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  “Hey Officer Powell,” smiles Pooky. “The Rev said you’d call back.” Pooky’s breath shrouds him, dancing with blue welding light. Kirsty glances round and Georgy’s suddenly on the move, just four street lights away. “Here he is now,” says Pooky.

  “Don’t talk, just listen,” she blurts out at the Reverend. “You offered me some of your guys and I said no. Are they still available?”

  The Reverend’s all white teeth and smiles. “You know how it goes. First we chat, and then…”

  “No time,” Georgy, two lights away now. “I need someone to watch over me, right now. Can you do?”

  “What if I…”

  One light away now, striding fast. “Can… you… do…?”

  The Reverend nods. “I can. Meet me in the night market, Ho-T Mann’s stall. One hour.” She cancels the call and steps back and holds a hand up to keep Georgy away.

  “Keep the fuck away from me, Georgy,” she says.

  “Who was that?” he shouts. “Why d’you use a paybooth? Why didn’t you use your Slate?”

  “What’s it to you?” she says. “Fuck off to your side of the street.”

  “Who d’you call?” He steps up and pushes her aside and stares at the blank paybooth screen.

  “I called my janitor, alright? I used a paybooth because work frowns on personal Slate usage, alright? Jesus, you need to lay off the music loops.”

  “Yeah, well new plan – from now on I’m sticking even closer just to see what you’re up to. How d’you like that, huh?”

  He grins as she points an imaginary laser pen straight at him then due south to the deepest part of Lake Ontario. Much to her disgust, Georgy just frowns at her in confusion. He doesn’t scamper off and drown.

  Some day, the federal government hopes to take control again. It will end border disputes by licensing Japanese settlers on the West Coast, compensating Canada for the territories it took away and settling its differences with Mexico and Honduras. It will offer sixty years of wetware development to the UN and China in return for them lifting their trade embargoes. Some day, it even hopes to take the Hubs back from the corporations.

  When this happens, mercwar units will augment the federal army to bolster a new PD, one made effective by transferring all Urban Pacification Force personnel to government control. As corporations find they can’t hire mercwar and UPFs lose the right to police whole Districts, every franchised G-boy and girl will say goodbye to their parents, stick a spraygun under their armored jacket and head for the 49th Street Night Market. It’ll be their final stand against a government about to make them illegal.

  They won’t all be in the same place, of course. But the Hubs’ modular design means that every District has a 49th Street Night Market, right there between Hudson and Tiber on 49th Street. Every G will go to the closest one because every Night Market is the true seat of gang power.

  Kirsty casually saunters up to the ring of steel shipping containers marking the market fringe. Some are bars and burger stands, others cafes and toilet stalls. She’s in one chopped open to form a covered bike stand, fumbling with her bike lock, when she feels Georgy’s hand tight around the top of her arm. “Are you shitting me?” he hisses. “No way I’m letting you loose in there.”

  “But Slate has listed a priority call,” she says, “look.” She pushes Slate into his face then darts into the crowd.

  Inside are scaffold poles draped in tattered plastic sheeting and bamboo canes covered in sheets. Inside, the only viable transport is on foot, the only guarantee a handshake, the only currency cash. No credit, no plastic, no tear-out welfare coupons. She pushes shoppers out the way before looking round and already, Georgy’s hopelessly lost in the crush.

  She takes random turns then asks Slate for the time and finds she’s got ten minutes until she meets the Reverend. The crowd’s radiated warmth feels safe. For the first time since Arclights, she feels back in control.

  Past the bustling food stalls, hydroponic salads and roots grown in roof gardens from composted human waste. Waste minimized, food miles eliminated, nutrients recycled round one more time – the simplest, most streamlined and simplified solution to food production.

  Through a jingle of rough and ready cheeses and pickled olives, sun-dried and smoke-dried and salt-dried meats. Kirsty checks her wake – no Georgy. She finds herself next to a dangling forest of plastic-wrapped bacon joints and doesn’t need to see any branding to know that this used to be machinery. It’s ex-livedrive, cold-cured and water injected and rubbed down with hickory-scented glaze. Some gang has ‘jacked a high-end BurbBuggy, stripped the mechanical linkages off the wetware and butchered it for food.

  Then she’s through the food stalls and into the clothing stands, where G-boys protect and invest in the microbranded streetware they wear as their uniforms. Time was the corporations told these kids what to wear. Time was they’d gun each other down for a pair of sneakers or jeans with the right logo on them. These days, the must-have labels come from the street, corporations and rich Clave kids forced to wait for a trend to emerge from the night markets before they can drag it into the mainstream.

  Kirsty jostles up and down rows looking for Steven Ho’s stall. Ho-T-Mann sneakers are the Grifters’ footwear of choice. In return for their protection, Steven Ho supplies the gang with one pair free for every ten sold.

  She’s made it. She relaxes. She doesn’t sense Georgy until he’s in her face, pushing her against a stall with his nose against her nose and steel against her stomach.

  “Think you can shake me by hanging with the fucking homeboys?” Someone in the crowd jostles his arm and she gasps as his knife splits skin.

  “Jesus, Georgy… what gives? I’m working here.”

  “Bullshit, you’re running.” He spits the words and twists the blade enough for her to wince again. She feels blood flowing warmly into her clothing and tries to think fast but talk slow. “Think I won’t do you right here, huh? Think I won’t do that?”

  Tears well up, warm and heavy. “Please Georgy, you’re hurting me,” she hisses. Her shoulders shake in a quiet sob as she slides a hand up to her waistband and the gunmetal waiting there.

  “Yeah, well… new plan. I’m tired of trailing you round and taking your shit. I figure it’s easier if I hold onto Slate from now on.”

  “Wait a minute, M4 must have told you… you can’t take Slate off me.” She squirms as the blade digs deeper into her skin.

  “Fuck M4! They told me to keep an eye on your Slate, so I’m doing it my way now.”

  “Pleeease Georgy,” she hisses through clenched teeth. “Ease up the knife. I swear to you. If you take Slate, it’ll bring so much federal heat down you won’t believe.”

  “And I swear to you, I’m past negotiating. So you gonna give it up?”

  “Sure,” she says, and finally clears the Jericho.

  She presses against his heavy leather coat and feels the thickness of woven sheets within. The first shot’s muffled, a slap that makes only a couple of people look round.

  Georgy belches explosively as the bullet dissipates energy into the armored fabric over his stomach. She gets off a second shot as he falls and this time it’s deafening and everyone shrieks or dives for the ground or spins round. She tries for a third but strong arms push the pistol skywards as strong hands claw the pistol away and she’s bundled to the ground.

  She screams and freaks but, by the time she’s had her arms pinned behind her and been picked up and had her jacket pulled off and been frisked, all that’s left of Georgy is the knife, a bad smell and a wet patch on the ground. It isn’t blood.

  She shivers from the shock and the cold and is gingerly lifting her blood-soaked t-shirt to wince at the damage when the curious crowds part and there he is, walking through them with her Jericho pistol held out for her to take back.

  “Damn, Powell,” smiles the Reverend, “I’m five minutes late and you shoot a guy. Pooky, take a memo. Remind me never, ever, to stand up this lady on a date
.”

  And even though she tries not to, Kirsty can’t help but smile back.

  The Scotia Plaza Building

  Toronto Hub Central

  Monday 10 March

  08:48 pm

  BLEEKER TOLD THEM it would be soon so they packed their chutes in anticipation. He told them where and they made their travel plans. He told them when – the night after next – and they flowed through cracks in the system like mercury through a sieve.

  What’s left of Bleeker’s old guard come, the guys who wrote BASEracing’s few simple rules on a silk panel stained with the blood of the fledgling sport’s first fatality. No one doubts the courage of these guys who hobble on legs reset too many times, cursing knees and elbows irrevocably busted from clipping flagpoles and balcony edges. Their eyes burn darkly with the knowledge of every BASEracer’s inevitable end.

  Out-of-towners violating federal law by Hub-hopping come. There’s Mifune, back after a year out from injury. The owners of these redundant skyscrapers, they don’t like them being used as playthings. They’ve started draping them in monofilament dragwires – impossible to scan for, practically invisible. One almost sliced Mifune’s head off.

  Living legend Stephan Masse’s there too – the professional fallballer whose unrivaled possession time meant nothing when he was busted for selling livedrive-grade pharmaceuticals on the party circuit. He spent three years on a penal farm in Kansas, lost his fallball license and keeps tight-lipped about both experiences. Rumor has it that since Masse’s making this jump, so are some big league fallballers, slumming it with the kids, their famous faces hidden behind silk ski masks and scarves.

  Six nights, six skyscrapers. No one’s BASEraced Toronto in years so the hope is that PD response will be sluggish and uncoordinated but Bleeker’s never asked anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He’s the first man in, driving a FedEx utivan into the sub-basement loading bay with Butch Mary in the passenger seat. Bleeker’s wearing soft leather gloves with six ounces of granular lead stitched across the knuckles. Two guys sitting on piles of packed chutes in the back clutch pistol grip pump-actions – beanbag riot rounds in one, armor busting tungsten-cored sabots in the other. Bleeker prays they won’t be needed but having fun’s a tough game these days.

  The building security guard doesn’t even see it coming, leaning out to put his thumb to the delivery Slate and getting a stun gun in the neck from Butch Mary instead. Twenty thousand volt prongs against bare flesh leave him twitching as she tapes him up and Bleeker drives on in… the fake FedEx thing works every time.

  They get organized fast. Guys head down to fire up the old electricity generators since they haven’t bred a livedrive yet powerful enough to haul express elevators up a last-century skyscraper. He sends guys up to marshal the roof then strolls out the front door towards the crowd that’s emerging from the shadows. “Okay,” he says, “head on up…”

  Sixty eight stories above, race marshals check names against clipboards and sort out the three race groups. It’s cold up there and dark too, just the building’s strobing red navigation markers to ward off airships and the bobbing lights of head torches.

  Racers keep quiet and jostle for prep space. Groups get quietly psyched or stay mellow in huddles of cross-legged contemplation. The scagbanders strip to the waist despite the cold, blasting music though expensive headphones while they rub the fat black thrilltats that snake across each other’s shoulders and backs. The tats work better warm. They’ll respond more crisply, converting each musical note into a fluttering, constantly changing stream of mesodorphine droplets. Carried into the brain, they’ll magnify the few seconds of drop time into an eternity of chemically-enhanced stomach flutters and soulful wind noise.

  Not everyone likes the scagbanders. Some on this roof will say, without a hint of irony, that having bioengineered tissue stitched into their nerves is a risk they could do without. Damning judgment from people getting ready to jump off a skyscraper that may or may not be crisscrossed with invisible razor wires.

  Down on the ground, Bleeker checks his watch and opens comms and tells the race marshal on the roof to go when ready. The marshal waves a silk panel lit by a flashlight and everyone feels the tension because they live for the rush and gravity’s the only power not yet restricted in the Hubs. In a flurry of silk, the moment explodes into motion as they sprint to the edge and the blackness beyond.

  Some hesitate at the lip, most don’t. Roxanna Pierce loads her forward momentum into bent legs and springs clear of the tower in a graceful swan dive. Right behind her, Stephan Masse goes over like he’s Wile E Coyote, sprinting still even though he’s dropping through space. A few panic and try to stop, only to be bundled over by people coming up behind.

  Two seconds in and already the pack is strung out. The front runners streamline, dropping head first with their bodies parallel to the glass frontage. This way, they reach 120 mph – terminal velocity – that fraction sooner.

  Three seconds in and the turbulence of so many dropping bodies starts to throw racers around the crowded sky. A few veer too close to the building and pop their chutes, immediately pulling hard left or right as they fear another racer dropping into their silk and taking them both to their deaths. But the terror, like everything in BASEracing, only lasts a fraction of a second. They start to float down safely but they’ve lost because to win at BASEracing, you’ve got to be the first one to land and stand. But how low can you leave it without the impact driving the splintered ends of your femurs through your shattered pelvis?

  Four seconds in and Michelle Ferderber deploys, giving Mifune a face full of billowing silk as he blasts by. It freaks him enough to deploy too, his feet kicking up as he’s jerked back just before most of the racers’ packs auto-deploy twenty floors up.

  Then the race is down to decimal points of time as only Stephan Masse and some other guy fall into the death zone of the lower floors. Masse’s already yanking his cord but… get this… the other guy, no more than a kid, is only just starting to pull out of his headlong dive.

  Bleeker feels an acid jolt in his stomach the same as everyone else. This guy’s ‘crete meat for sure and they’ve got ringside tickets. Concentration is focused, time slows as Masse’s rig opens, three progressively larger drogues snapping the main canopy of his low-altitude chute open in the blink of an eye.

  Thirteen floors up, too low to live, it looks like the other kid’s actually been waiting for Masse to pop his chute, which is crazy since no one’s reactions are that sharp. Yet the moment Masse’s canopy blows, the kid opens his hand and lets go of the single drogue attached to his main canopy. It’s a low-tech system compared to Masse’s rig and it’s slow to deploy. Far… too… slow…

  He’s slowed for an instant, his shoulders jerked and his feet kicking out just before he piles into the ground and the barely-opened canopy settles over him like a shroud. Masse lands hard two seconds later, which is light years in BASEracing so no one’s looking at him. Bleeker holds his breath and stares and waits for a crimson puddle to start spreading from the still lump in the center of the silk.

  Four or five others land, one crying out as her leg snaps so cleanly, onlookers hear it. But no ones cares about her because everyone’s gasping as the crumpled bulge shifts and elongates and rises, working its way to the edge of the silk to emerge as a pale-faced kid, limping a little but grinning too. Like every great sporting moment, the crowd goes wild.

  Bleeker’s too old and too cool to run over and hoist the kid high, but he’s got to know his name. As casually as he can manage, he walks over to where Patrick Van Haden is marshaling the plaza, shouting names off a battered clipboard and pointing racers towards the utivans that’ll disperse them downtown.

  “Unfuckingbelievable,” says Bleeker. “First drop of the year and we’ve got a new star already.”

  Van Haden nods. “What can I say? You’ve got to be brave to risk a pop that low and crazy to wear a rig that old.”

  “I hear yo
u,” nods Bleeker. “And I’ve never seen anyone stand up after a landing that hard. Who is he anyhow – one of the league fallballers?”

  Van Haden shakes his head as a shout goes up that the second race is clearing the building lip. “He’s just some nobody local kid, Bleek. Came along and signed up and won his place in history.” He checks his clipboard. “Name of… let’s see now… Sossamon. Kenny Sossamon.”

  Wednesday 12 March

  10:29 am

  DAYLIGHT, MID-MORNING and the end of a shift that started with threats and gunfire and Georgy hitting the cold ground. Kirsty, dizzy with fatigue, chains up her bike and rides the Tramtrax to District 45’s core instead of going home. She walks quiet roads round the back of the main Amtrak station, trying to find an address written on the back of a letter that eventually matches a shipping container on the old freight sidings, the whole area redeveloped as residential now that long-distance haulage is a thing of the past.

  She walks past five container blocks laid out on the railside concrete hard-standing. The letter was sent from one next to the perimeter fence, fifth container up, eleventh one from the left. She climbs stairs on a scaffolding access frontage that looks old and used enough to be permanent but shakes and rattle enough to feel temporary. The stairs are crossed by power lines, cable access and plastic waste piping held by untidy miles of twisted wire. To one side, regular-sized doors cut into the containers’ original oversized ones. To the other, blue plastic sheeting and worn tarpaulins rattle and flap in the breeze. She knocks and waits, feeling exposed, until Scott opens the door and blinks in morning light tinted by the flapping sheeting. He’s wearing moccasins and a faded dressing gown. He’s thinner than she remembers, longer hair too.

  She holds up his crumpled letter. “Scott Karpel, I find you in federal violation of not attending your own welcome home party.”