People think the best thing to do when a gun is pulled on you is dive to one side, but that doesn’t work. A patient Gunner, a trained Gunner, doesn’t come up shooting. He comes up, tracks your movements, and chooses the best time to pull the trigger. You don’t shoot at where your target was, you shoot at where he’s going to be. You only shoot blind when you’re desperate. I used my head. It was the only reason I was still alive.

I threw myself forward and down, pulling Nad down with me. It’s usually the last place a Gunner expects, and that buys you a second or two. With other adversaries, a second or two is often enough to change the equation. With the Monk, it just meant that Nad got shot twice in the chest as he fell on top of me.

The only chance I had of staying alive was to keep moving. Nad was a heavy piece of dead fucking weight, though, and as I tried rolling to my left he weighed me down. By the time I finally broke free of him, his sticky blood all over me, debris from the street sticking to my soaked clothes, I was sure the headshot was coming-except no, it wouldn’t be a headshot. They needed the brain. I panted, scrabbling, ripping a fingernail on the concrete, get up get up-If I’d been in the Monk’s shoes, I’d have been able to take at least three shots by the time I rolled behind cover; I winced spasmodically, imagining the impact.

Then, somehow, I was behind a trashcan, still alive, filthy but breathing. I came up with my own gun. Worrying about why I was still alive would come later. With the copper smell of blood in my nose, I swallowed puke and forced myself to be still. I peered over the trashcan and got ready to sell myself dear.

I wasn’t alone anymore. The alley held me, the Monk, Nad’s corpse, and someone else-and the mystery of my survival was clear: An unknown quantity had entered the equation, and the Monk was playing it safe for the moment. I couldn’t see the new person clearly; he was on the other side of the Monk backlit in the wash of streetlight. I knew two things right away: The sound of shots fired didn’t faze him in the least, and the Monk had forgotten all about me. This led me to conclude that the new guy was a System Pig, an SSF officer. I didn’t relax at all. If it had just been a Crusher walking a beat, it wouldn’t have worried me, but in my experience, the elite SSF officers never improved situations, and their presence usually increased my personal chances of getting killed. Everyone complained that the System Cops thought they were gods, but I thought, fuck, they think that because they are gods.

They try to teach all the young kids that the SSF exists to protect them from dangerous fuckers like me, but that isn’t really true. Most of those kids are going to grow up to be dangerous fuckers like me, anyway, since there’s nothing much else to do these days if you want to eat. So the SSF is really there to fuck with everyone on the bottom 99 percent of the pyramid.

Cowering behind my trashcan, fully aware that I should be dead already, I was for the first time in my life glad that the SSF existed. And that the System Pigs were such fucking badasses. Nad was dead, but maybe this guy could help keep me alive. And then I thought of the last few weeks, of all the money and effort I’d had to put into distancing the name Avery Cates from a dead SSF officer shot on the East Side in a botched assasination, and dread replaced my relief, black tendrils inching through the cracks.

They started talking. It gave me time to think, but how fucking weird. The Monk and the System Pig (taking a break from busting heads for shakedown money) meet in a dark alley, guns drawn, and start chatting. I knew they were frisking each other for backup and telecom, making sure they weren’t each going to have a goddamn army on their heads if they made the wrong move, but it was still creepy.

Time to think. Why in fuck had the Monk killed Nad? The answer was fucking surreal, but it stared at me. The Monk was recruiting him. I’d heard the rumors, and I knew a little something about anatomy-when the Monks had been a fairly new phenomenon there’d been all sorts of articles about them in the Vids, the underground, off-net Vids, technical specs and theoretical designs and treatises on brain chemistry and how a human brain could be transferred from a skull to a CPU. You could shoot a man dead in an alley and have him up and running in a Monk body in a few hours, with minimal brain damage. Damage that maybe could be fixed through circuitry, who the fuck knew. Someone you used to pal around with, get high with, woke up one day feeling spiritual and signed up for their metal body, for no reason, and next thing you knew they were doing the ritual introduction, Hiya, I used to be your pal, now I’m a Tin Man, let me chew your ear about eternity for a while. Except now I knew the reason. And people like Nad-people like us-were meaningless, in the grand scheme. No one would miss us, no one would bother investigating us.

It’d killed Nad Muller to recruit him. Nad was going to wake up tomorrow a Monk. And me? I got the feeling I hadn’t been chosen.

I had better things to think about, like lines of sight and escape routes. I needed contact with a System Pig like I needed a hole in my head, and here were both possibilities staring me in the face. It was a banner fucking night. I wished fervently that Kev Gatz had hung around, the fucking freak. He would have come in handy. I squeezed my gun tightly to keep my hand from trembling.

“Hello, officer,” the Monk said, calm and cool. “This man appears to have been attacked.”

Motherfucker, I thought, it’s just buying time.

The cop knew the Monk was just buying time, too. System Pigs generally didn’t do undercover. They strutted around and no one dared fuck with them. You could pick out a System Cop a mile away, and that was just how they liked it. They stepped out of their cars and everything stopped, hardasses standing around whistling like there was nothing in the world could get them to commit a crime. This one just stood there for a moment, looking the scene over, before responding to the Monk.

“Identify yourself,” the cop said. The street was quiet and very dark, but his voice was clear and steady. Human.

I pictured the street and considered my options. If I stood up, I’d just get nailed by the cop, distracting him in the process. This was my best opportunity to just leave the fucking Monk to whatever it was going to do. I didn’t know. I was paralyzed.

“I am Brother Vita,” the Monk replied immediately. “Brother Jeofrey Vita, of the Alpha Brethren, the Electric Church.”

“I can see you’re a goddamn Monk,” the cop snapped. “What happened here?”

And I knew right away the cop wasn’t linked up. He was either on his way to something, or off-duty, or doing something he didn’t want the Worms to find out about-whatever, he wasn’t linked up.

After what I’d just seen the Monk do, I knew he was a dead man.

That was my cue. No link meant he couldn’t beam my picture in, meant I could walk away from him and let Brother Vita do the deed. But fuck if I could move. The fucking Monk was fast. If I’d figured out the cop was unlinked, the Monk couldn’t be far behind, and I didn’t have any doubt that the Monk could nail the cop and shoot me in the back without breaking a sweat. If it did sweat. I crouched against the dirty pavement and tried to think of something to do that wouldn’t end up with me getting shot. Nothing came to mind.

For whatever reason, the Monk didn’t make a move. It played along another moment. “I don’t know, officer. I found this man here, and was about to contact someone.”