Downstairs, the bar was pretty empty. Six or seven vinyl booths opened towards the bar, shiny black wood covered in water marks. Sally stood behind it, her back to the room, filling a glass with a bright green chemical cocktail called Sap. In front of her were the large, neon cabinets of beverages, drinks like Falax and Deiod and Blackest Blue and Urasi and Johny Sure. Plastic tubes slithered down from these cabinets and into taps at the bar, and mist fell from their chill, aluminum hides, as if from the very words and images of their advertisements. There was a rack of dirty glasses, a rack of packaged snacks, and a small line of condoms and matches. Cigarettes were kept under the bar, but Sally only sold Puffems and there was rarely any interest.

A few regulars sat at the bar, watching her pour and sipping their drinks at an even rhythm. For guys like this getting drunk was just a job they just had to get to. Several were rhata. They would have worked all night at the kilns and the fire shops, on the work line, and had been drinking since the morning. The windows were high and greasy, never cleaned, and the light which passed through them came out grimy and weak. It was a dim place with little chatter, circulating with vague synthetic music that passed back out of your ears without being heard.

Mateo passed the drinkers, shrugging on his jacket and running a hand through his hair. He approached the bloodbox in the corner. It resembled the jukebox near the bar, but with frosted glass that remained opaque and a sterile, white furnishing rather than the glitzy and colorful jukebox. On one side was a bronze panel with a scroller ball and coin sized divot. Mateo took his knife from his back pocket, flipped it open, and pricked the skin on his thumb before pressing it into the divot. The frosted glass shuddered, then ran like a liquid in every direction, flowing down the glass until it was clear and transparent.

Inside the blood box, a screen fizzed into life.

Mateo used the scroller ball to select the notice board, hoping to find a bit of action. He scrolled. There was a job over in Atica Six offering 600 X, cash in hand, for each rider. Fun, but a bit too fruity. Plus Atica Six was five hours ride away and Mateo didn’t know anyone over there he could work with. There were a couple of simple lorry heists, like the one they’d done yesterday, but both only offered cash after the fence had sold the stuff and Mateo was already waiting on seven different fences to pony up. There were several street hits that wanted a rider of his ranking, but he never took those. He’d made a promise to his mother that he’d never get involved in wet work and so far he had kept it.

At the bottom of the list was a high-profile, highway slip job that looked perfect. Next to it he could see the blinking emblems of three members of the chapter. Thrift, Underarms, and Wisely were all keen. If he clicked on the rest would follow. He was their best rider, now that Prince was gone. Mateo flicked the ball to the right and clicked it in place, and the job flashed golden yellow. Then he deselected the bloodbox and the glass shivered opaque again.

Mateo left the bar and went over to the convenience store three doors down, purchasing a bowl of noodle soup which Louis, the old guy that ran the place, heated up for him, and a soda. He put the soda in his jacket and walked back to his bike, lapping up the noodles with plastic chopsticks.

Other than the tires the bike was fine. It was in its usual place, locked up across the street with a tarpaulin thrown over and tied down with nylon string. Mateo rode an immaculate Dayzl Dust Chuffer, a beauty in silver with bulging shoulders and an ultra-thin-polycarbon windshield that slid down into the chassis when he didn’t want it; with sharp angular flanks, wheels three fingers thick, and a coil of pipes in its belly that took his fire and compressed it and heated it and made the wheels sing.

There was a big yellow sticker plastered over the rear of the vehicle, depicting a shark in a fedora. Bellow the shark were the words ‘OH NO, I’M ON LOAN’ in holographic black text, and a phone number. Two more payments left to make before that sticker came off and the Dust Chuffer was all his. Mateo couldn’t wait.

A voice popped into his head.

“Oh. Mateo, those tires don’t look so good.”

Mateo blinked. It was the voice of the boy from his dream. He shook his head. Waited. It didn't come back. Perhaps it had been his imagination.

"Hello?" he said to the empty street, looking around him self-consciously.

There was no reply.

Oh dear.

Well, he might be losing his mind, but even so, he was right.

The tires were ruined.

He looked over the bike for scratches and checked to see if there was any damage to the pipes, but it all looked fine. Then he slurped down the last of his noodles, chucked the paper bowl onto the street, and took the soda out of his pocket, resting it against the gauge. He took out the key around his neck, the only adornment Mateo wore aside from Poro’s bone and the golden ring in his ear, and unlocked the bike. He stored the bike-lock in the seat, taking out his goggles, and then shoved the windshield down into the bike. He straddled the bike, cracked the soda, and stamped fire into the left mount, flying off.

You had to ride nicely at daytime. The sky was full of zus, and there were cameramen that sat on the top of the taller towers or perched on the vertical farms and watched the streets, writing down the plates of malcontents that rode naughtily. And of course there were Beetles that patrolled the streets and civilians that liked to play tattletale. To a certain extent, riding an F-bike was itself suspicious, as rhata are widely mistrusted and often criminal, but if he rode nicely all they could do was watch him slide by and note his plates. New plates were cheap in Tinjouki, if you knew the right guy.

Mateo knew all the right guys.

He rode the slipway up to the Jadranju skyway and buzzed half a click along before coming down and taking a couple of nameless turns to Henry’s, sipping his soda the whole way. He pulled into the yard, tossing the can into an alley way. Henry was working on a beaten up old Korse, on his back underneath it on a skateboard. Mateo kicked his foot lightly and waited, and after a few moments the man slid out, running fingers down his oil slick mustache and turning it. Henry wore black sunglasses most of the time, was bald and liver spotted and covered in burn marks, with a big bulbous nose full of blackheads. He saw Mateo and spat, sitting up on the board.

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“I’ll give you seven, Smoke” said the man, glancing over at the Dayzl. Mateo bristled.

“Fuck off, Hen. They’re fresh. They are not three days old. The rubber alone is worth twenty.”

Henry stood, cleaning his hands off on his overalls and then stuffing them into his pockets, and approached the bike. He kicked one of the wheels.

“They’re beaten up, burnt, and look like shit. Three days on your bike is a lifetime on anyone else’s.”

“Seven is robbery. I won’t be robbed.”

“I can’t sell a Deh Liksi on to another rider. They’re not like other wheels, people want them fresh. And they’re white. No one wants to buy white wheels ’less they’re pretty. And no-one but you wants Deh Liksis anyway. What are you doing with them?”

“Nothing,” said Mateo, looking over the other man’s shoulder. He inspected the Korse. It was an ugly car.

“I only want them for the rubber, and in that state it's seven.” Henry took a hand out of his overalls and rubbed down his mustache again, finger-long on both sides and drooping. He sighed. “I’ll let you have your beloveds for seven as well, and you’ll take it or get off my yard. I’m spoiling you.”

Mateo shook his head. He wasn’t angry at the price. It was fair. He was just angry in general.

“Fine.”

Henry went over to the Kors and chucked down a wrench besides the torque lever. Mateo dragged over the bike stand and Henry rolled over two brand new Gurko tires and let them fall beside the bike. The Gurkos were thicker, black. They moved quickly on the road and lasted forever, but they were slippery and you had to be careful on a quick turn. Gurkos had killed more than a couple of riders. Mateo changed the tires slowly, lovingly, taking his time and enjoying the motions. He left the Deh Liksis where they were in the yard and drove off without another word.

He rode back to the J-way and took it all the way to the border of Sedum Ward, coming off two turns before Cato, coming down in the Jayu financial district. Jayu was Six’s most affluent area. He kept his eyes down, ignoring the roof parks, the bright, mirrored surface of the office blocks, the advertising balloons floating over head, driving straight and ordinary so as to avoid notice. Next he cut west along Tipana park, sliding through the dappled concrete underneath the huge trees that described its perimeter, and then through a middle class residential district full of large houses, with a floor typically going to one family, and then through the high street onto the outskirts around here, which provided restaurants and shops to the residential district. Finally he passed through an industrial yard, full of rhata busy at work, and immediately felt the pressure slacken. The prying eyes of the city never looked closely at the rhata, nor where they worked or lived. People ignored him, almost religiously, and Mateo could believe he was invisible. It was an enjoyable fantasy.

He popped out of the industrial yard into the Niporto Community Stretch, vented fire from his heels and sped up to seventy, zipping through the abandoned buildings. Niporto was right on the border between Zones Six and Eight. Years ago, before Mateo’s time, there had been an initiative to build community play and learning areas such as this one, where people of lesser means could come to play sport, socialize, and take free classes to make them more employable. They were lightly policed, to stop the underworld from sinking its teeth yet further into rhata territory and community, and for a while it had worked. When his father was a teenager, Niporto was the heart of the community, and people drove over from Sedum, Hosta and Papaver to partake. Even rich families from Cato or Sevenites with a Six visa had come. It was a family place, where children could play, where wives and husbands could socialize, where teenagers met and fell in love and so on. Everything was very wholesome, to hear his father tell it.

Mateo had his own ideas of what the kids where getting up to, and as to how successful a light unit of Beetles would be at keeping the Kid out of territory. Regardless, the funding had dried up. The police stopped coming. Drugs and alcohol proliferated, and then a series of high profile violent crimes hit the headlines. After a Strange Event, whereby some cape had fallen into Niporto flying over and, in dying, mutated into a monster the size of an apartment building, oozing toxic blood and poisoning the locals with schizophrenic dreams, people had stopped coming.

An Executive team had quarantined the area for a long time, investigating the Strange Event, and there had been some legal dispute involved in handing the district back over to local control. Both Zone Six and Eight claimed to it, and so it was stuck in limbo. Nothing happened here anymore. One by one the buildings had sunk into the ground and crumbled, as there were no olmets here to maintain the structure of the sand deep down in the earth. Most of it was rubble now. The rhata, who were deeply superstitious, stayed away from it after the all the violence and the Strange Event.

Niporto was always quiet. There were a few kids around, rolling tires along the street with sticks, clambering and searching the rubble for prizes, sitting with stray dogs or lounging in the sun, wrestling. Not so long ago Mateo had been one of those kids. There were addicts in the darker recesses, as there were anywhere the Beetles didn't come to remove them. But mostly it was empty. Mateo rode down the empty streets until he came to a particular pile of rubble, threading his F-bike through a gap to one side, then pumped fire, racing through seven more turns as fast as he could before pulling up besides the pool.

Somehow, the pool still stood. Prince had said this was because the building was all glass and steel, the steel sunk especially deep into the earth with a kind of construction technique where the shifting sand barely lowered it. The huge metal and glass building leaned oddly to one side, but that was fine. It had looked like that as long as Mateo had been coming here. He drove his bike through the open doors of the building and parked it next to the others, to one side of the pool pit. Lounging around down in the pool pit were Thrift, Underarms, Wisely, Paunch, No No, Jake, Glow and Dove—the whole chapter. They were watching TV.

Prince and Underams had brought most of the furniture, stealing a moving lorry to shift it all: the sofas and coffee tables, the potted plants, the beaten up old TV, the pool table, the ornate liquor cabinet against one wall. Bits and bobs had arrived over time, things stolen or found or given as reward. The light came in oddly, wriggling through the thick layers of graffiti and grime that lay over everything, from the enamel floor tiles of the pool to the tall glass windows and roof. Still, it was a bright space full of light and the tall house plants Prince had favored. Tarpaulins on poles were erected over the sofas and the TV, to keep the sun and the rain off—although once the TV had shorted and they’d had to replace it.

Everyone looked up as he arrived, several shouting hello. Underarms hit Glow on the arm and Glow got up and went over to the stove, taking off a hot jug of coffee, pouring it into a chipped, handleless mug and bringing it to Mateo as he walked down the ramp on one side and into the pit. Everyone was clustered on the sofas, watching the TV.

“Hey Smoke,” said Glow. Glow was a scrawny boy of 15, facial hair shoving it’s way meekly down through the bottom of his chin, with greasy, mousy hair swept behind his ears. He was always rubbing the tip of his nose, never met your eyes, never raised his voice. Mateo took the coffee and walked by, glancing at him blankly. He sat down on the sofa next to Underarms, taking Glow’s spot, and they bumped fists. He bumped Wisely, also on this sofa. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the TV, and a strange look was on Underarm’s face.

“The First Lady’s dead,” he muttered. Mateo gulped his coffee, wincing at the heat of it, and set it down on the floor. He opened his ears, finally listening to what was being said on the TV. An anchor woman in a black dress was stood outside of the Executive’s Hall and Palatial Offices, the Wall looming hugely behind her, talking into the camera with a face of barely suppressed grief.

“Shit,” said Mateo. “No way.”