"You're the ones that wouldn't be wanting that!" an arrogant male voice bellowed in return. But the female voice overruled him.

"We'll come out and talk if you promise not to shoot. It was all an accident. We don't want any trouble with you-we just want to get out of this place!"

"So do we."

"Right. So we need to talk. Promise not to let your friends shoot."

"Then throw out your guns first!" Mott yelled. But it was Javier's gun, suddenly, that pressed hard under the Choom's heavy jaw.

The leader of the Snarlers did just that, through gritted teeth. "Are you trying to steal my job, wanker?"

Mott looked back at his friend from the corner of his eyes. "No, man, I just…"

"What do I got to do to get you to listen to me? Make that hole in your ear bigger? We're going to talk to these people. It sounds like those gray things have got them pinned down in here. And it looks like we're pinned down in here, too. We might just be on the same side."

"They probably killed Brat!"

"Don't be stupid. We found his gun outside- where those things are."

"We didn't kill your friend!" the female voice called. Javier was surprised; he hadn't thought they'd been discussing it loudly enough for her to hear. "He was outside. I didn't sense it until he started screaming. The trash zapper out there picked him up, and fed him inside. I heard him screaming inside my skull."

"What are you talking about?" Javier demanded.

"I have a gift."

"Mutants," Nhu whispered.

Javier lowered the gun from Mott's jaw, where it left a red indentation. "Let's talk. Come out. We'll keep our guns down if you do."

"Don't, Mira," that angry male voice rasped. But she wasn't listening to him. The female came out first, her arms raised above her head.

Arms as short as those of a small child.

"Mutants," Patryk echoed Nhu belatedly.

The first person to emerge from the darkened room, into this room where the surviving

Snarlers were clustered, was an adult woman in her mid-twenties compacted into a condensed form. A dwarf, with a normal-sized head and fairly normal-sized torso, but with chubby stunted limbs, her somewhat bowed legs giving her a waddle. Her hair was long and black, cinched in a messy ponytail, her dark eyes large and striking. Her clothing looked like it had been donated to a homeless shelter by a parent whose daughter had outgrown it: a pink T-shirt with a cute cartoon jellyfish on the front, outlined in flaking glitter, and white shorts. But the clothing was dirty and frayed, speckled with dark stains of old blood.

Had he only seen her face, Javier would have found the young woman very attractive, with those heavy-lidded eyes and her strong nose and full lips. But besides her dwarfism, there were also dark purple veins on both temples, running up into her hair, like tattoos of forked lightning. A gift, she had said she possessed.

"I'm Mira Cello," she told him, stopping in the center of the room. The Snarlers hadn't put their guns away but they didn't point them, either. For a moment, the only movement was the gray palms sliding down the windowpane, then moving back to the top again.

"I'm Javier Dias. This is my gang. What's left of it. The Folger Street Snarlers."

Mira glanced down at the body of Hollis, then away with a wince. Slowly she let her arms drop, having established that she meant no harm. And then the rest of the squatters timidly began filing into the room after her. A couple of them carried guns of their own, but kept them lowered as the Snarlers did.

Javier had the irrational thought that the next person into the room was the man Mott had shot, but that man was dead. The reason for this impression was that the mutant's head was an impossible ruin, looking as though it had been run over with the tread of a construction robot. It was crushed into a half-flattened mass, with only one eye showing through the rubbery folds that twisted the mouth into a drool-slicked hole. More like a crumpled Halloween mask than something with a skull, let alone a brain, inside it.

"This is Nick," Mira said.

The Choom man who followed Nick crawled into the room on all fours, like some giant white spider. He was naked but for a pair of filthy shorts, his bony body making him look as though he were in the terminal stage of starvation. His strangely bent stick limbs each had two extra joints, and it appeared that his too-long fingers were supernor-mally jointed, as well. A wispy-haired head wove like that of a cobra atop a slender neck twice as long as it should have been. The young man smiled shyly at pretty Nhu. In his hollow, wasted face, his already broad Choom mouth seemed a death's head grin. Nhu had seen a lot of mutants and non-human beings in her young years, but something about this man's eerie movements made her shiver. She quickly looked away.

Mira introduced him. "This is Haanz."

Another woman came shambling in, hefty and wheezing, a too-small dirty gray sweat suit straining to contain her bulk. Javier counted five faces of varying sizes crowded onto her single shaggy-haired skull. Oddly, the one normal-sized face appeared insensate, its mouth drooping and eyes rolled up white. Only two of the smaller, rudimentary faces appeared to be cognizant, with sharp, alert eyes. One of the three dead faces was positioned upside-down, with hair trailing from its scalp to partially obscure the half-formed suggestion of a sixth face. "Barbie," said Mira.

Finally came the owner of the angry voice. He too resembled some giant insect, though black and bipedal, stalking in like a mantis with a soft pneumatic hiss. He was little more than a black man's bald head perched on a stubby, grub-like blob of a body, harnessed into a cybernetic frame. Javier had seen badly wounded war veterans reduced to moving about in this sort of mechanical "pony," though in this man's case his limbless state was obviously congenital. His mother had either not wanted him aborted, when obstetrical scanning disclosed his anomaly, or she had been too poor to have received advanced medical care at all. Orange flames had been stenciled onto the sides of the open thorax that held his nude little body in place, and decals had been pasted on the pony's skeletal limbs, but the machine had seen better days; one arm was silver instead of black, with a different sort of claw hand-a replacement part. The other arm gripped a big Decimator .220 revolver in its fist.

"I'm Satin," he introduced himself, his eyes moving over the Snarlers with a challenging menace.

"And this is Hollis," Mott said, sweeping his arm at the dead man on the floor between them.

"Yeah? Well our friend Chang is in there with his throat shot out." Satin flicked his head back over his little nub of a shoulder.

"Wanker shouldn't have been so trigger happy!" Tiny Meat said.

"Enough," Javier said. "None of us are happy what happened to our friends. But I think we can agree that the real problem is out there." He pointed his pistol toward the window.

"What are you doing here?" Big Meat asked the mutants.

"Like we said, we're squatters," Mira told him.

"We're the Tin Town Terata," Satin elaborated proudly. "The Triple Ts."

"Yeah, nice alliteration," Patryk muttered.

"So you're a gang, too," Javier noted. "That was your insignia outside, in green? Not smart, putting it there. You were begging the forcers to see it and come in here to investigate."

"It was there to warn other gangs that this is our place now."

"But now you want to leave," Mott snorted.

"Funny, our two gangs both coming to this same place, here in money land," Javier said.

Mira replied, "Not so unusual, when you're talking about a big abandoned building. We were surprised there weren't any other squatters already in here. Until we found a homeless man in one of the hallways. What was left of him, anyway, after they were done with him."