by Phil Geusz ©2008 Phil Geusz

Editor’s note: The author would like to thank Fox Cutter for the title to this story.

   In some things, the secret to success is pure timing.
   I didn’t have much use for chink-shops. Still, they could be fun sometimes. I was just shooting up a bunch of T-Men as Pretty Boy Floyd when Peckerhead came and knocked on my cell door. “It’s time, Gade.”
   “Sheee-it!” I murmured, killing the holo-sim. I was just about to kill Melvin Purvis and win it all; wasn’t that a helluva time to have to go to work? But schedules were schedules, and I was the one who was always bitching about things needed to happen as planned. American Crimelord was a great chinkgame, yes. But not worth screwing up a real job over.
   Peckerhead smiled knowingly as I emerged from the holocell, but the expression faded when he saw the ice in my eyes. He and I might be cool when it came time to sit around and talk shit, but right now business was calling. He knew by now that I didn’t take any crap from anyone when it came time for business. Not even him. “Weiner’s already inside,” he explained as he fell in alongside me. “And Romeo’s found us a ride.”
   I nodded as we left the chinkshop and swung out onto Ninth Street. There wasn’t much traffic on Ninth. Not for cars, of course, but I looked anyway, to make sure the Ninth Street Avengers were still hanging tight with me. It was habit, was all; Sammy cut them in on everything he did, and I was sort of counting on their help later in the day. But one could never be too sure about these things. I scanned the street twice for their watchman before picking out Doolie’s tall, thin greyhound-morph form leaning so close up against an old telephone pole that he seemed to blend into it. He was a good watchman, honest and true both to his masters and to everyone else he dealt with. It was a dog thing, I supposed. Dogs never had trouble finding work. I nodded slightly as our eyes met, and he even smiled a little. I was glad that I was cool with the Avengers; if Doolie ever decided he didn’t like me, I wouldn’t last long.
   For that matter, so long as you were cool with the Avengers, you didn’t have shit else to worry about so long as you were in their territory. No one dared fuck with you or yours; anyone who even thought about doing that kind of shit without the Avengers’ blessing would likely as not end up frozen to the sidewalk some cold morning with their balls stuffed down their throat. The Avengers’ territory was rich; there were two little stores in it that sold food and shit, plus the chinkshop, a little nightclub, and even (of all things!) an actual doctor’s office. There wasn’t another gang half so well off anywhere that I knew of. That was why Sammy stayed cool with them, where he could have paid anyone. He only dealt with quality.
   Romeo was just around the corner on Pine Street, leaning up against a lamppost and trying to look as lean and hard as Doolie. He wasn’t very good at it, though; like all of us rabbits, he was short and tubby and not very big in the arms and shoulders. Dogs had been gengineered to fight; we rabbits had been designed to shut up and perform stoop-labor without making any trouble about it. I smirked at the thought; the whole fuckin’ world knew how that one had come out! “Gade,” Romeo greeted me, nodding slightly. He was shivering a bit, like he always did when the shit was about to hit the fan. My friend thrived on action.
   “You got something for me?” I asked, smiling. I liked Romeo, even though he was a hopeless pincushion and wasted all of his take buying more shit. So long as he wasn’t stuck too bad, you could count on him all the way to the fucking hilt.
   He nodded. “I do,” he answered, a little formally. “It’s an old four-door beater, but the motor’s good enough. Parked just outside the grocery store, where you wanted it to be.” He smiled again. “The owner’s a fat norm pawnbroker.”
   My eyes lit up. I’d do what I had to do regardless, but a fat norm pawnbroker was about as good as it got. He stole from us furs every fucking day of the week; why shouldn’t we take him for a little ride in return? “Way cool!” I answered. “You got your jack?”
   He smiled, then pulled a little black box about halfway out of his pants pockets. “Always.”
   “Outstanding,” I answered. I’d been a little worried; Romeo never settled on which car to steal until the very last minute. It would’ve been annoying, except that he always had about a million good reasons for being so picky. Then I turned to Peckerhead. “And you say Weiner’s already inside? That’s for sure?”
   “Oh, yeah!” my number-two man agreed, nodding hard.
   I nodded back. Peckerhead was valuable for many reasons, but the most important was that he had a legitimate job Outside as a parking lot attendant. It was all just bullshit, really; he didn’t make hardly anything at all at it. But bullshit or no, it gave him plenty of time to just sit and look around and pay attention to shit without anyone noticing anything strange about it.
   Leaving the Zone was a snap; Sammy made up fake work-passes for us whenever we needed them, no questions asked. So long as we wore cheapshit work clothes and kept our eyes low and subservient, no one ever gave us any crap. We hit the gates right at shift-change time, merging in with the workers headed out to work ‘legitimate’ gigs as maids, gardeners, factory-slaves, and all the other low-class jobs the norms were too fucking good to do for themselves. They’d tried to make us work for free, once upon a time—fucking owned us! But then we went apeshit on them one fine June morning, and ever since they’d come to understand that they didn’t own quite as much of us as they thought they had. My mother and father had been among the leaders, in charge of our whole city. Like most of their peers, they didn’t survive the experience. I couldn’t even remember them, I’d been so little. Because of what they’d done, though, the furs always gave me a little extra respect. Which was plenty cool by me.
   “Down that way, Gade,” Romeo whispered in my ear. “The blue one.”
   “Right,” I agreed. There was a big police-snake wrapped around the traffic signal
at the corner, its ugly four-camera head taking in everything around it. The fuckers carried microphones, too, and Sammy had warned me since I was little that they could hear a gnat fart. Police-snakes were harder than shit to fox, which left only one viable alternative. I felt inside my jacket; the packets were still there, all right. I’d only checked about a million times. Then I looked at my watch; everything was cool. “We’re on,” I confirmed.
   I didn’t know who or what monitored the police snakes; it wasn’t important, so I’d never bothered to find out. What I did know, however, was that the things defended themselves with tasers. They wouldn’t be a problem. Keeping our eyes low and servile, Peckerhead and I let Romeo fall back a little ways, so that he’d be right alongside his targeted car when we put in the fix.
   “Move!” I ordered, my voice clear and calm like it always was at moments like these. With a single fluid motion, we pulled out our cable-guns…
   …and instantly the snake came to life. “Freeze!” it ordered, the blue lights mounted on its head suddenly flashing. “You are—”
   But it never finished. As one we fired at the sewer lid almost under our feet. By the time the snake’s taser-darts hit us, the superconductors in our ordinary-looking clothing were so firmly grounded that all the electricity in the North American power grid couldn’t touch us. Sure, the darts stung. But who gave a shit about that, so long as we were still up and about?
   “You are—” the snake repeated, but I wasn’t having any of it. I fired my cable-gun again, this time grounding the body of the snake itself so that it couldn’t shock me directly. Then I pulled out three stickybags full of Sammy’s best home-made thermite and slapped them onto the snake’s body. The last one I flung up as high as I could; it stuck just below the head.
   “We’re in!” Romeo cried out just as I punched my detonator-remote. Sammy mixed his explosives in several different ways; this batch was intended to ignite rather than blow up. Still, the shit burned damn fast, and the snake was deader than fuck before Peckerhead and I had dashed the few steps back to our stolen ride.
   “Those snakes cost, like, a bajillion dollars,” Romeo observed as he plugged his ’jack into the car’s diagnostic socket. Multicolored lights flashed on the dashboard as the onboard computer fought and lost its last battle, then everything went green and Romeo was in charge. He powered us up, then eased us into the traffic lane and around the remains of the police snake, which was now little more than a pile of molten metal melting its way deep into the asphalt. “You’d think it’d be cheaper if they just let us have the fuckin’ car!”
   “Heh!” Peckerhead agreed. Then he pulled out a stick and injected himself. “That’s for the shakes, Gade,” he explained before I could object. “I’m hurtin’, man!”
   I frowned, but said nothing. Pecker and Romeo were both pincushions, and that was that. They’d be hooked until the shit eventually killed them. Which was just as well, I supposed. If they hadn’t needed the money for drugs, they probably wouldn’t be desperate enough to help me pull off these crazy jobs. Besides, what the fuck else was there in this messed-up world for furs like them? I’d have been a pincushion myself, most likely, if Sammy hadn’t been shooting me up with counters every week since I was almost a baby. Counters were nasty; if someone taking them tried to shoot up with stick, he got sicker than hell. Not that I ever found out for myself. Sammy pulled samples too, and told me the first time I came up dirty he’d put me out in the cold. That was too terrible to even think about! And besides, stick didn’t look so cool anymore. In fact, I was beginning to think you had to be a hugely stupid motherfucker to even try the shit.
   All three of us kept a close lookout as we cruised through NormTown, though we didn’t see a thing. A police-beetle screamed towards the grave of its brother-in-arms, but it didn’t even glance at us. Taking down a beetle was a lot harder than burning a snake; it took either serious firepower or else a lot of preplanning. By five-thirty we were sitting two blocks away from Universal Check-Cashing, an outfit I’d been casing for weeks. It was Friday, and the place was swamped with just-paid furs and even a few norms either so fucking broke or so fucking desperate or so fucking stupid that they’d willingly pay ten percent for cash now, where any sane person would open up a bank account and then get to keep it all when the check cleared on Wednesday. I maybe felt a little sorry for them anyway, even though I knew that most of them were hurting because of stick or liquor or gambling or too much time in the chinkshop. They were victims, in the greater scheme of things.
   But the owner of the check-cashing place… Who felt sorry for him? Certainly not me!
    “Weiner’s inside for sure,” Peckerhead offered, even though I hadn’t asked. “I watched our friend carry the bag in.”
   I nodded; Weiner was a tiny fuck, one the smallest bunnies I’d ever known. He stood only about two feet high, and his back was hunched so that he had to get around on all fours. Sammy told me once that he was a throwback, a partial reversion to the original rabbit-form, and he’d made me read a big, thick book on gengineering. But unlike most throwbacks, Weiner’s mind was fine. Or at least his mind was fine when it wasn’t all whacked out. He used way too damn much stick. In fact, I’d had to put an entire unused stick in the suitcase with him to make sure he wouldn’t go into withdrawal before the time was right. Weiner was the weakest spot in the whole plan, but what could I do? Where else was I gonna find a two-foot-tall quadrupedal bunny willing to sit in a rented locker all day and wait? Especially one that was also the slickest, fastest, best escape-artist I’d ever seen?
   Suddenly an alarm bell rang. “This is it!” I said, even though I didn’t need to. It was as if a switch had been flipped in the stolen car; suddenly we were all business.
   “Yeah,” Romeo agreed, his ears rising in interest despite himself. Normally Romeo was a honey-brown color, but he’d dyed himself black for this job. Me and Peckerhead had too, though I rather hoped that we hadn’t missed as many spots on the backs of our ears as he had. The bell rang and rang, and gradually the slow, dull-witted check-cashers began to grasp the fact that something was wrong. Their heads swung about uneasily, and those equipped with mobile ears raised them. Then, suddenly, there was a swirl in the crowd that I knew was Weiner, down on all fours and carrying a moneybag of some kind or another in his mouth. Sure enough, an instant after the swirl passed through a bunch of guard-dogs appeared, brandishing blast-rifles and looking pissed. I smiled to myself. As small and low and chase-smart as he was, Weiner’d never offer a rifleman a clear line of fire. Whoever’d set up Universal’s security hadn’t considered the possibility of an inside job by a tiny, fast-moving quadruped, and who could blame them?
   Then things started to go wrong. Another uniformed guard-dog emerged, this one a greyhound like Doolie back with the Avengers. Greyhound-morphs had been cooked up specifically to hunt down us rabbits; this was bad news indeed. “Shit!” Romeo observed.
   I frowned, too. We hadn’t known that Universal had a greyhound on staff; it would be just our fucking luck if this was his first day. Still, I’d considered the possibility. “Weiner’s goddamn fast,” I pointed out. “He’ll make it this far.”
   “Maybe,” Peckerhead replied. He leaned forward a little. “Be a helluva show if he gets caught.”
   I curled my lips in disgust; Peckerhead enjoyed blood vids, and was a big fangfight fan. It was unusual for a rabbit to develop a carnivore’s taste for gore, but somehow he’d managed.
   “There!” Romeo observed as Weiner leapt extra-high over a car, eyes wide in terror and green cash-bag clamped tightly in his teeth. He couldn’t have any idea how much money he’d stolen; the bag might contain twenties or fifties or even just blank accounting-slips meant for the bookies who always could be found at check-cashing places. His part of the operation was simply to break out of his locker and grab whatever he thought he could get away with. Though, of course, the more he stole, the more he’d be allowed to keep.
   “And there!” Peckerhead added, pointing at the big greyhound as it vaulted over the same car, perhaps a second behind our friend.
   “He’ll make it,” I declared, a bit more confidently than I felt. I rolled down the car’s window and hung my head out. I’d have exactly one, and only one, chance to pull this off.
   Sure enough, here came Weiner exactly according to plan and schedule, barreling down the narrow sidewalk for all he was worth. Obediently he dropped his bag right under my door—
   —and then, instantly, I threw said door wide-open right into the path of the greyhound!
   Wham! The dog slammed into the door like the end of the world, full-bore and headfirst, then dropped to the concrete without so much as a whimper. The impact slammed the door shut again, hard. So I re-opened it and scooped up the loot as Weiner, blown and exhausted, doubled back and hopped in alongside me.
   “All right!” Peckerhead exulted as he slapped his wheezing friend on the back. “All right!”
   Romeo was smiling too as he powered up the car and got ready to pull out into traffic. But, of course, he didn’t move us an inch. For the real game was only just beginning. It’d taken me weeks to plan this job, and Sammy’d sunk a lot of resources into it as well. My cohorts might be perfectly happy with a quarter-share of a bag that might or might not be filled with cash in return for so much risk and toil, but I certainly wasn’t.
   Not when there were far more valuable items at hand for the taking.
   I’d chosen our waiting-spot very carefully indeed; while the check-cashing guards might guess that there was a getaway car involved, we were far enough away that they could only guess which one of dozens we might be waiting in. Even more, their building was brightly-lit, while we were lurking in the shadows. On top of that, the theft had been a small one, relatively speaking. It wouldn’t make sense to denude the main treasure of most of its guards in order to chase a single cash-bag. So, as anticipated, no one else followed to support the greyhound, who now lay unconscious amid his widely-scattered teeth. Instead, like anyone else would do, they waited for the police-snake at the intersection to come to life and call for backup. Its blue lights had long-since turned themselves on, and the beast was even now tracking bunny-spoor down the sidewalk.
   “Come on…” I whispered under my breath. It was very hard indeed to just sit and wait at the scene of a crime, instead of fleeing as my lapine ancestors had for so many thousands of generations before me. “Come on…”
   Then it happened. The same police-beetle that had been investigating the death of the snake we’d killed earlier came roaring up. Because we’d left it only a few blocks away, it was the first responder, and even more importantly it was traveling all by itself, along a predictable route. Romeo might’ve been a pincushion, but he could drive like a motherfucker. The car had been waiting in reverse-gear for over a minute; now he goosed the throttle and rammed us bass-ackwards into the speeding beetle. Wham! The impact was a lot worse than when the dog hit the door; I’d been worried that we’d be knocked silly. But Sammy had predicted there’d be no problem, and as always he was right. Little Weiner was thrown pretty hard, but he didn’t give a shit. All he cared about was the fresh stick waiting for him in the floorboards.
   Instead of stopping after hitting the beetle, Romeo kept his foot mashed flat to the floor so that, skidding and protesting all the way, the beetle was forced out of the street and down the alley across the way. The car steered funny with the beetle locked to its bumper, but somehow Romeo managed, only striking the wall a couple of glancing blows along the way. The alley was a dead-end, and as instructed my driver rammed the beetle into the wall hard at the end, kicking up a shower of sparks that I hoped was the nasty thing’s primary batteries shorting out.
   “All right!” I declared, hopping out and lighting my minitorch. Now was my time. The turret was trying to deploy, though the mechanism was too fucked up from the collision for it to operate, again just as planned. Beetles weren’t armored, though I hadn’t a clue as to why not; if I’d designed the fuckers, they sure as hell would’ve been! So it took only a few seconds to slice open the sheet metal and access the innards of the beast. There were five black boxes, just as Sammy had told me there’d be. With a quick snip-snip, they became mine. Then, I slashed through the gun-mount and tipped the whole thing over on top of the stolen car’s ruined trunk, then tack-welded it into place. People would notice, yes. But we had less than a mile to go before we hit the river, and with any luck even the police-snakes wouldn’t be able to do anything more than watch us race by and ram through the barbed-wire. Once we got there, the Ninth Street Avengers would be waiting for us with open arms. Sammy could make cheap-shit stenguns all day long, sure enough. But a police-issue machine-cannon, that was another story entirely! This was worth all the time, risk, and effort we’d poured into the operation, and more. Not a tiny bag of maybe-cash.
   “All right!” I declared one last time as I hopped back into the half-ruined getaway car and slapped the dashboard. “If this piece of shit’ll just get us back to the Zone, you guys can party all fucking week long, my treat!”

   If I’d been stupid the way most criminals are stupid, I wouldn’t have gone home and cleaned the black dye out of my fur before going out to party. Peckerhead, Weiner and Romeo might or might not have figured out to wash up on their own, they being a notch or two above average despite the stick-thing, but I made damn sure they knew what to do regardless. The Zone was too dangerous and expensive to be worth policing as a general rule, but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be any heat. Or snitches, for that matter. The cops tended to sit up and take notice when machine-cannons went missing, especially when it was the law enforcement community you lifted them from in the first place. The government wasn’t barred from policing a Zone, Sammy had explained to me more than once. But they weren’t obliged to do so. Auto-cannon theft was precisely the kind of thing that might make the fat cats reconsider their cost/benefit ratios.
   So, instead of going straight out onto the dance floor when I passed through the front door of The Warrens, I turned right, smiled up at the armed feline guard that stood on watch twenty-four/seven, and went all the way down to the very end of the long corridor, past the little private rooms that the nightclub often rented out to those blessed with heavy wallets. The hallway made a sharp left turn at its terminus, and there was red line painted on the floor. A little sign posted there promised mayhem and worse to anyone who passed that point; it emphasized the point with a little skull-and-crossbones. Sammy had an autosecure system set up there, salvaged and modified from an obsolete-model police snake. It was programmed to let me pass, and in truth I didn’t even think about the system anymore except when I had to step over a body to get where I was going. Sammy was a stand-up guy, for the most part. But he didn’t fuck around regarding security, and who could blame him? He owned the biggest gold mine in the Zone. Or maybe he was the biggest gold mine; I never could quite decide.
   The hallway soon became a flight of downward-leading stairs. I stopped on the seventh one and bounced up and down twice in place to activate the hidden switch. I had to be really careful about that, as one bounce would set off every alarm and booby-trap in the universe, while three times was the signal that I’d led someone home under duress. There was a loud click, and then the stair-tread behind me rose, revealing Sammy’s carefully-camouflaged lair.
   “Simeon!” he greeted me, looking up from his workbench. The Ninth Street Avengers had delivered his new toy and, predictably, it was already half-disassembled. “I’m so glad you’re home!” His smile widened. “Excellent work, son! Magnificent, even! I’m so proud!”
   I shouldn’t have felt the way I did about Sammy. He wasn’t my real dad, after all. And, he made me do all kinds of embarrassing shit like go to school and read books and exercise. He was even a fucking norm, one of the handful that still lived in the Zone. I had every reason to resent the shit out of him. But, somehow, what Sammy thought mattered a lot, deep-down. I felt my ear-linings darken in the lapine equivalent of a blush. “I planned it, like, forever. It was supposed to go well.”
   “Ha!” Sammy answered, lowering his head so as to peer at me over the top of his granny-glasses. He wasn’t only a Norm, but an old one as well. His hair was almost half gray. He wore it long, in a ponytail, and a big bushy beard besides. “It was a fine, successful operation, Simeon.” He patted his new cannon lovingly. “I’ve been wanting one of these for years.”
   I sighed and shook my head as I walked across Sammy’s work area and back to the little room I called my own. Not that it was much of a room; our hidey-hole had once been a public fallout shelter, and whoever’d designed it hadn’t been much for interior walls. I’d made myself an enclosure out of empty crates, then hung a curtain across the entrance for privacy. The stacks didn’t reach all the way to the ceiling, so every time Sammy used a power-tool the racket was enough to wake the dead. It was still better then his own little bunk-area, however, and he never complained even though we were perpetually short on floor space.
   Our lair was close enough to the edge of the Zone to have running water; Sammy’d tapped a main years ago for both us and the nightclub, and the resulting flow helped pay our rent. So I was able to take as long as I needed in the shower getting the black dye out of my fur. It was pretty nasty shit. Sammy made it from a recipe in one of his books. But it would wash out if encouraged enough. At least I had plenty of soap to help me; my friends probably didn’t, and I couldn’t imagine what they must be going through. Plus I even had a working blow-dryer! I was King Shit by Zone standards, I supposed. Which made me the biggest loser in the universe, compared to most norms Outside. They all had yachts, I mused as I ran the hot air back and forth over myself. The dryer always made me sleepy and thoughtful. Yachts that they raced back and forth over lakes so pretty I still half-believed the pictures were fake, lined with big trees and birds that sang real honest-to-god songs instead of just shitting all over the—
   “—done yet, Simeon?” Sammy was asking from the other side of my curtain, I suddenly realized. “We need to talk some more.”
   I sighed and turned off the dryer. Try though I might, I’d never been able to get Sammy to call me ‘Gade’. He didn’t seem to like my nickname; when my friends used it in front of him, sometimes his face even screwed up a little. “Sure. What about?”
   “This,” he answered, pulling aside my curtain and laying my essay on the desk he’d scrounged for me so long ago I could hardly remember not having it. He frowned, and fingered the numerous red ink marks on the cover page. “Son, I know you’ve been busy on the job…”
   “Jesus!” I complained, looking up towards heaven. “What the fuck do you want out of me, Sammy? I’m the best jobber you’ve got, and we both damn well know it. Plus, I ain’t so bad with the shop equipment, either. Even you say so! I’m pulling my weight. When are you gonna stop treating me like a baby?”
   “Not so bad with the shop equipment,” Sammy corrected me, and I rolled my eyes in pain. “Not so bad.” He scowled. “Look. I know you’ve got to learn to survive on the street. You have to, being who and what you are. So, you can’t help but pick up the mindset. But, I keep telling you… There’s so much more out there!”
   I looked down at my much marked-up essay; it was about the cultural impact of the Industrial Revolution on western civilization. “There ain’t another bunny in the Zone gotta do that shit!” I protested.
   “There ain’t another bunny in the Zone could’ve planned and pulled off that job today, either. Don’t you think that just maybe the one might have something to do with the other?” Sammy suddenly frowned. “Isn’t another bunny, rather. Now you’ve got me doing it!”
   I smiled despite myself, then Sammy did too. He shook his head. “Look, Simeon. Maybe I am asking too much. But…” He met my eyes. “Tell me you didn’t enjoy doing the research for this paper.”
   I looked away. “That part,” I admitted, “was fun.”
   Sammy smiled. “Yep. I thought so. And, for all the crappy grammar, you didn’t do a bad job. I especially liked how you compared the Uprising to the general European social upheaval of 1848.” He tilted his head to one side. “That was good, Simeon.”
   I felt my ears blush again. “They both had lotsa causes,” I explained. “Too many to really understand. And both of them pretty much went nowhere, in the greater scheme of things.”
   “Maybe nowhere, maybe not,” Sammy answered, not specifying which revolution he was referring to. Then he shrugged. “Anyway, if you’d use proper grammar, you’d really be somewhere. Well ahead of most kids your age, certainly. Far ahead, even.”
   I looked away. “Why should I talk shit, just ’cause all you Norms do?”
   Sammy sighed and looked away. “There is that, I suppose. From your point of view.” Then he picked up the report and tossed it into my lap. “You get an ‘A’ for content, an ‘A’ for reasoning skills, and a ‘D’ for grammar. Try not to use the word ‘fuck’ anymore in formal writing. All right, Simeon? Can you at least give me that much?”
   I rolled my eyes, then looked down at my feet. I’d done it quite deliberately, of course. The mangled sentences, too. As Sammy knew perfectly well. It’d seemed cool at the time. But now… “Yes, sir.”
   Sammy smiled then and everything seemed all better, just like it always had since I was little. He reached out and tousled my ears, something that I’d pull a shiv over if anyone else tried it. “I’m glad to hear it, son. The world’s done nothing but piss on you from before the day you were born, so it stands to reason that there’s going to be a few rough spots in your character. But still… Your parents were something special, Simeon. Every day, you remind me more and more of them.” He turned to leave. “They’d be proud, son. Of both the report and the job so well done. Why don’t you take the weekend off? All work and no play makes Simeon a dull bunny, after all.”

   A whole weekend off! I’d intended to take a break anyway, but this was even better than I’d expected. Planning a job was hard work, and the essay hadn’t been any cakewalk, either. None of my friends ever worked so hard at anything; most of them, in fact, thought I was out of my fuckin’ mind not to party more, as rich as I was compared to them. Life was short, they kept telling me, and it wasn’t gonna stop raining shit anytime soon in the Zone. So why shouldn’t I spend more time being happy and living large?
   Even just a year or two ago, that line had sounded pretty convincing. All the really cool people went for it, to one degree or another, and bought the stick that I now understood was what was really being sold. And, sure enough, one by one they turned thin and sickly and brittle-furred. They even quit growing, which was all the more tragic for us rabbits given that we were so small to start with. The users might live large, but they wouldn’t live long. Sammy claimed that the stick dealers were even bigger Enemies of the People than the Imperialist norms outside the Zone, but he didn’t dare lift a finger against them. They were entrenched too deeply into the Zone’s power-structure and economy. Even the Ninth Street Avengers, if forced to choose between Sammy and stick, would choose the needle every time. Sammy paid well, but they needed drugs.
   Since I didn’t do the pincushion thing, that left me exactly one way to have a good time. It was almost nine before I made my way up the back stairs and back into The Warrens, which meant that things were only just getting started. Our neighborhood was made up mostly of rabbit-folk, so the band played heavy-beat Hop music of the kind we lapines mostly liked. The Rope was working guard duty; he took a moment to smile at me as I eased past him and out onto the dance floor, white fangs flashing in his dark face. I kinda liked The Rope, even though he wasn’t half so smart as he thought he was. He read a few books now and then, and therefore knew a little bit about a few things. We’d talk, and I’d begin to believe that just maybe I might’ve found someone besides Sammy who might actually have heard of, for example, the Revolutions of 1848. But then he’d say something incredifuckingly stupid, and make himself look like a total idiot. Tonight was to be no exception. “Adolph Hitler did too kill George Washington!” he declared in-between wanding guests and collecting cover charges. He had to raise his voice to do it; the music was loud, loud, loud, just the way I liked it. “You’re full of shit, Gade! I read about it when I was little! In a picture book!”
   Probably a picture book starring Superman, I decided for about the thousandth time as I smiled back and shook my head in a friendly way. The Rope meant well, I knew. And, by Zone standards he was a friggin’ genius, just by being literate. But in his mental universe the Pyramids were built by the UFO-men and the Declaration of Independence was being signed at about the same time as the Jews were dying in Dachau. And what the fuck could you do with someone like that? Give him a brainless job wanding-down drug-dealers and their wannabees, I supposed, at shit wages in a crappy Zone-club, with no future and no hope of things ever getting any better, while all the time he insisted that he was the only one that knew the true way of things. And what was really a heartbreaker was that his was among the best minds the Zone had to offer!
   “Hey! It’s the Gade!” a new voice interrupted. Without my even noticing, Spunk, whose birth-name had been George, had eased up on my right. He was a sneaky one, Spunk was; most of the time, my survival instincts would’ve warned me before he was within striking range. Not that I was afraid of little Spunk shanking me or anything; far from it! We’d played together when we were little. And besides, he didn’t have a tenth the balls it’d take. Sammy wouldn’t be happy if anything bad happened to me, not happy at all!
   “Georgie!” I replied, smiling and slapping my long-ago friend on the back. It was cool to call someone by their real name sometimes if you’d known them when they were little. “How’re they hangin’, rabbit-brother mine?”
   “I’m keepin’ on keepin’ on,” he replied easily from behind his thick, dark glasses. He wore them inside, I knew, because eventually stick made a user’s eyes overly sensitive to light. In the latter stages of the addiction, that was. When death wasn’t just a distant theoretical possibility anymore. His smile intensified. “I hear the Renegade scored big today!”
   I pressed my lips together and looked away. On the one hand, Spunk might simply be taking a friendly interest in the exploits of an old friend. But, on the other, he had to pay for his stick somehow. And information was always good currency. Would a hurting doper sell out an old friend for his next fix? Fuck, yes! Coldly and without hesitation. Stick was nasty shit! “Maybe,” I answered, shrugging and turning towards the dance floor.”
   “Aw, come on!” Spunk replied. “I hear you scored heavy, man! Biggest fucking haul in years! Direct from the pigs to Sammy’s garage!”
   I kept walking, but Spunk didn’t get the hint. “Was it an autocannon?” he demanded. Then his eyes narrowed and he asked the important question, the one that told me for sure that he wasn’t my friend anymore. “Who’s Sammy gonna sell it to? The Avengers?”
   That was quite enough. I stopped cold right on the edge of the floor, then reached into my pocket and pulled out a single five-credit coin. “Here!” I declared, throwing it down on the floor. It rolled, and behind the dark glasses I watched Spunk’s eyes follow it greedily. “Go buy your fix, and get the fuck outta my life.” He went scampering after the coin, as intently as a hungry puppy pursues his dam, all thoughts of me and the autocannon forgotten. Then I turned towards the big table near the center of the room, where all the big stick players hung out. They wore gold in their noses and ears, and no one ever, ever fucked with them. “I don’t speak for Sammy,” I explained, raising my voice so that everyone in the place could hear. “No one speaks for Sammy but himself. If you’ve got any more shit-for-brains questions, why not come and ask them to my face?”
   Suddenly The Warrens was filled with dead silence. Then Growly, the biggest stick player of them all, nodded slightly. As if the gesture were a command, the band struck up once again, the colored lights whirled, and everything went on just as it always had.
   Except, of course, for the fact that from that moment forward, I could feel Growly’s eyes boring hard into the back of my neck. He didn’t look away for an instant.

   If Growly was gonna sit and bore eyeholes though me, then I figured at least I oughta give him something interesting to look at while he did so. He was trying to intimidate me; the best way to counter that was to dance like hell.
   So I did. No one really knows why it is that we anthro-rabbits so love to dance together, but the urge is almost universal. Sammy told me once that he thought it might be because we were originally gengineered to assemble things in factories, and that therefore the designers made us love to move together in a synchronized manner. Or maybe they’d redesigned us to dance instead of craving continual physical contact with each other; real bunnies spend half their lives snuggled up into little balls together, and that wasn’t any way to run a profitable business. It didn’t matter to me; all that I cared about was that it was Friday night, the Hop beat was grooving, and a good three dozen fellow bunnies were out on the dance floor formed up into three regimented lines, shaking tail to the music.
   Norms and felines and just about all the other sapient species that enjoy music tend to pair off in couples to dance, but we rabbits were wired differently. Like all other bucks, I couldn’t even get a hard-on unless a doe was putting out the right pheromones, and said does were gengineered in such a way that they wouldn’t ever come into season unless they took special pills for a week ahead of time. That was to help keep the breeding programs on-track back in the days when we’d been owned, so that throwbacks like Weiner, even if not culled outright, wouldn’t ever sire or bear young. Does usually littered two or three offspring at a time, and it was a hard pull indeed to simultaneously feed so many extra mouths in a place like the Zone, all the more so because most of us males tended not to give a shit about our kids. So does didn’t drug-up very often, and as a result sex wasn’t nearly as much an issue in our lives as it was for felines, canines, and perhaps especially norms. And, therefore, we danced in large groups instead of pairs.
   The floor wasn’t particularly crowded, so I choose a spot near the end of the front line, where I could keep my back turned to Growly while still allowing him to watch me really, really close. I don’t give a flying fuck what you think, my choice of floor space declared, and I’m not in the least bit scared of you, either. The band was playing Hard Times, which was really popular just then, and I felt my body twist and writhe to the powerful beat.

   Hard times comin’
   You gotta be sure
   Hard times comin’
   Find you the cure

   Some rabbits prefer to dance choreographed steps, and I have to admit that the results can often be quite impressive. But we rabbits didn’t dance to impress others, or at least I sure as fuck didn’t. Instead I danced because I had to, because there was something inside always straining to get out that I couldn’t give vent to any other way. Everyone else was doing a little hop every time the lyrics said “Hard”—that part of the dance was communal, the part we needed each other for. There was a cream-colored doe with chocolate paws and eartips dancing next to me; she wore a printed t-shirt that said “Stew me!” on it. Her hips were swaying easily to the song, and she was snapping her head hard first to the left and then to the right on every second beat. I decided to elaborate and build on her pattern, stamping first one foot and then the other as she snapped her head. Meanwhile, on the other side of me a buck about my size wearing the gold finery of a successful stick dealer decided to stamp his feet too, but on the opposite beats. The dancers writhed, the music thumped along, colored lights flashed. Everything was shaping up splendidly.
   Then, right on cue, the beat sped up and the music intensified.

   Hard times suck but happen all’a time!
   Hard times for ev’ryone till we all die!
   Hard times laughin’ at all that we try!
   Hard times makin’ us live lives of crime!

   That was more like it! As one, we danced harder and hopped higher.

   Hard times comin’ to those who’d live free
   Hard times promis’d to both you and me
   Hard times livin’ at the fuckin’ norm’s knee
   Hard times all that anybody can see

   I liked this song, I decided, as I poured my soul into the dance steps. My stamps became high kicks, my arm-motions angry punches, as all the while my midsection swayed back and forth with the powerful backbeat. All too soon, it was over.

   Hard times thrivin’ inside every Zone
   Hard times growin’ ’til the whole world blows!

   “Yeah!” I cried out at the last angry note of the song, just like every other bunny on the dance floor. We ended up turned every which way, but it so happened that the next-door doe and I ended up facing each other, arms in so close to the same positions that we might almost have been looking into mirrors. She and I both ear-blushed, then looked away from each other.
   “Yo!” a new voice interrupted me. It was Gash, Growly’s number-one bag-man, who’d been waiting patiently for the music to end. Being a leopard, he wouldn’t be caught dead dancing with us bunnies. “You got a minute? The set’s over, and my boss wants to have a little talk-talk with you.”
   Sure enough, the band was shutting down for a break. I shook my head and sighed, then looked at the doe. “I’m just warming up!” I complained.
   She shrugged. “They played ten nonstop. What more can you ask? The rest of us are ready for a break, too.” Then she smiled. “You’re good!”
   I felt a little tingle somewhere inside of me; it represented, I was quite certain, a tiny fragment of normal romantic functionality that somehow the gengineers had missed. “I’m Gade,” I explained, holding out a friendly hand for her to shake. “And you’re pretty good yourself.”
   “I’m Fina,” she answered, looking away. Her fur was warm, and soft.
   Then Gash cleared his throat. “It’s not every day that the Boss decides to apologize to someone,” he pointed out.
   “Alright, already!” I protested, giving Fina’s hand a little extra squeeze so as the drag out the moment a little longer. “Go tell Growly I’ll be right there.”
   Fina’s eyes widened at the mention of the tiger’s name. “Growly?” she observed as Gash disappeared. “The big-time dealer? Growly’s going to apologize? To you?”
   I ear-blushed again. “I’ve got friends, is all.”
   “Right,” she agreed, pulling her hand back. Then her golden-brown eyes narrowed. “Sure. You’ve got friends.” She rose up on her tiptoes and examined me with care. “Are you with the Avengers? Or maybe the West End Skullfuckers? I can’t imagine who else Growly might apologize to. Where’s your tattoos? And piercings?”
   “Nowhere,” I answered. “I’m not with any of them.”
   Her eyebrows rose, though clearly she didn’t believe me. “Really?”
   “Really,” I assured her, looking deep into her eyes.
   “Huh!” she answered, looking confused. Then she smiled. “Well, you’d better be going. And I’ve places I need to be myself. Do you come here often?”
   “Every day,” I assured her. “I live downstairs.”
   Her eyebrows rose again; not many bunnies could afford to live in such a classy place. “Well,” she said slowly. “I’m new. And I expect I’ll be around. Bye!”

   It took me a long time to figure out why the big cats and even a few dogs hung out at The Warrens. They didn’t particularly like the music, or at least not that I knew of, and their social structures weren’t geared towards activities like group dancing. All they ever did was sit or lie around half-naked on heavily-upholstered lounge chairs and couches, hardly moving. They could just as easily have done that at home and saved themselves the cover charge, I’d thought when I was still little. Then I found out that the big cats were originally gengineered as exotic sex toys, and the whole thing came together for me. Especially once I realized that it was almost always the cats who rented out the private rooms. They weren’t just lying around; they were displaying themselves. And, they did it at The Warrens because it was pretty much the only game in town. There simply weren’t enough cats to support a nightclub of their own. Besides, what was the point of extreme vanity if there were no lesser beings around to look down upon?
   Growly was getting a massage from a tigress when I finally arrived, the sort of slow, sensuous kneading that only felines indulged in. The masseuse was collared, like everyone had been back when we’d been slaves, and her jade-green pupils were the tiny pinpoints that marked a serious stick high. The cats sold sex as well as drugs, and clearly this female was one of Growly’s call girls. One of the more expensive ones as well, most likely. All big cats were beautiful; even The Rope, a black jaguar, was drop-dead handsome in his dark, unadorned way. But the tigers and leopards and cheetahs and such, with their intricate markings and lean, super-athlete builds… Fina, the doe I’d just been dancing with, was dumpy and pedestrian by any reasonable comparison; we rabbits had been bred to work, after all, not play. Not for the first time, I sighed and cursed my bad luck at having been born a rabbit, instead of a privileged norm or sexy, virile cat.
   Growly didn’t seem to notice me at first; his eyes didn’t open at my approach, and his hooker-masseuse did nothing to let him know that I’d answered his summons. But, eventually, he purred. “Mmm, Gade! It’s a rough life, but someone has to live it. Right?”
   I smiled despite myself; Growly was a murderous drug-dealing bastard, but in his own way he had style. He had a sense of pride in himself, a trait shared by far too few others in the Zone. It was part of why I was more than a little afraid of him. “I guess,” I replied, not committing myself.
   “Sit down,” he directed me, gesturing languidly. Instantly a chair appeared, and I did as I was told. “Care for a drink? A little something to touch yourself up?”
   To be ‘touched up’ meant to be stuck. “No,” I answered, crossing my arms defensively. “Not my bag.”
   “Smart kid,” Growly observed. “We already knew that about you, though.” Then the cat-man waved his hand again, and instantly the massage ceased. He rolled himself into a sitting position; it was like watching quicksilver flow. Then he smacked his lips a time or two and licked his nose. “Be a doll,” he ordered his girl. “Leave us alone for a bit.”
   The collared masseuse sort of half-curtsied, then vanished back towards one of the private rooms. So did the rest of Growly’s retinue. Then we sat in silence for a time, watching the band drift back towards the stage. I was just starting to become uncomfortable with how things were dragging on when Growly finally spoke.
   “I’m sorry, kid,” he began. “You were right to be pissed off at me for sending an old-time buddy to pump you.” He shook his head sadly. “You deserve more respect than that.”
   If Growly expected an answer, I didn’t know what it might be. Sammy claimed that in tough situations silence usually worked as well as anything, so I just sat and watched the drummer as he set himself up to play again.
   Eventually, the tiger continued. “That was a world-class job you pulled off today, Gade. I don’t know of anyone else who could’ve come close, even with the Wizard’s help.” The Wizard was Sammy, of course. Only furs usually had nicknames; once again, Growly was trying to show respect by treating my mentor as if he were a true brother. The tiger reached down and picked up a glass of something that looked expensive, then raised it to me. “Salute!”
   I felt my ears darkening. “It wasn’t much,” I answered, shrugging. “Not in the greater scheme of things.”
   Growly smiled, exposing his huge yellow fangs. “Maybe not much to you,” he observed. “Because there’s so many greater things still in store for you in the future. But, from where a simple man of the street like me stands, it was a helluva thing.”
   I sighed and looked away. “Growly, you can save your line of shit for someone else, if you’d like. I honestly don’t know why Sammy wanted an autocannon so bad, or what he’s gonna use it for. That’s the simple truth.”
   The tiger-man nodded, not taking offense. “He’s a wily one, the Wizard. Hasta be, or he’d have found an unpleasant end a very long time ago.” Growly sipped at his drink. “But, look at things from my point of view. A man in my position needs to know certain things.” He met my eyes. “Like, who holds the heavy firepower.”
   I blinked, but said nothing.
   “Order is a very important thing, Gade,” Growly explained as if to a child. “Without order, there can be no structured society. No one can work or buy or sell or even cash their welfare checks. And then where’s an honest businessman like me?” He smiled, then nodded towards the rabbits who were lining up for the next dance. “Order is what makes civilized life possible, in the Zone or out. It’s worth far more than gold. Or even than any one man’s life.”
   “Sammy’s not stupid,” I answered eventually. “You just said that yourself.” Then I lowered my ears and narrowed my eyes. “And he doesn’t like being threatened, either.”
   “No, he’s not stupid,” Growly answered, smile gone. “Absofuckinglutely, he’s not stupid.” The tiger looked away and sighed, the sound a massive rumble in his huge chest. “It’s the damnedest thing, how people tend to drop dead once the Wizard’s taken a dislike to them. They get sick, strange accidents befall them, sometimes they even get shot in the middle of the night when nobody can see shit. No, Sammy’s not stupid.” He sighed again. “Which is why I’m taking such an interest here, Gade. I mean, if he doesn’t want a war, then why did he want that cannon so bad? If he does want a fight, then against who and why? My interests might be affected, you see. Or, if he just needs money…” Suddenly Growly was as cold as ice again. “I’ll pay for that cannon, Gade. Pay a lot. More than anyone else can. Just to preserve the social order, for the good of everyone.” His whiskers twitched, then he winked. “I’ll even throw in a commission for you. My girl? The one that was just here? I saw how you were looking at her. Make this deal happen, and you can have her all you want, whenever you want. Full-time, if it suits you.” He leaned forward, bringing his face close to mine. “We can even make her smell right for you. You poor de-balled rabbit bastards! You don’t know what you’re missing!”

   Sammy was already asleep when I got back home. I almost woke him up to let him know what Growly had said to me, but by the time I came staggering in he was snoring like hell. I’d stayed for two more dance sets, just to send the tiger-man the message that what he thought about things wasn’t all that important to Sammy and me, even if it wasn’t quite true. Not looking scared was half the battle, I’d learned young. I didn’t dance very well, though. No matter how hard I tried, I kept wondering what Sammy really did want the autocannon for. He wasn’t obliged to let me in on everything. In fact, most likely this was something he wanted to protect me from. But still…
   Well, a guy just had to wonder.
   The cannon was still set up on the main workbench; I had to pass within touching distance of the thing in order to get to my bedroom anyway, so it wasn’t any big deal for me to rise up onto my toes and give it a good looking-over along the way. It was a rotary job, with six barrels and a big electric motor to keep the thing turning. Most automatics, like the stenguns Sammy made to sell to the gangs, tapped the power of the exploding powder charge to strip out the expended brass and feed a new cartridge. This meant that all the ammunition had to be of very nearly the same power and operate at the same pressure, or else the gun would jam. A rotary, however, could fire anything from blanks to armor-piercing rounds without missing a beat, in any mixture one cared to feed it. It was therefore far more versatile. The cannon had been armed with fifteen-millimeter general-purpose soft nose rounds when I stole it; the casings were long and evil-looking things, and I shuddered to imagine what the projectiles would’ve done to our getaway car if we’d given the beetle time to fire. The reserve magazine contained tear gas rounds; tracers designed to scare the hell out of everyone in the neighborhood if fired at night; explosive rounds intended not to destroy things via their bursting charge but, rather, to transform themselves into harmless powder upon impact so that they wouldn’t hurt anything behind their target; and even a small clip full of armor-piercers that must have been included in the standard mix just in case we furs suddenly began pulling main battle tanks out of our asses. Sammy could never recreate the specialty rounds, I knew. Not with the tooling we had on hand. But already he’d turned out a very nice fifteen-millimeter brass cartridge case with a small primer-pocket to match the ones we used for the stengun ammo, and the CAD machine was loaded up with specs for a soft nose bullet to match. I picked up one of the armor-piercing rounds and pursed my lips. They looked simple enough to emulate as well, but in this case looks were deceiving. The anti-tank projectiles were made of something very hard, saboted down to a sub-caliber, and probably propelled to an ungodly velocity by a specialized propellant formula that had taken a chemical engineer supported by a fully-equipped lab months to create. So, tempting though it might be to try, I decided that manufacturing more AP rounds was probably out of the question. Besides, it was hard to imagine what anyone might actually need such firepower for, in the Zone at least. The autocannon could piss out soft noses like water from a firehose, and that ought to be plenty good enough for anything Sammy and I might ever need to deal with. And more!
   Which was exactly what was bothering me, of course. Growly had got me to thinking, and I wasn’t coming up with any good answers. I shook my head and sighed, then turned to the big gun rack on the wall. Sammy usually kept a fully-loaded stengun there at all times; just now there were four, his emergency standby and three—he always made stens in sets of three to save time—ready for sale to pay our bills. The stens were crude, ugly things, and by no accident at all they always fell apart after a couple hundred rounds. All they were really good for was spraying general areas. But, hanging just above the stens, were Sammy’s real weapons, the pride and joy of a master machinist. He had a machine-pistol he wore under his coat that could group a dozen sten-rounds inside an inch at fifty yards, and a scoped automatic rifle that could do the same at a hundred. Deadliest of all was an antique big-game rifle fitted with a night-vision outfit. Sammy could kill a man-sized target nearly halfway across the Zone with the thing, or so he claimed, without anyone having more than the vaguest idea of where the shot might have come from. “So long as you only fire once,” he’d explained to me back when I was learning to shoot, “they’ll never locate you in time to do anything really dangerous.” Not that this advice was of any immediate practical value to me; the weapon was so big and heavy I couldn’t even hold it up to my shoulder. But soon after, Sammy’d built the auto-rifle. The infrared system also snapped onto it, and that gun fit me just fine…
   Also hanging on the rack was an old zip-gun, the kind of thing Sammy’d used to sell when I was just little. It was made of pipe, used a nail for a firing pin, and was so primitive that it didn’t even look like a gun. You loaded it by taking it apart, and fired it by banging on the nail with a rock or something. Back in the day, Sammy’d sold a crapload of the things. But then someone on the other end of the Zone had started making them too, and things got kind of deadly for a while. Eventually Sammy won, but to do it he’d been forced to begin making and selling stens to the gangs who took up his side, so that they’d have an edge. And, of course, after that he could never go back; his customers would never again settle for anything less than full-auto. Still, the zips were cool for booby-traps, all the more so because they looked like pieces of scrap-pipe. So, we always kept one or two on hand to meet life’s little challenges. I sighed and shook my head again. Sammy and I were, like, the best-armed pair in the whole fuckin’ Zone, and probably for a long way beyond it. We didn’t need a fuckin’ autocannon, or at least we didn’t need one that I could see. Nor were we in terrible need of money, not from Growly or anyone else. So, why had I risked so much to get us one?
   “Sner-er-er-erk!” Sammy snored, half waking himself and then rolling over on his side. He had a plan, I knew. Sammy always had a plan, worked out twelve steps ahead and with every contingency considered. That was what made him so dangerous, I’d long since decided. Sure, the guns and poisons and shit helped. But it was his brain that made everyone else in the Zone tremble. In the end, that was why I kept on studying and shit. Because I could see that it paid off, in spades. And I was doing all right, I supposed.
   But if I was so fucking smart, then why couldn’t I figure out what we needed a goddamn cannon for?

   Saturday morning I almost went to the chinkshop. Sammy was no miser; he’d paid me very well indeed for my work the day before, so I had plenty to spend. And there was no doubting that I wanted to get back to American Gangster. I’d killed Purvis before, yes, but never so quickly. Besides, he was an ugly fuck. Or in the game he was, at least. He stank too, even worse than Sammy did. Almost every young male fur I knew played American Gangster, and the one universal constant was how bad we all hated Melvin Purvis. He was every norm who’d ever cheated us, stole from us, fucked with our heads. But, of course, it was the norms who made the game and sold it to us for twice as much an hour as any other chinksession with less than a ‘XXX’ rating.
   I probably would have gone to the chinkshop, if I hadn’t thought about my fresh-earned money all getting funneled right back into norm pockets, just as surely as if I were patronizing a pawnbroker or buying stick or doing any of the other stupid shit we furs kept doing that held us down in the Zone, too broke to ever leave, too dumb to do anything about it, and too fucked in the head to much care. But, what else was there to do, besides hanging around, shooting the shit, and drinking or drugging one’s self into zombiedom?
   Not much, I decided after standing outside The Warrens for a couple minutes, watching my breath make little puffs of mist in the cold air. A front had come through while I was sleeping, and it felt like it was going to snow. Back when I was little, snow had been cool. Sammy and I had made snowmen out in the alley, thrown snowballs at each other… He’d even made me a little sled and let me go racing down Ninth Street after an ice storm once, guarded every foot of the way by the eternally vigilant Avengers. The sled was still in the storeroom somewhere…
   Then I scowled, pulled my worn-out overcoat close around me, and turned towards Mrs. Rudder’s Academy like I did every other goddamn Saturday morning of my life. It was lame, it was boring, it was totally uncool. But what the hell else was there to do?
   Mrs. Rudder ran her Academy out of the basement of the old Tenth Street Methodist Church building. It hadn’t been a church in a very long time, but was still a very impressive place regardless. The steeple was the highest point for blocks in all directions. This created an ideal vantage point for an Avenger lookout, and one was on duty there pretty much around the clock. It was natural, therefore, that they should take over the rest of the building, as well. The front of the place was the most heavily-tagged place in the Zone—there wasn’t a square inch of surface area that wasn’t done up in arcane neon-hued symbology. And, of course, two guards shivered atop the stairs. “Gade,” one of them greeted me respectfully as I climbed the steps. He was a feline, but not much bigger than me. His genome had been derived from domestic cat stock. “You the man!”
   “Yeah!” the other agreed. He was a fellow rabbit, wearing sunglasses. But the lenses weren’t so dark that I couldn’t see he was stuck halfway out of his mind. “WayWayWay cool!” Then he held up his hand for me to slap in celebration. It was filthy, but I did it anyway. Then, I was inside.
   The old church stank the way only a public building that never sees a mop anymore can; if anyone had scrubbed the toilets during my lifetime, it had to have been back before I learned to walk. The restrooms had clogged and clogged again, so many times that the floors were buckled and warped from the continual soakings for many feet around them. But it wasn’t just piss and shit that stank the place up; even we furs needed to wash sometimes. Unfortunately, however, the Avengers weren’t much on that sort of ‘bullshit’. Most gang-bangers sprang from the most fractured and dysfunctional families in the Zone. Their parents hadn’t washed or used civilized plumbing, so they didn’t feel the lack even as the lice crawled through their fur and their teeth rotted out of their heads. The stick killed the discomfort, I supposed. As well as ensuring that things didn’t get too bad before the plug was finally pulled. It took years to thoroughly rot out a set of teeth, and stick was lethal enough that most users still didn’t need dentures when they passed.
   “Gade!” the Avengers greeted me as I eased me way up the center aisle between the old pews. Most were sleeping or, if not rabbits, screwing. But almost all the conscious ones waved and smiled as I passed. “My man!” “It’s the Renegade!” I smiled back, but kept my hands firmly in my pockets. I didn’t want to encourage any more high-fives. There were diseases present here that no doctor could cure.
   Originally the building had been designed with many stairwells, but all of them had collapsed except one. This last holdout was directly behind the altar-curtain, a fact which I hated. The Avengers had many trophy-rooms and places of memory, but this was one of their largest. I wasn’t by any means a god-fearing rabbit, yet what the gang-bangers had done to the once-holy place was… macabre. One wall was dedicated to the memory of departed comrades. Unlike more conventional memorials, however, this one was festooned with the weapons favored by the dead heroes—shivs, zip guns, chains, cruel-looking noodges, even a few axes still covered in dried gore. On the opposite wall was a similar setup, this one of trophies taken from the gang’s enemies. And, on the altar itself…
   I looked away as I passed within five feet of the grisly display. There, lined up in a neat row, were the severed heads of six Skullfucker sub-chieftains unlucky enough to find themselves on the losing end of a rumble. They’d been pickled or preserved somehow, but the stench was incredible regardless. This was due to a rather quaint Avenger custom. Since the toilets were all broken anyway, the head-display had become the communal urinal.
   As always, or at least as always since I’d grown up enough to understand how fucked up it really was for the Zone’s only school to be tucked directly underneath a desecrated church full of murderous substance-abusing psychopaths, I clenched my fists in rage as I descended the steps down to the Academy. It wasn’t Mrs. Rudder’s fault; there weren’t a lot of places in the Zone where a bunch of kids could be kept at least relatively safe from about a billion different kinds of predators, and even fewer where the rent was low enough for someone like her to be able to pay it. Not that she could swing it on her own; Sammy’s fingerprints could be found all over the operation, if one knew where to look. The water still worked in this part of the building, for example, and the Avengers never, ever came downstairs, no matter what. Besides, he and Mrs. Rudder were a little sweet on each other. Sometimes she came over to our place, and I had to go dance for a while.
   About halfway down the stairs, as always, the whole atmosphere of the place changed. There was a huge fan at the bottom, always turned on, which held most of the stink at bay. All by itself, that helped a lot. But the paint was also fresh and bright, the floor was clean, and there weren’t piles of used-up sticks lying around all over the place.
   “Why, Simeon!” Mrs. Rudder greeted me as I rounded the corner and entered her classroom. “What a pleasant surprise! Sam told me not to expect you today.”
   He don’t know shit, I started to say. But beyond Mrs. Rudder, all clustered together around a single computer terminal, were about a dozen of the richest, luckiest, cleanest, and healthiest children in the Zone. I’d once been one of said kids myself, and still felt kind of funny cursing in the presence of my old primary-school teacher. “I do have the weekend off,” I explained more formally. “But…”
   Mrs. Rudder sort of glowed. “Wonderful!” she repeated. “We were just getting ready to enjoy a story together. Would you like to read for us?”
   “Yay!” the kids cried out together, swarming over me like a soft, furry wave. They all loved me to death, though I never quite understood why. Perhaps it might have been because I was the only non-norm they’d ever met who already knew the stuff they were struggling to learn and was willing to help them with it instead of laughing in their faces and calling them ugly names and stealing their backpacks?
   We read for a couple hours, swapping books around as necessary to allow for the missing pages, so that everyone got to try and read everything. Then we did math, played a dodge-ball game that I had to work very hard at losing, and the school day was over. Mrs. Rudder only taught for a half-day on Friday and Saturday, because the streets got bad early on the weekends. The Avengers might be on the lookout, but they could only do so much. Every year or two Mrs. Rudder would lose a student, and then class would be canceled for about a week while she disappeared to no one knew where to mourn in private. Then she’d emerge, haggard and drawn and empty, and once more begin trying to water the endless Sahara of the Zone with the leaky soup-can of her pathetic little school, another piece of her heart gone forever.
   “Thank you so much,” Mrs. Rudder said to me as we cleaned up after class. I was feeding Chucky the Fifth, the class pet. He was a white rat, and far cleaner about his person than most of the furs who lived upstairs. Most animals were, I suspected. Once upon a time I’d earned the right to feed Chucky the Third by getting a hundred-percent on a spelling test, and ever since I’d still considered it to be my personal privilege.
   “Not so much fruit!” Mrs. Rudder complained, like she always did. “You’ll spoil him!” But, again like always, she indulged me. I was one of her very first Zone students, and the only one that wasn’t already on stick, in jail, chilled, or working a brainless, menial, soul-killer of a dead-end job.
   “Sorry,” I answered, not really meaning it.
   “It’s all right.” She sighed, then smiled as Chucky chittered happily over his Saturday feast. “At least someone in this hellhole is happy.”
   I shook my head, but said nothing. Eventually, Mrs. Rudder spoke again. “I know about the autocannon, Simeon,” she said. “I can’t say that I approve, mind you. But I understand. And, of course, I’m glad you’re safe.”
   I looked away, feeling something I hadn’t known was hurting ease up a little inside of me. “Thank you.”
   She shook her head again. “If only…” Then she sighed again, and began turning out the Academy’s lights. “But there’s no point wishing for that which can never be, is there? You’d think I’d eventually learn.” Then she headed off to the back room for her coat. “Don’t leave yet, dear. I’d appreciate if you walked me out to the street. One day a week, at least, I’m not afraid.”

   Mrs. Rudder had an apartment in one of the big buildings over on Walnut, where a lot of the working furs lived. Like Sammy, she was the only norm in her building. But unlike him, she didn’t live in a fortress. What kept her alive, I could only imagine. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I walked her all the way home. Duane Generalservices met us at the door and smiled at me, his long fangs standing out against the dark Rottweiler fur of his face. Duane was Mrs. Rudder’s security guard, most Saturdays. He’d tried to learn to read, my former teacher had told me once, but between the three jobs he worked to keep his family under a decent roof he just hadn’t been able to make time. Duane didn’t like me very much, probably because I carried myself like an outlaw and had a bad reputation in certain circles. But he also had known my parents, and taken note of how much Mrs. Rudder thought of me. So, his smile was genuine if guarded as he held the door open for his sole norm resident. “Hi, Gade!” he greeted me. “What’s up?”
   “Not much,” I allowed, smiling back as best I was able. Duane Generalservices was in my mind representative of a whole class of furs that left me deeply conflicted inside. On the one hand, they were good and decent folks doing their best to raise their families under impossible conditions. Yet, they were also ball-less sheep, bowing and scraping to the norms every chance they got in exchange for whatever crumbs they might be thrown. Duane, for example, hadn’t even bothered to change his name after the June Revolution; he still carried that of his one-time corporate owner. My parents hadn’t done that; they’d chosen a new surname from among the finest and boldest in the history books, and then named me after its greatest scion. Thus, I was Simeon Bolivar, not Simeon Clevelandlaborsolutions as most certainly would have been the case had Duane been my father. And how fucked up would my head have been then?
   With Mrs. Rudder safely back at home, I found myself at loose ends again. I scowled to myself as I walked down Walnut, carefully noting and nodding to each Avenger lookout as I passed by. Sammy made me read three news-sites a week; one of these was geared to norm teens. As near as I could tell from the fucked-up thing, the biggest problem norm kids my age had was too much time on their hands. They filled the empty hours with dances, all kinds of nitpicky talk about music, and most of all trying to decide which kind of expensive shit to rub on their faces. Maybe their faces really did need to have expensive shit rubbed on them; acne looked painful. So that part, at least, I didn’t hold against them. But still… How much bitching about school did Sammy expect me to read about, when their schools weren’t hidden under gang-houses and their textbooks weren’t missing about a dozen pages each? How long did Sammy expect me, an orphan, to listen to the norm kids complain about how their parents didn’t buy them the right gifts or let them go to the right parties? And how many pictures did he expect me to look at of spacious, pretty houses maintained by fur gardeners and fur maids, when he and I lived in a fallout shelter under a noisy nightclub with automated machine guns—even worse, automated machine guns that we actually needed—for a security system? Sometimes, especially on Saturdays after school let out for the little ones, it was just too fucking much. Bitch, bitch, bitch all the time, when they lived in fucking heaven!
   “What did you just say?” a voice suddenly demanded.
   I was startled out of my reverie. “Huh?” I demanded intelligently, swinging around to face whoever had snuck up behind me. In my jacket pocket, my fingers sought the special hide-out pistol Sammy had made for me.
   But it wasn’t necessary. “I was just wondering what you were muttering about, with your face all sour,” a familiar doe replied, speeding up her pace a little so that we could walk side-by-side. It was tubby little Fina, who I’d danced with at The Warrens. “I saw you walking Mrs. Rudder to her apartment, so I figured I’d come out and say hello.” Her head tilted a little to one side. “How come you know her?”
   I smiled a little. Should I tell Fina that my mentor was shagging her? Somehow, it didn’t seem like quite the right approach. “She used to be my teacher,” I explained. “I still help her out on Saturdays sometimes.”
   “Wow!” the girl-bunny replied, her eyes widening a bit. “That is so cool! But…” Then she stopped in her tracks, so suddenly that I took another full step before I could react. “You can’t be,” she declared.
   I felt my eyebrows rise. “Can’t be who? Or what?”
   “Can’t be the same Simeon that Mrs. Rudder is always going on about. ‘So smart’, she says one minute, and then ‘so good with the little ones’ the next.” She shook her head. “But, you’re a criminal!”
   I laughed, then rocked my head slightly from side to side as I thought about how to answer. “Maybe,” I replied. “The criminal part, I mean. That’s a definite maybe, in fact. But, I have to admit it. I’m also Simeon.”
   Fina’s reaction surprised me. Her brows lowered, her back straightened, her hands formed fists, and suddenly she was mad as hell at me. “Ooo-oh!” she complained, putting said fists on her hips. “If only I’d known!”
   By now I was starting to grow a little angry myself. Sammy was always cracking wise about how unpredictable the females of all species were; now, for the first time, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t just a dumb joke. “What?” I demanded. “I mean…”
   “Oooh!” she repeated in a near-snarl. Then the storm was past as if it had never been, and the bunny-girl was walking alongside me again. “I work at the school Monday through Friday,” Fina explained eventually. “I’ve only been on the job for two weeks. Saturdays, I help out my sister. She’s got three little bunnies in diapers. And on Sundays, Mrs. Rudder is teaching me to read.”
   I nodded slowly. “It’s a good thing to know,” I agreed. Then I quoted Sammy. “There’s so much more out there, than… This.”
   “So I’m starting to figure out,” Fina agreed. When I turned to face her she was staring at me. “Mrs. Rudder says you’re the best student she ever had. And, she used to teach norms.”
   “Really?” I asked. The last part, at least, was news to me. I felt my ears blushing. It was uncomfortable in the cold. “I don’t think I’m all that smart. Without Sammy’s help, I’d be just another pincushion.”
   “And without my parents, so would I,” the doe replied. “We both owe so much to others.”
   Suddenly, I was angry again. Though I wasn’t sure quite why. “Our whole world is shit,” I declared, apropos of nothing. “We live out our shitty little lives in a shitty little shithole of a neighborhood. We can dream of breaking out of here, but no one ever really does. Not any of us furs, at least.”
   Fina shrugged. “There’s a few Outside,” she countered.
   “Pampered pets. Still living as slaves, though their chains have been cut for years now.” I scowled again.
   “Not slaves,” Fina countered. “Servants. And performers.”
   “Slaves in my book.” I stopped and sighed, then shook my head. “Sorry. I’m having a bad day. Seeing those beautiful little kids trying to learn in a place like that…”
   “I know,” the pudgy doe replied. She was looking at me again, and in some mysterious way her eyes seemed to be penetrating deep inside me. “It’s a messed-up world. Enough to spoil anyone’s outlook on life.”
   “Fuckin’ A,” I agreed. Then I realized that somehow we’d walked two whole blocks together, and I hadn’t noticed. “Listen, this is Saturday. It can get pretty ugly hereabouts…”
   “Right,” Fina agreed, nodding. She had a scar on her face, I realized suddenly. Not a terrible one; her fur nearly concealed it. The wound ran upwards from the left corner of her mouth, almost all the way to her eye. Something had laid her open in a very serious way, at one time or another. Yet, she didn’t seem to let it bother her much. “I don’t even go to The Warrens on Saturday nights, much less down this street.” Her right arm jerked, as if she’d almost tried to touch me, then changed her mind. “Even for a guy, it’s rough. You sure you’ll be all right?”
   I smiled. “There isn’t a street in the Zone I can’t walk down, though it’s not because I’m especially tough. Sure, on some of them I might have to answer a few questions or explain myself, but nobody fucks with me in a serious way.” I let my grin widen. “I have friends. Like I said last night.”
   Fina looked away. Clearly, as a general rule, she didn’t approve of that sort of friend. “Well… In that case I’ll be heading home now. Sis’ll be wondering where I’m off to.” She smiled a little. “See you around, Simeon.”
   “See you!” I answered reflexively, though I should’ve asked her to call me Gade. People would laugh at me if she ever did that out in front of anyone. Then I stood and watched her as, hands thrust deep into her jacket pockets, Fina turned and headed back towards her home. She was fat, I knew. Very much overweight, even. Her legs were short, by bunny standards, and her face was plain. But her scent was sweet and pure.
   I stood and watched her every movement until she turned the corner and vanished from sight.

   Chestnut Street was one of the most violent places in the entire Zone. Oddly enough, this was a direct result of the fact that a truce had been declared there years back, so that no single gang controlled it between Eighth and Eleventh. The only genuine supermarket in the Zone was located at Ninth and Chestnut. While a few other little grocers were still in business here and there, a lot of the more specialized-diet types couldn’t survive without the market. In the early days Joe’s Superama had been the focus of one bloody battle after another, until the violence grew so bad that Joe shut the place down entirely for two weeks to sort of make a point. Since the major gang leaders at the time had all been of the feline persuasion, and since Joe’s was the only place that sold stuff palatable to cats, the wars had ended almost overnight. Since then the Avengers’ territory had steadily grown, largely due to their close association with Sammy, so that Chestnut Street formed a sort of deep salient into their holdings. If the wars ever started again, I reckoned the Avengers could probably seize and hold the area, if they really tried. But it’d cost lotsa blood, so much that as yet they hadn’t made their move. I wondered how long it’d be.
   No one had much interest in policing ground that didn’t produce revenue, and the Chestnut district was no exception. There were muggers, rapists, and every other kind of two-bit sleazebag aplenty to be found anywhere one might go in the Zone, but it was only near Joe’s that they operated with impunity, in no fear whatsoever of retaliation from the gangs. Or almost no fear; there were a few ground rules everyone understood. If you fucked with a connected man, for example, you could expect to be fucked with in return, most likely fatally. Friends were friends and blood was blood, even on Chestnut Street. The only people I really had to worry about were either dumbshits too stupid to know who I was, or else a total nutcase. Once, in fact, a nutcase had mugged me. His corpse was found hanging upside down from a lamppost the next morning, with a nail driven into the braincase. That was the Skullfuckers’ trademark kill. Just in case anyone didn’t get the point, a note was pasted to the mugger’s chest. It read “Our respects to Sammy and Gade”. And, the next day, my wallet and knife arrived back home, carried through Avenger lines by a heavily escorted Skullfucker courier.
   I was still pretty much at loose ends, and had just decided to duck into Joe’s for something fresh and green when a black-and-white clad rabbit fell in alongside me. Black and white were Skullfucker colors. But I didn’t need the hint. Shiv had once attended school with me. He’d been pretty smart, too. Bright enough, in fact, that he was already a sub-chieftain. “Gade!” he said, sidling in easily alongside me. Two lampposts away I saw an Avenger bunny scowling at us. The Avengers didn’t like it when either Sammy or I had dealings with the Skullfuckers. But, what could they do about it?
   “Shiv,” I acknowledged my one-time classmate. Once upon a time, we’d read The Jungle Books and many other happy tales together. He’d even visited me a time or two at home, something Sammy never let anyone else do. But, things had changed since then, in a very serious way. In order to become a Skullfucker subchieftain, one had first to kill an enemy in fair fight, then kill another slowly. Mrs. Rudder and I spoke often of her previous students, but neither of us ever, ever mentioned Shiv. “How’re they hangin’?”
   He held his hand out to be slapped, and out of politeness I did so. Shiv wasn’t as dirty as most gang-bangers. In fact, he was nearly as clean and well-dressed as I was. Nor could I detect any sign of stick about him. This didn’t surprise me; he’d always been one of the brightest. “Real good, Gade,” he answered, grinning and putting a little extra swagger into his step as we passed the Avenger. Other than that they ignored each other totally, as Chestnut Street protocol dictated. He smiled, exposing file-pointed incisors. “I’m making a real name for myself.”
   “Heh!” I agreed noncommittally, turning away. Filed teeth were common enough, but it made my head hurt just to look at the nasty things. They weren’t natural, somehow.
   “You done good yesterday!” Shiv continued, deliberately bumping into me. That was a cool way to, like, slap someone on the back. “Jesus fucking Christ almighty, Gade! That took brains and balls both!”
   I shrugged, not saying anything. It was easy to guess what was coming next. “And you want to know what Sammy’s going to do with the autocannon.”
   Shiv shrugged. “It’d be nice, I admit. But I ain’t that stupid, Gade. I know you better than that!” He deliberately bumped into me again. “You and me, we’re the smartest motherfuckers in the whole fuckin’ Zone. Except for Sammy, of course.”
   “And Mrs. Rudder,” I pointed out.
   “Cunts don’t count.” Shiv looked away and scowled, suddenly angry about something. But, in an instant, it passed. “So when Zoomo asked me to find out what the fuck, I told him up front that you weren’t gonna talk.” He shrugged. “So, I’m just here to send Zoomo’s regards. And to see an old friend.”
   I looked down at my feet for a time, thinking over my reply. Zoomo was the top Skullfucker, and had been for almost two years. That was a record. “Well,” I said eventually. “Please return my greetings to Zoomo. And tell him that so far as I know, there aren’t any outstanding grudges.”
   “So far as you know,” Shiv answered, eyes narrow.
   “So far as I know,” I repeated, shrugging. “Shit, Shiv! You’ve met Sammy. Do you think he tells me every fuckin’ little detail?”
   “Nope,” my one-time friend replied, looking off into the distance. “That’s part of what makes him such a dangerous motherfucker.” He turned back to face me. “You know,” he said softly. “We got along real good when we were little. When you were Simeon, and I was Jeff.”
   “We did,” I agreed, refusing eye-contact.
   “It’s kinda sad how we’ve drifted apart.” Shiv sighed, then shook his head. “I’m movin’ up fast, Gade. As fast as anyone ever has.”
   “Yeah.” It was a flat, noncommittal monosyllable.
   “Did you ever wonder?” he asked after an awkward silence. “I mean… You’re bitchin’, Gade! The only other fuckin’ rabbit I know that I really respect. You and I, we could…”
   “Run the entire Zone together?” I asked gently. “With an autocannon to back us, of course.”
   He met my eyes again. “Like I said. You ain’t dumb.”
   I sighed, then lowered my head and began walking again. “Shiv, don’t take this wrong, okay? I don’t mean any disrespect. But for us to do that, you’d hafta waste Zoomo and I’d hafta… do the same to Sammy.” I choked a little on the last part; the words didn’t want to come out. “That’s what you’re suggesting. Isn’t it?”
   Shiv smiled a sad smile. “Everyone dies, Gade. It ain’t no big deal.”
   “Maybe,” I answered, turning away. “Maybe not. But I just couldn’t do it, Shiv. Chill Sammy, that is. Not even for the whole Zone. Not even for a whole universe of Zones.”
   Shiv smiled again. “I expected that,” he answered. “And, no disrespect is taken.” His expression faded. “But he’s gonna die someday, Gade, even if no one offs him. He’s old; you know it and I know it. So, all I’m saying is, maybe you oughta be giving a little thought to your future. About how you’re gonna survive without the Wizard’s magic to protect you.” He smiled again. “Take your time, friend Renegade. When the day comes, not only will I be there for you, but so will the Skullfuckers. I promise.”

   I ended up not getting any fresh greens after all; once Shiv was done with me I felt sick and cold inside; not at all in the mood for a treat. It was always like that, when I talked to an old friend who’d fallen from grace. But this was worse somehow. Because Shiv was right. I wasn’t stupid. And Sammy would die someday, no matter what I did. Where the fuck would I be then?
   I was feeling low indeed as I reentered Avenger territory and nodded my respects to Doolie, who was back on watch again. The whole world was fucked up, near as I could tell, maybe even more fucked up than it’d been back when Mom and Dad and Sammy had engineered the local Uprising together. At least then, we furs hadn’t spent half our time wasting each other. We hadn’t been filthy and diseased and greedy and allowed so much stick that we rotted our own brains out. Sure, we’d been owned, exploited, worked half to death, not permitted even to choose our own mates…
   But at least we hadn’t had to worry about how the fuck we were still supposed be alive five years from now!
   I was kind of hoping that Sammy might be at home and working on something when I got back to our little hidey-hole. He didn’t mind talking while he was working on shit; in fact, it was the best time to hold a conversation with him. He was always happy when making or fixing something, happy in a way that I sort of envied him. For all the hours I spent with him on the lathe, the drill press, and the tridee alloy printer, I was still only a fraction as good with my hands as my mentor was, and both of us had long since come to appreciate that I’d never be his equal. I was reasonably competent; he was a fuckin’ mechanical genius. It might’ve been easier to take, except that no fur had ever proven to be exceptionally gifted with tools, according to my books. Sammy’d done his best for me, but even he knew that he’d met with only limited success. Apparently, such advanced levels of tool-using skills simply weren’t in our genes. No matter how many Uprisings there were and how many hours we spent in training, we’d never be Wizards. Never, in this one area at least, be the equals of the norms.
   Just like I was beginning to suspect that we’d never be competent to run our own society, either. Maybe we were better off being owned…
   There were no less than eight Avengers standing outside The Warrens when I rounded the last corner on my way home. The biggest, baddest Avengers there were, in fact, all of carnivorous stock and wearing coats with bulges about the size of stenguns under them. Stonecold’s bodyguard.
   I shook my head and thrust my hands deeper into my pockets as I approached the entrance to the nightclub. It still wasn’t dark yet, and normally The Warrens would still be pretty much deserted. But there was The Rope, watching the door much earlier than usual. Which made sense, I supposed. Stonecold was Chief of the Avengers, which made him one of the biggest VIPs in the Zone and the target of god-only-knew how many assassination plots at any given moment. He didn’t leave his lair often, mostly for this reason. And, of course, god help whoever had the miserable luck to own the building the Chief of the Avengers got whacked in. His successor would make it his first order of business to waste him, along with everyone else who just might maybe have had anything to do with the regicide. It was, after all, the prudent thing to do. Even if he was the one who’d arranged the hit in the first place. Maybe especially so, in that case.
   The Rope wasn’t nearly so cheerful as usual, being surrounded by the most notoriously trigger-happy of all the Avengers. I decided to just keep my cool and act like nothing major was gong down. “Heya, Rope!” I greeted my friend as I walked up the three concrete steps and across the broad patch of sidewalk that separated The Warrens from the street.
   “Gade!” he greeted me in return, smiling a little despite his nervousness.
   “How’s it going?” I asked the Bengal tiger-morph who was clearly the leader of Stone’s bodyguard. “Is everything cool?”
   His eyes narrowed a little, but apparently he had his orders. “For you, they’re cool,” he rumbled, stepping aside just enough for me to edge past him and through the door. “For now.”
   I smiled back, employing my best dopey-harmless-bunny smile. Avenger bodyguards were institutionally paranoid, and about as macho as macho got. They made it a point never to employ a pleasant word when an implied threat would serve just as well. So, I didn’t take it personally.
   Two and two had come together for me almost from the moment I’d realized who the bodyguards were. So, I wasn’t at all surprised to find another pair of Avengers halfway down the little hallway that led to my home. They had their orders too; as I approached they stood up a little straighter and reached under their coats. My own hands had long since left my pockets; I kept them well away from my sides as I eased my way down the corridor. “Heya!” I greeted them, still smiling my dopey-smile. “I’m just trying to go home, guys.”
   “Stop right there, Gade,” one of them directed. “You’re carrying, and we know it. It ain’t personal, and there’s no outstanding grudges. But we’ve got orders.”
   I smiled a little wider. If Stone was downstairs chatting with Sammy in his innermost lair, as I figured just about had to be the case, then my little handgun was about the last thing his bodyguards should’ve been worried about. My mentor could hold off a fuckin’ army down there, and that was before he’d scored the autocannon. Stone was a fly trapped in a technological spider web, guards or no, and he’d leave alive only by my mentor’s sufferance. But, there wasn’t any point rubbing it in. So, instead of bitching, I just nodded. “Right,” I agreed, sounding as reasonable as possible. Then, moving very slowly, I pulled a little datapad out of my pants pocket. “I’ve got homework to do,” I explained. “Would you mind if I sat here to do it?”
   The guards looked at each other, then one of them shrugged. “Fuck if I care. Just don’t do anything stupid.”
   I smiled again. Despite all their protests to the contrary, reading and writing were a little magical to the average gang-banger. Mysterious, in other words, and interesting. The fact was, they wanted to watch. So I sort of slid my back down the wall, turned on my pad…
   …and pressed my head firm up against the heater vent, so that my sensitive ears could pick up every word of the ‘secret’ discussion going on down below.

   “…here you are rattling on about elections and governments and shit again,” Stone was complaining as I settled in and turned on my datapad. One of my defaults was to the New York Times; I chose it to impress the guards, since there were usually both pictures and a lot of fine print. They wouldn’t notice that I wasn’t actually turning pages. They probably weren’t even aware that I was supposed to. “Ain’t you learned nothin’, Wizard? I was around for the Uprising too, you know. That shit just don’t fly.”
   There was a long pause; in my mind’s eye it was easy to picture gray-bearded Sammy looking off into the distance, the way he always did when he was really thinking about something. “It’s got to fly,” he answered eventually. “Look, Stone. For almost fifteen years now, the norms have held off. They’ve let us try and work this shit out on our own, because they figured that all they could do by sticking their noses into our business was fuck things up even worse. “
   “They’re goddamn right about that!” a new voice interjected. It was Growly, the drug dealer! What was he doing down there?
   “It’s what’s always happened before to us norms, you see. Whenever we’ve tried to fix societies that we weren’t actually part of. In fact history is mostly just a series of…” His voice trailed off, then he sighed. What did Growly and Stonecold understand of history? “Anyway, it just doesn’t work when we try to fix things up for people, instead of helping them help themselves. And, the norms Outside know they fucked up royally by making you guys slaves to begin with. They feel bad about it, even today. So, they’ve been patient.”
   “They charge us taxes,” Stonecold complained.
   “Only for earnings outside the Zone,” Sammy countered. “Inside, we’ve got full autonomy. That was the deal, for every Zone in the world. But that was only supposed to be a first step. We were supposed to elect leaders, you see. Form a government. Pass laws that suited the unique needs of our culture. Build our own schools, police our own streets. All that shit.”
   “We did elect people,” Growly pointed out. “Hell, I campaigned for the Bolivars myself. Donated money, even back then when I was still just a small-time nobody. But, they got whacked the first time they tried to enforce a law that pissed someone off.”
   A law that pissed you off, I didn’t say aloud. My mother and father had tried to outlaw or at least regulate stick. And, they’d died for it. Just like all the leaders in all the other Zones had either died or turned into crimelords themselves.
   “And we never held another election,” Sammy agreed. “Because we couldn’t. The Provisional Police broke up into armed mobs, then unarmed mobs when the ammo ran out. You were one of them, Stone. It was all clubs and knives there, for a while.” Sammy sighed again. “Ah, the good old days!”
   “Heh!” Stonecold snorted. “Then you turned as rotten as any of the rest of us, Wizard. Maybe even rottener.” His tone turned icy. “You picked and chose who got the best guns, and charged us every cent we could possibly pay for them.”
   “So I’m not entitled to a living?” Sammy demanded, his own voice hardening. “What the fuck is this, Stone? It’s not like you haven’t made out pretty goddamned well, considering. Or you either, Growl. You want to try and manufacture your own fucking guns?”
   “Easy there, Wizard,” Growly interjected, his voice warm and reasonable. “You’ve got our full respect, mine and Stone’s both.” There was a brief pause, and I could imagine the gang leader and the big drug-dealing lion exchanging an icy glare. “You had to help keep order. There has to be order, after all. I was just explaining that to Gade last night, when I was congratulating him on his take. Helluva kid, he is. His parents’d be proud.”
   “You stay the hell away from Simeon,” Sammy growled. “Both of you. That’s part of our standing deal.”
   “Whatever,” Growly replied. “I was just trying to show my respect, was all.” There was another short pause. “Wizard, you can’t protect him forever. You gotta know that. He’s bright, sharp, and able as hell. I could offer him a real future, if you’d let me.”
   “Me too,” Stone added. “I’d give him a squad from day one, just for what he pulled off yesterday alone. Maybe even a platoon.” His voice darkened again. “One of his best friends is a Skull, though.”
   “You stay the fuck away,” Sammy repeated, though less angrily this time. “And let me worry about his future.” There was another pause. “Not that there’s going to be much of a future for any of us, if we don’t get our shit together here. Like I said, the norms won’t wait forever.”
   “So what’re they going to do?” Growly demanded. “Try and police the Zone, with every fur hating them more than anything in the universe? I still remember some tricks from the Uprising, by God! It’d never work!”
   “Anything they did would just make us hate them that much more,” Stone agreed. “Last time, we won. If they want a rematch, we’ll just have to fuck ’em again. Right up the ass!”
   Sammy sighed. “It’s not that simple. We don’t live in a vacuum, here. There’s all kinds of shit you haven’t considered.”
   “Like?” Growly demanded.
   “Disease, for one,” my mentor explained. “You guys are part-human, and some of the shit you get sick with can spread to norms. The sewer systems are about shot; in some places, they already are shot. We’re fucking up the norms’ water, in a very dangerous way.”
   “How so?” Stone demanded. “What’s us being sick got to do with anyone else?”
   There was a long, long silence. “It matters,” Sammy said eventually. “Trust me. It matters a lot, and the norms know it. Then there’s the crime outside the Zone. The norms don’t like the stick trade; it’s illegal to make the shit. But, furs pay so high for it that the some people see the risk as worth taking anyway. Your suppliers, Growly.”
   “Business is fucking business!” the lion countered.
   “They’re getting so rich they’re buying the judges, and corrupting the whole society. You think you’re in the money? You oughta see their bank balances! Norms don’t like having their judges bought and sold, Growly. They don’t care for it very much at all. And then there’s the other crime all around the Zone, the break-ins and burglaries and such. We’re dragging property values down all around us; every Zone in the world is, and the total cost is probably in the tens of billions. Enough, I’d say, that eventually some norm’s going to decide it’s time to do something about it. More likely sooner than later.”
   “Shit!” Stone objected. “First you send Gade out to jack a gun from the pigs of all people, then you bitch about too much Outside crime! Ain’t that a motherfucker?”
   “You’re talking out of both sides of your mouth, Wizard,” Growly agreed.
   “Maybe,” Sammy agreed. “But I need that cannon.”
   “Why?” Growly demanded, his voice filled with anguish. “What in the name of God for?”
   “To make the elections happen,” he explained patiently.
   “But…” the lion-man objected. “I mean…”
   “We don’t want no fuckin’ elections!” Stone protested. “They’d fuck everything up!”
   “How unfortunate,” Sammy observed. “How very unfortunate indeed.”

   I wouldn’t have thought that jack-shit was wrong, if all I’d had to go by was Growly’s and Stonecold’s departure. Or at least I wouldn’t have until I made it downstairs. The two Zone crimelords seemed even more pleased than usual to see me; Growly asked me to read a few lines from the Times aloud to him, then he and Stone laughed and patted me on the head as if I were only half my true age. “You keep that shit up,” Growly directed, nodding at my datapad. “It’ll pay off for you someday.”
   Sammy wasn’t in nearly such a good mood. He was mad as hell, in fact, though clearly not at me. When I came through the door he was drinking a cup of coffee and glaring down at his workbench, where the single prototype autocannon shell he’d completed sat waiting to be tested.
   “Hi,” I greeted him, knowing better than to say much more. When Sammy was glaring, as a rule, it was best not to bother him.
   But this time was an exception, it seemed. “Hi, yourself!” he greeted me, forcing a smile. Sammy looked very tired, I realized suddenly. The lines on his face were a lot deeper than they’d been when I was little. And his eyes seemed almost to have a sort of film over them. “Whatcha been up to?”
   I shrugged, then went to the refrigerator and poured myself some juice. Sammy didn’t like juice; he bought the stuff just for me. “Nothing much, really. I helped out at the school a little bit.”
   My mentor’s face brightened a little. “How’s Alice?”
   “Good. I walked her home.” Then I shrugged again. “Other than that, not much.” I looked Sammy in the eye. “Though, everyone and their brother wants to know what the fuck about your new toy.”
   Sammy smiled. It made him look a little better, though the lines were still plenty deep. “Ain’t that the truth!” He sipped a little coffee before speaking again, then picked up his prototype shell and toyed with it absently. “That’s what Growly and Stone were just here about.”
   I nodded. “Growly asked me about it last night. I almost woke you up to tell you.”
   “You should have woken me up,” Sammy corrected me. “Though it’s not any big deal.”
   I shrugged. “And Shiv hit me up about it today. On behalf of the Skulls.”
   “Of course, they would Jeffrey to see you,” Sammy agreed, looking off into the distance.
   I pressed my lips together, deciding whether or not to say any more. Then, I realized that I had to. Sammy needed to know this kind of shit, to help keep us both alive. “He suggested that he and I could take over the whole Zone, with that cannon. If we wasted you and Zoomo, that is.”
   “Ha!” Sammy replied, slapping his knee. “I knew it! Even way back when!” Suddenly he was grinning like a little boy. Then, his expression faded, and he looked deep into my eyes. “Could you, Simeon? Theoretically, I mean. After all, I reckon that if you were actually going to do me, you wouldn’t have given me any warning.”
   I smiled back, then looked off into the distance to think. “Maybe,” I allowed. “It’d take some planning.”
   His eyes narrowed, like they always did when he was serious about something. “How?”
   “Well… I can run the machines, right? But I’m still not you. So I’d have to time things carefully. You’re the one that always scores the raw materials; I don’t know where or how you get them. I’d have to chill you when we’ve got plenty of stengun makings in stock, and worry about making new connections later.”
   “Right,” he agreed, nodding.
   “Then…” I paused and thought some more. “The Skulls aren’t nearly as strong as the Avengers. I’d have to fix that, probably even before Shiv wasted Zoomo. The best way to do it would be to hook them up with all the minor outfits.” I wriggled my nose furiously.
   “Good,” Sammy continued, nodding again.
   “To make that happen… Well, the only way I can think of would be for the Avengers to threaten them somehow. Threaten them hard, in a way that no one else could tolerate. Also, that way the Skulls and whoever would have to immediately rally behind a new leader when Zoomo met with his accident; they wouldn’t have the time or space to fuck around with internal power struggles. It’d be mostly up to Shiv to see that he became the leader in question; I dunno much about Skull politics. But, my money’d be on him. He’s smart, all right.”
   Sammy shook his head. “Damn, kid! You’re growing up!” He smiled again. “Go on; I’m fascinated.”
   “So,” I continued. “That’s the tipping point. I’d have to see to it that the Avengers got fucked somehow, right at the critical moment; bad ammo, maybe. Or, more likely, make ’em all gather together in one place and hose ’em down with the cannon. That’s one deadly motherfucker, I’d imagine.” I shook my head sadly. “Jesus! It’d fuckin’ slaughter them! We could hunt down the rest and kill them one by one after that, whenever we liked.”
   “That’d be that,” Sammy agreed, looking at me strangely. “You and Jeffrey running it all. And probably no one else with enough balls to take the two of you on for twenty, maybe even thirty years after such a bloodbath. People don’t forget shit on that sort of scale very quick.”
   I shrugged again, then sipped at my juice. “It’s just like planning out a job,” I explained. “Except of course that I’d never… I mean…” I’m not sure just how it happened, but suddenly Sammy and I were hugging like I was a little kid again. And I was crying, too. Both of us were.
   “I know,” Sammy answered, his voice soft and calm. “I know.” There was a long, warm silence, then Sammy spoke again. “I’m so proud of you, Simeon. You’ve worked hard, grown up straight and tall, and fulfilled every last one of my hopes and dreams for you. You’re tough and smart and strong. Exactly what’s needed here and now.” He pulled away and looked into my eyes again. “And just a wee bit ruthless, as well. Which is all to the good in someone like you.” His smile grew very cold, despite the tears.
   “It’s what your parents lacked, you see.”

   Theoretically I had Sunday off, too. But, I didn’t feel much like doing anything. Sammy turned in early, so I did too. When I woke up, he wasn’t anywhere to be seen in our living area. So, I checked back in the storage room. And there he was, about waist-deep in his latest project. “Simeon!” he greeted me, looking a lot better than he had after meeting with Stone and Growly. “I’m so glad you’re up! Come here and hold this for me, will you?”
   I wasn’t half-awake yet, and still hadn’t drunk a glass of water. But, I didn’t even think of protesting. Because what Sammy wanted me to hold in place for him was a piece of armor plate. And, what he wanted to do while I held it was weld it to the absofuckinglutely coolest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
   It was a sort of mini-tank!
   “I’ll be right there!” I declared, practically jumping through my own asshole, I was so eager to get involved. What an awesome setup! Years ago, back when I’d been little, he’d bought a little earthmoving tractor-thingie from someone who’d lifted it Outside. I’d played on it for hours at a stretch, once upon a time, climbing all over the thing and tugging at the levers that made the blade go up and down. Sammy’d salvaged the heavy-duty battery-pack out of it for something or other, and I thought that was all he wanted from it. But now there were new batteries mounted on the back, the blade had become one of several pieces of armor-plating…
   …and there was a spindle on top that looked to me as if it just might accept the autocannon!
   “Holy shit!” I gushed as Sammy’s welder snapped and spat. “I mean…”
   “Heh!” the Wizard laughed. “I’ve named her ‘The Arsenal of Democracy’. Ain’t she a thing of beauty?”
   “Jesus!” I muttered as Sammy shut down his torch and lifted his face-mask. His armoring-job was clearly improvised; the tank’s left side, for example, was shaped differently than the right because it was made of rusty old I-beams instead of concrete-filled pipe sections, like the right. But good god, did the result look wicked!
   “You get in and then raise the blade,” Sammy explained. “That closes everything off.”
   I nodded, having already figured that out.
   “The biggest problem is that I can’t get a full three-sixty traverse on the autocannon,” he continued. “It’ll only bear forward. Though, through a fairly large arc.” He smiled. “The less people that know about that, the better. I’m gonna make it look like it’ll spin freely.”
   “Right,” I agreed. Then, I shook my head and turned to face my friend. “There’s no way you just pulled this design out of your ass. And half the parts are premade. You’ve been planning this shit for years. Haven’t you?”
   “Guilty,” he answered, teeth flashing white through his long, gray beard. “Guilty as fuck, in fact. Been looking forward to seeing it come together, too.” Then he frowned. “Though, I’m having trouble with the secondaries.”
   “Secondaries?” I asked.
   “Stenguns,” he explained. “To cover the blind areas. So people can’t just walk up and crawl all over the hull. I can’t quite figure out the best places for them.” He sighed. “When you’re driving one of these things, Simeon, a Molotov cocktail can ruin your whole day.”
   I shook my head. Here I was on a lazy Sunday morning, still in my underwear, helping to build an honest-to-god tank! Judging by the Outside teen magazine Sammy made me read, most norm kids my age were either spending the morning watching holovid with their kid brothers or else taking tennis lessons. Life in the Zone might be a buncha shit some ways, but at least it was interesting! “You,” I said slowly, shaking my head, “are bugfuck nuts.”
   “Oh, yes!” Sammy agreed, smiling and nodding and the happiest I’d seen him in years. “Of course!” Then he lifted the welding mask all the way off of his head. “Why else would I spend my life doing this shit? Come on, Simeon. It’s past breakfast time, and I haven’t eaten yet either. Let’s go take a break.”

   Like so many other projects before it, the tank pretty much took over our lives for a little while. Sammy didn’t sleep very well, so there wasn’t any telling what hour of the day or night he might be found out working in the storage area, happy as a clam. He was considerate about it, working on quiet stuff like wiring while I was asleep, so that I didn’t have anything to bitch about. But, there wasn’t any doubt that he was serious as fuck about what he was doing. Except for required reading, which I took care of during those few times when I was awake and Sammy wasn’t, my schoolwork was suspended so that I could help. I spent twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day welding, testing circuits, and hacking some of the simpler software. Rather to my surprise, my friend didn’t double-check much of my work, unless I told him I’d had problems. “Shit, Simeon,” he protested the first time I asked him to look over one of my circuits. “You’re plenty good at that kind of thing. If you say it works, that’s fine by me.” That kind of scared me a little; the circuit in question was for a rear-view video backup feed. If it ever failed at just the wrong moment, it could get people killed. So I’d gulped and double-checked it myself, half proud of lack of oversight but half frightened as well.
   It worked just fine. Like most of my circuits did nowadays. Almost as many of them, in fact, as