And the motherfucker was right-the moment I stood in the hallway with Gatz again, I turned to look at the door we’d just passed through, and it was gone. I put a hand against the wall and it felt solid enough.

“Looks to me like you just hired the right guy, Avery,” Gatz said laconically.

“You were a shitload of help,” I said, running my hands flat against the wall. It was fucking gone, and all of a sudden I was in total agreement with Gatz. Whoever the fuck Ty Kieth was-and his anonymity spoke well of a Techie-he was fucking good.

“Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “I don’t know shit about this shit.”

I turned away from the wall, imagining Kieth laughing at me inside, watching me pressed up on a plasma field with my nose squashed against invisibility. Fucking Techs. They thought they ran everything, and it was galling, because they did.

“Come on,” I said, pushing him toward the escalator. “We’ve got more people to dicker with.”

“Come on, Ave,” Gatz said with a crooked, crazy grin. “Everyone wants in on this.” He shook his head. “Everyone. They’ll fucking pay you.”

X

YOU ARE NOT A BAD MAN. I AM A BAD MAN

Gatz and I got out on the street and I looked for Kieth’s three cops. Even though they’d been clear as day on his little monitor, I couldn’t find them. It freaked me out. System Cops are not subtle; they do not deign to fucking worry whether we see them coming or not. Seeing three of them do the undercover thing made sweat pop out on my forehead, because the only thing that made it possible to deal with them was their arrogance.

I swallowed hard. Gatz trundled along behind me, and who knew what the fuck that freak was thinking?

Your whole view of the world changes when you’ve killed someone for money. You can solve anything through murder. Someone shoves you in the street, you can follow them all day until they’re alone in a darkened stairwell-and pop! Problem solved. Someone shortchanges you or doesn’t pay up, you could wait for them, and pop! Problem solved. When you killed someone for money, you realized that the world was just a fucking machine. Push here, something happens. Pull here, something happens. Push and pull in a coordinated sequence, and you could make just about anything happen.

Your behavior changes, and thus everyone’s reaction to you. I walked with Kev Gatz through the crowds, hundreds of people just like me and him, nothing better to do, lean and hungry. But everyone got out of my way. Everyone made room. When you killed someone, you were a god, if only for a few moments. It clung to you afterward, the faint scent of godhood. All the gray people around me could smell it, and they shied away.

You didn’t just walk in Manhattan, not these days. You performed. You did a little performance just to get across the street. I scanned the crowd, hardassed, trying to project complete disdain. The thieving, roiling mass of arms and sticky fingers was my enemy and they were all looking to get over on me. You couldn’t let that happen, because if you let one of the bastards get over on you the rest swarmed.

Gatz and I made our way on foot like all the other shlubs, pushing and shoving our way through the wall of meat. The problem with being hardassed all the time was everybody was hardass all the time. And I had a rep that inspired people to be twice as fucking rude to me just to show they weren’t afraid. Fuckers.

So it was pretty obvious what was going on when the crowds kind of miraculously began to thin, and Kev and I found our way much easier.

I glanced at Gatz. “Fuck me. We’re going to start getting a reputation.”

Gatz looked like he’d swallowed a stone. “Start?”

By the time the cop cleared his throat behind us, the street was deserted except for a trio of Crushers who lounged against a crumbling wall, looking unwashed and grubby in their ill-fitting uniforms, their faces careful and stiff. Otherwise, we owned the street. I could have set up a table and had high tea with the Pig and no one would have bothered us.

I turned. “Colonel Moje,” I said. He was about three feet behind us as we turned. He almost shone in the dirty gray light of Manhattan. The man could wear a suit. It was dark purple, pinstriped, with stylishly flared lapels and cuffs. He carried a dark black walking stick like a scepter, waving it unnecessarily. “How fucking delightful.”

He grinned, his beard trimmed expertly, the flashes of gray in it giving him a distinguished, professorial look. Then he tossed the stick in the air, caught it deftly, and swung hard, hitting me in the stomach.

I exhaled my kidneys and went down to my knees like a sack of shit. I tried to breathe, experimentally, but it felt like a small rubber cork had been shoved down my throat.

“Mr. Cates,” Moje said, breathing hard. “My name is Elias Moje, please don’t ever forget it, because you have been brought to my attention.”

Oh, fuck. I thought. This guy takes himself pretty fucking seriously. At my altitude all I could see were his shiny, shiny boots.

“I was inspired by certain parties to pull your file, Cates, and spent an afternoon reading it. You think you’re world-class. You think you’re a bad man. Let me tell you something, Mr. Cates: You are not a Bad Man. I am a Bad Man.”

With a large rock lodged somewhere in my windpipe, I could only stare at his incredibly shiny shoes while dark red spots crowded in on my vision. I thought, Shit, who’s paying this son of a bitch to run me off this job?

“I know that you’re working for Marin, that fuck,” Moje hissed. “I’m telling you to back off. Don’t get into shit with the Electric Church, got it? I’m telling you to go away. Go hide somewhere.”

A pinhole opened in my throat and I sucked hoarse, wheezing air through it. Moje nudged me roughly with his boot. “Got me, shithead?”

I put my hands palms-down on the pavement and panted, the pinhole getting wider. “Yeah, I got you.”

“I’ll be watching you, Cates. Behave yourself.”

I watched his boots scrape their way off, and Moje receded into a smaller version of himself, and was then swallowed by the suddenly returned crowd. Gatz eventually helped me up, and I wiped spit off my chin and watched where Moje had been, burning with a shameful fury.

“He doesn’t like you,” Gatz offered.

“Lots of fucking help you were,” I snapped. “And it has nothing to do with me, fuck. That bastard’s getting paid.”

It was pretty common for corporations or very rich private citizens to hire System Cops as bodyguards or what have you-officially illegal but the DIA winked at it, usually, if they even knew about it. Whoever’d paid Moje had obviously cheaped out and not gone full-price to just have me murdered. Or maybe they just thought I was your typical street rat, and easily scared. Or maybe they had paid Moje to kill me, and he was just trying to rip them off, take their yen without breaking a sweat. Or maybe Moje was too terrified of Dick Marin to just kill me-who knew? And if that was the case, who would terrify Moje enough to even get him to go this far against the King Worm? Thinking this, it hit me: If Moje wasn’t collecting a check from the Electric Church, I’d eat my fucking shoes. If the stupid motherfucker thought his sad display of power would somehow make me less terrified of Dick Marin, the stupid motherfucker was in for a lesson.

We blended again, becoming just another pair of unhygienic assholes in the mass. Milton Tanner were living a straight life up in Old Chelsea, running what, from all reports, was a profitable store selling artistic little bric-a-brac to rich fucks. I hadn’t heard much about Milton Tanner, as they were before my time, and were over forty, to boot, adding a layer of unbelievability to it all. I didn’t know anyone over forty, except Pick. It was like Gatz and I were going to meet a leprechaun.