Jerry nodded. “Awright, I know you. What kin Jerry do for Mr. Avery Cates outta New Yawk, then?” He squinted at me. I was still in my stolen duds, and they hadn’t gotten too beat up yet, because I’d gone a remarkable seventy-two hours without being shot at, beaten, or chased. “Assuming ’e’s gawt the bees and honey for the job.”
In response, I made a show of paying Drooly, who’d been standing there grinning in five-yen ecstasy, for his time. “I’ve got yen,” I said. “You have an office?”
Jerry Materiel spread his arms and smiled, his teeth brown and cracked. “The whole field a wheat’s my office, Mr. Cates! Tell us what y’be needin’.”
I had laboriously written a list onto a scrap of paper. “Any two or three of these would be fine.”
He ran his eye over the list, raised an eyebrow, and licked his thumb. “Y’know what yer doin’, fer sure. I’ll ne’ s’resurance. Say twenty would relax me on the subbeck, eh?” He produced a small hand-held credit scanner. Glancing around, I paused: A flash of red hair down the street, ducking behind something, made me stiffen. I ran my dongle through the scanner and it lit up green. I glanced back at Jerry Materiel and he grinned.
“No need to wor’ abut the whoppers, Cates. They don’t bust the Dole. Too borin’ for ’em. If’n yer gon’ wor’ abut sometin’, wor’ abut the feggin’ Tin Men.”
I nodded. “I worry about the Monks,” I said. “Be sure of that. I also need building plans. Old ones, pre-Unification.”
Jerry winked. “My speci-ali-tee, Cates. I’ll have a butcher’s and see what can be done. You gawt an addy?”
I slipped him another piece of paper. “Where and when, Mr. Materiel?”
He stared at the second slip for a moment, chewing his lip, and then glanced back at the list. “Here, Mr. Cates, in twenty.”
“Done.” I leaned forward slightly. “Tell me, is there a red-haired woman about a block away, sort of hiding behind that ruined wall, but watching me?”
Jerry Materiel didn’t move his eyes from my face, but that terrible, brown-black grin appeared again. “Lumme! She sure has been eyeballin’ you, Cates, since you got ’ere. She ain’t SSF, or you’da been shown the heels, right?”
“Thanks. In twenty then.”
Materiel sketched a salute and melted into the Dole Line. Gatz stood close to me as we pretended to join the line. “That your Vid anchor?”
I nodded slightly. “That’s her. Let’s see if we can get her off the street.”
We wandered. We didn’t know London. In some ways, all the cities were the same: half-ruined, never rebuilt after the Riots, and continually razed a little more every time there was a food riot or something. New York, especially Old New York, the original city, before urban spread had absorbed most of the other cities on the seaboard and formed the huge, endless city it was today, was a snarling mass of people, people, people-
people crushed into the streets, into the few livable apartments, into the rare legal taverns and the hundreds of temporary gin mills. The gray mass of men and women roiling through the streets was a permanent fixture. Sure, you wandered above Twenty-third Street in Manhattan and things thinned out as things got richer, but I didn’t think there was an inhabitable area in New York that wasn’t packed with people. London was different. It had the same razed look, the same crumbling buildings, and the same remnants of the Riots, but there weren’t any people. The streets were comparatively empty, winding off who knew where. In Manhattan, you could let yourself be carried along by the tide of people and know exactly where you’d end up. In London, I got the feeling that it was all narrow, winding streets, and the space made my skin itch. I felt exposed. And in New York, things had been crufted back together. Rubble cleared, windows boarded up, spared furniture rescued and reused. London looked like entire neighborhoods had just shrugged their shoulders, packed up, and left.
Gatz and I wandered, keeping the dirty river on our left and letting her keep us in sight, until we were on a wide but deserted street. At one time it had edged the river, but recently the river-a dirty, brown-flavored sludge flowing stolidly past us-had topped the embankment and lapped halfway across the broken pavement. When the time was right we ducked into the shadows offered by a wall of rubble dumped there decades ago and waited. Across the river from us was a hemisphere of rusted metal, a huge spoked contraption half-buried in river sludge, leaning at an extreme angle but somehow peaceful in its stillness. It was bent slightly, and I tried, briefly, to imagine it upright and suspended in the air again, but it was hard to imagine anything whole and functioning again.
She appeared a few minutes later, clean and coiffed and wearing more on her back than I’d ever possessed in my whole fucking life. It hurt my eyes a little just to look at her, someone who ate real food, who bought new clothes whenever she wanted, some girl playing at a profession because she was bored. The only legitimate jobs to be had, aside from maybe being a Crusher, didn’t pay enough to survive on-everyone who’d lived the streets, like me, knew that. The only people who could afford to have jobs were rich. I watched her pass our hiding spot, bold as brass because she was convinced nothing could happen to her, that the whole SSF would spring into action if she was so much as stared at rudely. It made my heart sing to follow her silently for a few seconds, and then reach out and wrap my arm around her neck, cupping the hand over her mouth to cut off the squeak of protest she managed.
“If I flex my bicep your neck will snap,” I whispered into her ear. “You believe me?”
After a moment, she nodded.
“Good. You’ve been following me, Ms. Harper. Bad idea.” Kev stepped in front of us. “I can’t have Vid reporters doing stories on me, now can I? Let me introduce my colleague Kev Gatz. He’s going to have a look at you.”
She tensed in my arms, not sure of what was coming, and probably believing the bullshit the Vids pumped out about the jobless mass they ruled over: that we were without conscience, without honor, without souls. Some of us were, but I liked to think there was still honor, still some humanity. I breathed in the smell of her hair-clean and perfumed-and swallowed involuntarily, shifting my weight to keep a sliver of air between us.
Gatz lifted his shades and I averted my eyes. “Ms. Harper, look at me.” He sighed.
I frowned. “Kieth said you didn’t need to look people in the eye.” Harper rolled her eyes toward me and then back toward Kev, trying to see us both simultaneously.
He shrugged. “I dunno. I can’t do it without eye contact. It’s like a block or something.”
And then, just before-just a split second before-the barrel of the gun touched my ear, I heard the faintest rustle of a coat, the faintest hint of someone behind me. I barely moved my head, and the gun was in my ear. I thought, Fucking hell, who the fuck moves that lightly?
“Mr. Cates, a pleasure,” a deep, roughly accented voice said quietly. “Please ask your friend to put his glasses back on, as I have no intention of looking at him.”
I nodded, not moving. “Go ahead, Kev.”
After a moment, the gun was removed. “Very well, Mr. Cates, you can move if you wish.”
The voice was calm and sounded amused, as if there was no worry over me making any sort of move against him. I released the reporter, who stood there in a Gatz-induced daze, and slowly turned. A few feet away stood an old man-at least fifty years old if he was a day, with a shock of white hair over a permanently pink face-dressed all in black, quality clothes, not flashy. The gun he held casually on Gatz and myself gleamed in the damp storm-light: a silver-plated, custom Roon model.