“How long will they be pacified?”

Gatz was leaning against a wall. “Few more minutes, Ave,” he panted. “It’s hard.”

I paced back and forth. “We can’t kill them,” I muttered. You didn’t kill System Cops, at least not after being seen out in the open with them by half of Old New York. It was unhealthy. The good people of New York never remembered a face… until the SSF started knocking heads and taking names.

“On the other hand,” Gatz said slowly, “you’re already fucking famous.”

He had a point. When a pair of SSF show up and tell you your life story, the chances you’re going to be left alone for the rest of your short, miserable life were pretty low. Maybe slitting their throats carried a low risk after all. But I shook my head. “Man, they sent two of them just because they thought I might have seen something. Two of them don’t check in, they’ll send a fucking army after me. I need to get them out of the way without being involved.”

Just beyond the crumbling old brick walls there was the usual noise of the world, and inside there was Gatz, dead skinny and wearing out way faster than was fair, and two comatose System Pigs who had to be dealt with. On top of that, I had an entire religion…

I paused, an idea forming. I smiled at Gatz.

“What the fuck you laughing about?” he demanded.

“Get them up, okay? Get them walking, and follow me.”

VI

CALM, DEFEATED HAPPINESS

The streets of New York were always crowded, because no one had anywhere to go. Hovers zoomed by overhead, rich-kid’s toys. Nothing commercial went by hover-all the shipping was automated, on specialized underground routes, though garbage was sometimes hauled in the air. The fucking robots had all the jobs; they were self-healing, intelligent, learning machines that never tired, never showed up late or hung over.

The street was wide, banked by tall, sagging old brownstones that looked moments from collapse. We followed the Pushed cops at a short distance, Gatz stumbling as he struggled to maintain a constant hold on them through his exhaustion. Trash swirled around our ankles, and every step was a push past shoulders and glares, everyone trying to out-tough each other until they saw the cops and suddenly got polite. I scanned the streets until I found what I was looking for: two Monks moving easily through the crowd with heavy tread, all the nervous humans making a small corridor for them to pass through, afraid to even touch their smooth, pale skins.

I nudged Gatz and the four of us started to follow the Monks. The Monks turned to glance back at the cops and then resumed their steady pace.

After a few moments, Dawson started to slow down, the tall blond looking up and back at me as if he’d never seen me before. His eyes sharpened.

“I’m going to eat your fucking kidneys, asshole,” he growled. “I’m gonna-”

“Kev,” I whispered.

Gatz nodded wearily and Dawson suddenly snapped forward again and picked up his pace. “Sorry,” Gatz muttered, “It’s… pretty fucking hard.”

I ignored him, waiting. I knew how his Push worked, the mechanics of it: He needed eye contact to establish his hold on you, but after that initial lock he maintained control just by concentrating, and the effects lingered for a few minutes even after he let it go, which was ideal for my purposes here, as we wanted to put some distance between us and these Pigs. When I thought it looked like the right moment, I nodded at Gatz, and he stared fixedly at the backs of our captured cops, Pushing them to act out the little script I’d hastily written. Dawson and Hallier suddenly animated, reaching into their coats and pulling out their guns. The crowd scrambled. Shouts of “Cop!” went up, and we were standing in a swirling mass of confused humanity.

“Police!” Hallier croaked in a voice that sounded like it wasn’t really meant to be used. The Monks didn’t hesitate. They moved, fast. I was surprised that they didn’t draw their own weapons, but rather ducked and ran as Dawson and Hallier pumped shells after them in precise, hypnotized sequence, Pushed. It was perfect. The Monks wouldn’t take this lying down. Once away from the public eye, they’d draw their own weapons, and my two pet cops, under Kev’s watery eyes, wouldn’t be any match for their digital reflexes. The cops would be eliminated, and I wouldn’t be implicated. The end result: two System Cops taking shots at legally recognized reps of a sanctioned religion, and poof! Dawson and Hallier out of my hair for good.

As the cops ran after the fleeing Monks, I grabbed Gatz by the collar and pulled him after me. I didn’t wait to find out what happened. We ran like hell, Kev wheezing like an old man, me snarling behind him. We melted into the city and I thought I’d be on a plane out of the continental area, under a new name, within hours.

Two hours later, Gatz and I were crashing in a borrowed apartment for a few hours until it was safe to venture out and try to contact Gatz’s Splicer friend, Marcel.

“Jesus fucked, Ave, isn’t that one of the Pigs we got rid of today?”

I looked wearily up at the Vid. It was an older model, with no advanced features and just a sixty-inch screen, but that also meant it didn’t have any of the tracking features the newer Vids had. On the screen, crisp and clear, was the oddly unhandsome face of Barnaby Dawson, blond and blue-eyed. He was staring straight ahead like he was pissed off at the camera.

I moaned, and gestured the sound back on.

“… dead. Representatives of the Electric Church issued a statement from London condemning the actions of the SSF captain, and demanding that he be immediately suspended from duty and tried for murder. No explanation for the illegally modified firearms found on the Monks’ bodies was included in the statement. The Electric Church is now listed as the sixth-largest religion on Earth, with about nine hundred million registered members. Brother Kitlar Muan, spokesman for the Church, refused all requests for an interview… In Minsk this afternoon another food riot was forcibly…”

I waved the sound off again as Dawson’s face was replaced by a video of a riot, people shouting and bleeding and generally getting their asses kicked by SSF, which was how all the riots ended. I looked down at the floor.

Dawson was alive, and I was fucked. We were fucked, but my interest in Gatz’s well-being ended well short of including him in my own worries. I liked Kev a lot, which meant I’d try my best not to kill him. It didn’t mean I’d lose sleep over it if I did, accidentally or otherwise, as useful as he was. Dawson was alive, Hallier was dead. They were both supposed to be dead. The fucking Monks were supposed to have pulled the same sort of cyborg voodoo on them that I’d seen, and Dawson was supposed to have gone down a Burned Badge who flipped out on the Monks and got fed some bullets as a reward. Having the motherfucker still alive-and being tortured in a fucking DIA Blank Room, a room that survelliance could not penetrate and that didn’t exist in any official building plan or document-had not been the plan. I began rocking gently back and forth.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I moaned.

Gatz was up, rubbing his bare arms in agitation. “Avery, we ought to get moving. Now. Find Marcel before your name gets on the street connected to this. Marcel hears you’re fucking marked with this shit, he won’t touch you.” Gatz shook his head, glassy-eyed. “No one will.”

He was right. It was one thing to get hassled by the System Pigs; everyone did. It was one thing to even get charged with something-everyone did, eventually. But to really piss off a cop, to maybe get your name thrown around a DIA Blank Room, to maybe have the whole fucking SSF on your ass for revenge-shit, I wouldn’t want to be seen talking to me either. Even the Crushers would stop taking your bribes.