YOU JUST HAD TO LET HIM DANCE

I reached out and pulled Remy back. He resisted for a moment and then let me shove him down into his chair. I leaned against the bar and let my coat hang open, showing off the Roon in its leather holster. The big, hairy guy who was sweating in the unheated bar looked at it and then back at me.

“I apologize for my friend,” I said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

The bar only sold something mysteriously sweet and disturbingly red. I didn’t know what they made it from, and didn’t want to know. Our first night in Potosí I’d made the mistake of having a third.

The big guy was probably seven feet tall. Old, older than me, but still a lot of muscle. His beard was gray and black and long, tied off every few inches with bits of leather. He settled back into his stool. “All right,” he said in an accent I couldn’t place. “Tell your friend he should not pick fights.”

I nodded at the bartender and pointed at the big guy. “He wasn’t picking a fight,” I said. “He likes to shoot people.”

I let that hang in the air while the bartender, a skinny girl of about ten with dull, wild black hair frizzing out around her head, poured red liquor into the big guy’s cup. I studied her as she worked; it had been a long time, I realized, since I’d seen a child. She looked incredibly small and new, suddenly. When she came over I handed her five hundred yen. All the bills were new and crisp.

“I need transportation, long distance,” I said, holding on to the bill when she grabbed it. “You point the right person at me and there’s another five hundred.”

She bit her lip and nodded, eyes wide and locked on the money. Paper was still strange to me, and fucking inefficient, but it felt good to be able to bribe people again. Five hundred yen would buy her something to eat. A thousand yen might keep her alive for a week, if she lived careful. It was a good enough tip to get her enthusiasm up. I let go of the bill and she made it disappear impressively. I eyed her for a moment as she ran, barefoot on the cracked, frozen cement floor, to the rear of the bar. She probably worked the streets as a Pick when she wasn’t slopping drinks in here, and she probably did well doing it.

I sat down across from Remy, who was finishing off his second cup of solvent, looking yellow and bloated, his eyes squinty. Remy was the worst drunk I’d ever known. He drank fast, like he was punishing himself, and got surly, picking fights and being nasty. He’d killed four or five poor assholes in stupid bar fights, and I’d learned that that was the whole point. That’s what he wanted to do—have a reason to shoot someone. I’d had to knock him cold a couple of times just to stop a fucked-up situation from crossing over into batshit insane, but he never complained. He woke up, vomited once or twice, and seemed good to go. I looked down at my own cup, untouched. In the cup, the booze looked black, and I wanted nothing to do with it. I missed gin, but no one made gin anywhere. I missed N-tabs, too. Every time someone set a joint of memy, who wdown in front of me, I wanted to puke right onto my plate.

“Try not to piss everyone off,” I said. “We’ve got a window before Morales gathers his troops. We don’t need the rest of the town against us, too.”

Remy saluted me and waved his cup in the air without turning around. I sighed.

The bar was mostly empty, just a half dozen people aside from us, four cripples who sat nursing cups on the darkened edges of the room, Remy’s new friend, and a cardsharp who sat alone, shuffling an ancient deck of holographic cards that still shone bright and cheery in the dim light. There was no sound in the place aside from the wind howling through the thin walls, and not much light from the smoky oil lamps. I wondered, briefly, how come no one tried to lift anything from behind the bar with the girl gone, and then wondered why they didn’t try with the girl there, since she looked about as dangerous as a cloud. Then I got bored and put my attention into trying to drink the stuff in my cup. I opted to breathe through my mouth and just swallow it fast. It was thick and oily on the tongue, and when I’d choked it down the burn wasn’t the pleasant one alcohol usually gave me, but something acidic and sinister.

I thought about Mexico. We’d passed through it on our way to Potosí, months ago, coming south down from Alaska and the ruin of California, which was still just a field of rubble that glowed at night. Mexico was better off; it had been largely controlled by criminal gangs before the civil war, and since the war had been under the thumb of two dozen old army units and their commanding officers, a hundred well-armed and desperate men and women who still had augments in their heads that could be controlled by their CO and his blackjack. Mexico wasn’t civilized, but you could get things done in Mexico, and the gangs and old military units were big enough that yen was useful to them. It wouldn’t be hard to run an operation in Mexico, if I could dig up the resources.

Tiny steps told me the bartender had returned, and bigger steps in tow told me my yen had bought someone’s attention. I didn’t turn around; Remy was still sober enough to glance over my shoulder and then shrug, letting me know it wasn’t a threat.

The girl who sat down across from me was beautiful: tan, smooth skin, long, glossy black hair, an oval face with a long nose and a full mouth with nice teeth. Her eyes were a dark green and looked back at me steadily. She was wearing canvas overalls that had been patched a hundred times over a thick, gray shirt that looked warm and scratchy. Her hands were nicked by a million tiny cuts and heavily calloused, but they were folded in front of her calmly. If she was afraid of drunk men with guns, she didn’t show it.

“Adela tells me you need to go somewhere,” she said flatly. “Where?”

I stared at her for a few heartbeats, smiling, giving her the old attitude. It was like clicking into a groove, well-worn and familiar: Avery Cates, Destroyer of Worlds, is not amused. “Mexico City,” I said finally. City was a grand term for what was left up there, but names stuck.

She pursed her lips, nodding, calculating distances and risk. She glanced at Remy, who had acquired his third cup and seemed content to stare into it, then back me. “Two of you?”