“We’re in, Mr. Cates,” they said simultaneously. “When do we get started?”

“Tomorrow night,” I said, sliding off the desk and making for the exit. “I’ve got a few arrangements to figure.”

From behind, I heard one of them call out, “Word is there’s a System Cop’s got your name tattooed on his ass. You still gonna be alive by tomorrow night?”

I didn’t look back. “Probably not.”

XI

JUST SOMEONE WE THOUGHT WAS DEAD

Outside Tanner’s, Kev and I paused a moment. I watched the gray, sullen faces of people who marched to jobs working for people just slightly less poor than themselves. Or thieving and mugging and murdering their way through life. Few of us managed what Pick had managed, a little emperor of information in his back office.

I glanced at Gatz, who looked like he’d fallen asleep standing up. “Shit. I need a drink.”

He nodded. “What the hell. I don’t have any appointments or job interviews today.”

We started walking. I felt nervous, exposed. I’d imagined I’d stayed outside the sphere of the SSF’s attention because I was smart and careful, but here we’d located several famous people on the SSF’s most-wanted list in almost no time. It suddenly occurred to me that the System Pigs might know a lot more than they let on, and just let us all scamper about to see where we’d go, that maybe I wasn’t as hidden as I’d thought. After all, we had engaged Pick in fifteen minutes of conversation, paid him a few thousand yen, and had the location of several desperate criminals. I had an uneasy feeling Pick got his info direct from the SSF databanks, and that maybe I was in there, too.

It never took long to find a booze establishment in Old New York, the ancient core of the city. This one looked nicely squalid-a transient, illegal bar, not like Pick’s, which was mostly legal and had bribed its way to a truce with the Crushers. It was one of the hundreds of illegal, unlicensed places that sprang up for three weeks, raked in cash selling sewer liquor to anyone with yen, and then disappeared just before the System Pigs took an interest. It was an old bombed-out relic from the Riots that looked ready to fall over in a heap, its windows ragged empty spaces. Scavenged tables and chairs had been scattered amongst the debris, and an open fire crackled in a trashcan in the middle of the room. I paused to admire the hand-lettered sign leaning up against the outside wall: live music every night. sitters must drink fast.

I turned to Gatz to say something about this, but the freak had kept shuffling forward and was already inside. I quickly followed him in. The only other customer was an Asian-looking kid, apparently asleep at a table, legs up, mouth open, sunglasses obscuring his face, empty bottle between his ankles. I walked up to the makeshift bar while Gatz took a position near the door and removed his own glasses. Good lad, guarding my back.

The proprietor was a short, round, red-faced man who beamed at me with alarming jocularity.

“Welcome! Welcome to Rolf’s by the Sea.” He winked. “The Sea of Humanity, that is, flowing by our hallowed windows every day. We serve anything you want, as long as it is potato vodka. But we will call it whatever you wish.”

I asked the obvious question. “Where in hell do you get potatoes?”

He winked one bleary eye. “We call anything used to make our fine liquors potatoes, sir. It is a generic term.”

I nodded. “Okay. Give me a bottle.”

He nearly farted in excitement and scurried away, opening a well-locked, reinforced door and disappearing into the room beyond. Real restaurants had fancy delivery mechanisms and Droid waiters, but who could afford shit like that? I drifted to sleeping beauty, pulled out the empty chair, and sat down.

“You have to sit here?” he said without moving.

I blinked. “No.”

I grinned as the blobular Rolf arrived with amusing pomp and ceremony. The kid straightened and leaned forward, folding his legs underneath the chair with surprising grace, and said, “I wouldn’t mind a blast.”

I looked at him. He couldn’t be more than a teenager, maybe eighteen at the most, but he was already ruined. Broken teeth, sallow skin, red eyes-a fucking waste. You could tell someone’s status just by looking at him, because there were only two kinds of people in New York-maybe in the world-these days: Rich and Poor. If you were rich, you glowed with health, you benefited from organ replacements grown from your own DNA, noninvasive life-extension therapies, effective and current vaccinations-the whole deal. If you weren’t rich, assuming you made it out of childhood to begin with, you ended up looking like this kid. Like me. A walking corpse. You either had more money than I could even imagine, or you had nothing. That was it.

You sometimes got a slummer in the gin mills, a rich fuck prowling around in a costume, pretending to be poor. That’s all they ever did-pretend. When you’re that rich, there’s nothing else to do. Everything you did, by definition, was pretend, because you didn’t have to do anything. If you worked a job, it was for fun, because the jobs didn’t pay shit. Droids did everything better; humans were just expensive, unreliable, and, to be honest, prone to robbing you blind.

You were either rich, cop, or little people. It always pissed me off when I saw some rich fuck pretending to do a job. There were people shuffling along outside right then who would kill for a job, any job. The only jobs left were in the Vids and the SSF. You could get into the SSF as a Crusher, a beat cop, which was better than nothing, but all it did was make your daily struggle for survival legal. Everything else you had to be rich in order to get the damn job. It made my blood boil.

I shrugged and slid the cup over to him, uncorked the bottle, and poured him a blast. He took up his cup, nodded at me, and drank. I took a hit from the bottle and winced. The stuff tasted like piss. Warm piss. “How old are you?”

The kid scowled, squinting into the cup. “What is this, a date? I’m nineteen.”

I nodded. About right. Hadn’t known any world but post-Unification. Had spent his whole life running through the sewers, terrified of the light because it usually turned out to be an SSF hover. I stood up. The booze was eating me from the inside, and I wanted to just puke it all back up. “Keep the bottle,” I said, feeling tired.

He was already pouring himself another. “Fuck, man, I owe you one.”

I started for the door. Fuck it, he’d be dead before long anyway, just like everyone else. Behind me, I heard a fussy, chubby little commotion.

“Sir! There is the issue of the bill!”

I paused next to Gatz and glanced at him out of the corner of my eye. “Kev, pay the man.”

Even though Pick had never been a physical kind of crook, the kind that waves a gun around and beats the tar out of people, he had everyone’s respect for the simple reason that he had survived the streets of New York long enough to grow old, and he knew everything. As a result, anyone in New York who planned to separate some citizens of the System from their yen came to Pick’s.

A lot of jobs had been planned at Pickering’s. Most if not all of the major schemes attempted in New York in the past decade had probably been started over rotgut gin at Pick’s, and I figured I could do worse for a portent. I slipped Melody a few yen and reserved the back room. Once we were seated back there, I ordered Gatz a bowl of whatever Melody had going in the kitchen and sat there while he ate. It was slow going at first, but some ancient instinct kicked in and by the end he would’ve eaten the bowl if that hadn’t cost extra.

I hadn’t even gotten around to my glass of booze when Ty Kieth appeared, lugging a huge black bag. It was amazing: I slept with everything I owned. No one owned anything, anymore; the best you did was work some rich fuck’s property and get some crumbs in return. But Techie freaks like Kieth could always scavenge tons of skag.