From the 14th floor of the Tattersall Hotel in downtown Manhattan, Red Hartford could look straight down into the street and watch the engine compartments of the passing cars glowing a dull red, speckled with melting snow. A block from the Empire State building, the traffic was either yellow taxi cabs or the blacks and deep blues of corporate limousines - tasteful conservatism, privacy in anonymity. Money rolling through the streets paved with gold. Hartford liked that view. He was going to have his own car when he got to Rome, a car smart enough to take him anywhere he wanted to go.

Heights made him dizzy, so he'd keep one hand against the glass to remind himself it was there as he leaned forward to look down, until his horns clunked against the window and reminded him to get back to reality, and let the thought of the money that was waiting for him make him dizzy instead. He smiled every time he thought about it. Here's one troll who's made it, Dad. I have done this. Just me.

Hartford checked the time in the augmented reality display in his contact lenses. It was 1738 hours, December 23rd, 2071. They'd been in these adjoining suites for sixty eight hours and eight minutes. Three hours, fifty two minutes to go.

A suite in the Tattersall was 1,150 nuyen a night, but the hotel bill was part of the operational expenses, and it gave Hartford a chance to educate himself on living like this for the rest of his sunlit days. He turned away from the window, and treated himself to another view he had yet to get tired of - the suite's living room, with two sitting groups, one upholstered in genuine brown leather; next year's model of trideo display from MCT, that could throw an image almost as wide as Hartford's luxury car was going to be long; and a tile-topped bar next to the door with a Manservant-3 drone in a glossy cream color that answered to "Gregory", to pour the drinks.

"Gregory," Hartford called.

"What can I do for you, sir?" The drone asked, tilting its head slightly.

"I'll have a scotch and soda, please."

"Coming right up, sir," the drone answered, one plastic hand sticking out to grab a highball glass.

Thinking about the car he was going to buy in Italy, looking around the room as the robot poured his Talisker, Hartford smiled again, remembering that when he'd had Tetanus, their hacker, reserve these rooms, Tetanus had asked if he should mark the preference for Homo sapiens ingentis. Hartford had told Tetanus yes, seeing as they were both trolls, yes; and when they'd walked into their suites, here in the Tattersall Hotel, downtown Manhattan, the very heart of the corporate fortress, not many blocks from the Corporate Court's own earthside facilities, all the furniture - all of it, down to the end tables - had been troll-sized.

"This is what it's like, having money!" Hartford had said, as soon as he'd straightened up from coming through the door.

Hartford was distracted from the memory when Tetanus suddenly gave out a loud, trailing laugh.

"What's so funny?" Hartford asked genially, although after sixty eight hours and ten minutes together, Tetanus was definitely beginning to bother him.

"Morder der Kinder just made his 10,000th kill!" Tetanus answered. He didn't turn his head to face Hartford when he spoke to him - he barely moved at all. He was collapsed back in the brown leather sofa with his hands at his sides, staring at the wall. This was how he behaved when he was using the Fairlight implanted in his skull, its audio and video outputs routed directly to nanocircuits in his eyes and on his eardrums. This was how Tetanus behaved for twelve hours out of every twenty four. Somewhere in his past, Tetanus had been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a high functioning form of autism that impaired him socially, made him a little odd to get along with. But Red Hartford could get along with anybody. That was his trade. He was a negotiator, a businessman, a connection maker.

"Can I get you a drink?" Hartford asked the hacker.

There was a long pause, where Tetanus' mouth fell open very slowly. Then Tetanus said, "There's been a disturbance at the moderate security penitentiary on Roosevelt Island. Two inmates are being treated for injuries...the cause of the problem was religious tension among the inmates, because it's Christmas."

"No kidding? That's life in the can," Hartford said. And he was a little startled to see the Gregory drone start putting orange juice and ice into a tumbler. When Hartford had asked Tetanus if he could get him a drink, Tetanus had emailed the drone an order. OK, that's Asperger's, Hartford thought with a twist of his mouth. And thanks for the update on who's champion of the matrix game.

Hartford drank his scotch and soda out of his double-sized crystal highball glass and reflected that the bull shaman and the man who had formerly been in maritime security for Wuxing, who Hartford had also worked with on this last job, had been pretty weird in their own ways. Compromise had been alien to the bull shaman, but Hartford had learned early that the way to distract the man, whose name was Otik, away from a disagreement was to present him with a chance to fuck. Hartford had called up an escort service he liked and given instructions that the encounters be made to look like chance.

It had been September of last year that he'd started planning on this job. Fifteen months later and they were done - they were going their separate ways, each with thirteen million nuyen in brand new accounts in a Russian shadow bank that was run out of an obsolete attack submarine in the Barents Sea. Tetanus had arranged the accounts. Hartford had express mailed a commlink to a condo he was renting in Rome under his new, end identity. The commlink contained the passcode and encryption key to his Russian account. He'd already burned the System Identification Number he'd used on the job; he was using a different one for the suite in the Tattersall. He'd burn that one on the sidewalk outside the airport in Rome.

They'd run a con on Citigroup, the megabank that had financed the rebuilding of Manhattan after the big quake. It was the last con Red Hartford would ever have to run. He was twenty-six years old.

Seven years ago he'd been an undergraduate at the University of Philadelphia, studying business and art, when the Crash 2.0 had hit the global matrix and erased most of him. His credit account and birth records remained, but his school records were gone - all of them. He was no longer a college student, and didn't qualify to be one, because he'd never graduated from high school, or even first grade. Just clearing up the charges of child neglect that had been brought against his parents for failing to send him to school took seven months. His dad, who co-owned a neighborhood bar with Hartford's uncle Benton, had repeated that it only went to show that there was only so far a troll could go. Things had looked as bad as they ever had, but within a year Hartford was facing for a little group that got their hands on cars, RVs, and motorcycles, the ownership of which was impossible to prove because the records had Crashed. Then they resold them. It was easier to buy a new life in the shadows than it was to rebuild the one he'd been born into.

He sat down on the couch with the immobile Tetanus and sipped his drink. I should look up what colors can be programmed into chameleon skin for the Mitsubishi Nightsky, he thought, seeing himself winding down a Tuscan highway in a forest green luxury car.

"Charles Camden has just been found dead," Tetanus said.

"What?" Hartford jumped, and his highball glass thumped against the arm of the couch.

"They're saying it was an accident with his prescription medication," Tetanus told him, still not looking at him. An email alert appeared in Hartford's contact lenses. It was from Tetanus; the official story on Camden's demise. He was survived by his ex-wife and two daughters. Camden had been found that morning.

Red Hartford wondered if he was going to piss in his pants. All right, Red...think. Think first, act second. He decided he would take two minutes to consider the situation, and then he would act, if action proved to be the best choice.

It took him one minute and ten seconds. He jumped up off the couch. "Shit, Tetanus, we're checking out. Gregory, reload this for me." He put his glass down in front of the robot. To the hacker he said, "Get packed."

Charles Camden had been their mark at Citigroup. Now a man who hadn't had a single prescription in his life, whose parents had bought him heart and kidney improvements before he was born, was dead in a medication accident. Apparently Hartford had miscalculated. He hadn't expected that Citigroup would kill Camden. If they had, they were a lot angrier than Hartford had expected. And they had certainly wrung every scrap of possible data out of Charlie first.

The plan had been that the bank would notice the missing millions within an hour of the theft. Then they would start looking for thieves who were fleeing. So Hartford and Tetanus would spend three days in the Tattersall, until Citibank was convinced that the thieves were long gone, and then they would just drive out of Manhattan. Hartford had a van waiting in the hotel's parking garage. The other members of their team had handled their own exits - Hartford didn't know where they were, and that was the way he liked it.

But now Hartford just wanted to get in motion before an anti-personnel missile came through the floor to ceiling window.

He explained the situation to Tetanus as they threw their few things together. In three minutes they were standing by the door. Tetanus' suitcase was following him, and he was carrying a garment bag that he unzipped and reached into.

"I don't think they know where we are," Hartford was telling Tetanus as Hartford zipped up his fashionable armored jacket. "These suites are rented on pristine SINs; Citibank doesn't even have our faces. But I'm moving up the schedule, because I like to be safe about things. It's nothing really to worry about."

"OK," Tetanus pulled an Ares vibrosword out of the garment bag. He hung the garment bag from one of his lower canines and pulled the sword out of its sheath. "I'm not worried," the hacker said, and the weapon grrrrrred into motion as he tested its battery, the edge blurring to invisibility, like a hummingbird's wings.

Hartford felt a spike of irritation about that. He'd told Tetanus no weapons in the hotel - they had to look like tourists, not shadowrunners. They'd have to get rid of it, but right now, he just wanted to get in the car.

Hartford used his commlink to order the van to be waiting for them at the front of the hotel; then he checked the video feed from the microcamera on the outside of the door. He saw a black man in his forties passing the door, wearing a Synergist overcoat with snow melting on the shoulders, blue blobs of cold water against the warmer fabric.

He waited a full minute before opening the door and ducking out through it.

They took the stairs, carrying their suitcases. First, the elevators were too small for two men who were 2.25 meters tall to stand up straight. Second, Hartford didn't want to take any chance of being trapped in the elevator if Citibank hackers seized control of it. The Tattersall's computer security was tough, it was one of the things that recommended it for Hartford, but not impossible to crack. Yes, Tetanus might have fought for control of the elevator in the event it was hacked, but why risk it?

They'd just passed the halfway point, the seventh floor, and Hartford was feeling good about their chances, when he got an email from Tetanus. "What's this now?" He asked, irritated. His voice and their footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Hartford thought, I'm right here, you know, you can just speak to me.

"It's about Rourke," the hacker answered from behind him.

He opened it. It was a file from a blog called "New York Blood". Hartford had heard the name. It was put up by a pair of human men who were amateur crime reporters. They specialized in the grotesque. And the unsolved. If unidentified metahuman heads got found by a restaurant's staff in a box of frozen krill, "New York Blood" would post a video.

Hartford felt the first squirming tendrils of panic.

A liquor store in Terminal, the south Manhattan neighborhood where NYPD Inc. did not go save in APCs, had been the scene of a violent incident yesterday. The video panned through the front door, traveled to the rear of the store, where a human woman was face down in a lake of blood that challenged believability. She was wearing a brown faux leather jacket, but that had been slashed through from collar to hem and was peeled open like a baked potato. Everything underneath it was trenches of ruby red blood and pink flesh. The "New York Blood" people weren't more than half an hour behind her killing. The camera lingered on the spine, the stump of which stuck up out of the mess from the middle of the back, and about five vertebrae of which were definitely missing. She'd been slammed into the tequila display, and there were plastic bottles all over the floor.

The freckled cream complexion, the color of the hair that they had had genetically tweaked to better appeal to Charles Camden of Citibank based on analysis of his previous relationships and media consumption, the long, graceful legs - she was face down, but Hartford knew it was Cailin Rourke. The other face from their team.

Stunned by the video, trotting down the stairs, Hartford had a thought intrude. Damn it! I left my drink on the bar in the room!

*****

Hartford did not think anymore about getting rid of Tetanus' vibrosword.

Citibank had known Rourke. They had known her face, they had known her location. And they had not tried to interrogate her.

The van was waiting for them under the hotel's drive-up portico. Between the hotel door and the van, they passed a quintet of laughing, well-dressed women in winter coats, and Hartford's stomach had clenched at the possibility of an attack - the women drawing ceramic knives tipped with venom milked from Mojave Nova Scorpions kept in cages for the purpose, and springing on them in one coordinated leap, like a flock of birds in brightly colored overcoats.

But the women went by with no more than the looks two trolls usually got walking side by side in a neighborhood of corporate castles. Hartford and Tetanus jumped in the van and slammed the doors.

"I need you to sweep the van for signals, any hidden nodes," Hartford told Tetanus. Tetanus barely nodded. "Tetanus! Greetings from planet Earth!"

"I'm doing it," Tetanus said.

"All right," Hartford put some apology in his voice. He started to make the first of a number of calls.

When Tatanus said, "We've got one," Hartford shrank in his seat. He cancelled his call.

"Tell me more, tell me more," Hartford encouraged, because the more he knew, the less he would be afraid. He hoped. His phone call was postponed.

"It's an RFID tag. It was in hidden mode, but that didn't stop me finding it." Tetanus laughed at his own success. "I'm editing its outgoing data now. I've got us going north on 5th Avenue instead of south."

An RFID tag was a millimeter thick, and no wider than the tip of Hartford's index finger. "You found one tracking tag? But there could be more, right?"

"Sure, there could be..." Tetanus answered. He sounded amazed and amused at the suggestion that there could be a tag he hadn't found, but there could be a dozen of them all over the van.

The calls are going to have to wait, until I figure out what to do. Hartford was driving manually, so that he'd know the moment it happened if a Citibank hacker took control. He gripped the wheel tighter, and furrowed his face into a frown as he tried to think. He had to assume they were still tracking the van. They knew his face, they knew Tetanus' face - there was no way they were getting out of Manhattan over a bridge or through the tunnel. Hartford thought, Fuck! Fuck! A world full of spirits and gods, but I can't seem to find one to smile on me! Twenty minutes ago I was having a scotch and soda in a four thousand nuyen, leather upholstered couch, browsing online for luxury cars to drive me to the Vatican Museums, and now I'm passing 29th Street in the snow trying to avoid the invisible monster that deboned Cailin in a liquor store in Terminal! What the fuck?!

*****

Melchiorre's menu offered a link to a history of the restaurant, which Hartford had browsed many times. There had first been an Italian restaurant at that location in 1907. The old building had been torn down and a new one put up in 1925, and that was when the restaurant opened up under the new name. The new building had been designed with Prohibition in mind - the first floor had remained the restaurant, and the second floor, allegedly private apartments, had been a series of drinking rooms served by waiters from a central bar. In 1937, a black boxer named Adam Coop was stabbed to death at the bar for taking a white woman to dinner. In 1948, Jake The Jimmy De Luca and an associate were gunned down at the table by the door on the orders of Don Vito Genovese. In the days after the quake in 2005, the damaged building had been made into an ad hoc field surgery, and there'd been a famous riot there when a mob had tried to loot the place for water and medical supplies. Actors, politicians, writers had all come and gone through Melchiorre's doors. Sheila Karadin, an executive vice president at NeoNET in New York, had her birthday party there every year. The place was a landmark. Hartford knew Michael Gianno, one of three owners. Michael Gianno wasn't there tonight.

"Mr. Gianno's not here tonight?" Hartford repeated what the manager had just told him.

"I'm afraid not," the manager answered.

"Not anywhere?" Hartford asked.

"I'm afraid not," the manager said, but with a new inflection that made it sound original.

Hartford thought, A world full of gods, all pissing on me. The man works seventy hours a week, I pick the day he's not here.

The manager's name was Mr. Trenton. He was an elf with cream white skin and blonde hair, three sapphire studs in his left ear that matched the color of his eyes. He was looking at Hartford and Tetanus because they hadn't even unzipped their jackets, and because Tetanus was the only person in the restaurant carrying a garment bag. He'd hacked the weapon detector at the front door and it had let him pass. It was 1820 hours and the dinner crowd was arriving. Hartford and Tetanus at the bar were two of only four trolls in the room, and the only ones not to have corporate logos on their coats and the look of bodyguards.

"Well," Hartford nodded his head, " please show me to the door, Mr. Trenton."

"The door, sir?" Mr. Trenton feigned confusion.

"The door in the floor."

Apropos of nothing relevant, Tetanus said, too loudly: "Morder der Kinder's back online! He's got eight more kills!"

"Heeeey," with a big smile, Hartford clapped his hands on Tetanus' shoulders. He acted like that was great news. Privately he wondered why hackers kept these imbecilic screen names, like Tetanus, and Killer of Children in German. His theory was that they picked them out playing VR shooters when they were thirteen, and stayed with them because they didn't care about losing their virginity.

Hartford turned his smile on Mr. Trenton. "You know, I remember when Michael did this remodeling. This new bar's just beautiful. This is ceramic tile, right?"

"Actually that's hematite," Mr. Trenton said.

"Hematite." Hartford ran his fingers across it, smearing a water ring left by a beer stein. "Beautiful! I told Michael he should get wood, but this is awesome."

A pair of men dressed in Aztechnology style and who spoke English with Aztlaner accents came up to the bar, and a bartender moved into place to serve them. Hartford, Tetanus, and Mr. Trenton moved down a meter and a half to speak privately. Hartford unzipped his jacket, and reached into it slowly enough to give Mr. Trenton time to wonder what he was reaching for. "I'm sorry Mike can't be here. I'd call him, but, you know, it's not the kind of thing I want to reach him on his business commlink about. Don't worry! Just show us to it, and I'll transfer the two thousand." Hartford brought his hand out of his jacket, with a certified credstick between his thumb and forefinger.

Mr. Trenton took them through the kitchen, and down the stairs into the basement. They moved some empty boxes concealing a corrugated plastic trapdoor that was locked with a keypad maglock, but Hartford had told Tetanus to expect that - as soon as they'd walked into Melchiorre's, Tetanus had been scanning for the maglock node. As they'd turned sideways and ducked to squeeze down the basement stairs, Mr. Trenton leading the way, Tetanus had given Hartford a broad grin and a big thumbs up. So Hartford knew that when he entered today's date into the keypad, the lock would disengage, and Mr. Trenton would think that Mr. Gianno had given Hartford the code.

They flipped open the trap door. Steel rungs were riveted into the side of a concrete tube leading down into utter blackness.

Hartford took out his credstick, and Mr. Trenton did the same. Hartford knew that 1,000 was the usual price, but he'd pretended it was double to move the restaurant manager. He transferred the money, laid his hand on the elf's thin shoulder, and said with a smile, "There's no reason to tell anyone we were here."

Tetanus climbed down first. As Hartford followed him, and the black hole swallowed him up, Mr. Trenton, with the perpetual, welcoming smile of the restaurateur, said, "I see no reason to disagree."

*****

After the trapdoor was locked above them, it was utterly dark.

"Tetanus?" Hartford asked.

"Uh huh?"

"Do you remember how we discussed that you shouldn't talk when I'm trying to do business?"

"Talk?"

"Morder Der Kinder's kill totals? OK? Nobody gives a shit."

"Oh..." Tetanus answered. "I thought that was just during the job."

"This is like a new job," Hartford told him.

Tetanus was moving on. "I don't like it down here."

"I've got a flashlight," Hartford said.

"We're in a fucking static zone," Tetanus groaned. "How can there be a static zone on Manhattan Island?"

"Well, it's a different world here, in the Underground." Hartford took out his flashlight. He'd been able to see Tetanus by his body heat, and the ceiling was a few degrees warmer than the floor. But the flashlight improved things. Hartford congratulated himself, not for the first time, on having had vision enhancement and magnification installed in his eyes before he'd left Philadelphia four years ago. He'd also had his bones laced with plastic, and his reflexes wired with neural boosters and adrenaline stimulators. He was wearing a heather gray armor jacket over his clothes, and under his clothes, a sleeveless, midnight black body stocking that extended to his knees, constituting a second layer of armor protection. He had the flashlight, and two certified credsticks, one with ten thousand nuyen on it, the second now with only eight. They'd left their suitcases when they'd abandoned the van, but there hadn't been anything in them but clothes. That was the list of his assets - with that, he had to get to Rome.

No problem, he thought. Which was an overstatement, but not much of one, because he still had his commlink. How many bad places have I gotten out of, just by talking on the link?

Hartford used his link's GPS to tell him which way was south, and they headed off, Tetanus having hung his weapon on his hip and dropped the garment bag.

In the mid sixteen hundreds, the Dutch had started laying down cobblestone streets on the southern end of Manhattan. With the streets had come drains, cellars, and sewers - people had been digging under the city for four hundred years, and after the quake and reconstruction at the turn of the 21st century, it had been most convenient for The Manhattan Development Consortium just to strike a lot of those tunnels off the maps; they sealed them with concrete, hung padlocks on them, and dropped the keys down a drain. But no padlock held forever.

Hartford had known there was a way into the Underground below Melchiorre's, but he had never been beneath the city before. He preferred the 101st floor to the basement. To his surprise, it wasn't too hard for them to find their way. The wireless signal that connected their links to the matrix was spotty, but usable, and at many of the intersecting tunnels they found RFID tags cleantacked to the walls, broadcasting information on the location. In some places there were even sheets of digital paper stuck to the walls. There were gang tags, and occult symbols. Every few hundred meters, there'd be an email dead drop - children's teddy bears, their nodes full of messages dropped in by passersby, to be picked up by the recipient later.

They'd passed through a room thirty meters on a side with a ceiling five meters high, with a row of van-sized water tanks along one wall, and a huge old furnace against the other - the engineering room of some pre-quake skyscraper, all aboveground trace of it erased by reconstruction twenty years before Hartford had been born. A crowd was gathered in the room, and above the glare of portable floodlamps there turned AROs - images that only appeared in the display of Hartford's contact lenses, or that were projected directly onto Tetanus' retinas by his image link implant - of two magicians who would duel each other with sorcery in another half an hour in that big room. One was a white dwarf dog shaman with clay brown hair and beard. His opponent was a bald human crocodile shaman with jet black skin, from the Nigerian Kingdom of Yoruba. Hartford and Tetanus stopped there to buy hotdogs in a package that heated them when a button was pushed. Hartford avoided the locally grown chicken kebabs. Trolls had great constitutions, but Hartford wasn't going to take the chance of puking up chicken and peppers from here to the river.

Hartford had been looking over his shoulder since they'd abandoned the van up on the street - it wasn't hard to notice the four humans who followed them out of the dueling room.

They'd had to duck over almost double to squeeze through a hole that had been chiseled through a concrete wall, that led them to a staircase made from recut sections of office floor laid into natural earth, that took them down to the floor of a subway tunnel, the only illumination in which was LED lights stuck to the walls every twenty meters, throwing out a weak, blue-tinged light. Hartford turned off his flashlight.

Hartford sent an email from his link to Tetanus'. WE'RE BEING FOLLOWED, 4 GANGERS.

Tetanus sent him back an image of a troll smiley face, with horns and lower canines projecting up out of the mouth. What the fuck does that mean? Hartford wondered. They were about thirty meters ahead of the four humans following them - two men and two women, all wearing long, dirty overcoats. Hartford glanced over his shoulder, and used his vision magnification to zoom in on them. The one in the lead was barechested under his coat, even in the winter-cold tunnels, and was wearing a double necklace of bone fragments. The woman behind him kept licking her lips, and had what looked like a bracer made out of interwoven fishhooks around her right forearm. She stared straight back at Hartford like she was calculating how much she could sell his bone and muscle for, per kilo. Hartford thought, And down here, they've probably got a day of the week set aside just for that. These four had the repurposed look of long term drug addicts.

Hartford turned back around and kept walking. His GPS said they still had some distance to go. Then the first pistol shot boomed through the tunnel.

Hartford yelled at Tetanus, "OK now, run!" A barrage of gunfire opened up behind them. There wasn't anywhere to go but forward - forty meters ahead, the tunnel curved to the right. Other than that it was just empty track all the way there. It was one of those times - it fact, it was the first time in his shadowrunning career - that Hartford just had to put his hope in the fact that trolls ran faster than little people.

Their pursuers weren't hitting much at that range, but Hartford was struck three times in the back, the slugs smacking into his layered body armor and offending his flesh. He heard Tetanus getting hit at least once.

They went around the bend in the track at a flat run, and when Hartford saw a double steel door standing half open in the wall to his right, he thought that maybe the gods of the 6th World had decided to stop pissing on him. "Tetanus!" he hissed, and pulled the hacker through the doors, and slammed them behind them. They did not latch.

The room was empty, except for a big electrical box that had long been stripped of every component. It was totally dark - Hartford could see Tetanus only by his body heat. Tetanus drew his sword. Hartford held his finger to his lips. They had to bend in here - the room was centimeters shorter than they were. Hartford gestured for Tetanus to flatten himself against the wall beside the door to the left, while Hartford stuffed himself into the little space to the right, and took his flashlight out of his pocket.

They heard a pack of running feet arrive outside the door - then a batch of gunfire, with yellow light blinking through the crack between the doors as bullets spanged through the metal.

Tetanus turned his vibrosword on.

Oh, fuck me, Hartford thought to himself.

The doors were pulled open from the outside, and the man with the bone necklace poked a Predator semiautomatic through, its muzzle glowing red from firing. Hartford's wired reflexes made everything seem to move fifteen percent slower - Hartford seized the man's arm just above the elbow with one hand, and with the other he slapped the gun down and out of the man's grip.

The woman with the fishhook jewelry wrapped around the right sleeve of her armored overcoat was coming in beside her mate, her semiautomatic in a two handed grip. Tetanus took a half step forward and drove his vibrosword into her neck, the blade growling right through the muscle and gristle and bringing out a spurting fountain of blood that glowed in the cold air. She gave out a stunning, damaged scream, and fired twice, but Hartford didn't know if she'd hit anything.

The man in the bone necklace whipped a tanto out of a belt sheath, then slammed it into Hartford's abdomen. Hartford folded his arm, twisted at the hips, and smashed his elbow into the man's mouth.

There were two fast gunshots at Tetanus from one of the two gangers behind the leaders, and Hartford saw the slugs plow into the hacker's armor out of the corner of his eye.

Hartford fired fast jabs into Bone Necklace's chin. The gunfire was becoming a cascade now - Hartford was shot again. Tetanus made a tight slash with his buzzing sword and Fishhook's gun arm came off just below the shoulder, the serrated blade chewing through sleeve and bone. The woman's expression turned to glass and she fell to the floor.

Bone Necklace was bleeding from the mouth and nose. He tried to slash at Hartford's eyes, but Hartford slapped his hand away, and threw a roundhouse right into the side of his head. Bone Necklace tried to move his head out of the way, but didn't succeed.

One of the gangers in the second row fired twice straight at Tetanus' chest, the muzzle flash lighting up the troll's face. Tetanus jerked. But he lunged forward again, and drove his sword through the shooter's solar plexus. The shooter sprawled backward off the invading point.

Hartford made an impulsive decision and wrapped his arms around Bone Necklace's neck, picking the stunned addict right up off his feet when he did it.

The last of the four gangers bolted back the way she had come, muttering something that sounded like, "This bullshit can go to Hell."

Tetanus poked the man he'd just stabbed under the sternum through the left eye, the vibrosword bringing forth a fog of hot blood and soft tissue.

Breathing hard, Tetanus turned around to look at Hartford, who looked back at him, his teeth gritted in effort. There was a noise like craa-pump! when Bone Necklace's neck gave way. The man stank like poisonous dirt.

Tetanus shut off his sword.

Hartford tossed the dead man down onto the old subway tracks.

Tetanus was staring straight into Hartford's eyes. Tetanus almost never looked into anyone's eyes, but when he did, he had a way of making it clear that he was looking, and that he wanted to learn something by it. The light was minimal - Hartford's troll eyes saw Tetanus mostly by body heat.

Hartford remembered that he still had his flashlight in one hand. He'd meant to use its beam to blind their attackers, but he'd forgotten all about it.

Hartford asked, "Are you wearing your form fitting armor under that jacket?"

Still breathing hard, Tetanus just nodded.

"What does a troll smiley face mean, buddy?" Hartford asked.

"I shut off two of their smartlinks!" Tetanus said happily. "They were only running Redcap Nix, and their agents were two years old. Shit! They didn't even notice me! Not like your friend in the restaurant. Now that guy had a Renraku maglock, with a Pueblo Eagle 3 running, so that meant that I had to..."

Hartford listened. It made Tetanus happy when he listened; Tetanus got very devoted when he talked about technical details. Hartford didn't remember a thing he said, of course.

*****

When next they came to the surface, it was in a long, narrow courtyard in the Terminal district, four blocks from where Cailin had been killed. The buildings on all sides towered up forty stories. It had been snowing steadily while they were underground, and white chips of snow whirled down on them now, dusting the centimeter of powder already on the courtyard's pavement. There were two trees in the courtyard, bare of leaves, clad in white. They could hear almost nothing in the enclosed space - the city was far outside, and they were alone.

Hartford had an appointment here. He looked at the time stamp displayed in his contact lenses - it was 1940 hours. Their footprints were the first to mar the new snow as they walked along, close to the wall. Hartford's ribs and shoulder ached from the bullets he'd taken.

"There's a good connection here," Tetanus said, without looking at Hartford. "I think some gang is maintaining it. There's a nexus in one of these buildings. Tickets have sold out for Confederate Railroad's Christmas Eve show in Atlanta, Georgia."

"Good to know," Hartford nodded. They were walking around the edge of the courtyard, just to keep moving. Hartford kept looking around, his enhanced eyes bringing out the details in the thermographic black of the blanket of snow. Someone had arrived.

It was a family of orks, pushing wheelbarrows piled with sealed packages of clothing. Soon behind them came three human women with rolling suitcases, wearing hoodies with the word Christian printed on them in glowing graphics. One of them carried portable speakers, and the sound of "Hark, The Herald Angels Sing" softly rolled through the open space. The music software on Hartford's commlink recognized the song, and offered to tell him its history. He declined.

From another direction, five human teenagers lugging canvas sacks appeared. Then five other human teenagers in a different style of clothes, carrying a folding table with storage tubs lashed to it. The two groups of kids set up far apart from one another.

It was a night market. It was scheduled to begin in five minutes. Hartford wished to be polite, so he waited until Funeral had taken his place and opened for business before approaching him.

Funeral was a sturdy little human, about 1.8 meters tall, with a barrel chest and heavy forearms. He was white, with a jutting beard, and wore a watch cap with a dark blue parka. Some of the teenagers with the canvas sacks had come up to stare longingly at his handguns, but Funeral ignored them when Hartford walked up.

Funeral had come with two folding stools and a Morlock drone, a military surplus item about the size of a touring motorcycle that was an armored box on tracks, designed to carry supplies. It was closed, and had two duffle bags lashed to the top of it. Funeral used an AR display to advertise his merchandise without having to put it in the open.

Sitting on one of the stools with her knees together was Funeral's woman, Genji, a Chinese human girl with a falling sweep of black hair, wearing a coat with a hood trimmed in white fur, and a red leather collar with a gold plated D-ring at the throat.

"Hello, my friend," Funeral said with a crinkling smile, resting his hands on the butt of the Japanese automatic rifle and shotgun combo he wore on a single point sling. It was often polite to avoid using the name you had last known for a friend who was on the run. "Glad you could make it."

Hartford bent to shake the dealer's hand. He was the last dealer on the island who would take his calls. Hartford had run through his list of friends, and had had to cross the first three off right away - they couldn't compromise themselves that far, not with Citigroup so angry they were slaughtering people in the tequila aisle and visiting accidents on their own executives. Many of his friends weren't in Manhattan, but in Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey - too far away to help in the time frame Hartford needed. Two people he'd called while traveling the Underground hadn't answered. Funeral was the last on the list.

Funeral looked at Tetanus, who was staring at the ground. Hartford could see Funeral considering if he should ask to be introduced, and then deciding, no.

We're radioactive, Hartford thought. He'll touch us only so far as he safely can.

"I've got everything you wanted," Funeral told Hartford. The Morlock opened up, and Hartford took a step toward it, but Funeral's dog was chained to the drone. The dog was a cloned Siberian Husky named Fred Astaire. Fred bared his steel fangs at Hartford, and glared at him with his black cybernetic eyes, and Hartford remembered to let Funeral handle the things.

The night market was in business now, and more and more people were in the courtyard every minute. One of the groups of human teenagers had started up their speakers, so East Coast death metal competed with the Christmas carols. A murmur of conversation was floating through the muffling snow. The crowd was getting thicker, but a space opened up around Hartford when Funeral handed him an assault shotgun. It had the full-sized troll grips.

With a great sense of relief, Hartford told Funeral, "You're a genius, my friend."

Funeral gave a modest shrug, and handed him a belt with a bag attached. "Sure. Here are the drum mags."

*****

As soon as they stepped away from Funeral's stall, Tetanus burst out, "StahlRitter just pronged Morder der Kinder for twenty thousand points!"

Hartford patted him on the back. "You saved that until after business. That's good."

Tetanus grinned, and actually looked Hartford in the eye. "Gloria Maddox's new porn sim is out. It's set in a private school! It's called Winter Classes!"

"Great."

Still grinning, Tetanus went on. "She was Hard On Magazine's Best Newcomer in '70."

"Even greater the second time."

They paid fifty nuyen to some locals to rent a quiet spot in an adjacent building for half an hour. Hartford had bought a medkit from Funeral, and they took the risk of taking turns removing their armor, and treating their contusions from the fight in the Underground. A couple of medicated bandages applied according to the kit's instructions, and Hartford felt better. He felt better, too, because they'd been on the run for more than two hours and they hadn't been dismembered yet, so his plan must be working. And he had to admit, although it disappointed him to do it, that the shotgun made him feel much, much better.

The Auto Assault 16 was graphite gray, modified for full sized hands, with foregrip, barrel vents and a smartlink mounted underneath the muzzle. It fed 12 gauge shells out of a thirty-two round drum, and it could fire on semiautomatic, burst fire, or full auto. Hartford had bought the weapon and two drums, one full of explosive slugs, the other armor piercing. He loaded the latter. They had the shotgun, a Warrior 10 submachine gun for Tetanus, and the medkit. Funeral had made an opening offer on the price with a 50% desperation markup, but Hartford had brought him down to 25%.

Hartford believed in deals. He believed that convincing people was the way to get ahead. He'd believed that when he'd been a freshman at Philly U., studying business, wanting a luxury suite and a Japanese sedan. And it was the deal that was the thing...most of the time. But even back in Philadelphia, carrying cases of beer in the family bar, the practicality of shotguns was something he hadn't been able to deny. His uncle and dad had kept a pair of old Remington pumps with biometrics under the bar, one loaded with gel rounds, one with 00 buckshot. There were some situations you couldn't negotiate with.

He was zipping his jacket back up when his commlink alerted him to an incoming call. He answered it right away, transmitting his audio only. Jesus Christ. She called back.

"We're clean, right?" He quickly asked Tetanus.

"What? Oh, the commlinks? Yeah, anonymous as a baseball cap."

"Red?" The caller asked. "Red, are you there?"

"Yes, I'm here...but I'm not going to use your name."

There was a pause. "OK. Red...what's going on?"

He didn't tell her the details. He said he needed help. He had to swallow before he could bring himself to give his location over the link, no matter what kind of hat Tetanus said they were wearing.

"I'm coming," she said.

After ending the call, Red remembered that she'd said that to him once before, ten years ago. He'd been splayed out drunk in an autumn corn field one night, and she'd organized three guys to come and physically lift him up into her mother's pickup.

He and Tetanus had to go out into the street, so that she could find them. When she manifested, they stepped behind an SUV parked in an alley that was displaying a message in neon blue font above gang glyphs: You Touch This Truck, My Robot Shits On Your Face!

"Hi, Obelia," Red said. "Thanks a lot for this."

"By the Mother's Mercy, Hartford, you had better tell me what the fuck is going on."

"Actually, really, I had better not. Sorry again. I just need some magical help, until I get out of the city."

Obelia Reese was a witch from Perkintown, Pennsylvania, a few kilometers southwest of Philadelphia. Hartford had known her in high school. A human woman with freckles, they'd been out of touch for a few years. He knew she was in a coven now, and had two husbands, John and Tom, and a little son by each of them. She was the only magician who'd returned his email. He'd contacted her while he and Tetanus were walking the Underground. She was projecting herself through the etheric plane to be with them now as a misty image of the girl Hartford had known back then.

Obelia Reese laughed - she had the same laugh he remembered from bonfire parties. "Well, hello to you, too, Red. It's been too long. What do you need the Mother's help against?"

Hartford said, "A beast spirit. It has to be a beast spirit - it slipped in and out of a liquor store without any mundane seeing it, and it kills with claws and teeth. This shotgun was my policy so far, but I'd love to have you here, too."

"How long do you need my help?"

Hartford checked the time in his contact lenses. "About another half an hour."

Obelia's manifestation shrugged, and gave a wry, nervous smile, which meant yes.

"Tetanus," Hartford turned to his hacker. "Get us a car."

Tetanus turned his head slightly toward the van displaying the threat about shitting robots.

"Something less gang-affiliated than that," Hartford amended.

*****

Tetanus convinced the computer onboard an Ares Humvee with 177,000 kilometers on the odometer that it belonged to him and Hartford. Hartford wedged himself into a driver's seat not designed for someone like him, and drove them to the docks in Terminal. It was a pier that a street gang charged admission to, but the gang organized that effort through a computer node - Tetanus got them on the dock for free.

It was 2109 hours. The wind was whisking heavy flakes of snow past them. The Hudson River was an ink brown plane that disappeared quickly from view in the flying snow, with the New Jersey lights on the other bank glowing through. There was no one else nearby. Hartford parked the SUV facing down the street they'd just come from, so that he could watch.

Hartford knew a crew of sailors based out of Long Island who did shadow work. They had a cargo ship at anchor offshore. He'd arranged them as a backup plan for getting out of the city, although it had been a backup plan neither he, nor they, every thought he'd have to use. The captain had sounded surprised when Hartford had called him earlier, from the Underground, and told him to send the launch. It was waiting in the Hudson. Hartford had sent the email to summon it while Tetanus had been getting them the truck.

He and Tetanus both got out of the Humvee. They didn't like being squeezed into seats made for humans. But Hartford didn't like being on the pier, either. The smell of the river, the cranes rearing up into the night, the buildings being chipped away by time and lack...with a cold wind carrying snow, it was all too working class.

Out on the dark river, he could see and hear the launch coming. It was only about thirty meters off the pier.

He remembered with a grimace and a shudder how that drug addict's neck had felt, back in the Underground, stretching, and then snapping, in his arms.

Obelia Reese came streaking to him out of the city lights, hanging at his eye level. "There's a warded minivan pulling up to the curb up there," she said quickly, pointing up the street. "There's no driver, but there is a big animal in the back of it."

"An animal?" Hartford was surprised. He'd expected a beast spirit. A spirit existed in the physical plane and the astral plane simultaneously - Obelia could have attacked a spirit. If it was an animal, she couldn't help. And who but Citibank could be delivering an animal out here in a drone van warded against astral intrusion?

Pointing, Obelia cried out, "There it is!" She sounded shocked.

Hartford crouched and threw the Auto Assault 16 up against his shoulder. The smartgun reticle glowed green wherever he focused his eyes. He looked up the street, straining to see. Traffic was light on the street. There were cars parked along the curb. He saw one liquid motion, a ripple of asphalt gray, as tall as the door handles on a car, about forty meters away.

"A what?" Tetanus wanted to know, his voice frightened.

Hartford gritted his teeth. "OK, fuck you then," he spit, and opened up.

The Auto Assault 16 bellowed, and glowing shells flew out the side of it as the weapon hurled armor piercing slugs down the street, Hartford waving the muzzle back and forth across the spot he'd seen the thing. A motorcycle's front tire exploded. A fat hole appeared in the grill of a compact car. A street sign fell, the stem shot through. Pieces of asphalt bounced into the air. Hartford saw it again, still coming, at least two meters long; across it's body oiled the colors of the street, the snow, the cars it passed - it was streaking at them faster than any metahuman could run.

Hartford heard Tetanus screaming, "Run! Run! Run!" And then a big splash, and he knew that the hacker had just jumped into the Hudson.

Hartford remembered how Rourke's jacket had been sliced open like the skin on a baked potato, and he thought to himself, This shit can go to hell. I'll drive to the boat. And he jumped back into the Humvee, the shotgun in his lap.

"Look out, Red!" He heard Obelia scream, and the windshield smashed in on him as something heavy crashed down on the hood, and it was a tiger, one clawed forefoot now on the steering wheel at twelve o'clock between Hartford's hands at ten and two; it was trying to get its head through the hole where the windshield no longer was, and it had fangs as long as Hartford's little finger, but it had no fur - it's body had turned the same rust red color as the Humvee. He could smell its humid breath.

Hartford screamed himself as he slammed the car into reverse and pressed backward into the seat, to stay away from those claws, to keep from being decapitated, and there was one long second of terror before the truck raced backward off the pier and fell, and the frigid river water was pouring in.

Hartford had held the door open with his left foot as he'd slammed down on the accelerator with his right, and now he burst out of the car and struck out swimming as fast as he could before the cloned, cybernetically rebuilt tiger biodrone could get on top of him. The animal was being driven by a remote operator who was looking at Hartford through its eyes. It would be relentless. He felt water streaming on his face as he broke the surface and dragged in air. All he could see was smears of light from the other bank of the river. He heard the launch's engine idling, and he thrashed around trying to see it. The shotgun was gone. His clothes were weighing him down. He wasn't much of a swimmer. At sunset he'd been looking down on limousines from the 14th floor. Now he was drowning in the Hudson, shaking with cold. How did they find us? How did they find us? How did they find us? Any second, he was going to be on the bottom of the river with the tiger crouched on his back, pulling his spine out with its teeth. Can that fucking thing breathe underwater?

Looking around, he saw the launch. And he saw Tetanus coming at him from his right, in the half second before the hacker threw out his hand and grabbed Hartford by the back of his jacket.

"He's got him!" A voice snapped from the launch, with an old Boroughs accent.

Hartford heard Obelia Reese's voice coming from above him. "Don't fight, Red! Just hold on!"

Hartford got his left arm around Tetanus' shoulders, and they were side by side in the cold water, their horns bumping together.

Then the launch's engine roared up to maximum. It pulled away from Tetanus and Hartford, and the yellow rope Tetanus was gripping in his left fist pulled taunt, lifting dripping out of the water and into the blowing snow. Hartford slapped his cold numb right hand around that rope, and it towed them down the river, away from Manhattan.

A sailor must have thrown this rope as soon as Tetanus was in the river, Hartford thought. I'm getting quick-thinking smugglers for Christmas.

"Thank you, Mother," Hartford heard Obelia say from not far above his head. "Your kindness is your blessing to us."

The only reason she could be saying that, he thought, is if tigers don't swim out to sea.

Very good. Well written and engaging.

Excellent writings.

Thanks for the feedback, Acidsaliva and Khyron .

I'd written this for the fiction contest Tisoz announced late last year, but then nobody else entered. I'd also run it past Bull for his fanzine, but that project seems stalled. So I put it up on Dumpshock.

I was half expecting the game stats Tetanus would randomly spout out to be code for something like citibank trying to buy him out. Also biodrone stealth tiger? That's crazy, I like.

The tiger is straight off of AUG 154.

Ninety-one views but only two comments? Come on, there have to be more opinions out there than that. Somebody must have hated it .

THAT was very engaging, had me hooked from begining to end. Well done indeed! You put my own pitiful attempts to shame.

Very wow, it was engaging like the others said. I liked the characters and the flow of the story. Are you planing on writing more?

Well, more of what?

I am a writer. I'm about to finish a novel and start shopping it, so that takes up most of my time. I enjoy writing Shadowrun fiction, but unfortunately there's almost no market for it. Catalyst isn't hiring, and there are few to no outlets for fan work. So, there's very little return in writing SR stories. I'd like to have a reason to do more.

My other SR short stories "Sharp's Farm", "Carding Estates", and "If You Meet The Buddha", have been posted on DS. You can find my non-Shadowrun novel Sojourns On Mars on the Kindle, and at podiobooks.com.