CHAPTER 2

The unsettling trio strode right into our little diner and stopped in the center in front of Pop, Evie, and Hilde. Pop was cool as ice, but Evie looked ready to spit fire from her mouth. Hilde stood in the back and fidgeted nervously. I saw the guys give her a thorough thrice-over before turning to my dad. Their wanton disrespect for Hilde lit an angry fire inside my veins as I slammed the door shut behind them.

The leader gestured around. “Your filters running at code?”

Pop nodded. “Plague and pollution both. We’re safe so long as none of you cough on us.”

The scarred man nodded and reached up with gloved hands to undo the straps holding his mask in place. His buddies kept theirs on and stood silently flanking him. The scene was right out of any number of gangster holovids I’d watched with Evie. The bloodier the better, with that girl. I’d expect the goons to pull guns if they weren’t so rare in Milheim City, but their probable lack of firearms didn’t stop the hackles from rising on the back of my neck. Something about the guys made my skin crawl, and it wasn’t just their massive size.

When the scarred man pulled off his mask and glasses, my body seized up in shock. Ugly rambling scars covered his whole face and bald head. The puckered patchwork even ran down the back of his neck into his collar. His sloping shelf brow and massive lantern jaw gave him a predatory air, which wasn’t helped any by the leering smile he turned on us. His relaxed body language and wide hand gestures gave the impression he actually meant the leer to look friendly.

“How’s business?” he asked casually.

“Real good,” Evie snapped. “Better than ever.”

“Ah, that’s good to hear. Success is important, builds the morale. You can finish on a high note.”

“Finish?” Pop asked in a neutral tone. His usually lackadaisical expression was carefully flat, so I knew the old man was wary.

The scarred thug smiled through yellow teeth. “When you sell the restaurant to my employer, Chow Hounds. We’re setting up franchises in the area and want to get rid of competition. I mean that in a friendly sense, of course.” He chuckled, but none of us joined in.

“Thanks for the interest,” Pop said, “but we’re not selling. Besides, we’re already up to our eyeballs in debt to the local syndicate. Selling off the restaurant probably wouldn’t cover that bill, and then we’d be out in the street with no way to earn.”

I fought to keep a smirk off my face. The syndicate held us in debt as they did every other business in District Thirty-two, but they gave us endless extensions. Part of that was due to the boss’ son, Johnny Stoke, being my best friend. If I’d really wanted us released from the debt I had only to ask, but the double-whammy of dishonor from both begging for money and using friendship as leverage sat in my mouth about as well as undercooked chicken.

Pop knew all of this and felt the same, which meant he was casting about for excuses not to sell, to send these punks away on another chase.

“Such a shame,” the scarred man said. His mood didn’t seem the least bit dampened by the refusal. “We’d be happy to pay your entire debt and get you free. And, trust me, the local syndicate won’t be of concern for much longer. Still, everyone says no at first. Then they find it gets harder to stay in business.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Evie demanded. She balled her fists and took a step toward the hulking brute, but Pop thrust a hand out and stopped her.

My old man held the scar collector’s gaze without flinching. “We’ve managed this far. A little competition isn’t going to stop us.”

My mouth finally got the better of me. I’d been boiling since they groped Hilde with their eyes, and the thinly-veiled threat against our restaurant sent me careening over the edge of good sense. “As if you scum haven’t already been making life harder on us. We know about you leaning on our suppliers to sell out, too. Prices skyrocketed when your company came to Thirty-two and decided to buy up everything. It’s not enough to run a good restaurant, you’ve got to run the rest out of business so your slop is the only choice in the district? Why don’t you just serve better food?”

The scarred thug turned his leering smile on me. The glowing wall sconces twinkled in his eyes, and with his yellow teeth and hulking visage I felt like I was staring down a big cat about to charge. “Restaurant business has nothing to do with the food, boy. People eat what they’re told and pretend to like it when it’s all they got.”

I glared back at him. “I’d never sell my restaurant to someone with such a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to serve food.”

A small smile curled the corner of Pop’s mouth. “You heard my kids. Nothing I can do if they’re against it. The boy especially is headstrong and never changes his mind. He’d kill me if I agreed now.”

The leering gangster turned slowly back to my dad. I saw Pop’s face tense up with that ugly grin aimed at him. “You sure you won’t regret that? It’s a cutthroat world out these doors. No sense in making enemies when the solution is real simple.”

Evie had a bad temper at the best of times, but her arched brows meant she was ready to go nuclear. She stomped up to the scarred man and got right in his face, even though he towered over her by two feet, and hissed like an angry cat. “You get up out of here right now, you ugly bastard, or I’ll throw you out.”

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The scarred man gazed down at her for a moment with a flat, dispassionate look. Then he raised his eyes to my dad and put that leering grin back on his face. “You really gonna let your little bit—”

“Yes.” My dad’s voice was flat and final, his gray eyes hard. I’d never seen him look so angry. “She’s right. Get out.”

The thug’s smile froze, then melted into an angry glare. He spoke with growling menace, his previous casual mirth gone. “You’re gonna regret this, Salt. Mark my words. You’ll wish you’d sold when we were easy on you.” He and his goons turned and tromped out, leaving the front door gaping wide.

The four of us stood in silence. Evie panted with rage, while Hilde stood fidgeting frantically with the bottom hem of her serving apron.

My father sucked in a deep breath and relaxed his shoulders. “Close that door, Evie. I’m not paying to filter the whole neighborhood.”

Evie stomped to the door, slammed it shut, and threw the bolt. A moment later, she unlocked it and locked it again even harder. Then she let out a frustrated scream and kicked the door.

I opened my mouth to scold her, but my father’s hand fell heavily on my shoulder. “Let me handle this. You and Hilde go take out the trash and give us a few minutes.”

I shrugged and headed for the kitchen. Hilde looked relieved to have something to do as she followed me through the swinging door.

As we gathered up the trash bags, I glanced at her to see her cheeks were still a little red. “You okay?”

She turned those luminous blue eyes on me and smiled reassuringly. “Yes, I’m fine. Just a little flustered. I hate confrontations.”

“Especially with huge goons who look like they fell into a meat grinder, right?”

Hilde burst out laughing. Her hands were full so she couldn’t cover her mouth, which meant I got to see the full expression of joy light up her gorgeous face. “Wasn’t he so scary looking? It was like one of Evie’s gangster movies!”

“That’s what I thought, too.” I unlocked the back door and set down the trash bags next to it to reach into my pocket. I drew out my mask, a thin muffler like a detached turtleneck which I slipped over my head and pulled down to my neck. When I pulled the front up over my nose and mouth, it exposed two little silver filters for me to breathe through.

Hilde set down her bags and reached into one of her narrow pants pockets but stopped. “Oh, hold on. Evie gave me a new one.” She reached into a different pocket and pulled out a light blue copy of my mask. She slipped it on over her head and drew the front up over her nose and mouth, showing the little silver filters just like mine. “How do I look?”

I gazed at her and pretending to mull over my answer. “Like one of those mask models in Avalon Corp advertisements.”

Her cheeks just above the mask turned red again. She snatched up her trash bags and fussed with the bindings until I swung the door open for her and she brushed past me. I shouldered my bags and followed her out into the cool night.

The back alley was little more than bare asphalt hemmed in by sheet metal walls that ran off into the darkness in both directions. The glowing orb mounted above our back door was the only spot of light up and down the alley for at least a few hundred yards and left me feeling like a pool of life in a sea of black death. The shantytown slums rose in all directions above our two-story restaurant, some of the towering conglomerations of shops rising to a hundred feet or more. The District Thirty-two slum was only twenty square miles and bumped right up against all the districts around us with little distinction apart from posted street signs and specific gang graffiti.

Massive rock pillars wrapped in naked steel girders braced up the rough cavern ceiling three-thousand feet overhead, the roof of Midcity and the bottom of Topside, the surface level of Milheim City.

Hilde caught me staring at the ceiling. “What do you think it’s like, up there in the sunlight?”

“My guess? Cramped. Their precious biodome blocks out pollution and plague, but it doesn’t give them much room to stretch.”

“Maybe. But they don’t have to wear masks like we do. Down here in the dark, with our sicknesses and our vitamin D balm dependency.”

“You’re saying you don’t love getting all your unnatural light from sunlamps?” I pointed at one of the huge light fixtures hanging from the cavern ceiling.

Her eyes crinkled in what we Midcity folks call a “mask smile”. “Can’t stop a girl from dreaming of seeing real sunlight for once. I know they’ll just stay dreams, though. Most of our ancestors got shoved down here to work the dirty industries which provide luxury for the upper folks, and almost no one has ever made it out without some big break.”

I didn’t know how to respond to the melancholy in her voice, so we both just gazed out over the city.

The shantytown slums rose all across Midcity in unplanned towers like the fingers of buried men clawing up through the earth, straining to reach the sky far above. In some places, the ramshackle spires reached nearly to the cavern ceiling. Lanterns in various windows dotting the precarious tenements caused the structures to glitter in the night like sparkling stalagmites. The main pillars flashed here and there with warning lights to prevent hovercars smashing into them. Spotlights shone on big advertisements plastered up and down the pillars showcasing pop idol concerts and the latest big celebrity heroes.

“And anyway,” she whispered, “at least we’re not in Undercity.”

A chill ran up my spine. “No one with a lick of sense would ever go there.”

Hilde and I chucked the trash bags into our little plastic Avalon Corp waste can and shut the lid. All the ramshackle businesses around us were dark, towering over us like a rusty metal canyon as the two of us stood in the synthetic breeze kicked up by the industrial fans humming throughout the massive cavern. In the still alley, it was easy to pretend we were the only two people in the world.

“I hope that creepy guy doesn’t convince your dad to sell,” Hilde said suddenly. I looked over to see her staring up at the dark lamps in the cavern ceiling. Each one was marked with little twinkling lights to show their outline even at night so hovercar and hoverbike drivers wouldn’t hit them, and spotlights shone on the gold and red Avalon Corp logo splashed across the side of each lamp. Her eyes glowed with reflected light over the top of her mask. “This restaurant is the closest thing I have that feels like a home. I never want to lose it.”

I joined her in gazing up at the ceiling. “I won’t let that happen. I promise.”

She turned her eyes to me, and I looked back at her. We shared a smoldering look hot enough that I chickened out and turned away after just a few seconds. My heart raced and my face burned, and I hoped she didn’t notice. When I glanced back, she’d also turned her back.

“I need to get going,” she said in a tight voice, still looking away.

“Those guys were pretty creepy, seemed like they really upset you. Want me to walk you home?”

She looked back and I could see her usual smile in her blue eyes above her mask. “I’m just one block over, so I’ll be fine. But thank you.”

“Any time.” I stood watching her walk away toward a little side street which would take her around to the front of the restaurant.

Before she’d made it ten steps, a silver body plummeted from the sky and smashed into the alley between us hard enough to crater the asphalt.