stupid and gullible every day for ten years. I would never forgive them. I could never forgive myself.
The minutes passed with miserable slowness. I tried to distract myself by people watching—there was always some drama going on. Up the street, two women with rival plastic-goods stands were shrieking and hitting each other with toy umbrellas, rain boots, packages of cups.
Every so often an Ope came up to me, begged for money. Sometimes they took the food I offered—crackers, corn nuts, some kind of jerky that might be real meat—and ate it in front of me. Mostly they refused and went on begging. Whatever. I’d always give food to people, but if they didn’t want it, it just meant more for us.
I smiled, thinking about the haul I’d made this morning. Had I already checked every underground train stop, along all the lines? Probably not. I tended to stick to sewer pipes and mechanical access tunnels. I’d been down all the underground train lines—I was sure of that—but hadn’t fully explored them. They hadn’t been used in so long that some of them were collapsing. Once I’d been in one, trying to check out its abandoned stops, when I heard a rumbling. I looked up to see a heavy chunk of plaster ceiling drop down on an Ope, knocking him across the third rail. Amazingly the third rail was still alive and the tunnel had filled with the Ope’s agonized screams and the gross smell of burning flesh. He’d popped like a tick, and I got out of there.
So I hadn’t checked them out as thoroughly as I probably should—the memory of that smell kept me away. I was mulling this over when I became aware that people in the street looked agitated, ducking back into their street stalls, disappearing down side streets, jumping inside and slamming their doors shut. Straightening up, I scanned the street, listening to the cries, the harsh whispers of warning.
Soon I saw why: A bunch of Chung thugs were ransacking the street, knocking over stalls and tables, breaking glasses at a tea pub. If anyone was in their way, the thugs knocked them down, felling grown-ups with one punch, kicking kids to the side. They left behind them a street of destruction and a lot of bruised and bleeding people, the ones that weren’t quick enough to get out of the way or hadn’t paid attention to the changing mood on the street. I stepped onto the boarded-up stoop of the building on my corner, totally out of their way. My fists automatically clenched, my feathers bristled.
I counted at least eight of them, male and female, all pretty young. They had razored haircuts and tattoos and other body mods, like stubs of horns put under the skin of their foreheads, twenty rings in one ear, piercings through upper lips, eyebrows, the septums of their noses. I looked like a cuddly kitten next to them.
They stopped not far from me and made a circle, their backs to one another.
“We’re looking for witnesses!” a guy bellowed.
“One of our own was murdered yesterday!” The woman’s bleached-blond hair contrasted oddly with her smooth tan face. “We know some of you must have seen it!”
Murder. They weren’t going to pretend that the duel had been fair, weren’t going to slide back into the shadows and accept defeat. That meant trouble for Pietro and the Sixes. Big time.
I thought back to when one of the Pater henchmen had snapped the Chung prince’s neck, after Pietro had spared him. Had that been only yesterday?
One of the Chungs’ people took out a semiautomatic pistol and shot it into the air. People scattered. I calculated the angle of the bullet and followed its trajectory downward. It fell against a window, breaking the glass. When I looked up again, one of the Chung soldiers was looking right at me.
I glanced away quickly, trying to seem unconcerned, but he was headed my way. I could run, but unlike most regular people and Opes, these guys were probably genetically enhanced as much as they were physically altered. The Chungs took security very seriously.
“You,” the guy said, pointing his gun at me. “You’re a street rat. Is this your corner? Did you see it?”
A woman came up next to him, her long black hair hanging down in two braids tied with silk ribbons to match the Chung uniform. “Don’t make us cut it out of you,” she said, pulling out an eight-inch hunting knife, the kind used to skin