“Is that a chicken?” she asked with a full mouth, pointing at Ridley on my shoulder. “You gonna eat him?”
Ridley squawked indignantly as I tried not to laugh.
“Not a chicken,” I said, feeling her talons cling a bit too hard. “Not gonna eat her.”
“We live in the best city anywhere!” McCallum shouted as the Ope shuffled away. “But I can’t make it the best all by myself!” His unnaturally white smile stretched across the vidscreens. “What are you bringing to the table? Why do you deserve the space you’re in?”
The space I’m in, ha. Not only did I deserve it, but I couldn’t freaking get away from it. It’s like my parents willed that corner to me, or something.
“Freakin’ nut,” I muttered, heading toward the next street, the main street. As usual, Ridley took off to do an overview of the street from above. I knew she’d join me later.
At my corner a big, muscle-y guy was waiting for me. He was twitchy, jacked up, his fingers tapping the wall behind him. He knew it was my corner. Hell, everyone did. But everyone likes to pick on Hawk.
I could just do a U-ie, fade into the crowd, slip into an empty building, jump off the roof, and head home. That would make sense. It was the only thing that would make sense.
Rolling my eyes, I kept walking, aware of a few regulars on the street stopping their convos, looking up, waiting to see the fight. This guy had probably been paid to be there, to fight me. He was bigger than Clete, and Clete was dang big. I was close enough now to judge his pale skin, the grayish circles under his eyes. He was an Ope. He needed money. Someone had def set this up.
I was able to get real close while he was scanning the crowd in the other direction. I don’t believe in fighting fair, so I trotted up to him, pulled my fist back, and then—wham!—punched him in the side of his head. He staggered, almost losing his balance. I stayed close and snap-kicked the side of his knee, knocking him to the ground, where he lay looking up at me, confused and mad. The whole thing had taken six seconds.
“You bitch!” he sputtered, getting clumsily to his feet.
“Stay down,” I warned him, but he didn’t listen. Like an angry bear he hulked toward me, his large, meaty hands curled into bricklike fists. I’m tall but super thin and really fast. It was easy for me to duck his wide swing, but he couldn’t stop and he punched through the air and right into the concrete wall. I heard his grunt of pain.
Jumping high, I wheeled around and kicked his head, knocking that into the wall, too. He sank down again, blinking.
“I’m not afraid of you!” he snarled, rubbing his temple.
“I don’t know why not,” I said. “I just kicked your ass.”
He started to get to his feet, and I backed up in case he swung again. “I just don’t want to hurt Pietro’s girlfriend,” he said tauntingly.
I frowned. “I’m not anyone’s girlfriend!” Just for that, he got a left uppercut punch that snapped his jaw shut and made the back of his head hit the wall. Again. Then I socked him in his gut. He hadn’t had time to tighten his abs so his breath left him in a painful whoosh. This time he staggered around the corner, leaving my spot free at last—the spot I didn’t even really want but kept coming back to, like a trained dog.
And my day went way downhill from there.
CHAPTER 12
Every time I took my place on my corner, a new wave of embarrassment and rage washed over me. Fury at my parents for abandoning me, of course, but an even hotter anger at myself for being stupid and gullible every day for ten years. I would never forgive them. I could never forgive myself.
The minutes passed with miserable slowness. I tried to distract myself by people watching—there was always some drama going on. Up the street, two women with rival plastic-goods stands were shrieking and hitting each other with toy umbrellas, rain boots, packages of cups.
Every so often an Ope came up to me, begged for money. Sometimes they took the food I offered—crackers, corn nuts, some kind of jerky that might be real meat—and ate it in front of me. Mostly they refused and went on begging. Whatever. I’d always give food to people, but if they didn’t want it, it just meant more for us.
I smiled, thinking about the haul I’d made this morning. Had I already checked every underground train stop, along all the lines? Probably not. I tended to stick to sewer pipes and mechanical access tunnels. I’d been down all the underground train lines—I was sure of that—but hadn’t fully explored them. They hadn’t been used in so long that some of them were collapsing. Once I’d been in one, trying to check out its abandoned stops, when I heard a rumbling. I looked up to see a heavy chunk of plaster ceiling drop down on an Ope, knocking him across the third rail. Amazingly the third rail was still alive and the tunnel had filled with the Ope’s agonized screams and the gross smell of burning flesh. He’d popped like a tick, and I got out of there.
So I hadn’t checked them out as thoroughly as I probably should—the memory of that smell kept me away. I was mulling this over when I became aware that people in the street looked agitated, ducking back into their street stalls, disappearing down side streets, jumping inside and slamming their doors shut. Straightening up, I scanned the street, listening to the cries, the harsh whispers of warning.
Soon I saw why: A bunch of Chung thugs were ransacking the street, knocking over stalls and tables, breaking glasses at a tea pub. If anyone was in their way, the thugs knocked them down, felling grown-ups with one punch, kicking kids to the side. They left behind them a street of destruction and a lot of bruised and bleeding people, the ones that weren’t quick enough to get out of the way or hadn’t paid attention to the changing mood on the street. I stepped onto the boarded-up stoop of the building on my corner, totally out of their way. My fists automatically clenched, my feathers bristled.
I counted at least eight of them, male and female, all pretty young. They had razored haircuts and tattoos and other body mods, like stubs of horns put under the skin of their foreheads, twenty rings in one ear, piercings through upper lips, eyebrows, the septums of their noses. I looked like a cuddly kitten next to them.
They stopped not far from me and made a circle, their backs to one another.
“We’re looking for witnesses!” a guy bellowed.
“One of our own was murdered yesterday!” The woman’s bleached-blond hair contrasted oddly with her smooth tan face. “We know some of you must have seen it!”
Murder. They weren’t going to pretend that the duel had been fair, weren’t going to slide back into the shadows and accept defeat. That meant trouble for Pietro and the Sixes. Big time.
I thought back to when one of the Pater henchmen had snapped the Chung prince’s neck, after Pietro had spared him. Had that been only yesterday?
One of the Chungs’ people took out a semiautomatic pistol and shot it into the air. People scattered. I calculated the angle of the bullet and followed its trajectory downward. It fell against a window, breaking the glass. When I looked up again, one of the Chung soldiers was looking right at me.
I glanced away quickly, trying to seem unconcerned, but he was headed my way. I could run, but unlike most regular people and Opes, these guys were probably genetically enhanced as much as they were physically altered. The Chungs took security very seriously.