Angel Of The City Read Free Page A

morning commute. Dirty, pockmarked, diseased, all slowly rotting from the inside, like the mountains of trash surrounding us. About half are wearing paper facemasks over their mouths and noses; protection against the plague. Like that would help.
    A few rickshaws sit idle on on e side of the street, their drivers pacing next to them, occasionally blowing into their hands for warmth and eying everyone hungrily for any sign of a fare. Too old to work the scrap heaps, too young for regular employment, there’s little for them in this quarter.
    Looks like there ’ll be no takers today. The charge for a ride isn’t much but it isn’t free either, and here not a cent goes a wasted. Unless it’s for dust. I can afford it, but riding would set me apart from the crowd and I don’t risk unwanted attention.
    I integrate myself within a group of dark-suited men, middle managers headed toward another day’s drudgery. Jobs are scarce everywhere, but especially in the poorer quarters and the Bonifrei is one of the poorest. If you’re lucky enough to be employed here, you cling to that job like a life raft and take whatever they give you. No one asks if you like your work. It’s considered a child’s question.
    My trench coat makes them nervous—probably what made Pen nervous. Looks like a Counselor’s uniform, but too worn and frayed for one of them to be caught wearing. Natty dressers, the Cosags. Part of the image. You learn at an early age to keep your head down when one is near. No reason to draw attention to yourself, even if you have nothing to hide. And everyone has something to hide. The laws make certain of that. So you keep your mouth shut and your eyes down.
    Heading to Devon ’s place, I have to cross from the Bonifrei into the Chojo quarter, but no one gives me any grief. I’ve been around so long I’m no longer considered a threat. Besides, it’s a myth they cut the heads off anyone they don’t know. Be hard to get any business done that way, wouldn’t it? But the story’s enough to keep most kids from wandering anywhere in the lower nineties and that’s not a bad idea. Because even myths have a basis in fact.
    The city is divided into six quarters, roughly segregated by ethnicity. The government didn’t create them and doesn’t recognize them officially, but they have an interest in maintaining them. Nothing just happens in the city. The Ministry has a reason for everything it does. And the reason is control. It’s always about control.
    The separation helps keep the peace. There’s no love lost between the people of the various quarters. Most live their entire lives within blocks of where they were born, venturing further out only when need drives them. Some say the hatreds date to before the founding of the city itself, back when we were all just tribes roaming the wastes, killing one another to stay alive. Who knows? There’s no history before the city, at least nothing you’ll find in any government-sanctioned book.
    Whatever the cause of the bad blood, the system ’s not perfect. There are still groups within each quarter with an ancestral hatred of each other. Entire clans have been known to go after one another on occasion and you don’t want to be anywhere around when that happens. Stupid. All it does is give the Council for Internal Security more reason to crack down.
    Officially, t he city is divided into two hundred and seventy-three precincts, grouped into twenty-two districts. There are two out-districts as well—walled expanses of land hanging off the east and west ends of the city like the lopsided ears of a mangy dog: the Eastside and the Westside. The Eastside is zoned exclusively for manufacturing; the Westside, agriculture, where food for the city is grown. Both are worked by criminals, political prisoners, the insane and anyone else the Ministry deems “unfit”. And beyond the city? Nothing. At least that’s what the maps show. They might as well stamp, “here there be