“I didn’t think it was possible, but it’s even worse than the old one.”

Walker gave me a glare. “Hell of a lot nicer than your car.”

“That doesn’t make it any better. Kings.” We were in the alley behind Walker’s office and I’d just seen Allison Junior. I found myself wishing the lights weren’t so good here.

If Walker’s old car had belonged in a junkyard, the new one belonged in a scrapyard-or maybe a shallow grave. Its original make and model were unidentifiable, those panels not crumpled by impact having been crudely repaired with sheetmetal and uneven self-tappers. Where it wasn’t rust, the paint was several different shades of primer half-blasted off by glasstorm exposure. It had four different wheels-each a different size, of course-and one of the headlights had been “replaced” with a hand flashlight. It was such a disaster I couldn’t help marveling at it.

“You’re telling me this thing actually runs and drives?” I said with a sort of horrified awe.

“Uh, for the most part.”

I shook my head as I walked round to the passenger side. “I can’t believe you found something this shitty. Had to be harder than finding something nice!”

Walker swung into the driver’s seat and slammed his door with a crash. “My, you sure complain a lot for someone gettin’ a free ride.”

“I’m not complaining. I’m just stunned.” The interior was worse, somehow, than the outside. It was gutted down to the metal, the only amenities a gauge cluster and speaker unit glued crookedly to the firewall with globs of industrial sealant. Walker had a real seat, but mine had been replaced with something screwed together out of duct tape and scrap wood. It creaked alarmingly under my weight. No seatbelts for either of us, not that that was a surprise.

“I hope this place is close,” I said. “Think I’ve got a splinter already.”

“It’s down in South Valiant. Ain’t too bad.” He grabbed a screwdriver off the floor, stuck it in the ignition and twisted. The engine came to life with an arthritic whine. I could barely hear myself over the clatter of the valves.

“This thing’s about to explode, man!”

“Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t ya? Don’t worry, It always sounds like that.” He scraped it into gear and pulled into the street.

It was a good thing the engine barely ran, because riding around in this thing with Walker at the helm was terrifying. I tried to distract myself by sending Pengyi a message, just asking what was up. I got a response surprisingly fast. They sent a pic of themselves throwing a victory sign in front of a mass of gray-black fur. I didn’t get what was going on until I read the oddly effusive caption: “got him!!!!!! >:)” I realized they’d managed to kill the pergato that attacked us during our expedition-which was pretty amazing, considering it was larger than this car.

“How’d you manage that?” I sent back in pidgin Ofen’dha.

“trap with ropes!!!! then shooting!!!!! meat for days XD!”

Well. I definitely didn’t expect Pengyi to talk like that over text, but then again plenty of people acted different when they were online. We chatted a little more while Walker barged through traffic and generally did his best to give me motion sickness. They said I’d have to come by soon to try some Pergato jerky and I agreed. How exactly that would work we didn’t figure out; I really didn’t feel like going back into the park.

After about twenty minutes our mismatched wheels were rumbling over the half-shattered streets of Valiant. As usual, the people I saw on the sidewalks were rough. As I understood it, the place was shitty enough that neither Blue Division or the Bones bothered laying claim to the whole thing. They held a few blocks here and there, but the grand majority was a no-man’s-land of petty gangs and freelancers. I saw graffiti tags for crews I’d never heard of, names like the Dashing Glassers, the Perilos, the Apostles of Reix.

“Why don’t the Bones come in here and really take over?” I asked Walker. “Wouldn’t it be easier than dealing with all these piranhas?” That was what people called these two-bit ganglets, after some Sun Age sea creature. They were tiny in the scheme of things, but mess with them and they’d kill you just as dead as the big guys.

He blew smoke and coughed a little before answering. “Well, first of all, between us’n’ the Blues, we might as well own it. Who you think all these small-timers buy their product from? And second of all, sometimes it’s useful to have a crowd of...unaffiliated potential employees lyin’ around. Sometimes there jobs you don’t wanna send your own guys on. Sometimes there’s jobs you can’t. So you come down here instead and hand some a’ these dipshits some cash so they’ll do it instead.”

“Deniable assets and cannon fodder,” I said flatly.

He snapped his fingers. “Ex-fuckin-zactly. Very well put there, Sawyer.”

I nearly corrected him on the name but stopped when I saw the grin. He was doing it just to rile me up, of course. A few minutes later he slowed down as we rolled past a decrepit gray building.

Walker tossed his cig out the window. “That’s the address their pusher gave the boys.”

“Nice place,” I muttered. It was built of filthy cinderblocks, four stories high and and on the small side. The bottom floor looked like it used to be a storefront, though the sign was long gone and the window was covered with sheet metal. The stories above might’ve been apartments. There was another detail that jumped out at me more, though.

“You think they’re in the habit of leaving the door open?”

Walker squinted at the old storefront and cursed. “Shit. Someone must have got there before us.” He stomped on the gas and whipped the car around to park in an alley one block down. He hopped out before the engine stopped turning, checking the load on his big UZ Fabrika target pistol. I did the same with the coilgun, regretting my decision to leave the saw at home. I hoped I didn’t need it.

“Listen,” he muttered, walking fast toward the target building. “If we gotta go loud in there, then so be it. Just try not to hit any of the computers and stuff?”

“I’ll do my best,” I said, which wasn’t much of an answer at all. He gave me a dubious look and kept walking.

When we got up to the door he lowered his voice. “Alright. You still got that flashbang?”

I nodded, pulling it out of my jacket.

“Good. I’ll take left, you take right. When I say go you heave that thing in there. Soon as it pops we bust in an’ kill everything that moves. You follow me in. Easy enough, right?”

“Right.” I couldn’t help being excited. Breach-and-clearing a drug lab? It was like being in one of those old cop shows. We took our spots to either side of the door. Walker nodded to me and I pulled the pin on the ‘nade. Man, that felt cool. I kept the spoon squeezed tight in my left hand and drew my gun with my right.

I nodded to show I was ready, and Walker gave me a silent countdown. Five. Four. Three. Two. On one I shoved the door the rest of the way open, hurled the grenade and pivoted out of the doorway. I heard the cheery jingle of the spoon hitting the floor, a few seconds of silence, then an absolutely tremendous bang.

Walker flowed through the door like he’d trained for it, with me dogging his heels. We went in with guns raised-and froze.

“Holy shit, Walker! You said that was a flashbang!”

The room was full of corpses, ten or twelve of them. They were flopped about on the floor like people passed out after a big party-but partiers weren’t usually swamped in an inch or so of half-congealed blood. That awful, steamy slaughterhouse stink wafted out at us, all blood and shit and offal. I’d be puking if I wasn’t used to it.

“It...it was.” He sounded just as confused as me. “Someone definitely got here afore we did. Who and why, though...sheeit. Let’s have a look around.”

The room had indeed been a store once, if the shelving brackets left on the walls were any indication, but now it was packed with specialized equipment. A counter ran all around the walls, loaded with cabinets and boxy machines. I saw ovens, dispensers, autoclaves, centrifuges...a lot of it looked like repurposed medical equipment, connected by a rat’s nest of tubes and wires. On the far wall was a closed door that apparently led upstairs. The center of the room was dominated by a bunch of desks shoved together into a table, covered with food wrappers, cigarette butts-and a big pile of unused hush cans.

“Whoever it was, they don’t like the Blues much either,” muttered Walker. The bodies indeed all had Blue ink. They’d been killed efficiently and thoroughly. Each had been shot at least twice in the chest in addition to once in the head. Looking them all over, I thought I saw something odd.

“Look at this, Walker.”

“Hmm?”

I pointed to the bodies. “Look. This group over here look like shooters.” Four men and three women, some cybered up and all looking tough. “They dropped their guns. Thayer machine carbines, SMGs, a ten-gauge kalash...”

“They were rollin’ pretty heavy, yeah.” He scratched the stubble on his chin, looking pensive.

“Right. But these guys here, they’re nerds! Skinny, no guns, a fucking Vampire Maid shirt...if I had to guess, these dudes ran the lab.”

“I’m thinkin’ you’re right. And the soldiers”-he pointed with a cig that had appeared in his hand-“were for us. It was a fuckin’ trap.”

I’d been thinking the same thing, but it still didn’t quite line up. “Why not just send us to an empty warehouse or something, then?”

“You ever hear that old saying?” He was rummaging through the crap on the counter now, shoving machinery around. “Don’t blame on malice what’s probably the fault of incompetence. I’ll bet you that pusher really was that stupid, but somebody else that works for the Blues saw ‘im get pinched.”

“So they figured he’d talk and sent a team here to wait for us.” I crouched down, looking closer at the bodies. Something wasn’t right here.

“S’what I’m thinkin. Ah, here we go.” From the mess on the counter he pulled out a flat box made of industrial-beige sheetmetal. A spaghetti tangle of wires sprouted from all sides. This ain’t exactly my area of expertise, but I’m pretty sure this is their process box.”

“What’s that do?”

“Runs this whole mess automatically,” he said around his cigarette. “Real fancy. We take this and we’ll have their whole recipe. Start cookin’ the good shit ourselves. What?” He asked, noticing I didn’t look very excited.

I rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t know, man. I don’t like this drug stuff much, that’s all.”

He snorted and started yanking cables out of the process box. “Ain’t like I do either. Seen it ruin plenty of friends. Hell, if I had a kid and I caught ‘em doin’ any of this shit, well, you’d be inventin’ new words for how hard I’d tan their hide.”

“I’m expecting a ‘but.’”

“But, the fact is this is D-block. People are always gonna be buyin’ drugs, so someone’s always gonna be sellin’ ‘em-and it might as well be us. Besides, we ain’t making anybody buy anything. They wanna be stupid and huff poison, well, far be it from me to tell ‘em no.” He took a pointed drag on his cig.

I’d thought much the same thing that earlier when those rattlers tried to mug me. Why, then, did it sound so callous coming out of Walker’s mouth? I shook my head. Questions for another time. I kept looking at the bodies, trying to figure out what was bothering me. I finally got it just as Walker finished with the box.

“Walker, check this out.” I was crouched down by the corpse of one of the shooters, a muscular guy with olive skin and an electric-purple mohawk.

He squatted down beside me. “Again? What’s up?”

“These bullet holes,” I pointed to the one in the guy’s forehead, “don’t look like bullet holes. Look how clean the edges are. And the exit wound, too-“ I picked up the corpse’s head to demonstrate. “Exact same size, and just as clean. It’s like someone ran a drill through his skull.” For a moment I wondered if it was exactly that. Maybe I had a rival in the murder-by-power-tool department.

Walker squinted at the body for a moment, then went and checked the others. Apparently he didn’t like what he found. “Shit,” he said breathlessly. “Shit, shit, shit. This ain’t good at all.”

“What?” I was surprised. Normally unflappable, he sounded worried. Maybe even scared.

“I’ll tell you once we get the fuck outta here, which is what we’re doin’ right now. Take this and-“

There was a creak from the ceiling, like someone was upstairs.

“Move, Sharkie!” On instinct I jumped back. Nothing seemed to happen, but then I saw something out of the corner of my eye. There was a hole in the ceiling, maybe half an inch across. I was certain it hadn’t been there before. A glance down confirmed there was a matching one in the floor below.

Was someone shooting at us? I hadn’t heard a sound, though, not even of a bullet hitting the tile.

“Fuck!” Walker has seen it too. “Run, girl! Back to the car!”

I had a lot of questions but as I said, now wasn’t the time. I barreled our the door just behind Walker and ran. He glanced behind us, barked “Down!” I dove just as a bright flare of pain lit up in my left shoulder. Again, no noise. I didn’t bother looking at it for now. Next to me Walker had half turned, raising his gun. He rattled off half a mag fast as you please, the heavy slugs making puffs of dust as they hit around the second- floor windows of the hush lab. I cracked off a few shots of my own, lashing the building with tungsten flechettes, and then we were running again. My shoulder was like fire, and I could feel blood running down my arm.

We made into the alley where Walker had parked-but it was a dead end. I healed myself into the passenger side, the shitty wooden seat crackling under my weight.

“The fuck is happening, Walker?!”

“In a minute, woman! Sheeit, let me fuckin’ drive! And get ready for coverin’ fire!”

Hoo, boy. He was lucky we were in mortal danger. I jacked a fresh magazine into the coilgun. He backed up until the bumper tapped the dead-end wall, then floored it. We shot out of the alley as fast as the car could manage-which wasn’t fast at all-before Walker whipped into a tire-screeching turn. Without knowing what was going on, I had to assume we were trying to get out of line of sight. This meant we had a whole block to go. The engine wheezed as Walker stood on the throttle.

I leaned out the window, aiming backwards as best as I could and squinting at the building. There! Was that someone in the second-floor window? No idea, but I sent a few penetrators at them anyway. Every shot made my shoulder feel like someone was kicking it. I wasn’t hitting much of anything, which wasn’t a surprise considering that Walker kept jerking the car all over the place. It was a good thing he did. Just as I ran dry a strip of the roof next to me just...disappeared. No noise, no flash of light, just an inch of sheet metal there one instant and gone the next.

While I gawped at that, Walker hauled us around the next corner and out of sight of the hush lab. He kept driving fast, though. I folded myself back into the cabin and finally looked at my shoulder. Whatever hit me had taken a shallow divot out of the skin. It, along with the matching parts of my jacket and shirt, were gone. Disappeared like the piece of the roof.

I still had some first aid stuff in my jacket, so I bandaged my shoulder as best I could in the right confines. That done, I sat back and turned to Walker.

“Alright, big man. Do I have your permission to speak?”

He cringed. “Sorry for getting snippy there, Sharkie. Unbecoming of me.” He fumbled a cigarette out of his jacket one-handed and stuck it in his mouth.

“I’d have thought Marie would have beat that kind of language outta you while you were going out.”

“Naw, she was into that kinda shit. Always made me uncomfortable-wait, how’d you know we were a thing?”

“‘Cause she told me. And ew.”

“Yeah, you’re telling me.” He futzed around with his matchbox trying to strike one. I just grabbed it from him and lit the cig for him. “Thank you kindly.”

“Yeah, sure. Now what the hell is going on? What was that back there?”

He sighed out a cloud of gray smoke. “Nothing good. Nothing I feel like explaining while I drive. You hungry?”