Su-min flipped the ink-sheet around and showed them both an article they were intimately familiar with. “I was reading about this person, and the attack they performed on the Sekmore corporation.” She told them softly.

  It was a news article about Pushman’s attack on the place.

  “Mom,” Ko said softly, her partially paralyzed voice choking up with emotion.

  “What? Someone has to bring these people down and teach them a lesson!” She wasn’t quite yelling, but her voice had gotten louder and become rather impassioned.

  “I agree, but no one has heard anything from that person since the attack,” Trace said, preempting whatever Ko was going to say. “This attack was more or less a death sentence for them. Whereas, for Sekmore, all that happened was that they lost a few people and suffered some damage to a building. All it amounted to is a blip on their radar, nothing more.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Su-min asked, her voice growing shaky. “Just because I can’t take care of myself doesn’t mean I’m crazy.”

  “We know that, mom. It’s just…” Ko sighed and glanced to the side.

  They needed to be careful of what they said while inside the megastructure. Everything in the building was owned by a corporation and there was little doubt that their conversation would make its way back to Siren’s Rush in some form. They were paying for Su-Min’s stay, so the information being given to them was normal.

  In the end, she decided to change the topic to something with less baggage attached to it.

  “How are you enjoying work these days? Are you still working at that processing facility?”

  Her mother turned off the screen of the ink-sheet and placed it to the side, as she shook her head. “No, they switched me to a different job last month. Right now, I’m doing inventory management for one of the warehouses near here.”

  Ko didn’t say anything, but the look she had said all that there needed to be about the subject.

  “I know,” Her mother muttered unhappily. “All I’m doing is making sure the robots haven’t screwed anything up. It gives me plenty of time to read, so I can’t complain about the job too much. It’s easy work.”

  There were a few moments of silence that began to stretch out longer, before Trace took the hint, and gave them a new topic.

  ***

  “Well,” Trace forced out alongside an explosive breath of air nearly two hours later. “That was certainly interesting. I didn’t expect your mother to open like that on a few of those topics. Who knew you used to be a little nudist in training?”

  Ko blushed and turned away. “I was three years old. It’s normal for little kids to enjoy being naked all the time.” She huffed out, not truly mad.

  It had been surprising to her as well how much her mother had opened up at times. Every once in a while, it was as though she could see glimpses of the mother she had once known rising back up to the surface. They would slip away soon enough, but it was more than she had seen or experienced on past visits.

  “Thank you for coming with me today. It was probably you that made such a difference with her.”

  “I was more than a little hesitant when you told me who we were coming to visit, I admit. I’m glad I was able to help though. Where to now though?”

  “Can you just take me back to my place? I need time to decompress and think.”

  “Sure,” He replied readily, having already noticed the signs that she needed some time alone.

  A while later, he was sitting in a shop getting the rear glass of the car replaced, while he looked over the jobs that Stick-Point had sent him. If he wanted to finish the work on the railgun, he needed credits, and that meant another job. Actually, Monroe would be able to weld the fins to the gun later. He also had the equipment to solder the heat transfer pipes to the heatsinks and anneal them after they were bent.

  All Trace needed to do was get some paint and anything else that caught his eye for other projects.

  The credits were needed for when he wanted to do another project like this himself. He still wanted to get a laser welder. It wouldn’t have the power to weld steel plates onto the roof of the warehouse. However, it would be able to do the fins on the rifle easily enough, and in a pinch, he might even be able to do some spot welds on the car.

  In the meantime, he could also sell some of the items they had brought back in the trailer. The only problem with that was only three boxes were actually viable candidates to be sold. The rebreather masks could go, though all of them had decided to snag one from the crate in the end, along with spare filters just in case. Then there were the two crates with ingredients.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Sevorah was still going through the other items and the other three tech crates they were keeping.

  Monroe knew how to get them into the black market, and supposedly they would be going either that night or the next day. That would take care of the masks. The problem was and always had been, the ingredients. How were they going to sell those?

  There was another thing they could look at while they were at the black market later, and that was the price of modules. He doubted it was possible, but just maybe they would be cheaper than the official channels. It would be nice since he had used his last ‘System Breaching’ module to change the ownership information on the semi for Monroe.

  He highlighted a few jobs, put a couple of notes next to them, and then sent the information off to Monroe. With that completed, he was free to begin looking up information on restaurants and other ways to sell the goods.

  Outside the shop, the sound of gunfire intensified as one of the nearby gangs went to war with the police and the corpo security force backing them up.

  Trace closed the internet windows he had been using and moved closer to the windows, looking out over the street.

  He wasn’t going to get involved, but he did want to get a better look. The entire city had seemingly been embroiled in constant gang violence the last few weeks, and no one seemed to know why. It had all come out of nowhere and was only getting worse instead of better.

  According to information that he had received from Revlock, several of the smaller gangs had been either wiped out or absorbed already. A few had made good showings and were holding onto their territory, despite their diminished numbers. The larger gangs, in turn, had only grown larger, both in number and in their overall territory.

  The area around his warehouse was still unclaimed, and he would do his best to ensure it stayed that way.

  At the moment, he wasn’t at his warehouse and was able to witness the chaos they were creating firsthand. For the most part, the gangsters were leaving the civilians alone. Even they realized that if you killed the people who bought whatever you were selling, then you would gain a certain kind of reputation. Fear was fine. It was even useful. Being known as a murderer, on the other hand was not. People didn’t buy from you when they thought they might be shot.

  Truly, the gangsters were more enlightened than the police and security forces who had no such compunction. Their vehicles and bullets rained down with abandon, targeting anything even remotely near the fleeing gangsters.

  Civilians were crushed under their tires or gunned down in their negligence. The phrase ‘Protect and Serve’ had long since been replaced with ‘Punish and Steal’ on the sides of their vehicles, or at least it should have been.

  As soon as the cars had all passed, he ran out of the building and to the person lying on the ground closest to him. There were nearly a dozen victims left in their wake, a few were still alive, though quickly bleeding out, and the rest were already dead.

  He did what he could for them, and called Ko and Sevorah for help, along with emergency services. Unfortunately, none of the people who were still alive had been paying for their plans. He was their only hope of survival, for all the good that did them.

  By the time Ko arrived, racing over from her apartment, only two were still alive. It was only when she ran up with a first aid kit in hand that Trace remembered he had one still stored in the back of the car. It was unlikely that he would have been able to run in and get it without anyone dying. If he had remembered early on though, then one or two more might have survived.

  Cursing at himself, he worked with her to stabilize them until Sevorah pulled up in the clinic’s vehicle with Anna in the back.

  Once they were gone, he trudged back into the building where his car was and numbly cleaned himself until everything felt raw and tender. He had seen plenty of death during his life, even before he became an edger. He hadn’t been unfamiliar with it. Everyone on the street knew what death was and were friends with it. They knew its embrace like a friend or a comforting blanket.

  Each of them had come close to crossing over more than once. The freezing cold nights of winter, the long hungry days where you were so starved that your rib bones were pronounced even through your clothes. If you weren’t taken, then someone you knew was at those times. Betrayal was common back then; it was why Trace hated visiting the junkyard when the street-meat kids were there. It brought back memories better left forgotten.

  He had given up on friends until Stick-Point found him.

  So, yes, Trace knew what death was, and he had become even more familiar with it recently since finally learning how to use a gun somewhat decently. None of it had ever had the same quality of utter wastefulness that what he had just seen had. There had been no reason for those people to die.

  They hadn’t been gunned down because someone was mentally ill, or because they were hated. It wasn’t even some made-up reason in the shooter’s mind wherein he justified his actions. They had simply been too lazy to properly aim or drive better, nothing more, and it made him sick.

  His left hand and face were pink from the thorough scrubbing he had given them when he finally stepped out of the bathroom.

  “Thanks for helping those people,” A large man who was leaning on the doorway that led into the shop said. “It’s more than anyone else, including us, did for them.”

  “It’s fine,” Trace muttered, wiping some lingering sani-spray liquid from his face. “I just wish I had remembered that I had a first-aid kit in the back of my car.”

  The man looked over his shoulder at the car, that was having the fastback hatch reattached right then. He began to chuckle and then laugh as he slapped his thigh.

  “You’re alright kid. You don’t look like you’re very familiar with death though. Are you sure you’re cut out for edger work?” He tapped his thighs in the same places where Trace had his guns holstered.

  “Death doesn’t bother me. I grew up on the streets and have always known it. This though, this was just pointless murder.”

  The big man pushed off the frame of the open door and took a step into the room so he could look out the window. “Aye, I’ll agree with that. Few edgers ever seem to get the difference either.” He turned to Trace and stuck out his hand. “My name’s Frank, and this is my shop. If you ever need more glass work done, come to me and I’ll set you right for a discounted rate.”

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