At the back of the building, he led them toward a large rusting trash zapper with a red-glowing function bulb on its side. Clara cupped a hand over her lower face. "Oh God," she moaned, when she saw a mound of leaves beside the zapper. The rotting stench emanated from there.

Javier kicked through the leaves, and a dead pig-hen tumbled toward them, flopping and broken. "It's these. A lot of them. But we thought it was him, too, so we came back here to look. When I poked in the leaves, I found this." From out of his pocket, their leader produced a semiautomatic pistol, small but mean looking. "This is Brat's gun. I know-I gave it to him for his birthday a couple years ago."

"It is," Clara hissed, staring at the weapon. "It is his."

"Someone got him. someone got him." Hollis began pacing back and forth furiously, scuffing up leaves. He inadvertently uncovered a dead pig-hen himself and his boot sent it into mock flight.

A small creature like a monkey had been clinging to Big Meat's shoulder all this while. He was Tiny Meat. They were brothers that complemented each other symbiotically, working in conjunction like this on their own world. They had glossy helmet-like skulls, scarlet in color, but their faces were wrinkly masses of flesh like the caruncle of a turkey, as if badly sculpted out of raw hamburger. Their squinted eyes seemed lost in the heaped red tissue, but a long bone-white tube extended from the chaos by way of a nose. Due to his diminutive size, Tiny Meat's voice was high and squeaky, and as he shifted excitedly from one to the other of his sibling's shoulders, he said, "Look at this place-it's a fucking squatter's wet dream! If a gang jumped our boy, it's for sure they're holed up in here! We need to get inside and blast these fucking punks!" Tiny Meat had a vicious temper and was not to be messed with; even his big brother was cowed by his anger at times.

"T.M.'s right," Javier said, running his eyes over the surface of the building. "This place is derelict; it's gotta be filled with squatters, Beaumonde or not. Maybe that rich bitch Smirk is posing tough with another crew now. Wanted to impress them, and lured Brat here to set him up." He glanced at Clara. In her current regretful state of mind, he saw a flicker of pain cross her face at that particular scenario.

"So we're going in, right?" raged Tiny Meat.

"I don't wanna try the front door just yet," Javier mused. "Too much in view of the street. We'll try other ways first." He nodded. "But yeah. We're going in." He motioned for his people to spread out and approach the three service doors, apparently used by the building's staff back here at the rear of the building. He approached one of them himself, and tapped at the keyboard set into the wall beside it. "I don't wanna set off no alarms," he murmured.

"Look out," Tiny Meat snapped at Hollis, who was examining another door's control strip.

Hollis could tell by the eye-watering, ammonialike smell wafting out of Tiny Meat's snout that he was getting ready to jet his corrosive bile from that bone nozzle. He backed off fast and started to protest, but in his blubbery wet voice Big Meat expressed Hollis's concerns first. "Don't! You'll just fry the thing and jam it for good!"

"Hold on, don't get excited, scrotum-face. let me try my skeleton card," said another member of the Snarlers, a girl of Vietnamese heritage named Nhu, her long black hair flowing in a ponytail out a hole cut in the back of her lime-green swimming cap. She was reaching into her white leather jacket. It looked child-sized, to go with her miniature frame; only Tiny Meat's jacket was smaller.

"Who are you calling scrotum-face? Me or him?" he huffed.

"Both of you."

Javier hissed over at them, "All of you quiet the fuck down. If there is a gang inside, you want them to hear us coming and arm themselves up?" No doubt anticipating the possibility, he still gripped Brat's pistol in his right hand. He nodded at Nhu. "Try that card."

Using her home computer system, acquired under dubious circumstances, Nhu had impregnated a blank data card with hundreds of thousands of randomly generated key codes. There was a card strip in the keyboard unit, and Nhu swiped her card through it several times, flipped the card over, tried it again, tapped a button or two, gave a few final swipes-all to no avail. She shook her head at Javier.

"Let me try something," said Patryk, a very tall and pale youth with a crew cut and bland features. He was the most solemn and silent member of the Snarlers; his family had been forced to relocate to Folger Street when his parents were laid off from their jobs, replaced at the plant where they both worked by automatonic laborers. He always carried a backpack, and he slung this off his shoulder, extracted a pair of black rubber goggles with dark red lenses that his father had once used in his work. He fitted them onto his head. Javier and then the others followed him around the corner of the building, treading more quietly across the crunchy leaves now, back to that door where they had found their familiar insignia superimposed over an unfamiliar one. Patryk pressed his forehead right up against the glass of the last window in the wall.

"If this glass is one-way," whispered Tabeth, the final member of their group, a tall and solidly-built black girl with a pretty face and hair slicked close to her skull, "someone can shoot you right in the face, Pat, and you wouldn't see it coming."

"Nice apartments like these got weapon-proof glass," Javier told her, watching Patryk work. "But Pat, even if you get us into one apartment, that doesn't get us into the rest of the building."

"Maybe," he murmured, as he adjusted a knob on the frame of the goggles cupped over his eyes. So far, his artificial vision couldn't penetrate through the opaque-tinted glass. "But sometimes these upscale apartments have two means of exit for insurance reasons, in case of a fire or something else dangerous-like home invasion. One door leading outside, and one door leading into the rest of the building."

Patryk touched a keypad on the goggles, and suddenly it was as though a light, albeit a dim one, went on in the room beyond the glass. It was a gray, smoky, watery view. A smallish bedroom, maybe, but it was hard to tell from the absence of furnishings. He could see an open doorway on the opposite side of the room, maybe leading into a living room. He was reaching to adjust another small knob when a pale smudge passed across that dark, open threshold. He flinched, almost withdrew his face from the glass. It had only been a blink, but had that been a person?

Javier's sharp eyes had caught the tensing of his body. "What?"

"I don't know. Hold on." Patryk focused his goggles until, at last, the features of the room became sharply delineated. On the same wall as that doorway he saw the only piece of furniture: a built-in vanity unit with a large mirror. Shifting his position slightly, he concentrated on the mirror. He could see himself in the glass; the window he peered through was reflected, and it was indeed a one-way view. But more importantly, at the base of the window's sill he could see a little strip with a series of buttons. Patryk smiled thinly. He touched another keypad, and then a single purple ray pierced through the black window into the room, projected by a tiny lens on the goggles. He moved his head, until the beam struck the mirror. It bent sharply back in his direction, reflected off the silvered glass. By angling his head further, he inched the refracted beam toward the buttons directly below him, beneath the window's sill. Finally, he aligned the beam with one of the rubber buttons, and then he thumbed a little notched wheel set into the goggles, increasing the intensity of the ray until the purple light was almost a nonluminous black; almost a solid black rod.