“Don’t talk that way, Jiro,” Sam said.

“What difference does it make?” Jiro said listlessly. “We will be killed by these… these… terrorists.”

“Terrorists!” Crenshaw scoffed. “Kid, you don’t know the meaning of the word. These clowns are garden-variety shadowrunners. Their best card is that street mage, but they’re still petty criminals hiding from the bright lights of the corporate world and scavenging whatever pickings they can. They’re human rats.”

“Even if they are not terrorists, they still hide from the law,” Jiro said weakly. “How can they let us go when we have seen their faces and heard their names?”

“Don’t matter much,” Crenshaw shrugged. “The names are just street names, and the faces can be changed easily enough. These runners have no records in the databanks, so what’s to trace? They’ll let us go if we behave ourselves. All we’ve got to do is wait.”

"Wait? The only end is death,” Jiro said in a flat voice. He lay down again and was asleep in moments. Sam wondered how the man did that. Crenshaw picked a soycake off the plate on the floor.

“You should eat, kid.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Your loss.”

Crenshaw popped the cake into her mouth and wolfed down a few krill wafers before upending the water container and draining it. Sam was appalled at her selfishness. Suddenly he wanted to be someplace else. Any place. Just so long as he was away from the suffocating presence of his fellows.

He got to his feet and began pacing. Crenshaw watched him for a while, but soon lost interest and closed her eyes. Shortly thereafter, she began to snore.

Sam wanted to escape more than ever.

Without hope, he tried the door and was surprised to find it opened to his touch. Cautiously, he swung it wide. The outer room was as bare and dilapidated as the inner. Sally lay asleep along the inner wall. The door to the hail was open and he could see two of the gang’s warriors standing guard. They were chatting quietly in a language he didn’t understand.

This room had windows to the outside world. Desperate for fresh air, Sam moved to the open one, beyond which a fire escape formed an inviting balcony. He was halfway through the frame before he noticed Ghost standing on the iron grillwork, leaning against the wall.

“Wouldn’t be thinking of leaving, would you?”

Sam stammered a negative response, surprised to realize he hadn’t been thinking of escape. Though he wanted to get away from his fellow Renraku employees, he had not thought of abandoning them. “I just wanted to get some air."

“You’re welcome to your fill of what passes for it around here.” The samurai seemed pensive as he leaned back against the wall and looked out across the sunset-painted stretch of battered tenements. Ghost said no more until Sam was beside him. “You really are a strange one.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, you weren’t lying about trying to leave.”

"I couldn’t run out on the others.”

“So ka,” Ghost said with a knowing nod. “I can understand loyalty to your friends.”

“They’re not my friends,” Sam blurted. To the samurai’s raised eyebrow, he added, “We’re all Renraku.”

“So ka. The bond to the tribe is even stronger.

“My people here would never be called a tribe by those fancy ethnologists who wet their pants over the back-to-the-land dreamers out there beyond the plex. Those white-coats would call my kin a gang. But that doesn’t make them any less a family, a tribe that takes care of its own.

“We’re not like the Reds that live out in the Salish-Shidhe. Those dreamers can’t see that life in the world these days means life in a city. Red Men have to take to the concrete the way they took to the horse, or we will pass from the land entirely.

“Since the Whites came, some of us have fought them, some have welcomed them. Didn’t make much difference in the end. We lost control of the land and ended in misery, despair, and poverty. And then they threw us into the camps, where they tried to strip away our souls.”

Sam could see the pain in the man’s face. Ghost was too young to have been in those death camps that had been President Jarman’s attempt at a final solution to the Indian problem, but he seemed to feel the anguish of the camps as his own.

“When Howling Coyote came down from the hills with his Great Ghost Dance, he sure handed the Whites a surprise. Made the Man realize that Reds weren’t going to take it anymore. Broke their technology with his magic, he did. But that was then. The Whites have magic now, too, but some of my people don’t want to face it.

“The old men who led the Dance don’t understand what it did for us. It didn’t banish the White Man, as advertised, or the Black Man, or the Yellow Man. They’re still here. And so are their cities and works-weakened maybe, and pushed back by the magic and the power of the Awakened-but far from beaten. What the Dance really did was give us breathing room. It gave us a chance to beat the others at their own game.

“It ain’t going to be easy. It’s going to take real warriorship, but my people are ready for that challenge. We’ll show them. In the end, we will win. But to win, we have to survive, and surviving means nuyen. You ain’t got the bucks, the Man don’t listen. There’s lots of loose creds waiting around for shadowrunners to liberate.”

Ghost fell silent, seemingly exhausted by the long string of words. Sam didn’t know what motivated the man to speak so, but the speech gave him hope that these were not bloody-minded thugs who would as soon kill them as look at them. He began to think it was possible he might get out of this predicament alive.

Ghost’s next words startled him even more than had his confidences.

“Why am I talking to you?” the Amerindian snorted.

“I don’t know. Maybe you needed someone to listen to you.”

“Don’t need no drek from some soft Anglo corporate,” Ghost said gruffly. Giving the darkening skies a last look, he ordered Sam back inside.

The samurai’s sudden mood shift left Sam again unsure of what he faced among these shadowrunners. Nothing they said was exactly as Sam understood it to be. It made sense one minute, only to become totally alien the next. They seemed to live in another world. Confused, he climbed awkwardly back into the squat.

An Elf had arrived while he had been on the balcony. He sat cross-legged in a corner, his attention on a data-reader in his lap. From the jacks on his left temple, Sam surmised that the Elf was the decker who had been riding Matrix cover on last night’s shadowrun.

Sally still lay on the foam pad that was the room’s only furniture, but she was awake. She looked rested now, the hollow circles of exhaustion gone from her eyes. Ghost shouldered Sam out of the way and passed through a doorway hidden by a curtain that Sam had taken as a decorative wall hanging. The samurai returned with a tray of cold tofu and steaming soykaf, which he brought to Sally. She thanked him with a sad smile.