My fingers rap against the shiny mahogany wood, in a steady rhythm with the rain against the windows of the cafe to form a discordant harmony. My eyes find themselves pulled up towards the translucent 7 above the man’s head, while I wait for my coffee. If not for that, he would be impossible to remember, his face and body a collection of disparate parts and colorless clothing, the average man incarnate, his scans left and right easily excused - even the inadvertent tightening of one’s throat as his eyes pass over wouldn’t be noticed by those who weren’t in tune with those instincts. I waited in the room, the few minutes his coffee takes to arrive feeling far longer than they should. He finishes the coffee, gets up, and walks out the building in almost a single fluid unremarkable motion, myself casually inserted in the tail end. He walks without noticing the rain, it washing over him yet leaving his features unaltered, like a mountain under a rainstorm. The rain continues to beat down on both of us, and yet he continues straight forward, no longer with the deliberateness of a destination but with a question we both know the answer to - my presence behind him in the empty street a beacon of my intent. As if in reply, he turns into an alleyway.

I reach into my jacket for the reassurance of warm wood and cold steel as I enter behind him, only to meet a fist flying at my face. I sidestep and turn, dodging the first as I pull my knife out in the opposite direction, ducking along the wall deeper into the alley to contain our brawl. As if his arm was attached to my head via elastic, his fist comes for me again, this time with his whole body behind it, and he delivers a bone cracking blow to the wall directly above me. His fist cracks the veneer of the wall, leaving the red and white of brick and mortar exposed, as if he had wounded the wall itself. I push off the wall, thrusting the knife in front of me as he’s pulled forward by the force of his own attack. The knife moves into him without resistance, as if parting butter. Before I could finish my stroke, his fist slams into the side of my head, and I go flying to the opposite wall, the world suddenly darkening, but my grip on reality and my knife hold, even if the walls began to shift like sand in an hourglass, waiting for my grip to weaken. I duck forward underneath his obviously telegraphed punch, stabbing upward once more, as if to open a hole in him for my entire body to go through, then pushing off him before his fist can make contact, dancing backwards. He takes the pause to begin pulling the knife out of his chest, acknowledging the pain as much as he did the rain.

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“So, who are y-” He began, before the thunderclap of a gunshot blasted through the alleyway. He crumples to the floor like a sack of meat, falling with a meaty thud on the rocky asphalt. Sighing, I begin the grisly work of turning him over and digging the bullet and knife out of his body, pressing my hands deeper into his wounds, feeling for the cold feel of metal inside the nauseating warmth. Dropping the bullet into my pocket, I clean my knife on his jacket and put it back into mine, before searching him for anything else worth taking - the salters will take anything worth taking, and much more than that.

Taking refuge under an eave, I lean against a wall for support against the kind of exhaustion that makes gravity stronger and walls blurry. I open my phone and dial the familiar number of the collecting agency, calling as I flip a coin onto the corpse. The phone is picked up on the first ring, before the coin even landed.

“Articulate,” The disembodied voice commanded, in the same rote, recorded feeling tone.

“Were creature, integrated, name Daniel Hoffeman eliminated, bounty 20 marks, waiting for collection at-” I peek my head out of the grisly alleyway into the almost sterile scene of the street “In the alleyway between 22 and 23 Proctor drive, coin dropped.”

“Inbound, marks transferred.” With the same routine businesslike tone, as it had for the past decade. I watched the coin begin to glow and the telltale ruins of a transport emanate off it. The next blink, the coin was gone, salter in its place, bent over the corpse, rapidly examining and testing the corpse, like a child with a new toy, a giddiness to its stiff movements.