Port Town was about forty-five minutes away from Monte's Diner, off to the south and west. It clung to either side of the Guethon Canal like algae on rope, studded with docks which offloaded stone and ore and stranger things from the continuous stream of barges in from the quarries. There were also skiffs and boats coming in from the greenhouses, as well as-it was rumored-the very occasional traveler come in from whatever was left of the ocean off somewhere to the far southeast.

Whatever disparate cargo these vessels carried, they all brought one thing in common-sailors. And wherever sailors meet the land, businesses will spring up to cater to their needs-and empty their pockets. Port Town was so jammed full of them it was like walking through a carnival riot.

The lifelights were well-maintained and closely spaced. They had to be, both to keep business getting done and to keep from scaring customers off. Their intensity paled in comparison, though, to all the signs and ads. I passed bars, pubs, sinks, drinking holes, knife stands, jewelry kiosks, gun stores, liquor stores, drug stores, stores that sold drugs, strip clubs, gentlemen's clubs, gentlewomen's clubs, dance clubs, dance halls, brothels, bordellos, cathouses, whorehouses. The buildings were rough, low, either shanties of corrugated metal and bulk conplas or ancient structures of damp-rotted brick.

And the gambling! The casinos! I don't know what it is about boatmen and gambling. Maybe trusting your life to a buoyant slab of rusty metal every day gives one a predilection for tempting chance. I saw places where, if I liked, I could bet on cards and tiles, dice and dominoes, car racing, bike racing, bicycle racing, snake-fights, roach-fights, man and woman-fights, catfights literal and figurative. And each and every one of these places sizzled with neon signs, animated holograms, plasmagrams like a god's warnings written in iridescent, sourceless flame. The swirling mess of color dyed the faces of those walking below, making them look like a singular and seething creature, something shouting with a thousand drunken voices, smelling of sweat and spilled alcohol and sex and vomit and bitter chemical smoke. It was a parade out of the unsettling kind of dream you get when you sleep too long. The buzz of the inebriated crowd competed with the thump of music, the enticing catcalls of loudspeakers, the tannoy mantras repeated with out end. Beer! Guns! Liquor! Dice! Boys! Cards! Girls! All just for you! Walking in from the hood's edge, I couldn't exactly tell you where it hit full intensity, but when I took it all in it was like getting whacked in the face with a sensory sledgehammer.

The volume of curses around me increased, and I realized I was standing stock still like an idiot. With a curse of my own I got moving again. I fucking hated crowds like this. Pushing through made me feel like I was getting coated with grease, made my skin crawl. I kept my head up and my pace quick, letting my size and mass do the work for me. Big as I was, and wearing my army jacket, an old promo shirt for Flayed Innocent's last album, and a nasty scowl, most people gave me a little bit of room. Some weren't so smart, of course. The chubby guy that first tried picking my pockets got a big fist squeezed round his wrist in warning. The willowy girl that tried barely a minute later got it full in the teeth in anger. Thieves have to make a living too, but seriously, pick your targets better.

I was a few streets up from the canal itself, using the big HVAC tower of the Xinjiang Foley meat plant as my guiding star. I still had several blocks to go, looked like. After a while all the crazy flashing lights kind of faded into the background and I got a little better look around. Many of the buildings were marked. Plenty clasped hands sigil of the Guild over doors or on signs. Most of the others bore the Bones’ own symbol, which I couldn't help loving: a skeletal hand, scrimshawed with runes and curled into a proud one-finger salute.

The crowd was about what I'd expect, a mix of city-dwellers looking to party, quarry bargemen in their folded-brim hats, and corpo stevedores-Yakkorp CS in red coveralls, Amsidyne F&L in dark blue. There was a smattering of people that looked to be trying to get to and from their jobs, some bosos leaning on their bikes and giving dirty looks to those who passed, and even a few freelance sailors with old naval cult marks acid-burned into their biceps. Altogether, a bunch of men and women desperate to have as good a time as possible in the short segments of off-time they were given.

Despite all the lights, there was plenty of shadow left in Port Town, too. I skirted a pointless fistfight between some blue-suited corpo roustabouts and half a crew of quarry sailors. Someone had called someone else a dolo, and now they were hammering each other's teeth out on the perfed-steel sidewalk. A crowd had built around them, laughing and shouting advice and gambling on the outcome. It might have ended there, but just as I passed by one of the sailors, a wiry woman with filed teeth and an officer's tattoos, yanked a big old pigsticker from her belt and slit one of the steveys crotch to collar. I didn't see how it ended, didn't care to, but nobody quit making bets when the knives came out.

The scent of rot and sewage wafted from the alleys, unnoticed or ignored by the people using them to fuck. Bodies lay in some of the darker ones, passed out or dead I couldn’t tell. Street kids ran about half-noticed. Some sold snacks, some cried advertising and threw fliers, some scampered around lifting wallets and slabs (these carefully avoided me), and a few were just standing around wearing too little clothing and too much makeup. Fucking awful, that was, and dangerous too in a place so full of Guild.

I grit my teeth past all of it, resolving to finish up here and leave quick as I could. I had to veer onto the bank of the Guethon itself as I closed in on the meatpacker's. The canal was huge, nearly five hundred feet wide, packed with so many boats and barges I probably could have walked across without my feet getting wet. Docks and jetties stuck out into it like the bits of a key, some of concrete, some like steel gantries, some floating on pontoons, some even of wooden pilings and planks. Forklifts and winch-hacks and stubby little trucks filled the air with a fug of internal-combustion smoke. Even here, the stevedores were wrestling for space with partiers and junkies. Some took it with good humor, some with...less good humor. I tried to skirt the line between dock and drunk as best I could, savoring the bit of freer space.

Closer in I could see that the water wasn't any different than how I remembered it. Black with algae, iridescent with spilled fuel, the smell like a chemical spill at an open-air morgue. It swallowed even the lifelights, casting hardly any reflections. The canal's sheer concrete walls were stained and pitted where the water was eating them away. If any fish could live in that I didn't even want to meet them, let alone eat them. The smell made me think of the first time I'd come to Port Town. It was barely a year since Dad found me, so I was maybe fourteen. We were at a junk dealer's place, and me and the dealer waited up front while Dad rummaged through his stuff (he hated having owners look over his shoulder while he was picking).

"Hey kid," said the dealer as he ashed his cigar into a heavy glass tray. "You wanna see something cool?" I distinctly remember glaring at him, glaring and deciding that if he tried to whip out his dick I was going to put that ashtray through his teeth. But he didn't. Instead he reached beneath his counter, retrieving a different kind of bone. It was a bit over a foot long, straight and slender, from an adult's forearm or a child's calf. He presented it carefully, across both palms. Then, he let one hand drop and the bone went with it, bending like rubber. It shocked a laugh out of me, one of those sights that makes you think your brain slipped a gear.

"Why's it like that?" I asked him, anger forgotten.

"Floater patrol dredged it out of the canal a couple days ago." He passed the thing to me. It was soft and bendy as rubber. "The acid in the water eats the hard parts of the bone, 'n' that's what's left."

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Seemed sensible. I'd ask Dad about it later. But I was still confused. "But...whose is it?"

He sighed, sinking lower on his little stool. "I don't know. Probably no one does. And probably no one cares."

That hadn't sat right with little Sharkie. I set the bone down carefully on the glass-topped counter. "You should burn it," I'd told him in that tone of blithe authority it seems like only kids can use. "Or bury it or something."

He'd looked at me, then. His eyebrows were black, very bushy, his eyes small dark things trying to hide behind them. "Yeah," he muttered. "You're right, kid. I should."

Right after that Sawada shouted for me to help him lift something, and I'd run off without saying another word to the shopkeep. Why I'd come to this specific memory I had no idea, though. Something about it stuck with me. The bone's provenance. The way it was intact, but changed, lessened. The weariness of the shopkeeper. I shook my head to try and clear it, sped up briefly to get out from under a rickety jib crane.

Things got more industrial and less carnival the closer I got to the XF building, the bars giving way to dingy offices and warehouses mottled with graffiti and rust. I got to the plant itself just in time to see a barge arrive. It must have been from one of the big farms on the southeastern outskirts, where D-block edged into R. Its pilot expertly heeled it up to the dock with barely a bump. A couple of women tied the barge up, then a third dropped the ramp up front. The cargo moved itself: a reeking tide of half-blind, piebald hogs that squealed and honked as they raced off the barge, across a scale, and up a chute into the building. The piggies were not long for this world, I thought.

The building itself was a huge, gray cube, entirely featureless but for the huge black 'XINJIANG FOLEY FOODS' flashscribed an inch into the concrete. It stood behind a tall razor-wire fence, but the parking lot was open. I leaned against an abandoned sedan shoved into the corner and settled in to wait for this Bluecat. I hoped he'd be easy to pick out as Walker claimed. I had nothing but the name.

Turned out Walker wasn't exaggerating. It was only a few minutes before I saw a very distinctive stranger jog into the lot. The figure pulsed with blue light, occasionally flickering. Their proportions were slightly off. Closer in and I realized they were wearing a Somalux rig, basically a hologram that covered your whole body. They could even follow your movements if you sprung for the right haptics. This one was in the shape of...oh, shit. A bright blue, anthropomorphic cat, complete with tail and big cartoony eyes. I'd heard of these people on the net but never met one in person.

The kitty got up to me, huffing a little. This close the blue light made my retinas ache. I couldn't imagine what it was like inside.

"I'm guessing you're Bluecat?" I asked tentatively.

"No, I'm Red Roach, nya." The hologram flickered out, revealing a skinny young black guy with a blond ponytail and a puffy face. "Of fucking course I'm Bluecat, nya."

I focused very, very, hard to keep from laughing. When it passed I continued: "Good. You got something for me?"

He frowned. "Yeah, nya. What is freedom to a bird?"

I slowly shook my head. "Don't know what you're talking about, man."

"What the-oh. What is the freedom of birds, nya?"

Where the fuck did Walker find these people? I supposed that was close enough. "An insult."

He reached into his puffy jacket and pulled out a small package maybe twice the size of a deck of cards and about as thick. It was all wrapped up in white plastic. "Here. Y'know they told me you were tall, but Kings. You're like an old tree, nya.'"

Ah, nothing made me happier than to be informed how large I was. I'd only heard it about a million billion motherfucking times. I took the package, then leaned down at him. "Seriously?" I asked, eyes wide. "Thank you so much for telling me. I really hadn't noticed. No wonder I keep hitting my head on doors. You really did me a favor, man. Thank you so much."

Bluecat stepped back, scowling. "No need to be a douche about it, nya."

"You ever heard of the golden rule, Bluecat?"

He snorted, flipping on his Somalux. "Yeah, nya," the cartoon cat said. "Whoever has the gold makes the rules. Ny-fuckin-ya." The hologram flickered, and I caught a glimpse of him angrily whacking a battery pack at his waist.

"Looks like your voltage regulator's going. Want me to take a look, nya?" I swear I didn't mean to say it. Just slipped out.

Bluecat hissed at me through his hologram-it was impressively well-rendered-then jogged away, tail swaying back and forth. I guess that was a no.

I sat back against the vic and laughed a little. If someone had told me they’d seen this encounter going down I wouldn't have believed them. I checked out the package Bluecat gave me. The plastic wrapping was unmarked, heavily taped-over. It was flexible but dense, like a stack of paper or maybe a hardback book. I thought about slitting it open, of course, but I had no idea what kind of anti-tamper measures might be in there-plus, other than idle curiosity I didn't really care what it was. I dropped it into one of the big inside pockets of my army jacket and got to walking.

I stayed a street up from the canal, this time, looking for the Dockside Doxy. A few blocks up I found it. It was big for the neighborhood, one of the few real buildings. It was three stories, built all of crumbly red brick. The huge wooden double doors were propped open in the spring heat. Above them was an old-school neon sign. The top part showed the Guild sign and the name of the place in bright green, the bottom a generously-proportioned woman flipping her skirt up and down, up and down.

I watched it apprehensively for a few moments, reluctant to go in. Brothels had always made me uncomfortable. I knew that with the Guild around, the workers supposedly got paid fairly, didn't get abused, and were free to leave when they wanted-but still, something kept me from patronizing them. I knew plenty of people who did, even a few that worked them-and I'd certainly been tempted before. Maybe that was why I'd never gone, that the fact that I kind of wanted to shook my faith in what kind of person I was.

Well, today I was here for business, not pleasure. I took a deep breath and went inside. In contrast to the shabby exterior, the inside was quite nice. Dim light from faux-antique chandeliers and sconces, dark wood planks on the floor, dark wood paneling on the walls. It was what I imagined a fancy hotel lobby would look like. It was plenty crowded, too. The customers were the same sort of men and women you saw everywhere else in Port Town, though a little less rowdy. The pros themselves ran the gamut-male to female, tall to short, white to black, skinny to...healthy. Some chatted with the customers, trading coquettish banter. Others played strip tiles or dice, and a few danced on a small stage in a far corner, patrons slapping tips down on the edge. A disheveled woman in a bargeman's uniform staggered past me on her way to the stairs, a scantily-dressed lady under one arm and an even less-clothed man under the other. She was stumbling a little, but grinning like an absolute loon. Living her best life, I guess.

There was a bar against the left wall, a counter against the right. I felt eyes on me as I headed for the latter. Most were the usual, people staring at my height, though the glances from some of the lounging whores were rather more mercantile than usual. What I really noticed, though, were what had to be the security. They'd clocked me the instant I went in, catching my size and atypical clothing. There were two of them, one leaning against the wall in each back corner. The dude was almost my height and even broader. He flexed bulging synthetic muscles as he glared at me, subdermal stim injectors standing out in herringbone patterns down his biceps. The other was a woman, mohawked, heavily cybered. She stood tall and dangerous on digitigrade legs, holding a cigarette between claws like shards of mirror. Her eyes had mirrored irises, too, steady and cold. Fucking around in here would not be a good idea.

Manning the counter was a cute redhead a year or two older than me, wearing very many freckles and very few clothes. She gave me a shamelessly appraising look as I approached.

"Why, hello there. What can I do for you, jo-sama?" she asked with an insouciant smile.