Chap 3

Though two weeks had passed since that night of disgrace, the gnawing sense of humiliation continued to smolder in Riki's gut. With no place to express itself, the incurable fury raged within. The entirety of the shame stuck with him.

Unsurprisingly, since that day Riki had not trodden the Midas streets again. Far from any talk of "cruising," he could hardly get the first syllable out of his mouth. Instead, he sullenly bit his tongue. Day by day the crease furrowing his brows only grew deeper and deeper.

If he only could have repressed the abominable events, he could have lived a happy man. But whenever he closed his eyes, there in his head was the man's cold and beautiful visage, as if branded on his senses.

"When you miss your mark, is it your practice to pick someone up and make money that way?"

Communicating arrogance infused with intimidation, his uniquely cool voice clung to Riki like an incessant ringing in his ears.

Shit!

And still the painful misery of being able to do nothing but groan remained. What really pissed him off wasn't Iason's ridicule, though ridiculing a man's sex life was a blatant violation of the commonsensical customs in the slums.

Even in a "love hotel" at the outskirts of town, Iason hadn't lost an ounce of his dignity and majesty. Far from it, to the Tanagura Blondy who had all of it and more to spare, Riki would never be anything more than a prostitute who made a practice of hitting on men and selling himself for pocket change.

This realization was mortifying.

There was no doubt about it. He was the one who'd strong-armed lason in the first place and had riled him up until he'd gotten what he wanted. His stubbornness and pride was in Iason's eyes the mere reflection of his selfish and spoiled character.

The thought alone made his throat burn.

"Do not misunderstand, mongrel. You are the prize so clumsily forced upon me in exchange for my silence. Do as I ask, then, and give cry out for me and we'll call it even. Nothing more."

The cold and calculating remark, that could not be taken as anything other than the abusive language that it was. Stabbing at his gray matter, the festering poison at times welled up and scalded his pride.

He ground his teeth together. His temples throbbed. He hadn't experienced such feelings of disgust since leaving Guardian. And yet, he knew in his heart there was no easy cure for the fevered thing throbbing away inside his body.

Within the constrained limits of a world of a child, he could always plug his ears and close his eyes to that which was painful. In Guardian, that had been the only "right" allowed an immature child.

But now things were different.

Regardless of a man's maturity or immaturity, all the whining and complaining in the world wouldn't make a difference. In the slums, where the law of the jungle held sway, a man's words and action always came back to bite him.

Riki knew that reality as well—the reality that he couldn't make what had happened just go away. It weighed heavily upon him.

He was in an ugly place. There weren't enough hours in the day to transfer all the memories to some oblivion outside of the daily grind. But he had no other course to take but to persuade himself. It made him unbearably miserable.

How long would it take to mend his splintered emotions? He couldn't begin to imagine.

Of course, what had happened to him was less of a freak chance than a freaking miracle. Running into this strange man again, let alone getting within spitting distance of another Tanagura Blondy, was the last thing he expected to happen anytime soon. But despite this, he couldn't scrub the memories from his mind and go back to his old, carefree existence.

Being called "slum trash" so easily, the humiliation of being ridiculed and toyed with by those cold, emotionless eyes. His pride was beaten black and blue, and it just wouldn't heal.

The shameful memories of being so cruelly abused grew all the more vivid in his mind. Even during the well-accustomed bouts of sex with Guy, he could not blank out the mocking memories coiled stubbornly around his heart.

"Coming that fast is surely nothing to be proud of."

Shut up.

"All your supposed power is so much empty boasting."

Enough already!

"And here we find the bud of your pleasure?"

Fuck of!

"Still here—"

The teasing voice entwined around his skull, clinging to him tenaciously, its plaguing fever engulfing him.

Shit.

Shit.

Shit!

Miserably. Awkwardly. He could only grind his teeth and rage against the darkness. He was his own worst enemy.

This is not who I am!

He bit his trembling lip. Not some sort of waking dream, it was more like dropping acid and having a bad trip. There was no way that Guy could ignore Riki's high state of agitation. "What's up with you, Riki?" he whispered in his ear.

Riki languidly lay there relaxing his limbs and collecting his breath. Of course Guy noticed that he didn't seem to be "there" in body and spirit the way he used to be, and was getting a bit fed up with him.

"Did something happen?" he used the same gentle tone of voice that he always did. Brushing back a playful lock of hair that had fallen across Riki's forehead. Guy's warm hand felt no less comforting than it always did.

Riki was where he belonged. Guy more than made him feel how true that was. And yet—

Why?

How?

How had his thoughts been made captive by that monster? "It's nothing," he mumbled, the words like bitter brine oozing out of the corners of his mouth.

"You sure?" Guy pressed.

"Sure," Riki answered nonchalantly, but even he knew what lay at the heart of the matter—what Guy wanted to hear and what was likely on his mind. The feelings he didn't wish to express. In their mutual commiserations, in the certainty of their shared body heat, there were supposed to be no lies.

Guy trailed his tongue from the nape of Riki's neck to his earlobe, tightly entwining their lower extremities together. "Let's do it then." The heat growing in his young body was straight to the point. "Can you still get it up? I haven't nearly had enough."

Putting his uncontrollable desires into words struck the spark. With Riki as his partner, no matter how many times they went at it, he could never get enough. Guy could not help but be conscious of his thirsting, animal passions.

Those passions hadn't changed in the slightest since they were at Guardian, and had only strengthened his desire to further monopolize the parts of Riki that great good luck had made his own.

Riki might think that he was using Guy to his own selfish ends, but Guy knew differently. He wasn't attractive enough to justify dragging his sorry butt around out of sheer momentum. Neither was he as patient as people around him seemed to think.

It was because of Riki. Riki was his partner, and Guy knew well how eternally forbearing he could be.

He could still remember the small body in the darkness, in the middle of the bed, hugging his knees and shivering. When Riki closed his black eyes—eyes that made enemies of all those reflected in their intense glints—he became another person entirely. So young.

Then one night, the Riki who'd reached out his hand and grasped his was nowhere to be found. And even though it was long past the time when Riki needed his protection, Guy could never forget that he had sworn in his heart to protect him.

He never would forget.

Guy took great personal solace in the fact that he alone knew Riki's true, unguarded countenance, wrapped in so many layers of fierce, bulletproof pride. On the other hand, Guy was quite aware of the depth of the hunger he felt toward Riki.

More.

It was never enough.

Want me more! Desire me more!

Guy was not blind to the extent to which he'd become ensnared in this overpowering sense of attachment. At Guardian, the unpleasantness of the task notwithstanding. He had to come to terms with the depth of this wide difference in desire.

Without saying a word, Riki draped his arm around Guy's neck and kissed him, making like he was coming on to Guy. Changing the angle of their mouths like two lovers standing on tiptoe, indulging in the deep kisses, switching the position of their bodies, entwining their tongues. As if to totally assuage Guy's misgivings and anxieties.

Or rather, as if to thoroughly extricate from himself the last vestiges of Guy's presence wrapped around the core of his being.

And yet another two weeks passed. Riki still couldn't rid himself of the fever that consumed his viscera. He testily burned through the wasted hours and filled the empty spaces inside with junk food.

"Yo, Riki. You alone? Something you don't see very often." Zach Rayburn hollered out to him. Zach fenced the plastic Riki and his friends stole in Midas. "Haven't seen you around much lately. What's up?"

That was the way Zach usually said his hellos, and he didn't mean anything bad by it. Riki knit his brows together.

When he did so, the few bystanders nearby gulped and averted their eyes. Zach paid them no mind. Far from it, he pulled up a stool and sat down, his muscular height all bent over and bunched up. "Hey, Riki. You ever thought of being a courier?" he asked, getting to his point immediately.

"A courier?" Riki narrowed his eyes and gave him a long look. He'd been stuffing his mouth with a "fin"—a thin, lard-smeared, crepe—thin, reconstituted meat product on bread. He stopped long enough to breezily reply, though with no signs of taking offense. "You're a fence. When did you turn into an employment agency?"

Reacting to the imagined insolence in the tone of Riki's voice, the goons lurking behind Zach (who'd typically taken to casting menacing glances at everyone) narrowed their eyes at him. But neither Riki nor Zach seemed concerned.

Zack's brown skin and closely cropped white hair setting off his tapered ears made clear that he was no resident of the slums.

Among the sightseers visiting Midas there were those who, for whatever reason, stay behind in defiance of the immigration laws. Those 'refugees' who overstayed their visas and couldn't go home again if they wanted to, were maligned as "sinkers." But to Zach these people were not doomed to violence or desperation or misery.

Nobody knew why this stranger of unidentified origins had hung around in the slums for so long.

But even when dealing with the slum mongrels—the "parasites" that made a living "picking through the trash of Midas for table scraps"—Zach didn't make them bow or scrape. A businessman through and through, he treated everybody the same. His unusual nature was his calling card. In one way or another, everybody in the slums knew who he was.

"Not what it sounds like" He gulped down rest of the poisonous-looking ale. "Fact is, an acquaintance of mine told me to ask around." Zach lowered his voice to an exaggerated hush. "Seems that the guy he was using screwed up and he won't have use of his services for a while. So he's had his eyes out for a sub."

"Huh. What kind of risk factor are we talking about?"

"I don't know the particulars of the job. But seeing as he's not looking for a mere errand boy, I figure it's gonna be as risky as you'd expect a job like that to be. For what it's worth, the money's gotta be good."

"Not caring whether it's a slum mongrel doing the job sounds a mite suspicious to me."

Ceres wasn't listed anywhere on any official map of Midas. But like an open secret, even visitors to Midas with no prior knowledge of the slums could nevertheless sense the existence of a "red zone" teeming with the unwashed masses, where they must never go.

That was the reality the residents of Ceres represented to the outside world. Midas didn't recognize the existence of any civil rights within Ceres either. The brief so-called "honeymoon" with the Commonwealth following the independence of Ceres was now dead.

Tanagura was the star system's renowned "metallic city," sitting there in the shadows cast by the Midas lights. The Commonwealth human rights NGOs and lobbying groups were intimidated by its presence, and all too willing to give the problems of Ceres a pass.

No matter its shortfalls in human resources, no one was inclined to lend a helping hand to the disagreeable mongrels inhabiting the problem-ridden slums. The slums were forever trapped inside the suffocating box, gasping for breath.

But Zach scoffed at what passed for "common sense" in the world. "Look, the way I see things, you prove yourself useful and nobody's gonna check your resume." And furthermore, "That doesn't mean I'm willing to sign up any old body. The decision-making got left to me so my own reputation's on the line here."

Implicit in his nonchalant air was the message: That's why I chose you. It was a message that tickled Riki's pride. Probably the only reason he wasn't suspicious right away was because of the strength of Zach's character.

"What do you say, Riki? A simple face-to-face can't hurt, can it? If you don't like what you're hearing, feel free to turn it down on the spot."

Perhaps if Zach hadn't always treated Riki with the respect of an equal, he would have been franker and more bullheaded in his negotiations. On that point alone, Zach had definitely earned a reputation among Riki's fellow slum mongrels as a decent human being. Zach had never tried to make a hard sell with a crap hand.

A courier. Riki liked the sound of those words. Needless to say, had Guy been there with him, looking for the loopholes, he would probably have dissuaded Riki from the get-go. Still, an uncharacteristic sense of curiosity—more than the invisible but ever-present asphyxiation filling the slums—enticed and won him over in the end.

"Okay. When and where do we set this thing up?"

Ten minutes after three in the afternoon, Midas standard time. Flare (Area 2). Though dusk was still a while off, the human tide flowing through the district housing the high-class boutiques and restaurants had hardly abated.

Automatic "capsule cars" used by the tourist trade paraded back and forth along the roadway. The spic-and-span sidewalks stood out beneath the blue sky, dancing with shimmering colors as far as the eye could see.

Since that day, Riki had taken a break from cruising at night. But to him, who rarely ventured into the city outside the Midas Pleasure Quarters, the view from the outer circumference of the double rings of Midas wasn't the endlessly intriguing sight he'd imagined. Rather, it was all that defanged bawdiness exposed to the bright light of day he couldn't tear his eyes away from.

It's one big make-believe world after all.

If Ceres was a stifling, suffocating dump, then at night the highfaluting Midas Pleasure Quarters was a bottomless, swirling swamp of deception and desire. Ask whether the mongrels (who enjoyed more corrupted liberty than they knew what to do with) or the citizens of Midas (who lived behind the unseen glass walls of their invisible cages) enjoyed the greater freedom, and the true answer would be a long time coming.

The future isn't written in stone.

Such slogans from the Ceres independent movement, now ancient history, had long since passed from the collective memory. But Riki seriously believed he must seize this opportunity that had so unexpectedly fallen into his lap. No matter how heavily reality pressed down on a man's shoulders, if he was given the faintest breath of a way out, he could change his fate.

That was the truth Riki knew. The same as when he'd been suffocating within the glass bars of Guardian—a jail pretending to be a playground—and he'd encountered the indispensable Guy, the touchstone of his survival.

Nobody's future is written in stone.

Even if this was all some bait-and-switch, he could use it somehow, in some small way, to change his life around. With a scrap of courage and a little bit of luck, Riki knew he could make it happen.

If he didn't change, the world around him wouldn't change either. Nothing would happen. His future was in his own hands, and he had the feeling that right now this was something more than a mere daydream.

At the outskirts of the gleaming modern streets, Riki leaned back against the walls of the urban canyon and once again studied the card in his hand.

WED 15:30 MOGA-E- [R+B] 805 (#07291)

Those were the only characters printed on the card Zach had given him. Once his part of the transaction was completed, Zach gave a meaningful smile and walked of. "Well, good luck."

Later Riki took a closer look at the card and clucked to himself. No problem with the time. The stuff about MOGA was probably a ward or street name. Or perhaps the name of a building.

But located where? He hadn't the slightest idea. As a consequence, Riki ended up wasting half a day wrestling with the Midas maps on an ancient computer, searching through each area. And why the hell am I the one doing this? Spending time and effort on such an exasperating endeavor was stupid and it pissed him off.

He seriously considered tearing up the card and throwing it away right then. But half out of sheer stubbornness he pictured Zach's face in his mind and while directing at the imagined visage a stream of torrid curses, continued to pound away at the keyboard.

He didn't know the particulars of who Zach's client was, but sensed that written in invisible ink between the black characters printed on this ordinary white cardstock was the proviso: We don 'I care who you are or where you're from, but we've got no use for the useless.

Perhaps it was a psychological quirk ingrained in the soul of every slum mongrel. Or perhaps a vision arising out of his excessively ego-driven nature. Either way (fuck all!), the indisputable truth was that he went at it with more drive than he usually did.

On top of it being an ancient piece of junk, Riki hardly ever laid eyes on a computer in the course of his daily life, so the whole process took far more time than should have been necessary. But despite that, the fascination of untangling this engaging puzzle compelled him.

C'mon, cough it up. I'm definitely figuring this thing out.

Since being stripped of their rights as citizens of Midas, it was to be expected that the residents of the poverty-choked cesspool that was Ceres would be branded savages of the lowest order, below human dignity and intelligence.

Charged with giving and providing its wards with an equal education, Guardian accordingly pounded into them the basics of computer use. Except that after being forcibly evicted from this "paradise" to their living quarters in the slums, they found themselves in an environment quite incapable of capitalizing on those skills or drives.

It was no surprise that apart from a small group of dedicated fanatics, such an education was, to the vast majority, completely useless. Incidentally, bound up in the Zein class system, school attendance figures in Midas also revealed remarkable disparities.

So indoctrinated were they with an awareness of their own class, they lived happily with whatever degree of knowledge was on a par with their own lot in life. Thus, a considerably large number of illiterates were found among their ranks.

Nevertheless, they firmly believed that being in possession of their Midas residency cards elevated their worth as human beings far above that of the mongrels of the slums. And even if they happened to he unsatisfied with the hand life had dealt them, the existence of beings below them on the totem pole tickled the subconscious with a warped kind of pleasure.

Such was the ugly reality of Midas's control of the populace.

In the end, Riki personally experienced the commonsensical reality that the unexercised mind and body inevitably go to ruin.

And now he was in the Moga ward. To be sure, he had no positive proof that this was indeed the place. "Moga Ward, East 15-9-32, Red Baron" was not listed on the official Midas tourist maps, but what looked at a glance to be a small, nice and tidy "business hotel" was the only thing he could see.

The establishment, an "escort club," apparently sold "beautiful dreams" (he had no idea what kind of "dreams") to old and young, male and female alike. As shady as the place struck him, at this Juncture, Riki had ceased to be surprised. He'd turned over enough rocks and gone through enough pain to find the location of "R+B."

Whether or not his search would be rewarded was another subject. There were plenty of these little known places not found on any official maps. Not to mention that when it came to this type of members-only play zone, frequented by a hard-core clientele, he could hardly expect to waltz in the front door. In the end, Riki really had nothing.

Considering the time of day, he could have predicted that the place wouldn't be doing big business. On the other hand, there might be another way in besides the front lobby. Though nobody had crossed the threshold for some time now—

He made it inside without the bother of a pat-down and unconsciously drew a deep breath of relief. Pumped up, he headed directly to the elevators and headed for room 805.

He arrived at the door, his face tense and drawn. He punched the key code—"07291"—into the lock and paused. A green light blinked on indicating the door was unlocked. Riki swallowed hard despite himself. This moment was the fruits of a half-day's hard work at the computer terminal. For better or for worse, it was possibly the turning point of his life. Uncharacteristically, the fingers curled around the doorknob trembled slightly.

The stark, utilitarian room reminded him of an office. Waiting for him inside the room, reclining deeply into an executive office chair, was what appeared to be a man of uncertain age with a striking, if androgynous countenance. If it were not for the cruel scar on his left cheek, he would have been a perfect fit at a few of Midas's higher-class establishments.

However this was no ordinary guy. He glanced at Riki with severe, gray eyes. "You're right on time. Good. You passed your first test." Not a trace of kindness softened the tenor of his voice.

So it was as Riki had suspected. Following the clues on the card he'd gotten from Zach to the door of this room was the first hurdle he'd had to surmount in order to become a courier.

The man gazed at Riki with that same poker face, not inviting him to take a seat on the sofa.

"Name?"

"Riki."

"Age?"

"Almost sixteen," he answered honestly, in the same moment wondering if he shouldn't have padded that number a bit. But the man didn't seem inclined to split hairs over his age.

"Have you been informed about the particulars of the job?"

"Not at all. Zach said that, for the time being, whether or not I take the job would be settled after I met with you."

Riki figured right now he had at least a fifty-fifty chance. But he didn't want to go there. He wanted this job so badly he could taste it. Somehow the icy atmosphere the man engendered about himself—so similar to Riki—made him hate the idea of being thought too eager.

As if he could see right through Riki the man laid out the conditions: "I don't need a kid to run errands for tips, or some little smart-ass who'll be pawing through the packages for pocket change. You'll be my arms and legs. You'll get the merchandise to its appointed place at the appointed time, no questions asked. You don't need more than the average amount of brains or courage. And I don't need a cur that's constantly pulling at the leash and not heeling when he's told. That sound like something you can manage?"

He spelled it out without a flicker of emotion on his face.

The reason Riki reacted with no unnecessary disgust or contrariness was because, like Zach, the man didn't appear to care that he was a slum mongrel. Far from acting out of magnanimity, Riki sensed that he was a pure meritocrat. He wasn't searching for superiority in the blood, only whether he could do the job. And if Riki could, then he wasn't going to debate the matter.

The impassive scar-faced man was giving off a vibe that was already creeping him out. But to a slum mongrel wasting away the hours and days immersed in his own depravities, with no chance to give shape to the shards of his dreams, this unexpected luck falling on him was more enticing to him than a four-course meal shoved under his nose.

Waiting for life to arrive on his doorstep only ensured that nothing would happen. Riki answered back. "Give me a shot."

"Keep in mind that this shall be considered a binding contract." The man lit a cigarette and took a long drag. "I'm Katze." He took a card case from his breast pocket and placed it on the table, indicating with his eyes for Riki to take it.

When Riki clumsily picked it up, examining it with curious eyes the man said, "Good thing this wasn't a waste of our time." For the first time his mouth turned up at the corners.

This encounter between Riki and Katze, the infamous black marketeer, might have been called fateful.

Katze was a smart, silent slender-faced, well-mannered man whose outward countenance did not match his character. Though not exactly a misanthropist, he cared little for anybody outside those he met in the course of his business.

This was not some facade, but the way Katze lived his life. Somehow or another, Riki sensed a common bond with this man and it left him with a strange feeling. Katze didn't delve deeply into Riki's private life, and in exchange shared only the bare minimum of information about himself. When you're living on the black market, there's no profit in the past seemed to be his motto.

Still, plastic surgery these days could easily erase that scar from his cheeks. Riki suspected leaving it there intentionally served as a kind of warning. He didn't earn a living with his face. That mark alone said that he was a man who would do what had to be done.

Desires arose within Riki that had utterly fled him when he was stagnating in the slums. Some day, for certain—

He knew that the day when his dreams were no longer futile was coming. He didn't know the first thing about Katze, and he couldn't have cared less. He wasn't there to make friends. He hadn't come there with any expectation of getting personal. To Katze, he was simply another mule among many; nobody needed to tell Riki. He understood that well enough.

Katze, however, was the only one keeping his thoughts to himself. For better or worse, every age and breed of badass wanted to give the new guy, Riki more than the requisite helping hand, and Riki had to wonder where the hell they all came from.

Even so, there wouldn't have been a problem if Riki had possessed the kind of ingratiating personality that could have managed but a single, diplomatic smile. But, of course, Riki couldn't be anything but Riki.

Riki had never once wished for a bad reputation. He'd become accustomed to the strange looks cast his way, and even when not consciously ignoring them, for the most part, they flitted past in his peripheral version.

Nevertheless, from his experiences to date, he'd gotten the inkling that his existence became for a certain type of man (he didn't yet grasp all the requisite conditions) a kind of stimulant, exciting them such that they could not leave him alone.

Despite this realization, he wouldn't discipline himself and attempt to turn aside trouble before it started. He knew to a mind-numbing degree how futile such efforts were. In the first place, trying to imagine what hadn't happened yet was a pain in the ass, and Riki wasn't curious enough about other people to get stressed about shit like that.

But perhaps because nobody knows a thief like another thief, Riki's particulars got talked about without him doing anything to advertise the facts. Those whose minds changed on the spot and those who always went along with the crowd—his stance toward them didn't change. A simple reflection of his stubborn nature perhaps. It was all the same to him.

The couriers were divided into two factions: uniformed regulars called the Megisto, and a mercenary contingent known as Athos. Generally speaking, the Megisto had taken a particular disliking to Riki while Athos was disinclined to pay the masses any mind.

Nevertheless, as a resident of the Ceres that had been extinguished from the official maps of Midas, this slum mongrel remained something of a novelty. Or perhaps they'd even considered this teenage punk a fellow compatriot from the start?

Wherever he looked, whenever he turned around, there they were, with their inquisitive stares. The fights, the obscenities mingled with scorn exchanged under the cloak of humor. There was nothing unusual about him at all.

And he got a clue. Biography was a boat anchor when swimming in the dark waters of the black market. Yet, as hard as he tried, he could not shed the tendrils clinging to him from out of the past: the perceived slights, the visceral disgust, the irrational prejudices.

He'd been well-acquainted with that sort of thing since the day he was born, but these days he simply didn't have the time to overreact to each in kind, to pick at every slight.

The low man on the totem pole. As the word suggested, there were mountains of never-seen, never-done things that a spanking-new courier had to digest. At the same time, tutoring this stone-cold, pissant little kid—devoid of even a breath of his youthful charms—in their sort of hard schooling was a prerogative liberally indulged in by his seniors.

Riki being Riki, he kept it bottled up until he finally exploded. And when the knock-down, drag-out fight erupted, the bystanders watching with broad grins on their faces got a clue as well: there was nothing special about the despicable word "slum mongrel." Rather, it was Riki himself—with a gaze that threw off sparks of arrogance—who was the rare breed.

Katze was not surprised that Riki should so recklessly take on guys in weight classes far superior to his own. He knew the ins and outs of street fighting and wasn't overly impressed by Riki's unexpectedly strong stance. Nor could he fault Riki for the way he compensated by hitting hard below the belt.

In his own dispassionate voice Katze said, as if he'd been expecting it all along, "So I guess the boss of Bison is more than a paper tiger."

Never imagining that the name Bison would have any currency here, Riki wiped the blood from his lips and glared at Katze. "In a fight, the strongest man wins and the man who wins is the strongest. When your life's on the line, nobody cares if the money's dirty or clean."

"Well said. That bunch believed they'd have no trouble showing a runt half their weight what's what."

Their intent may have been to show that bastard what's what, but it turned out, the bastard knew how to kick ass when it mattered. Rather than running his mouth off, Riki had fucked them over, and it'd be a long time before they got over the embarrassment.

Muscles built at an exercise machine in a gym were for show only, no match for a body tempered in actual battle.

"They let appearances fool them into underestimating their opponent and found themselves on the ground because of it. They no doubt learned a valuable lesson."

They didn't need to hear this from Katze. If anybody had learned the painful truth that Riki couldn't be dismissed as a "little kid," it was those who'd touched the hot iron with their bare hands.

"Even so, don't go taking everybody you meet as another mad dog baring his teeth," Katze said under his breath, his words hinting at deeper, darker truths.

Eye for an eye, down to the flesh and bone—that was the iron law of the slums.

Just because he'd grown up in a different sector, didn't mean he had to do everything their way. Whether he picked up the gauntlet that'd been thrown down in front of him depended a lot on his mood that day, but he always settled a score on his own terms and in a definitive manner. That was his policy.

"You really don't care when they call you refuse that crawled out of the septic tank of the slums?"

No, it wasn't being called septic tank scrapings that got on his nerves. It was their fetid, bullshit posing, poisoned and choked by clinging twines of curdled prejudice. But saying so would change nothing now. All the better that their education be a thorough one. Teach them to think before speaking. Make pain the instructor and they'd never forget.

These thoughts on his mind, Riki glared at Katze. Katze answered with a lopsided grin. "That's a damned scary stare you got there." He lit a cigarette. "Prejudice is not a state of mind easily changed. There's no shortage of assholes who spin the finest of webs with their words but speak another language in their hearts, and it's going to stay that way for generations to come."

He came straight to the point as he languidly puffed away at the cigarette. "That's because the mongrels of Ceres are nothing but the talentless dregs, worn down in their depravities. Goes without saying these days. So get used to how the Market works. She's a harsh mistress that only the fearless survive."

He looked into Riki's black eyes with an expression that was entirely sincere. "Keep your ears open. Don't avert your eyes from reality no matter what happens. And keep your mouth shut. That's how you get ahead in this world. Understand?"

This was Katze spelling out the way he lived his life, and for a long moment Riki couldn't avert his eyes from Katze's gaze.

A short time later he was amazed to come across the rumor that Katze was an alumnus of the same slums as himself. Seriously? The information gave him the kind of shock he hadn't felt for years, stunned him like a blow to the back of the head.

Riki had to believe that flashing the cruel scar on his cheek was Katze's way of saying: This is what it means to crawl out of the slums. Do you have what it takes to do the same?

"Yeah, I've got what it takes," Riki whispered in his heart. If the only other avenue open to him was to grow old steeped in the sludge of the slums, then he was not about to let this hard-won chance go to waste.

The scramble for territory in the slums began anew. This was not a safety maneuver to release his stored-up energy, but a way to keep the rust from growing in his joints and seeping into his brain. He knew the consequences of that all too well. He was definitely working his way up in the world, Riki promised himself anew, gazing upon his future self with unclouded eyes.

"I don't need an errand boy. I need somebody who'll act as my arms and legs and who can get the merchandise to where it needs to be."

Still, it was only natural that a newcomer like Riki should start out as an errand boy. During this period he proved himself quick on the uptake, determined and never intimidated—a real asset to the team. He gradually took on more valuable assignments.

Despite having grown up in the same slums, Katze did not single him out for special attention, and Riki indulged in no expectations. Everybody knew that Katze was not the type to tangle the public and the private.

Far from it. Having made his own way and achieved the status of broker in the black market meant that Katze would be even harder on Riki, who had come out of the same environment. Or so one would think. Still, Riki racked up a winning record without a word of complaint.

And as he did so, the job became all the more interesting. Riki plunged into the depths of the black market, taking it in quickly and easily. He began to make a name for himself as "Riki the Black."