"-- problems in the pattern, voices carry the UDC --"

"-- so full of shit, if they cut him he'd --"

"-- high-quality blade, Damascus --"

Jacko half-listened to the conversations around him, paying most of his attention to the card game. The game itself was uninteresting, but the cute little blonde sitting next to him was quite the opposite. If she had a passion for cards, fine; he'd indulge it, and his own passions would later be indulged.

Jacko was a large man, close to two meters and with an athlete's bulk. His dark hair was close-cut, military, a testimony to recent UDC service and an odd contrast with most of the patrons in this self-consciously urban-counterculture coffeehouse. Before the UDC, he'd played football for Notre Dame, as his player's sweatshirt testified.

He didn't like the way the deathie at the next table was staring at the blonde, and the smoke from the kid's cigarette was getting in his eyes. She was smoking as well, and he wasn't going to say anything about that, but he felt no hesitation at all about turning toward the slightly built kid and saying, "That smoke's bothering me. Why don't you put it out?"

The deathie looked at him, his skin turning even paler than its usual shade, and quickly stubbed out his half-smoked Lucky Strike. Jacko turned back to the card game.

He was about to draw his next hand when a voice said, "Excuse me."

He turned to see a small, slender man of about his own age, twenty-five, looking at him with a hard expression just a bit short of a glare. "Yah?" Jacko prepared to rise from his chair and throw the smaller man through a window. He received the vague impression that some of the others standing around were ready to back the guy up. Careful.

"Eric Enriquez," the man offered. "Mitchell, right? UDC?"

"Uh-huh," Jacko said, relaxing.

"I'm Line Defence, myself. Couldn't see myself working for the Unity. But I remember you from the Narr campaign."

"Right, right," Jacko said, preparing to be friendlier. He was looking at the guy more closely now. Eric was maybe 165 centimeters, a shade shorter than average, and slender of build, but his Selkie t-shirt displayed arms ridged with iron muscles. His features were definitely Hispanic, but there was no trace of an accent, leaving no clue to his origins. His hair was cut in a high-and-tight with a top rather longer than regulation. His right hand hung slack by his side, but there was something indefinably wrong with his left.

He reminded Jacko of a lynx his unit had kept as a mascot.

"And you know what?" Eric asked, grinning.

"What?"

"I didn't like you then, mandryboy --" Eric hissed, and launched himself at Jacko, throwing the bigger man out of his chair and against the wall "-- and I don't like you now!"

Jacko lashed out with a big fist at a target that wasn't there anymore. A foot slammed into his stomach, and then he was flying through the coffeehouse, landing in the middle of the room on all fours.

The little soldier was weaving through the shocked crowd, followed by the group Jacko had already suspected were with him. "See," Eric said, "let me explain something to you. Billy, here," he gestured toward the deathie, "is a dervish of mine. Now, I don't care who you are or what you did, you don't order my friends around."

Jacko got up, shaking his head slowly. "You don't know what you're getting into."

Another incredible blur of movement, this one ending with Jacko on his knees, Eric behind him, pulling his arm up and around. "Look," Eric said softly, and unfolded his left hand in front of Jacko's face.

All five fingers had been amputated beyond the second knuckle. The remaining lengths -- ranging from about three centimeters in the case of the thumb to perhaps six for the middle finger -- had been replaced by catlike claws so sharp that it was impossible to tell exactly where they tapered to their points. The palm was toughened to the consistency of thick leather to protect it against the terrible claws, and even so it was covered with a network of scar tissue.

It was a beautiful job of gene mechanics, the subtle art of melding flesh to artificial constructs, not only at the gross macroscopic level but also on the level of the DNA in the patient's very cells. Anywhere but the finest medical facilities, an attempt at such a job would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and still likely as not left Enriquez with a clawed club of a hand useless for anything but killing. The Line government had given their soldier a deadly weapon which was still a mostly functional hand.

Jacko heaved, pushing Eric away from him and rising quickly. The Unity didn't do that kind of things to its soldiers; only rarely did he regret it. "I'll drive that hand into your heart," he promised.

A calm voice only centimeters behind Jacko said, "You'll be catsmeat."

He whirled to face a tall and strikingly beautiful black woman. Like Enriquez, she was slender but obviously strong; but if Eric had reminded Jacko of a lynx, this woman seemed more like a shrike.

"Who asked you, nig bitch?"

She smiled. "One of those, are you? Eric, can I have this one?"

"My kill, Anna," the short man growled. The woman shrugged and stepped back.

Jacko was suddenly very badly frightened. What Eric could do was abundantly obvious, and the bitch -- Anna? -- was an unknown quantity. Others were moving in around him: another woman, carrying paired bowie knives at her side; a blond man almost as large as Jacko himself; a wild-eyed kid, surely no more than eighteen, with a long object under his trenchcoat carried like a hunting shotgun.

Eric's claws flicked out casually, parting Jacko's sweatshirt and the skin underneath. The slashes were long but shallow. Jacko started to bleed, and the pain came a moment later. The wounds felt like half-meter papercuts.

Jacko had friends throughout the coffeehouse, and they were beginning to move. Jacko relaxed; if he could stall this group of assholes long enough, nothing would do them any good. Even those claws wouldn't help much if the arm attached to them was broken in a few places.

Forry was the first of Jacko's friends to get to him. Like Jacko, he was large and powerfully built; he launched himself at the black woman from about a meter away, and the outcome of the collision appeared certain --

-- until Anna jumped, spinning, and with balletic grace slammed the blade of her right foot into Forry's mouth. She landed perfectly. Forry collapsed to the floor, spitting out teeth.

Jacko was hit from behind, in the kidneys, and the world went away for a second, everything went away except the fire in his lower back and an overwhelming desire to take a breath he couldn't draw. Someone was screaming, far away.

When the world came back in, the screaming was in his ear. He felt a cold circle against the back of his neck. The shotgun.

"-- splattered all over the fucking room!"

It was the kid, he could see from the corner of his eye.

"Mikhail," Eric said quietly, "no."

The kid pulled Jacko back tighter against the muzzle of the shotgun. "Eric, please."

"Not now, Mick," said the woman with the bowie knives. "Come on. You want cops out here?"

"You know what I want," the kid whispered.

Eric shook his head. "Alexis is right, Mikhail, you know that. Not now."

"Blood 'n' martyrs, Eric, he threatened to kill you!" This came from the big blond man.

"He did, Jim. That's true."

Jacko's friends were still moving, albeit slower.

"But I don't think it'll be necessary. See, mandryboys like Jacko here don't take things like this too far." He was moving slowly toward Jacko now, moving his claws back and forth in languid, contemplative gestures. "They think, there'll be a fight, there'll be a winner and a loser, but both ..." he flicked his claws under Jacko's chin "... come out ..." he touched the terrible weapons to the big man's neck, pressing just hard enough to draw tiny beads of blood "... alive." He placed his hand gently around Jacko's neck. "See, you're in the killing jar now, mandryboy, like a butterfly. Don't fuck with us again, nor your friends. Any of them."

He shoved Jacko into a chair, then turned fluidly, gesturing his group to follow. They left with him, the kid tucking the shotgun under his trenchcoat with chilling precision.

Jacko sat stunned in the chair while Forry moaned on the floor. Their friends were approaching slowly, gingerly, clearly unsure if it was over.v

At the table Jacko had originally occupied, the blonde girl buried her face in her hands and said softly, to no one in particular, "I just wanted a night out with my friends ..."

Downtown Auraria at night was a far different place than during the day. The mandrys had all gone home, and what was left was a world they preferred to pretend didn't exist.

"We're getting there," Eric said unnecessarily as he swung the car onto Rice.

Rice Avenue cut diagonally through a good portion of the city, providing an artery from some of the older suburbs straight into skid row. Between was a strip of bars, convenience stores, small restaurants, and narrow alleys that branched off from the main road into a warren of other alleys and twisted side streets.

"Seven and a half blocks, Eric," Lexie replied. "We know."

Eric Enriquez, Mikhail Llewellyn, and Alexis Delapore were not strangers to Rice Avenue, or they hadn't been. They had all lived in Auraria before the Narr campaign, all in the same general area of the north side, though they hadn't known each other then. Then the Line government had recruited them, pulled them from the ranks of its regular army, and along with James O'Toole and Anna Kruger had turned them into something different from an ordinary group of soldiers.

When they'd returned, what had seemed like a frightening urban warfare zone before their military service was tame by comparison. It was sometimes depressing, but rarely frightening.

Rarely.

"Shit," Mick muttered as Eric stopped the car in front of a massive Catholic church. The humming whine of the blowers died to silence, and the car settled to the pavement.

They emerged slowly. They walked to a certain spot, and stood reverently around it for a minute. Lexie touched her hand to her lips and knelt, touching the dark stain on the pavement.

"Come on," Eric said.

Lexie rose, and they walked to the car. "Do you think we're ready?" she asked.

"Of course," Eric replied. "Let's continue."

"Oh yes," Mick said. "Let's."

Eric started the car and floored the accelerator. The blowers whined louder as they shot the car down the street and scattered fall leaves high into the air.

As they lay huddled together in bed, taking deep breaths and letting the night air cool their sweaty skins, Jim turned to Anna and asked her, "Do you think it's over?"

She laughed softly, then said seriously, "Over? With Eric and Lexie and Mick out there? Not bleeding likely."

Jim sighed. "Of course."

She tightened her arms around him. "Forget about it. Get some sleep. You'll need it."

And they slept, their soft breathing the only sound in the concrete room.