sweetie. Hell, they may even box you.”
“Enough. I got the point. Shall we meet for lunch?”
“Nope. Betty’s taking me to Powell’s bookstore for a romp in the stacks.”
He smiled. She often joked about her liaisons. She probably only planned a shopping trip of some kind, or a visit to the manicurist for new nail implants. “Don’t wear her out too much. She’s due to come back here tonight.”
“Tease!” she said, sticking her tongue out at him, flashing the blue lightning bolt tattooed there as well. “Wilted Rose?”
“Tomorrow night, half-dozen. I have a late appointment tonight. Later, Mink.”
“I’ll ‘Mink’ you,” she said in mock anger as she switched off the percomm.
* * *
The rich, musty smell of autumn harvest filled the Rose Garden Arena as Sonya, wearing only her tattoos and a loose brown chemise that went down to mid-thigh, wandered around through the milling swarms of people. Despite how people packed themselves in between unlicensed hucksters and questionable food stalls, a zone of emptiness 2 meters across flowed with her. Random decisions and free action always seemed to keep that zone open with Sonya in the center. No one noticed the gap.
She breathed deeply to draw in the spicy draft of roasting chilies, bruised thyme, garbled lavender, and simmering mystery stew heavy with the stink of cabbage. She stopped at a stall with dried herbs in plastic containers and an Hispanic proprietress. The pots encircled her four layers deep. “Te de diosa,” Sonya said.
While pivoting around, the woman grabbed leaves and pieces of bark out of seemingly random bins and stuffed them into a loose plastic bag. With her bare hands she gently stirred the dry concoction before sealing it with a plastic tie. Sonya handed her a credit slip in exchange, dropped her goddess tea fixings into her woven marketing bag, and moved on.
Two Metros, decked out in full assault gear—the only way a policeman would be seen at street level—strolled by with their own radius of emptiness around them. The members of the throng would take one look and decide to visit a stall in the opposite direction. The two toughs walked right by Sonya without a second glance, even as she passed through their own safety zone. The pair ambled up to a small food vendor, whose face went ashen.
“Pagueme el seguro,” one of the cops ordered in a no-nonsense tone.
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“You spoke it well enough last week, bitch. Insurance now or we’ll remove this unlicensed stall from the premises.”
Sonya stood behind and watched, nibbling on some dried tomatoes from an earlier purchase.
“I only have half,” the proprietress complained, quickly handing them a handful of small plastic bills. “Business has been off.”
The taller of the two tongued his mic. “Dispatch, I have a forty-three sixteen, illegal merchant without a permit. Our twenty is Rose Garden Arena, grid fourteen. We are removing it now.”
The smaller of the two Metros tossed over a huge boiling pot, spilling the contents all over the ground. Several unfed urchins scampered around, licking the bounty off the cracked floors. They scooped up chunks and put them inside their filthy clothes to eat later.
“Please don’t!” the vendor screamed. “This is all I have! I can’t feed my children!”
“Stand aside or be destroyed with it.” Both men took up lasing weapons and aimed at the fuel source, an old propane container.
The woman moved around to shield the tank, begging desperately. “Don’t. I can’t…”
The first one struck her with his right fist, bowling her over onto the wet ground. Both reached for their triggers, but something stopped them. They couldn’t squeeze. Sonya closed her eyes and muttered ungrammatical Latin to herself before the two officers put away their weapons and moved on.
No one saw anything. No one heard anything. Later that evening the two officers would probably have a splitting headache and wonder why dispatch thought they’d removed an illegal vendor.
The Metros’ own statistics showed crime at the street level—minus their own thuggery, of course—at two murders, sixteen rapes, eight robberies, sixty-four assaults, and eighty-four muggings per city block per day. Those stats vastly understated the true numbers by at least a factor of two, if not three or four, because Nil victims don’t get counted.
Being the white knight could suck you dry doing it each and every day. For every one you saved, you lost seventy or more others. Sonya knew that being the hero didn’t change the world. It never had and it never would, but in this case it made her