I walked fast as I could past Orrech's, only slowing down once I rounded the corner onto Gibbet. It was getting pretty late and the crowds had thickened, full of people heading to bars and restaurants and host clubs with the Entertainers' Guild mark. Yerroton and flickerhop and thumping electro-western drooled into the D-block twilight from empty doorframes and open-air stalls, swirling together into a weird musical melange that seemed to match everyone's pace at once.

Somebody bumped my arm and the twinge reminded me that yeah, I'd just been cut to the bone there. No way I was going to see Sawada now, so I barged into a drugstore.

The place was run by a family of daks. A chromed tencrown gleamed proudly above the propped-open doors, surrounded by plasmagram portraits of the Ten Martyred Kings. I certainly wasn't religious, but I didn't care if they were so long as my money was good.

I found a roll of sticky tensor bandages (still sealed!) and grabbed them along with a can of Ripjaw and a tube of antiseptic. On my way to the front, I glanced at a shelf full of sleeping pills. They were in little plastic baggies hand-labeled in paint pen. Probably fell off the back of a truck, literally or otherwise. The sign above them mentioned deep and dreamless sleep. What kind of place did I live in, where dreams were to be avoided? I almost bought some anyway.

I snapped off a couple chits for the skinny kid at the register, who wordlessly punched in my purchase while something that sounded like an air wrench with shot bearings blasted through his headphones. I popped the tab on the soda and drank deep on my way out.

I was straight-up numb after everything that had happened. Like my brain was a corrupt video file, stuck on one frame. All I could do for now was enjoy the small things. So I sipped my soda, felt the breeze on my face, pretended not to see the drunks pissing in the corners and the street kids with wary, hooded eyes.

I got back to the stacks, and was winding up to give Hermy's shed a mighty kick when the gate buzzed open. I looked in through the window and saw him actually paying attention for once, looking at me with what I thought was a worried expression (he seemed to be frowning a little bit, which was a lot more emotion then he usually showed). Walker must have already passed on the word about me. Scary.

Into the plumbing facility I went. It was another pair of containers set behind the main stack, connected by a medusa tangle of pipes to a water reclamation system whose flaking paint covered the pavement like rusty snow. I went into the ladies. Inside was divided into shower stalls, toilets, and a couple of long trough sinks, which was where I went first.

When I peeled the bloody strip of shirt away from my arm, I was surprised to find the bleeding was almost stopped already. Though maybe it wasn't weird. I'd always healed fast, and it wasn't like I'd had other cuts this bad to compare.

After washing it out as best I could with hot water (super fun, by the way, everyone ought to try it), I slathered it with gooey orange antisep and slapped a strip of blue tensor bandage over top. I ripped free the string along the back of the bandage and it tightened, pulling the edges of the cut together. I'd have a wicked scar but I'd live.

I came to the sudden realization that I really had to piss, but after taking care of that it was home free back to my cube. I shut the door behind me, quietly this time, and undressed with the slow movements of a geriatric. My slab went on the bedside charger shelf, I went on the mattress, and I was out before my head touched the pillow.

A procession of blurry lights passes by me. They move from the bottom of my view to the top, one every two seconds or so. I cannot move in this timeless void, cannot look around. There is nothing to see but the lights, and a strange pattern that they silhouette as they go by. I hear nothing but a faint, mufflled clattering and atonal, intermittent rumbles. The rattling stops and there is a noise like a slamming door-

The sound of my slab's double snooze alarm blasted me awake. That dream again. I'd been having it on and off since I was a kid. For a while I'd thought it was a repressed memory, something that could shed light on my origins. But even after months of dream-journaling, I hadn't found anything useful and eventually gave up. Accepted it as just another of my oddities.

I silenced the alarm and checked the time. Not good. Dag was gonna spit blood if I was late again-

Oh. Yeah. I'd been fired. And killed people. Being late was the least of my concerns. I got up anyway and ran through the exercises I did on the mornings when I wasn't feeling too close to dead. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats, lunges (one for each wall of the room) and pull-ups on the bar welded above the door, my hair brushing the ceiling with each rep. Some days I would go lift weights at Sawada's as well, but I was already beat and didn't feel up to facing him anyway.

That done, I threw on a set of coveralls, grabbed my shampoo and a towel and ran down to plumbing to get a shower. When I got back and opened the door, a note was waiting for me just on the other side, like it had been slid in. Old school.

Red Gila diner, Mora and Choremi. 12:00 pm. see you there, little miss. Very to the point. And still calling me 'little miss,' too, perhaps to authenticate. It was barely past 10 yet, but if I'd learned anything from watching Jet Colter it was that you always staked out a sketchy meeting before showing up. Considering I was meeting one gang and another might still want be dead, this qualified.

I yanked on a non-bloody pair or cargo pants and cinched them tight with a friction-buckle web belt. Over that went a Diavel shirt (for Hachazo, which is their seminal album and don't let anyone tell you different) and the same surplus jacket from yesterday. It was only a little bloodstained. My hair went in a ponytail through the back of my ratty ballcap. I grabbed my extra extra light to replace the spare I'd tossed last night, buckled on my knife and was off to Alba.

The Pall was thicker than usual today. The sky was nothing but mottled blackness, no sign of the sun's red coal at all. I vaguely knew where this diner was, though Alba wasn't a hood I usually headed for. The lifelights up on their poles weren't great, their housings cloudy and the lights themselves making that teeth-itching buzz they do when they're close to shot.

Old buildings were few and far between here, replaced by ramshackle constructions of sheetmetal and roughcut bulk conplas and stacked tires and mesh-bound concrete gravel that piled over and into each other eight stories high like maggots in a wound, bristling with balconies and catwalks and awnings and antennae, tangled with electrical wire and crisscrossing pipes, sparkling with LEDs and candles and old headlight housings turned into lamps, all of it spattered with a riotous particolor of repurposed logos and shipping codes and graffiti and windowsill herbs sucking in the meager lifelight that trickled down through the jagged roofs desperate as addicts.

The breeze carried the smells of cooking oil, sweat, tobacco smoke, herbs, compost. There were a multitude of tiny cafes selling dubiously sourced caff and whiskey and odd little pastries with votive tencrowns stamped into the top. In among them were gomi stands bursting with knockoffs of knockoffs, with glass jewelry and guns more dangerous to the user than the target, whose hawkers spent more time denigrating the other's goods than pimping their own. Dark and narrow shops full of electronic junk and machine parts jostled shoulder to shoulder with black clinics that would screw someone's scalped bionics into you for the price of a few denars and a a bad case of blood poisoning.

The whole mess crawled with shirtless people crisscrossed by sharp shadow and sprinting children with sharpened survey stakes and haggard amputees, with hopeful pretty girls who would not stay so for long and quiet young men with hooded eyes and well-dressed oldsters playing tiles with fragrant cigars hanging from their lips and the ubiquitous albino monkeys, who ran from the children in endless circuits lest they end up sizzling on a barbeque. It was a great mess of life, so much of it crammed a tiny space that you could stand there sketching for a day and not capture all the detail. Just walking by I felt like I was trespassing, like I was staring through someone's open window and getting a glimpse of an existence I didn't understand and never would.

After a bit of exploration and asking around, I realized I was already on Choremi Street and found the diner where it crossed Rue Mora, nestled between a Dakessar chapel and a bordello-go figure. It was one of the few real buildings around, its walls of stolid reinforced concrete painted with red and yellow checks. It was still warm out, so the doors were propped open. Above them burned a hologram of a big, bright-red lizard, stomping around and snapping at the air. It was vicious-looking, except it had a little bib around its neck reading 'Gila Roja' in fancy script. I loved it.

Walking over here had taken a little while, so it was only forty-five minutes or so until the meeting. I found a nameless little bistro across from the Gila and sat at one of the outside tables. After buying a can of Ripjaw from the motherly woman at the counter, I settled in to watch. Unless Walker had shown up very early I'd be able to spot him walking in.

Plenty of traffic through here, that was for sure. Loads of vat workers in orange haz suits and iron wranglers with heavy boots and sooty faces. I saw a shifty-looking pusher (probably a redundancy) doing brisk trade in powders and pills and little cans of hush. On one corner a pair of nanopaths busked. Lightning crackled from their fingers in the shapes of animals and heroes and Kestite devils. Tines of it snatched tossed coins from the air and dropped them into a jar.

Of vics there weren't too many, mostly buzzing rickshas and quarrybound jingle trucks that clanked and growled and spat brown-black exhaust through the prayer wheels clamped to their stacks. There were a couple taxis that stopped briefly to pick up or drop off appointments, and once a brand-new blacked-out Vintner Thirty-One hummed past like a very expensive dragonfly. Who knew what something that nice was doing here.

I wondered if Walker's sniper friend might have come along for the ride, but soon gave up looking for him in the crumpled-up mess of roofs and awnings and gantries. He could be anywhere. No sign of the man himself either. My eyes were starting to ache from squinting. The guy was so short that it wouldn't have been hard to miss him-

"Howdy there, pard."

"Shit!" I dropped the soda and almost fell off my rickety stool at the voice in my ear. I looked over, one hand on my knife, and saw Walker standing on the tenement porch to my left, wearing the same jacket and jeans as last night. He leaned over the railing, putting his face level with mine. "Shit," I said again, shaking my head slowly.

"Don't get all stabby on me. I didn't sleep and the last thing I want is a trip to the fucking trauma bay." He pulled off his wide-brimmed hat and fanned himself with it. "Good instincts to wait here, by the way."

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I was looking at the damp spot on the knee of my pants. So much for finishing my Ripjaw. "Not good enough, apparently."

He waved the hat dismissively. "Naw, mine were just better." He screwed his cover back on and grinned, a few teeth flashing silver.

"Shorter, you mean."

"Young lady, if you ever get to my age you'll learn to take every advantage you can get." He lit up one of his foul cigs and pointed with it at the Red Gila. "Shall we?"

I followed him across the street and through the low-ceilinged doors. The place had an old-school look inside, brick walls and red tile floor and mismatched tables under bare incandescent bulbs. He must have been a regular, for the host just nodded at him and let us choose our own table. He picked a booth in the corner, facing the door. No surprise there. Our waiter was a kid in black slacks and a red apron, a couple years younger than I was. Walker ordered a pot of caff. "Champurrado's real good too," he muttered at me. I nodded to the waiter, who smiled and jetted off.

Walker set his hat down on the table. His face had the shiny, tanned look of someone who'd spent a lot of time outside under lifelight. It was rough with salt-and-pepper stubble, matching his short hair. Yeah, still pretty good-looking. He looked like the guy in a movie who got called out of retirement for "one last job."

He leaned back in his chair and just looked at me silently while dub music pulsed from scavenged auto speakers in the corners, slow and dark as venous blood. After maybe ten seconds I'd had enough and leaned forward.

"What?"

He stared a second longer then shook his head like a cat pet the wrong way. "Nothin'. Sorry. Sleep-dep kooks me out. How you doin?"

I was a little taken aback. I thought gangsters were all business. "Um, okay, I guess. As good as you could expect."

"Sleep alright?"

This was confusing. "...Yeah? Is...is this how this kind of thing usually goes?"

"Whaddaya mean?"

The waiter came by, dropping off a mug and caff pot for Walker and a steaming bowl of cinnamon-topped champurrado for me. I took a sip; it was indeed 'real good.' Walker filled his mug. He took it black of course. As he poured I noticed the black-line tattoos on his fingers, like a diagram of his skeleton.

"I mean...being nice, I guess. I thought you were just gonna tell me what to do."

His leather jacket creaked as he leaned back, holding his caff near his face. "Shit, hon. It ain't like this is a date or something."

"I know that!" I sputtered. "It's just-"

"I'm bein' polite. Ain't people that work together supposed to be polite?" He grinned, showing off those silver teeth. "You can call me a criminal, but ain't nobody gonna call me an asshole."

The jury was still out, I thought. But I wasn't gonna say that out loud so I just drank some more champurrado.

"Man." Walker finished his caff and poured another. "Stuff just kills my stomach but damn if I can't stop drinking it. Phew. Anyway, we talked to our contacts in the Blues. Let 'em know that altercation in Orrech's was just a big misundersanding involving a prospect, kissed the ring a little, paid ‘em off. They ain't gonna be looking for you any more." He set down his caff and puffed on his cig. The man liked his stimulants. "Should help out when it comes to the job."

I leaned forward to listen. "Here's the deal," Walker continued. "There's a place on Boulevard of the Hyades. Grayson's. Grocery on the first floor, gambling on the second. Heard of of it?"

I had, actually. Sometimes I bought ingredients for Sawada to cook there. They had nice onions. So I nodded. "Yeah."

"Well, it's ours. We provide protection, help with supply, set 'em up with good software for the games, and they give us a cut of revenue. S'posed to be a real simple deal." He leaned forward, pausing as a VTOL cracked past somewhere overhead and set the plates to rattling.

"Except the fuckin' Blues barged in there yesterday morning like they owned the joint. Took over, beat the hell out of our guy on the scene, killed him and sliced his tats. Dumped him out front of the Ragged Axle like a sack of fuckin' potatoes." Another deep drag. "Now, if they'd just kicked him out of there, even roughed him up some...maybe it wouldn't be too big a deal. But going this far? Hell naw. Holy Bones don't let this kinda shit slide. So guess what?" He jabbed his cigarette at me, causing a little tower of ash to hit the table.

"That's where I come in?"

Walker pulled on the burner once more then screwed it vehemently into the ashtray. "Eck-zackly," he said, crushing the butt for emphasis. "You head in there and retire all the Blues you find. We get a couple soldiers back in there soon as we can and the place is ours again."

"Simple enough." Yeah, killing gangsters for territory and revenge. Nothing to it. Sharkie does that kinda thing before breakfast.

"It's a simple goal, but it might not be a simple task. Listen to me." He gave me a serious look, blue eyes boring into mine. "First of all, you ain't there just to fuck shit up. Ridiculous as it sounds, we ain't leeches. We provide our people a service. Act like parasites and they will tear us apart. S'what the Bones and the Guild and Blue Div did to the Spiders twenty years ago."

He wasn't exactly wrong. Gangs like the Holy Bones and Blue Division were the closest D-block had to police, to a government even. Once, Sawada and I were walking back from a scrap store after buying some parts for his water purifier. It was only a few months after he found me; I was maybe thirteen. We were only a few minutes away from home when a mugging went down on the other side of the street. A kid walked up to this older guy in a shabby suit and stuck a gun in his face, bold as you please. The old guy handed him a wallet and a few loose chits, then the kid knocked him down with a kick to the knee and ran off.

At the time it seemed so rote, a transaction as normal as paying the clerk at the register after picking your stuff out, but I still knew it was wrong. I turned to Sawada (even then I was almost his height) and, with all of my public-broadcast-inspired confidence in authority, asked him why Admin never came to stop things like that. Weren't they supposed to fight crime and protect people?

Sawada sighed, long and quiet. Then he looked at me sadly and said "The truth, my girl, is that they don't care. As long as we keep clocking in, they don't care what we do to each other." Eight years later I'd yet to see him proven wrong.

So Walker's order to avoid collateral damage made sense-not that I'd planned on busting up some poor family's food mart anyway.

I finished my bowl and kicked back. "I can manage that, I think."

"Good. Second of all, nobody ever won a war just killing all the guys on the other side. That's impossible. Mutual destruction, ya know? The goal is to convince the enemy that fighting any longer just ain't worth it."

"Psychological warfare?" I'd seen the term in some of Sawada's old books.

"Right. So what I'm sayin' is, go ahead and, uh, make an impression if you get the chance."

I thought quietly for a few moments, then remembered something. I told Walker what I had in mind.

"Holy shit, you sure?"

"Yeah. I just have to hit a hardware store first."

"Damn, Sharkie. You're real...enthusiastic. But I do have a bit of unasked-for advice for you. You got a heater?"

I shook my head no.

"Get one. In the quarries, we say no one ever won a knife fight but plenty of people lose 'em."

Well, shit. I slouched back in my chair. I'd certainly have a gun by now if I could afford one that wasn't likely to take my hand off.

"Aw, come on now." Walker slapped a chit card down on the table along with a scrap of paper. "Go see ol' Vandermaas and tell him I sent you. He'll get you hooked up with some iron. See? Charitable and polite."

I left them where they sat. "I'll be honest, man. I'm still confused."

"Hoh yeah?"

"Why are you doing this?" I set my hands on the plastic tabletop palm down. "I'm just some nutbar shasha you met in an alley, Walker. Why are you saving my life? Paying me to kill people? Buying me Kingsdamned guns? You setting me up or something?"

He gave me another smile, but this one was somehow more serious. "Good instincts, good questions. First of all, I got no need for a setup. If I wanted you dead you would be. Right?"

Right. There was that.

"And everything I said last night was true. We are low on shooters and we do need something decisive. Otherwise us and the Blues, we'll destroy each other. That means a power vacuum, and that means bad fuckin' times for everyone." He stared past me for a moment, then lit another cigarette.

"I was a kid when the Spiders fell apart. It was...well, I wouldn't wish that shit on my worst enemy. We got to finish this before it gets that bad. And you...lookin' at what you did last night, I really do think you can help.

"Besides..." He stood up and tossed a few more chits on the table. "What do I got to lose? If you fuck up, well, I never met you, right?" He laughed, probably at the expression on my face, then stuck out a hand.

I stared at it for a second, then took it. I had to work for him no matter his motives. "Thanks."

He pulled me up with a groan. "Kings almighty! You oughta be helping me up."

"Next time. Right?" I grabbed the money and address he'd left me.

"Right. You're gonna do fine. And speaking of next time, take this." He handed me a small, cheap comslab, straight out of a gomi stand. "Gimme a call when you're done. There's only one number in there."

"Sure thing." Now this was more like what I'd expected. "What should I tell Grayson?"

He scratched his cheek, considering. "Hm. Tell 'em the change in management was temporary, and we'll give 'em something to make up for the disruption. Hell, tell 'em their fees are waived for the rest of the month. Sound good?"

"I'll let them know."

Walker put on his hat and went straight to the door. "Alrighty then. We'll talk soon. Be seein' you, Sharkie." Before I could reply he did his disappearing act, vanishing into the crowd. I looked for him in vain for a few seconds, then shook my head and moved when I realized I was blocking the Gila's door. One of these times I'd catch him.