’t know I had the blade, but I’d already been forced to kill a few assholes since my arrival, and my name still had a certain weight to it, even to people who hadn’t lived in New York. It was painful to watch him think—and he was clearly the brains of the operation.