It sounded eerily human.

The cop grunted and pushed his long coat back from his sloppy suit-nothing I or anyone I knew could afford, but looking cheap nonetheless-and knelt near Nad, paying no attention to the Monk. A watch glittered dully on his wrist as he lifted Nad’s jacket to inspect the damage.

“Modified Roon,” the cop said thoughtfully. “Funny, I’ve heard that’s the kind of illegal weaponry-”

The Monk pounced, whipping up one arm so fast I thought I must have imagined it, a blur. I was mesmerized. Blink, the Monk standing there watching an officer of the law at work. Blink, the motherfucker has the Roon out, like he’s saying, inspect this, fucker.

I nearly shit my pants. Fucking System Pigs, man. They were not to be fucked with. A System Pig shows up, you look at your shoes and blank out your mind, everyone knows that. But I’d never seen anything as fast and blank as that Monk. The cop moved immediately.

The Monk fired, and the cop rolled and threw something at the Monk-I couldn’t see what-but it hit the Monk on the wrist, knocked its aim off, and then the cop was in shadows, and firing at the Monk. Firing fast. Blam blam blam blam blam-five muzzle flashes in the dark, lighting up the street, showing the Monk in jump cut, moving, dodging, rolling.

When I saw the cop had missed the Monk five times, fuck, something in me finally realized that this was my one and only chance. Whispering prayers to the cop-gods that the Pig had enough in him to give me one stinking, solitary minute, I turned and ran.

I’d bet my last yen I’d see Nad again with freaky mirrored glasses and plastic skin, but I had no fucking desire to join him. Avery Cates was an old man because he knew when to run, believe it.

I ran. Behind me, one last blast and then horrible silence. Within seconds, seconds, there were steady, heavy feet behind me. My legs didn’t want to move after a night of sitting and drinking; I felt like I’d stepped into a river of muddy concrete, the whole city sucking at my heels, urging me to kneel and kiss this metal freak’s ring.

“Wait, Mr. Cates,” the Monk called out. “Would you take confession? When contemplating eternity, it is advisable to map out a personalized plan of salvation.”

I kept waiting for the shot. I was sweating, soaked through, and I’d gone through drunk, hung over, and thirsty all in about five minutes, my body flushing toxins overtime. I’d pulled just enough ahead of it to queer its aim, or my erratic course was helping, or, fuck, maybe I knew the streets just a little bit better. These were old streets, ancient, back when everyone got around by car, before hovers, before everything else went bullshit and crapped out. Going back to when New York was a much smaller city, not the entire Eastern Seaboard, with Trenton as a neighborhood. I strained my mind for advantages, and thought of Kev Gatz, who crashed nearby; he’d always been a freak, but he was my best hope. He was twenty-three and looked likely to die within the next five years, but he’d looked like that for as long as I knew him. Just another faceless piece of shit swarming through New York, except something in his head was wrong.

Wrong in a fucking glorious way, because Kev Gatz was a psionic. If I could get to him maybe he’d be able to Push the Monk. It wasn’t much, but it was the only asset I had.

I rounded a corner with a five-second lead, and I knew exactly where I was and I knew, with a jolt of something approaching joy, that there was an old Safe Room nearby. Not wasting any time, I pounded down an alley, and then immediately bolted down a second alley. Both were just wide enough for a man to run through if he was very careful. You could walk past both a thousand times and never see it.

“Do not flee your destiny, Mr. Cates,” the Monk said, closer than I’d expected. “Can you outrun oblivion? Think, and submit.”

Think and submit, holy fuck. I wish that Pig had taken your fucking metal face off. With a solid kick, I knocked a cheap wooden door off its hinges, revealing a rotting stairway. I pelted up, my weight making the ancient wood sag and dance in unexpected ways. I was turning the third landing, lungs burning, legs aching, when I heard the creak of weight on the stairs below me. I made a desperate leap into a spare, battered room of white plaster and rotten wood flooring. No hesitation, no mistake: I had my five-maybe four-seconds to save myself.

I hit a spot in the plaster that looked like every other bump on the wall, and kept running, leaping into the far wall. I skittered onto a dusty metal floor like a cannonball, getting scraped up pretty badly in the process, and curled up into a ball. I smacked into something unyielding, my whole body lighting up red.

Lungs burning, I froze. Sweat poured into my eyes. I didn’t even allow myself to blink.

There were Safe Rooms all over this area. Everyone floating under the SSF’s radar had hired Techs to come in and set one up at one time or another, cash only, one day’s work, to spec. Heat shielding, signal fuzzing, holographic obfuscations, soundproofing-once you were inside one of these rooms, the System Pigs would need to start knocking out the walls, or shooting into them, to find you. They weren’t comfortable, but they did the job.

A moment later, the Monk was in the room. I clenched my teeth against the desire for a breath. A single, deep breath. Anything. I wished I could suck oxygen in through my pores.

Then, heavy footsteps, moving around. And something else, distant, weak, like hope: the displacement of an SSF hover.

Another moment, the two of us still and silent, me with my vision getting blurry around the edges. Inside the Safe Room, I couldn’t be seen, but I couldn’t risk the noise of my breathing, not with a goddamn cyborg looking for me.

“Why hide, Mr. Cates?” the Monk said. Amazingly, it almost sounded sad. “Oblivion comes to us all. End this game with dignity and embrace your destiny. It appears our friend from the SSF was linked up after all. That is unfortunate, as it means I cannot spend a few profitable minutes shooting randomly into the walls. That would attract attention, would it not?” There was a pause. “Well, as a dutiful citizen of the System, Mr. Cates, the least I can do is pass your name on to the local SSF office and suggest you might have been in the same location as a recently murdered officer. The Electric Church takes citizenship very seriously. Good-bye, Mr. Cates.”

I heard its heavy tread retreat from the room, and then down the stairs. The hover was close. I imagined bright blue light flooding the room, searching for the dark figure of the Monk. I held my breath. I held my breath until I felt like biting my tongue off. I held my breath until my vision fogged and my brain blanked, and I finally passed out.