I sat on my rucksack with my bad leg stretched out in front of me and thought about how everyone was going to die.

I figured I'd developed a certain expertise in the field. I ran my eye over the damp, chilly swamp that was Englewood and decided to exclude the obvious, which was mass murder at the hands of some group of desperate folks—burned cops, renegade troops, starving criminals. Too easy. I liked a challenge. I'd been in Englewood for eight months, healing up and busting heads to earn my keep, and aside from the interlopers I'd personally murdered we'd seen thirteen deaths in that time. I'd brought it with me, a black cloud of homicide that had settled on the place, choking people into irritable fits of temper.

Even if the town was saved when I moved on, dragging my ghosts and voices and doom along with me, it was going to end up in flames, eaten up by the world itself.

I looked across the way at Bixon, leaning imposingly in the door of his bar. My room was—had been—above it, in the tiny, suffocating attic, a cot and not enough headroom to stand up in. Bixon was perpetually pissed-off, and his swollen, blackened nose made him look demonic. If he'd been more than five feet tall he would have been frightening. Bixon was going to be shot, probably soon, simply because he was sitting on a dozen barrels of moonshine any day of the week and was barter-wealthy, his basement crammed full of food and junk people had traded him for a shot of his paint thinner. I'd killed four assholes trying to rob Bixy: It wouldn't be long before the next one came along.

Bixon's was one of just five buildings that didn't make you worry about being buried alive under rubble. I watched the three or four dozen citizens of Englewood getting ready for their day—hunting, fishing, chopping wood—and imagined a large number of them would either be crushed under a collapse one night, or simply suffocated by the smoke from their own cook fires.

The bulk of the population slept in the Post Office, a big, mysterious building that sported a complex decorative outer shell that was falling down in big dusty chunks. It also had the best roof left in the whole place. Probably everyone in it died in a fire, someday soon.

As I watched, the Town Council emerged and started heading straight for me. They weren't formally a council, or formally anything: They were just the half dozen assholes who actually thought this town had a future, and therefore needed a government. It was Gerry, of course, rail-thin and squinted as usual, seventy pounds of dried-up skin and sinew, half-blind and alone, but still convinced the whole fucking universe would collapse if she took a goddamn nap. There was Stiles, the butcher, wearing his bloodstained smock like he always did, a former Vid producer proud of getting his hands bloody in deer and rabbit carcasses; Alfonso, fat and tan, who oversaw all the batteries and other tech we'd managed to scavenge, working up homebrew solar-chargers and swapping parts out like the ex-Joint Council Technical Associate he was; the sepulchral Dieter, nearly an albino, who only spoke German and who remained a mystery aside from the fact that he was the closest thing we had to a doctor; Frida, our whore—or, better, the Chief Whore—swinging her impressive chest around as she walked daintily through the snowy mud; and Mills, who didn't do anything that I knew of, but always showed up for these Council Meetings. Since none of them had been elected or sponsored anyway, I figured the more the merrier.

Behind them, scuffing his feet in the mud, came Remy, looking ready to stab me in the stomach.

I shut my eyes and listened as they approached, and pretended to be asleep. They stood there for a long time, shifting their feet and saying nothing, until finally Gerry cleared her throat.

"You can't go, Avery."

"I thought we had this conversation about you telling me what to do, Geraldine," I said immediately. "Several months ago. I'm just waiting for my severance."

"I wouldn't call that a conversation, actually," she said.

I opened my eyes. "Fucking hell, it's the League of Useless Gimps. What can I do for you, Gimps?"

They all exchanged a glance like it was the only one they had between them. Finally Stiles, who had more words than the rest, cleared his throat, reflexively wiping his big shovel hands on his smock. "There's a Press Unit headin' our way, Avery."

I nodded. "There was going to be one eventually."

They exchanged that look again, passing it, greasy and used, from hand to hand. "Well," Stiles went on bravely. "We need you to help us."

"Avery, if they come sweeping in here, they're going to take everyone. The Greene Act gives 'em permission to snatch up any citizen and to use whatever force is necessary."

"I heard they sell off anyone worth anything," Alfonso said nervously, making me wonder why in the world he thought he might fall into that category. "The officers. Put in the Command Augments in your brain and then sell you to anyone who wants to pay, before your name goes on the lists and they have to officially induct you." He licked his chubby lips. "The fucking Greene Act, man."

The Greene Act: A collection of bits on a server somewhere that supposedly made all this very legal, very above-board. Undersecretary Greene must be one of those clever sorts, I thought, knowing you had to have something on file before you could start fucking with people.

"Call the cops," I said with a shrug, wondering if my leg would let me get up without making a ridiculous scene. "They don't recognize the authority of the civil government."

Gerry snorted. "Then we just end up in jail."

"Or a bullet in the head," Frida said, fussing with her boobs.

Or in a data brick, low-power eternity, I thought.

Not these assholes, Marin whispered. Drum trial, definitely.

I shrugged again, decided I couldn't risk the humiliation of trying to stand up and failing. Remy skulked behind everyone's legs, dirty as usual, his round little face all shadows and storms. He'd gotten tall, somewhere along the line. I sighed and put some drama into it. "Gerry, you knew I was going someday. As soon as I got a lead on my project."

She nodded, holding up her hands. "We've got those two Swedes or whatever they are, out of Grafton, said they managed to escape a Press Unit. They can tell us what to expect. Look, I didn't know it was going to be one day before the shit hit the fan here, Ave. We need you."

"What you need, Gerry," I said, struggling up onto my good leg with a grateful minimum of hopping and staggering, "is a reunion with reality, okay? You don't even have Vidscreens here. You don't even have guns. You're not going to survive. This town is not going to survive." Buried. Burned. Shot. I saw them all, my particular expertise making it all perfectly clear. It was like I was psychic, but only when murder was involved. I put my bad leg under me and tested it; stiff but serviceable. "My advice, Gerry, is clear out. Pack a bag, grab whatever might be worth something, and start tramping. Rumor is Antarctica is safe enough."

I started to step around her, and she stumbled backwards to stay in my way. I stopped rather than push the old bat down into the mud.

"Avery, not everyone in this settlement can make a journey. Not everyone—"

I leaned forward suddenly, and she stumbled backwards with a yelp. "Not everyone is not my fucking problem," I said. "The only reason we are all here is because the rest of the world hasn't noticed us yet. When that happens—say, tomorrow—my advice is to not be here. Because I won't be here to save your asses. Not this time." I turned to pluck my bag from the ground. "Call the cops. That's what you did before the world ended, right? If you saw me walking down the street, you'd call the cops. They probably still have you on file."

"Hey!" Stiles shouted from behind me, and suddenly there were hands on me, the butcher's huge calloused hands clamped onto my upper arms, pulling at me. I stiffened up out of habit and snapped my head back, connecting with Stiles' nose and making a nice ugly cracking noise with it. His hands flew up and off me, and I spun around, swinging my rucksack in a wide arc that hit nothing. Stiles had fallen back into the cold, half-frozen mud, hands on his face, dark blood leaking down his cheeks, and I was already crouching to leap on top of him when I realized what I was doing, and just stopped, standing there with my bag dunked into the mud, my muscles suddenly aching with unused adrenaline.

Stiles took his hands from his face and pointed at me. "Fuck you, Avery."

I put on one of my smiles and sketched a little bow to him, another member of the Avery Cates fan club enjoying his complimentary beating, one free with every membership. "Stay down," I advised.

He didn't stay down. As I turned around again, slinging the bag over my shoulder, the whole group of them formed up in front of me, with Stiles, slinging blood and mud everywhere, huffing into place a second later.

"Avery," Gerry said, sounding tired, "none of us know how to fight. You've taken on cops, soldiers—we've seen you. We need you."

I pointed at her. I could feel myself drowning. I didn't owe them anything, but I knew if I walked away, they were all as good as dead. "You owe me two bags of N-tabs and two bottles of Bixon's best, as per our agreement."

"Later. Full payment after we're clear." She put up her hands. "Name your bonus. You stay, you're in charge, we'll do whatever you say. You say jump, we jump."

I wanted to reach out and choke her.

"You gonna run?" Stiles snarled, turning his head to spit blood onto the snow. "You run, we're all dead."

I dropped the bag again and stared at them. I ran them through my sixth sense again, looking at them in turn, seeing them all dead, one after another. I looked from face to face, swamped by the pointlessness of it all. They expected me to stick around and fight for them, delay going after Michaleen, probably get killed myself—for nothing. For all of us to be dead a few days sooner.

Movement to my left made me turn. Remy stared murder at me, his little face like a stone. The kid had been following me around since I'd arrived, begging me to teach him to shoot, telling his pals that he was my deputy. I hadn't taught him a damn thing. I should have kicked his ass and told him to stay away, but I'd been soft. The kid was funny. I'd liked his rich accent and I'd amused myself wondering how long he'd keep trying to preserve his expensive, shiny shoes (an amazing forty-seven days, as it turned out) and he was useful for running messages and errands. I settled my eyes on his muddy, unhappy face.

Every asshole needed a valet.

I saw Remy: beaten to death, eyes open and staring, accusing.

"All right," I sighed, keeping my eyes on the kid. "All fucking right."

For a moment there was silence, layered on top of the usual sounds of the town. Suddenly Remy's face split into a grin. I saw him again, staring at me, black and blue and torn up.

I'm not saving you, kid, I thought. I'm just making it interesting.

You can't save anyone, you arrogant ass, Dolores Salgado whispered, sounding tired.

"Tell us what you need," Gerry said, all-business. I half expected her to pull out a digital clipboard and start making notes.

I turned back to them and shut my eyes. "Booze," I said. "Every drop you have."

I added up my advantages and disadvantages. It didn't take long.

On my plus column, I was alive, at least for the next few minutes.

My negative list was lengthy, but it was all centered around the fact that somewhere in the near dark there were fifty or more soldiers, trained and packed full of augments that were illegal just a few short years ago, all of whom were going to be trying to kill me. Or kidnap me, which didn't seem appreciably different. Beyond that, my leg ached, I was hungover, and I was surrounded by children.

At least they were all terrorized into silence. I added that to the plus column with some satisfaction.

We were in the old garage, or barn, or whatever it had been. It was a large, cavernous building that was still upright by sheer luck and some quirk of gravity. From the outside it was obviously unusable; the roof had caved in and one wall sagged dangerously inward, the whole thing made of graying, rotten wood. Assuming it didn't choose this frigid night to fall down on top of me, it was the ideal hiding spot, the last place any sane person would go looking for inhabitants. The wind cut right through what was left of the walls, and the eleven kids we had in town all huddled around me, shivering.

Peering out through the huge gaps in the slats, the town appeared abandoned. We'd put out all the cooking fires and other lights, boarded up windows and doors with ancient, rotten scraps wood, and everyone was lying low. I thought the chances we'd fool the Press Unit into thinking Englewood was abandoned were about zero—they'd almost certainly scouted us a long time ago—but it never hurt to try. And the dark, empty street offered no obvious targets. They were looking for bodies to fight their war for them, not corpses, so they would be forced to be careful. Both sides were suffering manpower shortages; the cops had lost most of their manufacturing base, and avatars were expensive and difficult to build. Rumor was they were even struggling to hang onto the folks who knew how to make them, since Marin had hesitated to brick the Technical Staff for so long. The army, on the other hand, was steadfastly against avatars, but considered folks like us hiding in the wilderness to be traitors anyway, so they hunted us down, filled us with the latest in slavery augmentation technology, and we popped out on the other end incorporated into suicide units that took the brunt of every charge, sparing their experienced and loyal troops for more effective uses.

I tried to will my nightvision to improve and thought back to New York, to the years before I'd ever met two cops named Dawson and Hallier. I'd thought I had problems then. That was fucking paradise.

The darkness still freaked me out. The totality of it. In the cities there was always light—streetlights, nova lamps, the shifting headachy glare of the Vid Screens looming up on every corner. I'd never been so fucking blind as I was out here in the middle of nowhere. We didn't have many artificial lights—a few scattered nova lamps, two flashlights, all carefully nursed by Alfonso—and we didn't use them often. Walk ten feet from a cook fire and you were enveloped by terrifying, confusing darkness, nothing but shadows and things to trip over. I hated the fucking darkness.

I squinted at the street. I was counting on the army being arrogant fucks, like every group of people with guns invariably turned out to be. And hell, they didn't just have guns: We'd counted at least four solid-fuel-cell ATVs with the unit. They were old and wobbly-looking vehicles, blackened metal chassis shaped like diamonds mounted on high suspensions with solid-rubber wheels; I hadn't seen a Hover in months. Still, wobbly or not they would mow through anything in Englewood without a problem, and they would know that. Figuring they'd just come in down the street, plain as day, we'd spent most of the day digging pits, filling them with stakes carved from branches driven down into the frozen dirt, and covering them with sheets of canvas. In the darkness, with snow and dirt kicked over them, you could barely make out the edges of the sheets.

A hint of movement drew my eye to the edge of town. I couldn't see anything, and it might have been a trick of my own mind, but I'd learned to trust my instincts.

"You ready?" I said to Remy. He was the oldest, and thus in charge of the kids by default. We hadn't had much time to rehearse, but the plan wasn't complex.

He nodded, his face expressionless. I knew the look, and reevaluated Remy—kids in downtown New York, when there'd been such a place, got that look after a while. When any emotion or reaction except violence and anger was seen as a weakness, you learned to keep everything off your face, to freeze every muscle in a mask of disinterest.

I nodded back and looked back through the slats. "Keep moving, remember where the pits are, and don't forget: They're not here to kill you. They won't shoot, even if they say they will. Keep moving." I took a deep breath. "All right; go."

There was the slightest hesitation, and then Remy was up and whispering hoarsely to the others. They split into two groups and headed to the rear of the building, utterly silent. Within a few seconds I was alone, breath steaming around me. I took out my automatic and checked it over; it gleamed back at me with a cool blue light, seeming to move in my hand, squirming for action. I had four clips for it, rounds thumbed-in myself from the loose shells Dingane had managed to bring back for me. Against soldiers wearing body armor it wasn't much; I'd need to be within three or four feet to pierce their vests, otherwise the worst I'd do was bruise a rib or two. A headshot would still pull a card, but the weird cowls the soldiers wore were at least bullet-resistant, if not impervious. I closed my eyes for a moment, imagining my glass-enclosed space, quiet and clean, uncrowded. Peaceful. The wind howled and for a second or two I was perfectly calm, and alone.

The sound of a boot crunching ice brought my eyes open again.

The kids were all orphans, at least, and I hoped no one in town had grown to like any of them too much to watch them risk their lives like this, because if anyone did anything too soon we'd be even more screwed than we already were, which put us so far to the other side of screwed we were starting to push the limits of physics themselves. As I watched, a sparse line of white-uniformed troops materialized out of the gloom, shredders held expertly in front of them, moving slowly in sync with each other, silent. Communicating, I knew, telepathically via augments.

On cue, Remy sprinted from the shadows between buildings, just twenty feet or so from the nearest soldier. A second kid, just a blob in the darkness, popped out from across the way, both of them running like hell.

The four visible soldiers moved fast, in perfect sync and in perfect silence, their movements graceful and coordinated as they split into two teams, each going after one of the kids. I pushed myself up onto my feet, one leg numb, both knees popping like shotguns, and staggered for the sagging doorway. The Roon auto was not a distance weapon. If I was going to play my role, I needed to be in the mix. Staying in the shadows close to the buildings, I moved as quietly as I could towards the edges of the town.

Remy was a pro. He criss-crossed the street, looking terrified, and his pursuers treated it like sport, taking their time, letting him run a little. When they were close enough to reach out for him, he angled for the first pit, gathering himself and leaping over the canvas to land on the other side. The closest white uniform behind him went down instantly, the ground just dropping away. Remy's second soldier almost managed to save himself, displaying some serious reflexes, but skidded into the pit behind his partner a second later. Remy kept running, like I'd told him. I didn't look to see if the other kid was doing as well, because another line of soldiers crept in from the dark, six this time, stepping slow and light with Shredders pointed at the ground. This wasn't a kill mission.

Nearby, I heard the rumble and roar of their ATVs.

I dropped to my good knee and forced myself to breathe shallowly. As I knelt, one of them stepped out of the darkness right in front of me and kept moving. I let him go, holding my position and making like a shadow. Behind him stepped another, and suddenly there were almost twenty soldiers crowding the street, silent and steady like fog.

On cue, the rest of the kids exploded out from the alleys between the buildings.

They knew the layout of the pits and they dashed between them easily. For a second it almost looked like a game, except silent, and then the squad took the bait and went after them, springing into smooth, loping runs that made me queasy at the thought of taking them on. Four went down instantly, chasing after the kids, and then the rest of the squad suddenly stopped as word went around telepathically.

I stood up, took a bead, and put four shells into three of them, fast.

The roaring of approaching vehicles swelled up as the squad spun almost with one mind to face me. I threw myself backwards into the narrow space between the Post Office and the tiny shack Alfonso used as a workshop, thinking that it didn't matter, they had night-vision augments, certainly. And then it really didn't matter, as Nova Lamps exploded into life around us, lighting up the whole street in a blinding, pure-white glare.

The moment I saw the four ATVs bouncing onto the street, two of them burst into flame. For a few seconds, fire rained down on the soldiers as my fellow citizens of Englewood put Bixon's booze to better use than usual, lighting up rags stuffed into ancient bottles and lobbing them down from the rooftops where they'd been waiting. Watching the bottles explode into bright, angry fireballs made my stomach lurch, but they quickly turned one of the ATVs and three of the soldiers into moving bonfires. One of the soldiers dropped and rolled a few feet away from me, and I took my time, getting a good line on her before putting two shells into her neck. I looked up in time to see the burning ATV disgorge two white uniforms and roll lazily into the darkness, avoiding all of the buildings as if by secret mechanical intelligence.

"Enough of this horseshit," I heard someone bellow in a strange, twangy accent that deleted random hard sounds from his words: Nuff a dis hawsit.

I knew instinctively that our momentum had just stopped cold and was about to turn on us. If we'd been winning this battle for forty-five seconds, we were about to lose it for the rest of our lives.

As the bellowing voice cut off, snatched away by the howling wind, a big gun mounted on top of one of the ATVs opened up on the rooftops. No one had noticed me yet, somehow, so I stood watching as orange streaks like pins streamed into the sky, each volley accompanied by a steady droning pa-pa-pa-pa. The rotten buildings tore apart like paper as the big shells slammed into them. I couldn't see what it did to any of the people standing on top of them, but I could imagine it pretty easily.

Word had gone around the squad about the pits and they'd ceased to be any kind of problem. The kids, on the other hand, were still running, and even the augment-riddled soldiers were having some difficulty catching them. I stood in my weird little blind spot for a few seconds, watching as everything drifted away from me, feeling like I was miraculously and unexpectedly invisible. I watched the kids running, the buildings burning, and I knew this was it for Englewood, which didn't surprise me—but I hesitated, thinking of Remy. I thought of Gerry, and hated her for not running

I started backing into the darkness, thinking if I angled my way behind the row of buildings I might intercept Remy on one of his turns and scoop him up. There wasn't anything I could think to do to help everyone else, but I told myself I'd warned them. I'd read their future and they hadn't liked it.

"What we got here," a voice oozed from behind me: wat we got heah. "Is a deficiency in enthusiasm."

I spun, dropping down low as I brought the gun around. My leg betrayed me, buckling like a dry twig and sending me off-balance, and before I could do anything else something smacked the Roon out of my hand. I rolled a foot or two and pushed myself up, thinking of the bone-handle blade tucked into my boot, but it was no use: Three of them, gleaming white in the darkness, the orange glow of flames bouncing off of their kits, the shredders in two pairs of hands like talons pointed right at me.

"Fuck me," I muttered, putting up my hands. "All right: I enlist."

The third soldier wasn't wearing a cowl. He was thin and tall and the whitest man I'd ever seen, his skin looking silver in the patchy moonlight, his hair so blond it was like snow waving on his head like filaments. Both his eyes glowed softly, the left iris a cold silver and the right a warm orange that reminded me of Helena Krajian and her own softly glowing augmented eye.

He didn't smile. I had an instant impression that he had never smiled, that he might in fact lack the necessary muscles.

"Cheer up, cit'zen," he bellowed as the other two approached me, one snapping a professional-looking pair of silicon bracelets into their hand. "You gonna 'member this day as t'happiest day of your life, t'day y'joined th'System of Federated Nations Army, an' rejoiced."