Night had shoved its way fully into Sector 4 by the time Mike climbed down from his container.

  Out here the darkness wasn't clean. It was smeared with the off-color glow of jury-rigged lights and the sickly orange halos from burning barrels. Blue-white flickers where someone had hacked a power line stabbed through the gloom, joining the occasional harsh beam from a gang watchpost. The heat still clung low over the heaps and turned the alleys of trash into sweat-slick tunnels that tasted of burning plastic.

  Mike moved through the narrow lanes with a habitual caution. His shoulders were hunched and his gaze scanned ahead without seeming to focus on anything in particular. It was a prey posture learned over years of being the smallest thing with two legs in any group.

  Only now there was another sense running ahead of him like a scout.

  It was a scratching at the back of his mind that spoke of vermin. A cluster huddled under a roll of rotting carpet. A thick knot of them beneath the warped boards bridging a gap between containers. They were thickest of all near the puddled low-spots where the runoff from the higher sectors collected into iridescent films. He threaded his route along the edges of the heavy vermin presence and hugged the flow of it like a crowd. Where the sensation thinned he slowed and let his senses prick at the air. Twice that caution made him duck into a side-gap just before a pair of Rigg's boys rounded a corner. Their voices were loud and their hands were already half-curled in the universal gesture that meant give.

  He had nothing visible to give but that didn't matter. Sometimes they just wanted to remind Sector 4 who held the hoses.

  The closer he got to Rigg's main lane the thicker the human noise became. Voices bartered and argued and wheedled in the stifling air. Someone laughed too hard at something that wasn't funny and somewhere a baby cried with a sound that was thin and ragged.

  The setup Rigg had built hulked ahead. It was the carcass of an ancient tanker container split open and gutted with its insides refitted into a pump station. Pipes snaked out of it in all directions like limbs to be bolted into makeshift cisterns and jacked into the sector’s few decent supply lines. Salvage-sourced generators throbbed in fenced cages to power the pumps and their exhaust added a bitter note to the air.

  Lines had already formed at the spigots. People clutched canisters and cracked buckets or anything that would hold liquid. Rigg's men patrolled the queue with rifles slung casual and batons clacking softly against their palms.

  Mike slowed as he approached the fringe of all that noise and light. His hand tightened on the strap of the battered backpack holding his precious filter. After his practice in the container the new skillset sat in him like a coiled thing. It was restless. It was hungry.

  You could still walk away, something whispered. Beg like always. Take the cut in rations and patch Jory’s filters and die more slowly.

  He knew that road. He could see the end of it too clearly now. It ended with coughing blood into his mat while someone outside argued over whether his container was worth fighting for. Jory might spare a thought if he still lived but then he would get back to work. Rigg's men would carve up his filters and sell them on.

  The other road wasn't clearer but it was jagged and black. The difference was that it didn't have a quiet fade at the end.

  The System pulsed with a cold affirmation he hadn't agreed to want.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  His sense of the vermin flared as he cut down a side lane just shy of the main pump thoroughfare. He aimed instead for the narrow back-ways that led to Jory’s corner where rats nested thick under the shop. Jory had always joked they liked his stories.

  "Hey." The voice drawled from the shadows ahead. "You lost, filter-rat?"

  Mike stopped.

  The lane he had chosen funneled between two leaning heaps so that their precarious stacks formed a kind of canyon. Dampness pooled here and the ground was slick underfoot. Someone had tried to stretch a tarp overhead once but it hung in shreds now and dripped slow from the last acid drizzle.

  A figure detached itself from the darkness where the lane kinked.

  He was big by Sector 4 standards. Broad shoulders sat under a sleeveless vest and muscles roped and bulged from labor or cheap bio-boost. His skin glistened with sweat and old oil. A scarf wrapped his lower face more for fashion than filtration and his eyes were narrow and amused over the top of it.

  Rigg's mark was tattooed on his neck. It was a stylized water droplet turning into a hook.

  Mike felt his stomach sink. He recognized the man. Targ. He was a low-rung collector and the kind of man that enjoyed his job too much to ever get promoted.

  "Targ," Mike acknowledged. He kept his voice level. "Got business with Jory. Rigg’s filters."

  "Yeah?" Targ's gaze flicked to the backpack and then back. "Rigg didn't say nothing about you tonight."

  "He doesn't schedule me." Mike forced a shrug. "Old man calls and I go. You want to be the one explains to Rigg why his favorite fixer missed a pump cycle?"

  He tried to thread enough truth through the lie to make it hold. Jory did pull weight and Rigg liked clean water. But favorite was a stretch and they all knew it.

  Targ stepped closer and his boots squelched in the muck. Up close the man reeked of cheap reactor brew and the tang of someone who bathed only when the smell offended him.

  "Rigg says," Targ rasped, "nobody walks round his station with hardware he don't get eyes on. That includes little rats like you Mikey."

  His hand shot out faster than his bulk suggested and his fingers closed around the strap of Mike's pack. He yanked hard.

  Mike stumbled forward and the momentum smacked him chest-first into Targ's solidity. The man smelled like sweat baked into cloth. Heat rolled off him.

  Old instincts flared. They were the ones that had kept Mike breathing this long.

  Hands up and palms out. Apologize. Grovel. Offer something small so they don't take everything. Make yourself smaller. They were prey rituals.

  His mouth opened.

  The System cut in.

  It wasn't with words or text. It was a pulse.

  Aggression surged up his spine. It was foreign and feral and skittered along the new neural tracks etched by the crystal. It was cold in a way that made his fingers want to clench and it was a command whispered into the base of his skull. Do not kneel. Dominate. Claim.

  It layered over his own anger and the old bitter streak that had always burned under the fear when someone took what little he had. Together they clicked into something sharp.

  Mike's jaw snapped shut.

  Behind Targ the heaps crawled with life. Roaches and rats and something larger coiled in a drainage ditch. Within five meters he counted at least twenty vermin presences strong enough to latch onto. He had practiced with ten before the headaches blinded him. But he knew he could hold twelve. Just barely.

  Twelve. He watched Targ's hand hover near the knife. A full jury for one man.

  He let his shoulders sag and tilted his chin down to play the part.

  "Come on Targ," he said. He made his voice smaller. "Filter is half-gone anyway. Just got the last bit working again. Rigg won't thank you for shorting his supply."

  Targ chuckled. It was a low and phlegmy sound.

  "Rigg don't gotta know what I skim," he said. He hauled the bag around to his side and out of Mike's reach. "Maybe he gets it. Maybe he don't. I'm thirsty now."

  His free hand twitched almost idly toward the hilt of the knife at his belt. It was a lazy threat. An old one.

  On Mike's inner map the layout was clear. A cluster of six roaches clung to the underside of a warped board near Targ's elbow. Four more were jammed into a crack in the lane wall behind Mike. Two stragglers skittered near the drainpipe.

  Twelve.

  He reached.

  Twelve threads snapped out at once and latched onto every single one of them. The strain spiked and pain bloomed behind his eyes like a sudden migraine. It was sharper and hotter than usual and felt like a nail being driven into his frontal lobe.

  He swallowed it and squeezed.

  He didn't have time for coaxing. He needed violence.