Protection Racket

by

Brian Downes

Mellow Al Fasad drummed her fingers on the Turk’s counter twice. There was a chick-ck-chick as she extended and then retracted her implant razors, for emphasis. “Remember who you’re talking to, Olzev. This is not the beer delivery man standing in front of you.” She drummed her fingers twice more, just to make her point. Her face was flat and her eyes hard stones.

Olzev backed down, very subtly. But he was still angry. “You say the money is for protection.” The storekeeper pointed at the wad of nuyen in Mellow’s other hand. “These new people are plundering my pockets. Why do I pay you if not to prevent these things?”

Mellow fanned through the money. She was practiced at rapid-fire counting. “If you’ve forgotten why you pay me I could get you reminded.” She looked up at him.

Olzev rolled his eyes towards heaven and took a step back.

Mellow stuffed the nuyen into the front pocket of her blue-black pants, a safer place for it than the pockets of her duster. “We’ll see you next week,” she flipped two fingers off her temple in a casual salute to the Turkish shopkeeper and walked out of his little store.

On the street her breath steamed in the chilly rain that fell out of the leaden sky that lowered over Battery City, on the southern tip of Manhattan. She cocked her head in the follow me signal to her four crew across the street and started down the sidewalk.

Mellow had been born in Battery City, which even then had been a place that NYPD had tried to invent excuses not to go. She grew up on the streets there. A theme that ran through her childhood and teenage years was her mother trying to teach her things that were at odds with Mellow’s experience; devotion, education, “lady-like behavior”. None of that made sense to the wayward daughter, who learned on the playground that strength was the ability to inflict pain, and the street respected strength.

Mellow Al Fasad’s grandfather had come to New York City in 2001 from Jerusalem, in Israel. He had been an ophthalmologist and a Shiite Muslim with a strong faith, and the sporadic war against the Palestinians had convinced him to make the move. Mellow liked to joke that faith was blinding, because her grandfather made a lot of money adjusting the vision of NYC’s Muslims. He married a Muslim, and the family mythology was that they had been popular and respected in the Islamic community, that people came to them for their advice on all matters, and the doctor and his daughters (he had two, and one son) never had to ride the subway, but always took cabs.

But the subterranean crack between the Atlantic and the east coast gave a shiver in 2005, and the great city had come tumbling down. The place where grandfather’s office had been turned into open sky, with an office building-sized pile of rubble beneath. Grandfather survived the quake, and his daughters too, but Ali, the son, had been downtown when the quake hit and was presumed to be a part of the tons of chopped burger liberally mixed with the four-meter deep drifts of broken glass. Grandmother had been at home, and home had fallen on the building next door.

Grandfather died of a fever that had swept the refugee camp in New Jersey (“And of grief,” Mellow’s mother claimed). The family had moved back to Manhattan during the reconstruction, but they were sliding down the scale. A renegade viral data weapon that got loose and ate the worldwide telecommunications grid in ’29 was another blow to their fortunes.

Most of the Muslim had been squeezed out when it came to Mellow; she had been taught Arabic so that she could read the Koran, but if she knelt twice a day it was out of the ordinary. She had thrown away education and “lady-like behavior” and kept with strength, which was how she ran the South Tip Silencers. At twenty-six, she was an old and respected figure on the street, and personally pocketed five thousand nuyen a month from their protection rackets alone, which was a little more than twice what her mother made out in the open.

Today she was making rounds herself, which she liked to do once a month or so. Showing her own face to the clients made a point of who was in charge. And touching the money at this level kept her runners honest. No one could skim if the gang leader herself collected the fees now and then.

But what she was hearing today from clients like Olzev, she didn’t like. For a few months Mellow had been hearing about a rising gang across the water in Brooklyn. They were called the Manifestos, and it sounded like they were ambitious and not afraid to inflict pain. And now the Manifestos were coming across the bridge to bite into her protection business in Battery City.

She had eight more clients to see today: two more grocery stores, a pawn broker, a Catholic Church, a small taxi company, every one of who’s cabs carried the Silencer’s tag on each fender, two restaurants, and a city-funded day care center that paid because they knew the Silencers were better protectors than NYPD in the Battery. She’d already seen her doctor’s office and her record store before she stopped at Olzev’s.

The record store had also been hit up by the Manifestos. And like Olzev, they had paid. Better to pay and tell Mellow later than try to resist.

It was well after dark before she was almost done, with just an all-night grocery store to go, tucked underneath one of the aging tenements that had been put up in the Battery with money from Shiawase corporation after the quake, to house the returning flood of impoverished refugees. You had to go down a narrow set of metal stairs to reach BREAD MILK LOTTO SODA. It was getting bitter cold. Mellow had taken her ear warmer out of her pocket and put it on an hour ago.

She wished, definitely not for the first time, that she could listen to music on the long and familiar collection route. But she couldn’t afford the distraction while out on the streets.

She collected the nuyen from the gray-haired ork who seemed to be BREAD MILK’s principle staff, and when she came back out, the two beetle-heads who had been tailing her for the last block were standing up on street level, next to the metal railing that was the same color as the stairs.

They were both humans, thin, wasted, with the total neglect of the flesh that chip addiction caused. They were shivering and hopping up and down in place, which would have given them away, even if Mellow hadn’t noticed them as soon as they’d started following her. Why were they just standing around out here if they were so cold?

Mellow went up the stairs and past them like they weren’t there. They started following her again.

Mellow’s mother used to dwell on the motives of bottom-feeders like these. Rape, robbery, slavery, sick kicks, rape again . . . there was a morbid litany of fearful outrages that her mother repeated. Mellow had long ago stopped wondering about what they wanted. Maybe it was the money to chase their artificial dreams, where it was always golden warm. Maybe it was a fleeting feeling of power. Mellow thought that they didn’t really know. They just wanted, in their idiot limbic reflex.

Mellow glanced at her shadow crew. We see, came the handsign. Kill? Mellow gave the No sign back.

Chipheads were always impatient. Mellow turned down the next side-alley, which she knew extended about twenty meters before it T-boned. As she made the turn, she took her low light shades out of her inside pocket and slipped them over her eyes. The world jumped up at her in near-daylight tones, the shadows dispelled by the glasses’ light amplifying circuits.

Behind her, she heard the chipheads start to run. Once she was off the street, she took her handgun from her shoulder holster. She held it in both hands and stepped behind a rotted old mattress that was leaning against the wall.

The chipheads came around the corner. Both of them had carving knives now. She shot the taller one in the thigh, her Colt’s laser sight painting a red dot where the bullet would go. His feet went out from under him and he fell with a CRACK of his butt on freezing pavement.

The shorter one stopped in dumbfounded amazement. Mellow took careful aim and shot him in the thigh, too. He fell next to his fellow.

Mellow walked up to them. Her bullets were black market Aztlan military surplus. They exploded when they hit, and they’d sure made messes of these two jerk-offs legs.

“Did you know me, or did you just pick me out at random?” She asked them. “Is this an accident, that you come after me on a collection day?”

Both chipheads were whining and squirming. The shorter one was saying something about Jesus and Rapture. Mellow could see that his teeth were almost black.

She looked up and down the alley. She looked up at the nearby buildings. She saw a couple of people leaning out windows who instantly disappeared.

This half minute of waiting was necessary. Of course she could have given these two carrion eaters the slip, but she’d never even thought of that. They couldn’t be allowed to size her up like that and live. Especially not two animals like these. And they couldn’t be killed cleanly. They had to appear to suffer. If it got out on the street that Mellow al Fasad ran from garbage-eating beetle heads . . . she shook her head.

The shots weren’t the message. The time between the shots was the message. The people in the windows had to hear the time between the shots. Her Silencers, waiting on the street, had to hear.

But these two were pathetic, and Mellow just wanted to be away from them.

She looked up and down the alley again. Nothing.

The taller one rolled over on to his hands and knees, and started to crawl away. Mellow shot the short one with the black teeth three times in the body. Then she shot the tall one in the same way.

She switched to a full clip before leaving the alley.

Two hours later, Mellow went around to see her friend Clianne at her band practice. Mellow timed it to get there when the band took their break, but she discovered when she arrived that Cord and Harrison, the two synth players, had come in that night with brilliant new software. It was going to fine-tune their interactions to a point no one would believe. As a result of this new software, neither of the synths were working for five minutes together and almost nothing had been done tonight. Clianne was sitting on one of the old overstuffed chairs and drinking a beer with an expression on her face that showed she was exercising her patience muscle.

Mellow joined her there.

There was a horribly loud sound of shattering glass. “What’s going on with that?” Mellow asked.

“No, the other one,” Harrison yelled to Cord.

“What other one?” Cord yelled back.

“Our marvelous new software,” Clianne said to Mellow. “How have you been keeping yourself, baby?”

Clianne wore clingy pants of midnight blue and a drapy green halter top that sparkled. She was barefoot, and her toes were painted the same sparkly green as her shirt. They made her 180-centimeter elven frame look like the sexy bomb. Clianne looked like the sexy bomb so often and with so little apparent effort that it got right on Mellow’s nerves.

Clianne had just turned fifty, and liked to laugh when she told people that, because she looked twenty-five. It was an elf thing. She’d been born in New York City and had spent most of her life there, except for three years she’d spent in Cleveland, you know, with a guy. She’d been one of the first UGE babies. Her name, her original name before she changed it, had been in the New York Times when she was born.

Clianne had befriended Mellow fourteen years ago, when Mellow had been twelve and walking around Manhattan Guitar, unashamedly reading the music books, and Clianne had been the clerk.

In the time since, Mellow had killed a bunch of people (she’d stopped counting around eight), and Clianne had gotten to be famous on the New York music scene with a series of bands she sang front vocals for. This one was called Arrowhead.

“Mellow, what are you thinking about?”

“Why?”

“Because I was just talking and you’d just gone deaf,” Clianne smiled. There was a horribly loud shattering of glass.

“Don’t worry about it.” She had been thinking of the two chipheads she’d shot four hours ago, the day before. Idiots. Urban mudfish.

“We’ve got a gig in two days in the Village.” Clianne shook her head. “New software. I can’t believe this.”

“The Village? That’s tony.”

“Why don’t you come and sing backup for us again?”

Mellow grimaced. “Who, me?”

“Yeah, you. No, the hardass behind you. Who did you think I meant?”

Mellow made a dismissive gesture.

“Why not?” Clianne asked. “I never wanted you to leave the first time.”

“Yeah, I’ll have to, someday. But I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what? The street? What you do is play out your string, sweet one. Those streets are going to kill you. You’ve got potential for music that you still haven’t developed.”

There was silence then, except for a horribly loud shattering of glass. Mellow drank from her plastic bottle and her eyes flicked back and forth from Clianne and an empty distance.

“What is going on out there,” and Clianne meant in Battery City, “that vexes you so much?”

“You’ve heard of the Brooklyn Manifestos?” Mellow drank again, and it betrayed her tension. Clianne nodded. “They invaded my territory, shook nuyen from my clients.”

“Doesn’t that girl you used to . . . aren’t the Manifestos run by Keisha Starr?”

“Yes,” Mellow said. And that was the sticking point of it.

Mellow said goodbye to Clianne and took her beer with her out on to the street.

0311, her wristwatch said. Second nature to her, she put her cautious head out the door of Clianne’s practice space and scanned the street up and down before setting foot out on the stoop. There was a little squatter encampment of shipping cartons and trash fires she had to walk by, and one of the men there, with wild, wind-tangled hair, barked to her in the gibberish of crazy squatters: “That’s bird! Take my right!”, or something like that. She stared intimidatingly at the homeless as she went by, and there was no more shouting.

The first thing Mellow did when she got home to her double-wide apartment – she actually lived in two, with the separating wall torn out – was go straight to the end table next to her futon, and the ceramic jar on top of it.

The jar was in the shape of a little brown monkey, who had an intelligent gleam in his eye and a conical wizard’s cap on his head, decorated with stars and moons. In each hand the monkey held a tiny snow globe, as if balancing their weight, and in each snow globe was an itty bitty suggestion of a village or town.

The monkey was sitting on what looked like a rectangular brass box. The monkey and the lid of the box were one piece, and Mellow lifted it up to reveal the inside of the jar and the Ziploc plastic bag full of Bliss she kept there with two small squares of plastic, one larger than the other by almost twice.

Keisha Starr, Mellow thought to herself as she put the larger square of plastic down on the table, poured the fine blue powder from the bag onto it, and divided it into lines with the smaller plastic square. Keisha Starr . . . thinking about her used to kill me, spear me right in the chest. Still hurts pretty good, actually . . . not as bad as it used to.

Thinking of Keisha and cutting the Bliss made her flash back vividly to her novacoke days. I was a lot more uptight back then, she reflected as she snorted up the drug.

Let’s see, that was . . . she rehabbed for the ‘coke in 2058, she remembered. And she had her first snort in – it was Fourth of July weekend, 2055. She was twenty-one years old, and she had skyrockets in her eyes for Keisha Starr.

She’d been running in a gang in Terminal called the Lo-Downs. Terminal had been and still was a crazy-world of blood and thunder. Where Battery City had a pretense of police protection, Terminal had signs the city had put up that said, Warning! Enter – . The rest would be unreadable underneath layers of graffiti . . . Terminal was it’s own little world where the gangs rode the streets in souped-up war cars that had automatic rifle barrels poking out like spines . . .

Mellow had spotted Keisha in a club there. A small place filled to bursting with bouncing metahuman bodies, radiating in waves in all directions. Mellow had been staring with lust at this white-skinned girl with kinky black hair in the shiny red jacket. She thought she’d been staring stealthily. But then the girl had looked straight at her and said, “Do you want to dance with me, baby?” She wore an expression then that Mellow wouldn’t learn to understand until later, but what it meant was, I am bad dangerous. Come lick me.

She’d been hoping for it.

That first night they had rapid, muscular sex in a bathroom stall. “This is my regular club,” Keisha told her afterwards, speaking quickly while pulling the straps that tightened her Rhinohide bullet-proof vest. “You can find me here again if you want to.” Mellow was slipping her duster back on before she even zipped up her pants.

“Sure,” Mellow affected carelessly, and practically raced her to the door, because she wasn’t going to let it look like Keisha had just abandoned her in the bathroom.

The exact same thing happened four more times in the course of the next month. It was a hardcase facade that both of them had to maintain; I don’t care about you all that damn much, so however you really feel is your problem. But Mellow knew in her breastbone, with the street instincts that told her when a client was lying, that Keisha was putting up an act, and she figured Keisha knew the same thing about her.

Their thing got a stamp of permanence when they started to hear people outside their stall say, “Oh, Christ, those two chicks are doing it again.”

After that they were a regular pair, flexing their muscles at each other, getting high, fighting beside each other, threatening to fight with each other and having escape velocity sex to make up for their threats. They did lots of novacoke. They got to a space eventually where novacoke was food, air and sunlight, one-stop shopping for everything the body needed. Days flew by.

In retrospect Mellow knew that the Lo-Downs had been a small time bunch that wasted too much energy. They’d start an extortion by stabbing the biggest ones right away, which didn’t really put the clients in a mind to cooperate. That was easy to see now, but then it was a fast and sexy thing to beat ‘em down and keep beating ‘em. But that couldn’t last. They were inefficient predators. So the Lo-Downs fell apart, through bad leadership, through ego problems, through way too much novacoke – through a dust-up one night within sight of the river, which was memorable because Mellow got her eyebrows burned off while she was trapped in a burning car. The arm of her jacket had actually been on fire, and her right eye blinded by blood, but she had been high, high, high, and now, floating with the current of the Bliss, she could remember lining up the sight’s of her old Ares Predator on the black shapes that were moving outside the firelight . . .

It was from the wreckage of the Lo-Downs that Mellow and Keisha really took flight. Because Mellow needed the help.

It was probably the second worst pain Mellow ever felt in her life. It was something she woke up with in the afternoon and went to bed with in the morning; the knowledge that she was just a splinter. A homeless piece of garbage, like a plastic bag on the sidewalk. She wasn’t part of anything. It was like her blood got thicker, her hands and feet tingled because of the poor circulation, she felt like she was drowning in the sluggish blood that clogged her brain.

So she flung herself into Keisha, because Keisha was there to catch her. “You are mad lethal, baby,” Keisha would tell her after they’d gone out clubbing and blown up some little disrespect into an excuse to get savage, and as long as somebody suffered the evening was a success. Mellow would get up out of their bed the next morning, look at the bruises and lacerations on her face, and the rush of pride would be the high point of her day.

She already had a reputation for wisdom with people her age and younger. The addition of her new berserker fury made her something like a goddess.

The next week was a dry one, with no rain or snow. The skies were partly overcast, dark gray sheets of cloud struggling against panels of sky that looked vanishingly deep. And the Manifestos came across the bridge again, from Brooklyn.

Mellow had gone to every client on her list and told them: anybody asks for protection money but me, you pay them, and then you dial me. The call had come in from the record store.

“They said they were the Brooklyn Manifestos, and that we were on their route now,” the old hippie who managed the record store told her. “They’re driving a green rust-bucket Honda Accord.”

She found the green Accord outside Olzev’s grocery.

“That’s an old 2050,” Oxford said when they saw it.

“Drive on past it and make the next right.” Oxford did as Mellow directed.

Mellow was riding in the truck with Oxford, More Twenties and two more of the Silencers. Mellow had calculated that they would be enough firepower to send a message through this collection crew. She didn’t want to overdo it. Gang leaders who overreacted were usually seen as being afraid. But Mellow also knew that if you had to hurt a crew, you should hurt them so frighteningly bad that they’d never jerk with you again. She had spent hours after she woke up from her Bliss trip figuring out just exactly how she was going to kill these mooks, and she was pretty sure she had it right.

Of course, she couldn’t imagine the Keisha Starr she knew being so frightened by a hit that she stayed home. But Mellow was going to turn on the juice and see what shook loose.

Out of sight of the Manifestos, Oxford stopped the van and More Twenties and one of the other Silencers hopped out. Twenties was holding his AK-98 against his body, underneath his bullet-proof duster. The barrel poked out next to his knee, but he wasn’t going to have to hide it for very long.

“Go, go,” Mellow slapped Oxford on the shoulder and Oxford pulled back out onto the street, going back the way they’d come. The Manifestos were still parked on the curb, one in the car, one dwarf lookout on the sidewalk. There were two or three more inside Olzev’s.

Except they were already coming out. Both orks. The truck was rolling up parallel to the parked Accord, and the curb on their side was solid with parked cars. Nowhere to stop but in the middle of the street. Mellow swore. “Stop the truck! Stop the truck!”

Oxford stomped on the brake and the truck rocked to a halt. Immediately a volley of horns started up behind them. Mellow bounded out the back doors, the Light Anti-Armor Weapon tube already extended and resting on her shoulder.

The cold air in the street hit her like a spun crank on a vise. She picked out the Honda Accord, twenty meters away, and spent two long seconds sucking in a deep breath of air so cold it made her teeth hurt while she lined up her sights carefully . . . the Manifestos had seen the truck brake suddenly, and two of them were looking at her.

FWWOOSHH. She’d been aiming for the driver’s compartment, but the rocket crashed into the rear wheel well and the lid of the trunk flew five meters straight up and the tire was stripped off the wheel in a blizzard of shreds. The Manifestos staggered around like tops, and one of them was quickly punched down by the ripping fire of More Twenties and the other Silencer, who had come trotting around the corner as soon as they heard the Honda go up.

Mellow threw the empty tube back into the truck and pulled her Colt out of its holster. She plastered herself against the door of the truck for cover and saw the dwarf lookout reach into the burning car and pull out a smoking automatic rifle. Mellow heard the stutter of SMG burst fire and bullets spanging off the truck, and she fired at the dwarf before he could get that assault rifle roaring. He took a bullet in the chest pretty stoically, but his body armor didn’t save him from Oxford’s magical attack, and he went down like an axed tree.

It was over pretty rapidly, clouds of steam and smoke swirling away on the wind, and Mellow dodged across the suddenly thinned traffic to the screams of pedestrians who had thrown themselves down on their bellies all over the place.

More Twenties jogged up in his heavy-footed way and started blasting the bodies. Mellow fired a few into the hood of the Honda for good measure. The explosive rounds burned little star-shaped patterns into the paint.

The whole thing had taken about 45 seconds from the rocket to Oxford mashing down on the gas to get them all away from there, and the column of smoke that was climbing up past the rooftops of the Battery to mark the position of the burning car.

Oxford the shaman was orkish, and capped her protuberant lower canines in gold to show off her money. Mellow had chosen Oxford very carefully. If your gang didn’t have magic, then you were meat for the beast that did. But magicians had a tendency to think they were smarter than you. Mellow had been a runner for a gang when she was a kid that had taken on a voodoo man because he could give them that magic power, and within six months the old gang leader was locked in a Federal prison and the top hat was running the crew.

But it was Dog who spoke to Oxford in her dreams, and Mellow knew that Dogs weren’t anything if they weren’t loyal. So she didn’t have anything to fear from Oxford. Mellow had never slept with Oxford because Oxford was not wired for girls and Mellow was not wired for rough trade with orks.

More Twenties was someone Mellow kept a closer watch on. More Twenties was human, 183 centimeters tall, and had no neck. Mellow theorized that Twenties’ lack of a neck kept blood and oxygen from getting to his brain. The theory fit the facts, which were that Twenties was as dumb as a brick and had comparable charisma, too. But Mellow was definitely not the head of the Committee to Get Air to MT’s Brain, because if Twenties had been a few grams smarter, Mellow would have had to arrange for him to be dead. Street samurai types tended to think they should be the ones running your crew. A lot of them did run crews, come to think of it. Mellow kept Twenties around because he was plenty dumb enough to like being a legbreaker lieutenant. She herded him carefully to make sure he never looked up from his narrow little path.

This was More Twenties: it really ate a hole in him that Oxford, average ork woman, was almost, maybe even as, strong as his neckless self and his addiction to working out.

Mellow would not have slept with Twenties for either pizza or beer. This produced cognitive dissonance in Twenties, because he thought he was a player. But Mellow got the issue under the umbrella of “professional relations” and let Twenties go around thinking that, if Mellow hadn’t been gang leader, she would have been on her back many months ago.

But Oxford and Twenties had done fine as part of Mellow’s strike force today. They’d killed four Manifestos and totaled the car. Now, twelve hours later, the Manhattan news feeds were covering it as a throwaway piece of gang violence. Wounds among the bystanders had stayed low, with only three hospitalized and none killed; Battery City people had an instinct for using cover. The rocket was the sexy part, and there was lots of video of the burning car.

A rocket attack brought out the NYPD cruisers two by two, each one carrying a flatfoot team armed and armored for Eurowar II. It was predictable; fire a rocket, hear the word “terrorist” on the trideo. Out marches the blue show of force.

Mellow would never have told her crew this, but part of the reason she’d decided to use the rocket was that it would bring an increased police presence to her territory for a week or so. The Silencers would have to play it on the low profile, sure, but at the same time the roving Chrysler Nissans would make it harder for any Manifesto warparties to come marauding. The enemy of my enemy is a useful tool.

Mellow was right about the NYPD. For the next week the Battery was unusually full of police, stopping to hassle people at random and sweeping up quite a few arrests on the side, for possession of weapons and drugs. There were three times that the cops exchanged fire with members of minor gangs. Each time produced a gang fatality. One of the dead was a fourteen year-old elf, ripped to the tits on a combat psychotic and attacking people with a machete, and there were demonstrations the next day protesting NYPD’s racist brutality.

The South Tip Silencers collected the rent in three teams of one walking, one driving a car as backup. It worked and the PD stayed off them. Mellow spent different nights at the cribs of different Silencers, drinking beer and showing her face. And she’d go home, sleep alone with the stereo playing low, and think about Keisha Starr.

Mellow remembered fights on the slippery pavements of the Battery the winter of ’55 –’56, how she cracked her knee and had to get injections for it when she and Keisha had fought four male supremacist weirdoes who were trying to rape them. The idea of being gang-raped by these four slot-holes was actually funny to Mellow, at twenty years old with Keisha beside her. She’d slipped and fallen hard on her knee trying to

side-kick a guy’s head off, but the pain was a far-away twinge in her state of mind. She’d popped her razors and slashed open the front of his thighs (always hold back on the implant blades until it was too late for them to see them coming). As the guy sagged towards the pavement Keisha, in one of the extemporary choreographies that they were blessed with then, when they loved each other, pulled out her Ceska machine pistol and touched the muzzle to his ear and chewed his brains out. Then, naturally as reaching for the butter once she had her bread, she shot another target in the shins.

Mellow remembered kneeling on her swollen knee in bed that night, getting a close-up look at the starburst tattoo around Keisha’s belly button while she snorted novacoke off her lover’s stomach. Keisha put her hands in Mellow’s hair and laughed at the tickling. They had killed two of their attackers, and were still fat with the feeling of it, and that night Mellow’s only shame was that they hadn’t killed three or four.

Inevitably, they drew a crowd. And that crowd was the beginning of the South Tip Silencers.

By May of ’56 there were eight of them, and Mellow and Keisha were ready to set a fire in Manhattan that summer. They were young. They thought there was no old order that couldn’t be swept away by their energy and their bloodlust.

The Silencers were too small to be their own power. They rented themselves out as mercenaries in the street wars of the Battery. They had losses and new recruits. It was five years ago now, and a lot of it was a blur in Mellow’s memory. She remembered getting tear-gassed, but she didn’t remember by whom or exactly why. She remembered a colossal rage of her own one other time, because it was the looks on the faces around her that tipped her off to the size of her own emotion. She’d cut a woman’s neck, but she didn’t remember now if the woman had died. She remembered the heavy red blood rolling down into the collar of the woman’s bright blue LeatherLook jacket.

She remembered the magician they’d had before Oxford, a skinny Hermetic boy who was roasted alive by lightning, giving out the most terrible screams, in a sorcerous duel with the mojo man of a rival crew of West Africans.

All the frenzy blurred together in memory, becoming a gestalt of sweat and honey and music so loud it drowned out the thunder of summer storms. What did stand out with the clarity of a razor wound and lemon juice was the back end of her relationship with Keisha. The down-slope.

The Silencers got bigger, but they never grew fast enough to keep in step with Mellow and Keisha’s ambition. They were always reaching just a little too far. More and more of their time was eaten up in managing the gang’s affairs; recruitment, appeasement, keeping control, bailing members out of jail. Somewhere they quit being lovers, exactly, and became roommates. There were rumors that Keisha had other girls. Mellow ignored the rumors to save herself the trouble that paying attention to them would entail. They had sex less often. But still Mellow believed that Keisha loved her, and that she loved Keisha. To think anything else would be too much skullsweat. They were still gods, striding across the cityscape on the southern end of the most desirable island in the Sixth World, eating their enemies whole.

Okay, that’s all right, Mellow thought when Keisha got sentenced to six months for assault. I’ll just wait. I’ll still be here when she gets out. But her hollowness was like a bleeding ulcer. Yeah they weren’t as close as they used to be, but, surprise Mellow as it might, she found that her clock was still set to Keisha time.

Every time she talked to her troops she thought they must see it on her face. I am lost without her. The streets have turned upside down. It was while Keisha was locked up that Mellow had her affair with Borsky.

He was in from the west coast for three or four months, he said, studying conjuring with some friends he had in Manhattan. His totem animal was fox, and he was certainly foxy, with his long elven ears poking gracefully out of waves of thick light brown hair. His mouth was always twisting just a little bit in a snotty smile that Mellow wanted to kiss and to break his narrow back for.

Borsky liked to slum in the Battery, and Mellow found eventually that he had rented a coffin there. Mellow met him for the first time three days before Keisha’s sentencing, at four in the morning at a 24-hr. diner. Keisha had been in jail less than a week when Mellow and Borsky slept together for the first time. Mellow had taken him back to her pad in an attempt to intimidate the snot by taking him into the heart of her own territory. But he had looked completely relaxed on her fold-out couch, even when he was completely naked.

“You are such a little runt,” Mellow would tease him, curled up on the couch, her feet pointed at him as an implied threat; I could kick you if I wanted to. “One of these nights I’m going to get sick of you and cut your throat. What would you do then, you runt?”

“I’d look into your eyes, and think about you in a certain way that would make you die,” he said to her.

Remembering it now, in the fall of ’61, Mellow was appalled. The things she used to say in real affection when she’d cooked her brain with ‘coke.

Her fling with the elf was a temporary thing, she knew going in. He knew it, too. He often talked about when Keisha was getting out: “Atlantic City’s a great place to go. Next summer you can take Keisha out there and lose some protection money.” Things like that. But Keisha’s return seemed a lot less immediate to Mellow than it did to her mystic boy on the side. “Ishallah,” Mellow muttered.

“What’s that mean?” Borsky asked.

“It means I hope so.”

Borsky’s stay in Manhattan ran over his estimate by a few weeks, but his departure was abrupt. He woke Mellow up at 0730 by banging on her door like the block was on fire. She answered with her Predator in her hand and in the crane-print kimono she slept in. He was in the hall with his hair tied back, new Ferrari sunglasses and a midnight blue duffle bag slung over his shoulder. “I’m on an HSCT for SeaTac, baby. Give me a kiss and promise to remember the fox. You like these sunglasses? I stole ‘em.” He didn’t pay any attention to the gun that was jammed in his ribs.

Keisha came back with a huge hard-on.

Mellow met her outside the jail as soon as she was released. Keisha hugged her and kissed her, but the kiss was a sudden movement in and out, only a little bit more kiss than head-butt. “Let’s get out of here,” she said to Mellow. Which Mellow could understand perfectly. But her tone was short, and it sounded like an order.

“It’s nice to have you back, sweetness,” Mellow told her lover, smiling.

“It’s nice to be wanted,” Keisha said. “Where the hell’s the sub station from here?”

Mellow tried to match her tone to Keisha’s. “Couple blocks that way,” she pointed with a rigid index finger down the street. Keisha suddenly ducked her head, and turned a quarter-turn right, her hand coming up like she was warding off a hit in the face. Mellow pivoted left, her hand following the motion of her body, reaching for the semiauto in the shoulder holster under her coat. She craned her neck over her left shoulder to see whatever it was that had startled Keisha so badly.

An NYPD cruiser was rolling by, two helmeted cop heads turning to stare at them with the mirrors of their visors. The cruiser’s lightbar started spinning, but they drove on by them on their way towards the jail.

“What’s the matter?” Mellow demanded sharply, because she’d just been scared.

“Let’s just get the f--- out of here,” Keisha told her, making one desperate moment of eye contact before she started trotting in the direction of the sub station.

Keisha was not the same, now. She was skittish of the PD to the point of stupidity. She’d bolt from a patrol she had no reason to fear. Everybody on the street knew that what you did when the cops rolled by was stood still and acted like nothing was nothing. The cops preyed on fear and weakness, like everyone else on the street. Show none.

At the same time, Keisha’s bloodlust had gotten way out of control. And she did nothing but complain about the way Mellow had run things alone while she had been inside.

This kind of thing did not go unnoticed by the troops. Mellow could tell that the rank and file Silencer was starting to think that Keisha had cracked.

One night about 0400, after very unsatisfying sex, Keisha had sat in the window and looked down at the street. Mellow saw her in three-quarter back profile. Her jaw was clenched, and the muscles there were twitching, shown to Mellow by the yellow light from a Vector Matrix Services billboard across the street.

“What’re you mad about?” Mellow asked after a long contemplation of Keisha’s face.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m mad that you don’t have the balls to jam it up with the Cannibal Hand Grenade, what do you think?”

“The Cannibals have a lot of firepower and we don’t have the manpower right now.” Mellow regretted saying that as soon as it was out of her mouth, because it had an undertone of supplication. Like she was defending herself. But she didn’t have long to regret it because Keisha shot back:

“You don’t have balls is what you don’t have. Manpower, huh.” She spat out the window.

“Yeah, manpower huh,” Mellow returned. Voice too high. Go ahead and squeak, she’ll respect that. “You been away. I been here. So tell me what you know.”

“I know we’ve made no gains in six months while you sat on your fat hoop. I thought I kept you around because you were hard.” She got up and started putting her legs into her pants.

“While I was around we made steady money and we had no losses. We’ve got ten full-grown members. How many you want to bleed out against the Hand Grenade? We need all of them to hold our share of the protection business.” Protection had been an innovation of Keisha’s that Mellow had resisted, and then had been forced to deal with after Keisha went inside.

Keisha threw her shirt on and jammed both her pistols into the waistband of her pants. “Whatever. You keep talking that talk. Believe everything you hear. The Hand Grenade ain’t nothing.” She slammed the door behind her. She’d left her novacoke kit on the windowsill, a few grams of the drug wrapped up in foil along with the gear.

Would pride win out? Or would Keisha come back for her stash?

She didn’t come back. Pride had conquered all.

Mellow sat naked in bed, taking long, deep breaths, trying to unknot the muscles in her back and in her shoulders. “If the sex had been any good,” she told the empty room, “I’d be more relaxed right now, at least.” She fell back across the sheets, her back muscles stiff with the love she still had for the woman Keisha no longer was.

The next day Mellow, Keisha, and seven of their ten soldiers were gathered around the trash fires that were kept lit in fireproof plastic drums inside an unheated tenement building of the Battery. There were a few hangers-on, people’s lovers and little sisters, and they were all getting high and playing bootleg discs of German tribal industrial. The fire and the drugs kept them warm from the icy drafts of February wind that infiltrated through the window gaps.

“Now listen up, Silencers,” Keisha’s voice cracked across them all of a sudden, giving the phrase that always preceded orders. Mellow’s stomach congealed instantly; a premonition.

“We have not been making the money you think we’ve been making. You’re dirt punks if you think this two-a-day, three-a-day garbage is any kind of style. We are going to start making real money. Money that gets respect. Not this punk business we’ve got, bailing in and bailing out.”

They had all gone silent at her first words, the soldiers giving respect. But Mellow’s mouth was drying out like rubbing alcohol spilled in the sun.

“Business shares don’t lie around just to be picked up, like a pear that fell off a tree. You’ve got to take ‘em. You got to beat a fool down to take his business and make it your own. We are going to beat down the Cannibal Hand Grenade, starting right here, starting right now. We are going to seize that wealth.”

The cheers and affirmations were just coming from the throats of the soldiers when Mellow said, “No we aren’t.” And the cheers stumbled and fell. The soldiers all looked at Mellow for just one second – and then they looked away. When a couple of them looked away from Mellow they looked at Keisha by accident, and instantly looked somewhere else.

“What?” said Keisha.

“I said, “No we aren’t”.”

“You got something to say, say it.” Keisha’s spine drew up straight.

“I just said it twice. You got problems with your ears? The Hand Grenade has got the firepower.”

“What are you trying to say?” Keisha’s head was now weaving back and forth, like the head of a snake, or the mongoose that ate that snake, and what Mellow would remember most vividly about this night, no matter how she tried to beat and numb and strangle the pain, was her shame that she did not see what that weaving meant. She’d seen it so many times before, but never from in front.

“I’m saying that – ” nobody ever turned a profit getting killed. But she couldn’t make her point, because Keisha’s palm slammed into the side of her face like a merciless thing.

In front of the troops. Slapped.

Not even a hit

A slap

no one had ever hit Mellow before

and been allowed to

Then the hit did come, a stunning elbow smash above the joint of her jaw. Keisha had delivered it because Mellow had flown at her with no noise but one low grunt, both fists windmilling so fast they blurred.

Mellow realized this with detachment.

And that was the worst pain Mellow had ever felt in her entire life. Not the elbow smash, she could take a dozen more, bring them! But that she had been slapped and that was the end of the rational thinking about the pain, and her fists windmilled, firing volley after volley into Keisha. The pain caused the hitting, like stepping on the gas sprayed fuel through the fuel injector.

Wham, Mellow was thrown back by a body hit and instantly flung herself forward again to take two more hits in the head while her fists hummed through the air and bounced off Keisha’s Cavalier jacket, which was armored and soaked up the impacts.

Mellow hit the ground and got kicked, the pain of which was an interesting remark but not something she paid much attention to. Her duster was armored, too. Keisha was saying something very loudly, but Mellow had no capacity to derive any meaning from anything Keisha said anymore.

She got back up on her feet and then she got knocked down again. Probably twice. In the back of her mind she had a feeling like she was trying to remember something, but she couldn’t, and whatever it was it wasn’t as important as what she was doing. (What it was that she couldn’t remember was how to fight. Every scrap of strategy and technique had flown right out of Mellow’s head.)

Mellow couldn’t breath. Her eye muscles trembled. Keisha kept hitting her, spun her around by the hair and threw her down on the floor, and Mellow’s wild swings made no progress against Keisha’s skill and her plated jacket.

Finally, even though Mellow was dragging herself up off the floor, spitting blood to clear her mouth, she knew she was dragging herself up too slowly, and that the fight was over.

“Come on!” Keisha screamed. “Come on bring it back! I got some more for you! You’d better stay down there!”

Mellow screamed something too, but she didn’t hear it. She felt in her throat that her voice was high and reedy. Any second, she was sure, the tears were going to start spilling from her eyes. Not about the Cannibal Hand Grenade, and there was no way that Mellow cared about the beating. It was –

It was unbelievable how much this thing hurt.

Suddenly, Mellow looked up at the Silencers around her. She figured their eyes would be turned against her, flaring with the contempt they held for everyone who was weaker than them. For deposed leaders. She even yanked her Predator out and held it in her hands between her knees, because her body hurt so much she couldn’t stand up straight. Getting out of here alive seemed like a real unlikely prospect.

There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet.

“What?” Keisha demanded sharply.

And Mellow saw that the Silencers were all staring at Keisha with silent contempt. Keisha came towards them one menacing step, and the Silencers did not move. “What, your eyes all broken, you can’t look somewhere else?”

“I’ll look where I want to look,” one of the troops said.

Another one intoned, “We’ll get you some broken eyes, slitch.”

One of the troops put her arm around Mellow, and pulled her up straight. A new painful cramp in her stomach announced each degree of elevation. Mellow wanted to bury her face against the trooper’s shoulder and bawl. But that wouldn’t show strength.

“Okay, so who’s the first dead tough guy?” Keisha’s voice was climbing, threatening to shriek. “You talking with your smart mouth, I got what you want.” She whispered a double-edged commando dagger into her hand.

“What we don’t want is you.” Mellow’s troops told her. “So take yourself out of here before something bad happens to you.”

Keisha was famous for her bloody fury; but they were seven and she was one, and most of them had guns.

The troops had sided with Mellow, but they had also seen her beaten, losing her temper, going crazy. They’d only stayed with her because they knew, without understanding it, that they couldn’t endure Keisha after seeing that fight. Mellow had to work doubly hard to win their confidence again. But a year afterwards Keisha Starr was never seen in the Battery, and the South Tip Silencers cautiously prospered. And Mellow had learned never to let there be another dog that might think it was bigger than she was.

Running the Silencers by herself was more than a full time job. If it hadn’t been for novacoke there wouldn’t have been enough hours in the day. But the overwhelming hours were a blessing in one way; they denied her any time to sit, alone, and play her stereo. After three years with Keisha Starr, there was hardly a music disc she owned that wasn’t a death-trap of memories that would send her spiraling down into the swamp of pain. It was in that period that she had found some time to sing with Clianne, so much did she want to avoid her own audio collection. It was Clianne who, really, if Mellow really thought about it, had gotten her into rehab for the ‘coke. She’d been clean for two years now.

But here she was, she thought as she looked out of her apartment’s window at the upright logjam of feral buildings that all but blocked out the northern sky. It was six forty-one, and the columns of sky she could see between the buildings were turning a deep blue. She had slept for four hours. It was the eighth day after she had fired the rocket at the Manifestos collection crew.

Here she was in the swamp. And if she knew anything about her, the biggest crocodile in the place was swimming in her direction.

NYPD had killed that fourteen year-old elf boy the day before. Mellow saw reports about growing unrest in the news; NYPD’s public host had logged four hundred and nine protests, and the system’s defenses had chased off a hacker attack that was probably related. Angry crowds were forming outside the Battery City police headquarters and at other points around the neighborhood.

Mellow spent most of the day at home, listening to music and watching the trid. The Battery had been under police siege for more than a week, and even though Mellow had precipitated it with her method of attack on that Manifestos crew, she was beginning to feel boxed in. She performed morning and noon prayers, not hoping that Allah would hear her, but that it would work off some of her excess energy.

More Twenties showed up about 1600 with a couple rank-and-files, to hang out.

“Who is it?” Mellow demanded through the closed door with her gun in her hand.

“It’s MT,” boomed the reply. “Come on let me in.”

Mellow silently clenched her jaws together. She already felt locked in a box. She did not think being locked up with More Twenties was going to make her any happier.

She undid the locks on the door. More Twenties grinned, an expression he was convinced was charming despite the stone dumbness of it. “Mellow Fasad. My girl. What’s up?”

Twenties could not be convinced that her name was Mellow al Fasad.

“Same same old,” Mellow murmured coolly. She waved MT and the two soldiers forward. “Come on in.” Mellow kept a case of beer in the refrigerator for these kinds of things.

It was 2000 hours and dark outside when Mellow’s wristphone rang.

“Hello,” Mellow answered it. More Twenties and the soldiers were watching college basketball on the trideo and cheering for NYU’s team.

“Mellow?” A man’s voice hissed out of the phone. Mellow kept the video transmit turned off when she answered the phone, because she didn’t want any old idiot who dialed her to be able to see her face. But she could see on her screen the face of the Turkish grocer, Olzev.

“It might be,” Mellow said non-committally. “Who’s this?”

“This is Olzev. Those others came around here again. Those Manifestos. This time they demanded ten percent more. They threatened me with their guns!” The man was pale.

“When? How many were there?”

“I can’t have this in my store! What do I pay you for?” He was nearly wailing. Mellow thought he might launch into some Turkish ululation of bowel-quaking fear.

“How many were there?” Mellow shouted at the shopkeeper. And that arrested More Twenties’ attention.

“Four! I saw four in my store. Are you going to do anything about this!?”

“When?”

“They just left – “

Mellow killed the connection. “Twenties! The Manifestos are back collecting.”

“What?” MT twisted in violent indignation. He jumped to his feet, holding his muscular hands in front of him with the fingers spread to grab. “I’ll break their backs!”

Mellow tried to validate his stupid posturing with a little nod of her head while she went on quickly, “They just shook down Olzev. You got your AK with you? We got to go to war.” Mellow’s wristphone rang again.

“In the car, baby,” MT grinned insouciantly.

Don’t call me baby, Mellow thought sourly, and answered her phone.

Olzev’s face appeared on her screen. “Mellow? They said they were coming back! I don’t have the money they wanted and they said I had to get it before they came back!”

Mellow took a shallow breath. Okay, you shouldn’t have hung up on this little hamster until you’d heard the whole story. Calm down. Try to think.

She wasn’t very calm. The thought of running into Keisha out there on the street was squeezing her hard. And Keisha was certain to be leading this new warparty.

But now Mellow knew where the Manifestos were going to be in a couple of hours.

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Mellow asked Olzev on the phone.

Olzev was scared witless. “I cannot get their money! I don’t have it! What am I supposed to do?”

“Go home.” Mellow told him. “But don’t close up the store. You hear me? Don’t close up that store.”

Mellow made six phone calls while stuffing her feet into her boots and extra clips for her Colt into her pockets, and four of the calls were conference. She ordered every Silencer she could get a hold of to meet her a block away from Olzev’s grocery as fast as they could arm themselves and their feet could carry them. And while she was barking into her wristphone she was watching the trideo for coverage on the race demonstrations. She’d commandeered the set from her soldiers, who were now all on their feet and fidgeting with fear that they tried to give off as bloodthirsty anticipation.

Except for MT. He was just bloodthirsty.

Manhattan News 373 was carrying coverage of what they were calling a “disturbance” and “near-riot conditions.” Several metahuman rights groups – Mothers of Metahumans, Ork Rights Committee, even a few people from the Cult of the Dragon, who worshipped the dead president as a god – had taken to the streets chanting, “No justice, no peace!” and “Police brutality is not normality!” because of the fourteen year-old elf boy, Owen Wasthill, who had been gunned down by NYPD yesterday when, during a routine hassle-stop, Owen had gone after the cops with a machete. NYPD claimed that Owen had been high on an illegal combat drug called ICBM. The demonstrators were pretty much rejecting that claim. He was a child and he should just have been restrained, not killed.

The protesters had big pictures of Owen on their signs. He looked high to Mellow. But maybe it was just a bad picture, and anyway it didn’t matter. What did matter was that protests were taking place not far away from Olzev’s grocery store, and the trideo was showing Mellow crowds of both professional and amateur demonstrators sharing the street with NYPD riot control in a dynamic that was not stable. Mellow had seen more than a few of these things in her life, and she could read this one like a Bedouin can read sand. It said, “Water cannons and gel rounds.”

That was just going to have to be something they dealt with. She was surprised that the Manifestos had come back with the police so thick in the streets, much less with this riot about to happen. It was a hugely macho way to do it, which fit Mellow’s mental profile of the modern Keisha, three years older and more vicious. The message was that she’d come through hell and bad traffic to bite off a piece of their racket. To eat the whole thing and leave scraps and crumbs for the stunned survivors of the old order.

Mellow’s hands were trembling, and the trembling seemed to be making her queasy. It was easy to be brave when Keisha stayed in the past. She took out her Manhunter and checked the round counter. It still read sixteen.

It was 2045 hours when seventeen of the South Tip Silencers met together on the streets of the Battery in a light snow for about four minutes, which was how long it took Mellow to break them up into smaller groups and disperse them. They were within a couple of blocks of the demonstrations, they could hear police helicopters, the traffic patterns were screwed up because the protest area had been closed to vehicular traffic, and seventeen gang monsters all standing in a group was an invitation to tear it up with the police. Being a gang leader required Mellow to publicly condemn the NYPD as punks and weasels, but you understood early that fights with the police were not fights you could win, or you stopped understanding everything altogether, abruptly. Often with media coverage.

Mellow split them into irregular groups because four groups of four would look suspicious. Then she conference called the group leaders and laid out the plan: the Silencers would stake out Olzev’s. When the Manifestos came back for Olzev’s money, the Silencers would butcher them in a crossfire on the sidewalk outside the Turk’s grocery store.

“Okay? Good?” Mellow asked her lieutenants. The chorus of yeses came after a confused pause and Mellow winced invisibly. You didn’t ask if war orders were “good”. You just gave them.

She was feeling now what she’d felt around the trash fires in 2057. The poison in her chest that sapped her strength, so that she’d been like a kitten getting kicked.

That was a long time ago, and it didn’t matter now. She moved her troops out, each small group taking a different way to Olzev’s, Mellow’s own boots rhythmically splashing the slush out from under the weight of her feet in a repeating pattern of boot prints. She was on her way to beat and strangle and kill her pain, and find the life on the other side of it.

The foot and vehicle traffic was screwed up, and got increasingly so as the Silencers got closer to Olzev’s and the main demonstration. They passed some people in the street with Wasthill signs, hippie-looking people with a mouse-like fear coming off them, scuttling back and forth between the NYPD detachments. Mellow and the Silencers ignored them, because they were wolves.

Walking faster and faster with anticipation, they arrived on the street outside Olzev’s. Mellow had her low-light shades on, so the street was an open book to her. There was a loose crowd of nervous people milling around, watching up the street about a block. There was a wall of NYPD riot control up there, fifteen or twenty officers and an armored car with a rotating lightbar and a heavy armored turret, the barrels of which were pointed away from Mellow and her gang. From the other side of the wall of cops they could hear the crowd: “Police brutality is not normality!”

The Silencers – and the Manifestos – were going to have very little time once the shooting started, and then it was going to be a full-throttle run away from the cop hammer.

But they wouldn’t need much time. Mellow was thinking thirty seconds if they shot straight. Then she heard the first shotgun boom, and thought the demonstrators had set off some kind of bomb. Then the chorus of chattering small arms fire began its aria, and Mellow dove behind a parked car, skidding to a stop on her hip and elbow in the freezing rainwater that was running down the gutter. She heard again the familiar sound of auto glass being pulverized by gunfire. The street outside Olzev’s was a storm of screaming and confused motion, and Mellow understood – a minute too late – that the Manifestos had never left Olzev’s, and she had led the Silencers slap into a counter-ambush.

The chaos was too great. Mellow couldn’t lead them in this madhouse. She couldn’t count the Manifestos, but she judged there were at least as many of them as there were of the Silencers.

There was a weird, metal-cleaving noise over her head, occurring in conjunction with a heavy series of rolling thuds that, when Mellow looked up, she saw had been produced by the troll who had run up next to her and crashed the head of an ax through the roof of the car Mellow was lying next to. The troll had meant to chop Mellow’s body, not the car’s.

Mellow had a very vague impression of the gigantic metahuman standing over her. Male. Caucasian but dark. Biceps bigger around than Mellow’s thighs. Wearing a black stocking cap with a tassel. Without taking much aim, Mellow blasted it twice. She rolled violently up onto the troll’s feet. She was on her stomach, now, lying across her attacker’s toes, so that those huge feet weren’t going to be able to kick her ribs in like a rotten crate before she scrambled off as fast as she could. She then proceeded to run away. Crouching across the street towards a shop front that had been blown open by gunfire. Out of the corner of one eye she saw the NYPD turning itself around to face the gangfight. Out of the corner of the other, she saw a flashing figure in the maelstrom she knew with bone instinct was Keisha. She blazed four rounds at the blur without scoring any. The gunfire noises had picked up considerably and Mellow realized it was because of her. She was one of only a few targets still standing in the street, now that she’d abandoned her cover because the troll had jumped behind that car with her.

At the same instant, she saw a woman with an HK SMG. She was sheltering inside the shattered storefront that looked like Mellow’s best new cover. The woman looked Polynesian, and she wasn’t a Silencer, so that made her a Manifesto. The woman was startlingly pretty, and Mellow felt two different kind of tugs, one in her pants and one in her heart. Never letting her feet stop, Mellow charged right across the street, screaming and firing her Manhunter at the woman. The woman ducked out of sight, and Mellow felt at least one bullet score across her buttocks, but it was a glancing hit and her duster sucked it up. Mellow leaped straight through the gaping window and threw herself down into the lowest possible crouch between racks of shoes. She scuttled, half on her hands and knees, towards the back of the store; to get further away from the gunfire that was still splattering against the storefront, and to run that Polynesian slitch down and kill her. Mellow had seen her for two seconds, but she had high cheekbones, pouty lips, hourglass hips, and a snarling but poseur kind of ferocity to her that Mellow knew real well.

She was just Keisha’s type. She was Keisha’s new girlfriend.

Mellow heard the door at the back of the store slam open and then bang shut again. She knew exactly where the door was, not because she’d seen it, but because she had a tiny little cybernetic computer installed in her ears that let her know the direction sounds came from. It was real useful in places like this one, in the gunfights in tangled and small little urban spaces that were part of Mellow’s stock and trade.

She jumped to her feet and ran through the back room to the big steel door marked EXIT in white reflective paint. She skidded to a stop, flung it open, and sheltered behind the brick wall next to it. In the same second there was a ripping chatter of SMG fire that hailed in through the door and rebounded off the walls. A ricochet hit Mellow in the abdomen and tinked to the floor. As the door swung shut on its spring, Mellow heard an ejected clip hit the pavement outside. Mellow had been just about to do that herself, but there were no footfalls with the noise from the alley; Keisha’s new girlfriend was standing in place and changing clips. Grab the opportunity, even with four bullets left.

Mellow threw the door wide open, wedged her foot under it to keep it open, and fired her Manhunter into the other woman until all four rounds were gone and she got four clicks.

The Polynesian collapsed like a sack of wet flour, falling forward on top of her Heckler and Koch when her knees went rubbery underneath her.

Mellow jammed her empty pistol into its holster. She strode over to the other woman and kicked her under her collarbone to roll her over. Her eyes were glazed and her breathing was rapid and shallow. Mellow had a spasm of imagination, thinking how many times Keisha had bent over this same woman when she was wearing a very similar expression, wet with sweat and out of breath. click-ck-ck came Mellow’s blades.

She slashed the Polynesian’s face, forestroke and backstroke, and her throat, forestroke and backstroke, forestroke and backstroke. Without pausing to contemplate she retracted the self-cleaning blades and walked quickly away, going away from the sounds of police bullhorns and the grunting of the tear gas launchers. The gunfire now was all but gone. Only a few melancholy pops, the last notes of a fading song.

The string played out, Mellow thought vividly as she turned the first available corner, putting the gunfight behind her, her hands shaking with adrenaline and the gripping cold of her soaking-wet pants, still sodden from her roll in the gutter. Now the aftermath had to be managed.

The war between the Manifestos and the Silencers had ripped the lid off the street. When the shooting started a lot of people ran for home, but a lot of other people thought that it was the start of the revolution. A good percentage of the demonstrators had charged a police line in either a rage or a panic, depending on which report you believed, and had gotten clubbed down and tear-gassed. NYPD Anti-gang Units had rushed to the scene with their air support, and as a riot control method the police jammed all broadcast channels except their own. No cell phone or radio within ten blocks would work until 0600 the next day, when the police jamming ceased.

So it was a couple of hours before Mellow could begin to reorganize her scattered soldiers. She got out of the jammed area and started making calls. She got a hold of Oxford within forty-five minutes. They arranged to meet on an old tenement playground that took up a sad thousand square meters between towering buildings on narrow streets. Mellow drove down there and found Oxford and More Twenties hanging around outside a faded Dodge Caravan with a sheet of cardboard substituting for one of the side windows.

Mellow approached them cautiously, driving her car right across the bare earth of the playground, which was a field of ice-hard bumps and furrows.

MT had a flesh-colored bandage wrapped around his left hand that ran up under his coat sleeve, Mellow saw when she got out of the car. As she got closer she saw also that the sleeve of his heavy armored jacket was sort of shredded and torn.

“Heya MT.” She greeted him. “What’s up with your arm?”

“One of those jerk-offs shot me with a flechette gun,” he said proudly. “Look here,” he quickly pointed to the damaged sleeve, and Mellow saw that he was pointing at a pair of translucent white metallic-plastic slivers that stuck up out of the fabric. He gave her a lengthy description of the incident that boiled down to “I got winged in the gunfight.”

“Cool,” Mellow said, not meaning it. She looked over at Oxford, who had deep bruises around her eyes. The deep black, unvaried bruises of magical drain. “You worked hard out there, didn’t you?”

“Uh-huh,” Oxford grunted, with the minimum movement of her lips possible.

“We boosted this van,” Twenties explained unnecessarily. “Got something to show you.” He was excited. His voice even thinned out at the end of the sentence.

What could you possibly have to show me? Mellow wondered. “So show.”

More Twenties slid open the side door of the faded van with an air of presentation. Mellow glanced at Oxford, who was hanging back with a little air of embarrassment, like she was just waiting for this to be over so that she could go home and take a nap.

There was a big roll of plastic lying in the van. MT flipped back a corner. Keisha Starr was inside, and she was dead. Gunshot wounds.

“This one was their leader,” MT said excitedly. “Oxford and me and Sandals and Pett cornered them in back of that baby store across from Olzev’s. Buddaddadadada!” More Twenties actually imitated the sound of his AK. “Pett took one in the head. We had to leave him for the PD. I think he might still be alive,” he added helpfully.

Mellow stared at the body of Keisha Starr. Mellow’s hands were in her pockets. Her face felt heavy, numb, and inexpressive.

Ran out of time, baby. Ran out of time. Keisha’s body looked really . . . lifeless. Like a dead bird in the park. It seemed to be some kind of hole, into which some part of Mellow was trickling. This moron you did not deserve. Trapped like a rat you did not deserve. Not by this rockhead trash I got for a street samurai.

The moment drew out. Then Mellow shook herself. “That’s terrific, MT. That’s a great job.” She slapped him on the arm and shoulder. “You’ve been invaluable. Let’s gather up the rest of the gang and take stock. This war isn’t over, Twenties my man. And we’re going to need you to do this again. You and me are going to go over to Brooklyn and kill whoever is left over there right where they live, put this down forever. Am I right? Oxford! Great job!”

Oxford gave a tired nod.

“You’re right,” Twenties bobbed his head ponderously, showing a mirthful wall of teeth. Mellow could tell that killing the leader of the Manifestos was making More Twenties feel smart. Important. Like he was moving up in the world, like he was starting to think.

Mellow’s hand shot out and flipped the plastic back over Keisha’s face without anybody paying any attention.

“I’ll make the calls. I’ll get our counter-attack started. You are going to be right out in the front of the action, MT,” Mellow told him.

“Right where it’s hot!” Twenties declared, puffing out his chest.

Mellow raised her fist triumphantly. “Right in the burn!”