Chap 4

The moist, heavy breeze blew in from the sea and across the tangled, verdant woodlands of the green belt. Riki flew his jet bike to Orange Road, the boundary line separating flare (Area 2) and Janus (Area 6).

He parked his bike as he always did in a specialty garage on the outskirts of the purple city and strolled alone down the sidewalk. The streets were bathed in bright sunlight cut through by dark shadows. It was not yet noon and the pedestrian traffic was light. As a consequence, the familiar play of light and shadow falling from the clusters of buildings struck him as unusually listless.

With the tourists still recovering from their all-nighters, this was perhaps the most peaceful time of the day. Taking it all in at a glance, Riki continued his stroll.

It was also the best time of the day to be crisscrossing the borders between the Areas in Midas and yet keeping to the posted speed limit. And the best time of the day to go for a walk in the middle checking out the tidy, litter-free streets. At first it had all impressed upon him a kind of malaise, causing him to stumble a bit in his gait. But by now he was well used to it.

He turned off the main thoroughfare onto a side street. Riki nonchalantly sharpened his senses as he passed through the back door of a legal 24 hour drug store. That was the entrance reserved for use by the couriers. A scan of his right palm opened and closed the door.

Katze's offices were in the sub-basement.

Riki had gotten a page from Katze two hours before. As there was no indication this was a rush job, Riki showed up when he usually did, ten minutes before their scheduled appointment.

The sub-basement was accessed by means of a custom-made elevator, about which it seemed everybody had an opinion:

"Nobody uses old junk like this anymore."

"Man, I can't understand why the boss goes for this old-fashioned stuff."

"Enough already, I say. Time to exchange it for the latest model."

Replacement parts were impossible to get for the ancient electric elevator unless special-ordered.

Why the incarnation of capability and rationality that was Katze should fuss so over this antique was a mystery. Riki inserted the cardkey he'd gotten from Katze and the elevator doors opened. He stepped heavily onto the platform and the door closed. The way it swayed back and forth was familiar to him now, and prompted a slight yawn.

Riki didn't know how many floors below street level Katze's office was. There were no panels or indicator lights in the elevator to specify the floor. The elevator simply stopped Where Katze had his fortress, and that was all Riki really needed to know, so he didn't let it bother him.

The elevator was hardly the end of the oddities in Katze's office. More than simplicity for simplicity's sake, Katze banished anything frivolous, unproductive or useless from his environment. His office was like an inorganic black box. No matter how many times Riki came, it stilled jarred him.

Katze struck him as an obsessive-compulsive freak. The odd vibe about the place lelt him feeling constantly off balance. On the other hand, as discomfiting as the room was to Riki, who was steeped in the chaos of the slums down to the souls of his feet, the office's clearly androgynous atmosphere was a perfect complement to Katze's personality.

With the same roots in the same slums, every time Riki came here he could not help but feel the extent of the distance between them. This must be the difference between the made man and his unmade underlings.

Recognizing his presence, Katze shot him a welcoming look as always. But unusually, when he didn't push aside the computer terminal on his desk, Riki figured he'd got his timing wrong. He glanced at the sofa in the corner, the only object in the room that made the space feel more comfortable.

In the place usually reserved for him, he found two kids sitting together. I didn't expect this, he thought. Guess there's a first for everything. As far as he knew, Katze never allowed people unrelated to work into his office. Children were out of the question.

The kids struck him as not so cute as they were handsome. Their eyes and mouth possessed a cherubic quality. From a cursory examination" he couldn't tell how old they were. That was the kind of attractiveness they possessed.

The two sat so perfectly together like a pair of dolls, the sole ornamentation in the bleakly-furnished room. Riki had to wonder if they were there simply to add diversion for the eyes. He restrained himself from laughing at the apparent joke.

Both of them were swaddled down to their ankles in luxurious robes from a long ago, bygone era, lending to their identities an additionally mysterious aura. Taking all this in, Riki grew suspicious that Katze—typing away at the keyboard without a word of explanation—was somehow testing him.

The one wearing blood-red ruby earrings had a head of unpretentiously arrayed blonde hair that even from a distance looked soft to the touch. The image of that Blondy's magnificent, long golden hair sprang to Riki's mind. Recalling the painful sensation as he had just swallowed a small bone, he cleared his throat.

The other child's lustrous black hair, gleaming and equal to his own, flowed over his shoulders, neatly squared at the ends.

Perhaps to draw more attention to their sculpted features, a large sapphire was embedded in their foreheads. Riki was no connoisseur of jewelry and had equally little interest in their value, but he had no doubt that their ruby earrings and the sapphires in their foreheads were genuine.

At the same time, he could also say that the two did a good job at hiding that ethereal essence they possessed. Yet the two kept their eyes tightly shut the whole time, not acknowledging his presence with a single glance.

finally Katze spoke. "Sorry to keep you waiting. Straightening things tip. Took me a bit longer than I expected to find a good place to leave off." This explanation accompanied by what sounded very much like a sigh of relief.

"And Alec?"

At the mention of Riki's partner, Katze said succinctly, "Number three warehouse." Katze had been hurrying to put together the manifest for the cargo shipment.

From the first time they'd teamed up together, Alec had taken the new guy under his wing. "Maybe a picture's worth a thousand words, but looking ain't doing. It all comes down to experience."

That was Alec's pet phrase. More recently he'd taken to leaving all the preliminary work and various odd jobs to Riki so he could concentrate on procuring the resources for the consignments.

It all comes down to experience.

And it was all too easy for Riki. But as a lackey getting worked harder than some and seeing it all credited back to his easy-come, easy-go partner, Riki couldn't help imagining that Alec just wanted to lighten his own load.

Even though he'd heard that the job this time involved shipping a package to the frontier Laocoon district, Riki wasn't all that surprised. He only raised his eyebrows when he learned that the "package" consisted of those two kids.

Not taking the direct route but going via a cargo ship said a lot about the origins of the two as well.

Yeah, but they're still a pair of tykes, thought Riki. By this point in his life he hardly fancied himself a moralist when confronted with other people's personal predilections. But when it came to pervs and prepubescent kids, he wouldn't touch any of 'em.

A mere courier throwing a fit about it wouldn't change a thing, But on the other hand—

Giving the two of them another good looking over, Riki quizzically tilted his head to the side. He just didn't get it. What with the pierced ears and the bindi in their foreheads, he could tell at a glance that they hadn't been brought up in a run-of-the-mill harem. From what little he could see of their exposed countenances, they were the highest class of pet.

The kind of pet also sold through back channels. Considering the ironclad rule among merchants that sale items go through a thorough quality control check, it was incomprehensible that the both of them be coincidentally blind. But that wasn't the kind of query he was going to raise right in front of their faces.

Katze spelled out the current arrangements and the two were bundled up by one of his assistants and carried out of the room. Riki didn't need to be told: No need to go turning over rocks. Just do your job. Still, the desire to know overcame the certainty of a firm rebuff.

But Katze came straight to the point. "That was a Layana special edition."

Riki momentarily caught his breath. "Didn't he close up shop a long time ago?"

"That's what the public has been led to believe for now. But there are fanatics out there ready to pour money into certain pockets in order to get their hands on dolls like that. If you can't deal with the inclinations you're born with in an above-board manner, then you go underground. For the businessman, everything starts with an unmet demand and grows from there."

Katze indifferently related these facts of life, leaving his personal feelings out of the equation. Riki, in contrast, couldn't hide the looks of distaste on his face. Katze didn't flash a cynical or ironic smile in reply, but in the same, neutral tone of voice flatly declared: "It's not up to the Market to decide what is ugly or what is pretty. Your only job is to do your job well. Stop thinking so much."

"Yeah, I get all that, but—" was all Riki could get out, choking down the bile rising in his throat.

Layana Hugo. The name alone had survived the legendary edifice that was to Riki nothing more than mere rumor. Once upon a time in the garish neon-lit Midas streets, it was the one place that gave people the creeps. Too dark a name to answer the simple satiation of personal desires, it was a shop of horrors arousing visceral disgust even in the most permissive of pleasure-seekers.

Gentlemen and ladies alike. High-minded men of character and the pure of heart. Men and women were reduced to "male" and "female," rationality and moral standards stripped away as the raw, human animal was brought into the light.

The girls and boys Layana Hugo sold for sex by the hour were so beautiful that they drew stares of astonishment. But none of them were totally sound in body.

Even when the deformities arose out of the natural hereditary process, they were chimeras produced by chance mutation. They were created deliberately through genetic engineering. All in the heartless pursuit of the perfect countenance. Pathetically so.

But all this work wasn't just so they could show their creations off to the world. These "fairies" had no other purpose but as sex dolls for deviants.

They were all blind, not so much in order to placate consumer tastes, but rather so that the customer should be less self-conscious about his own deviancies. By eliminating the need to see, the remaining senses could also be correspondingly sharpened.

In order to prevent the customer from suffering an accidental bite, in order to ensure risk-free oral sex, at a certain age the teeth were removed. After such a manner they were instructed from a young age solely in the skills of the bedroom. Mutant sex dolls that never stepped one foot out of the room they were furnished with for life.

Riki reacted to the thought of them the same way he did smelling the fetid odor of the slums. Unrevivable, but alive. The living dead. Simply the despair of rotting away in a jail called "freedom." There were more perverts in the world, so-called "dilettantes" unsatisfied with "normal" sex, than he cared to think about.

The psychological burden of a person's own sexual deviancies became too much for him to handle. The reason for the Midas Pleasure Quarters was to condone and accept all those frustrated and self-indulgent carnal desires, embody them, and make them real.

Moreover, there was no fretting that the excesses of a private desire might be made public. No one would divulge any of those secrets. A customer need take no dangerous risks. This was a Shangri-La, where people could do whatever they liked to their heart's content.

Visitors entranced by the possibilities could be counted on for repeat business, hence the reason why the immortal night never ended in Midas.

Then a successful businessman, the scion of an aristocratic family fabled among the Commonwealth star systems, grew so attached to one of these mutant sex dolls that, suffering greatly in body and soul, finally blew the two of themselves up in a suicide bombing.

The nobleman who annihilated himself had the reputation as a dignified and high-minded pacifist. Consequential to the ensuing scandal, Layana Hugo, the city's champion of the perverse, vanished from its streets.

Though he had neither money nor social standing at his disposal, the name of Layana Hugo became known to the further reaches of the star systems, spoken among those who had no connection whatsoever with Midas.

Had they quietly offed themselves instead of going out in a carefully planned blaze of violent glory, the magnitude of scandal would have been considerably diminished. Had the man only considered his own reputation and that of his family, he would have died in the darkness and consigned the truth of their deaths to oblivion.

But instead he chose to take his mutant sex doll to a very public death with him, leaving unanswered the intractable puzzle of what prompted his diseased mind to end his life in such spectacular manner. His relatives were at first convinced it was only an accident, or that he'd gotten swept up in some conspiracy, or that he was the victim of an act of terrorism. The attention of the galactic mass media focused on Midas.

Fearing that the fallout would damage the legendary, "risk-free" image of the Pleasure Quarters, the high officials in Midas quietly and expeditiously set to work on the cover-up.

The frightening and scandalous death of this man, said to be a "veritable billboard for the Commonwealth star systems," put at risk all those whose reputations were also tied up with the Commonwealth. It could strike the spark that would burn even those who lived and worked in Tanagura's shadow.

Or so they feared.

Contrary to this sense of consternation, the man's family—still in the dark about the incident—demanded that the authorities conduct a thorough investigation. They had more than enough money and influence to make themselves heard, and so whipped the media into a frenzy. They finally got fed up with the spin and indecision of the Commonwealth officials serving as their intermediaries. Taking things into their own hands, the entire family gathered together and relocated to Midas.

Denouncing a Midas that had wrapped all details of the incidents in a veil of secrecy, and possessed by the conviction that they were there to speak truth to power, nobody could stand in their way.

Or perhaps this family, whose authority held sway over every other planet in the galaxy, seized upon a heaven-sent opportunity to make Amoy kneel before them. Toward those ends they took the unprecedented step of suing Tanagura, making exorbitant, unheard-of demands for compensation.

Midas, which had up to that point been earnestly maintaining its silence, tired of the family's outcries, and divulged all the details of the incident. Caught unawares, the family was shocked into silence. Flustered family members swooned on the spot.

Thereafter, they informed the mass media that the entire incident had in fact been a conspiracy to damage their reputations. Repeating these hysterical allegations every chance they got kicked up a lot of dust but accomplished little as their good names sank low in the cesspool, the expected restitution of their honor never arriving.

In the wake of the unprecedented scandal, the doors of Layana Hugo's demon-haunted pavilion were chained shut. Yet it proved at best a pyrrhic victory for this once noble family, now a pale shadow of its past, glorious self. The messes tourists regularly got themselves into rarely even made it into the news, and never to the extent of that scandal.

It all really happened, Katze blithely claimed.

In the meantime, Layana Hugo had gone underground and was in the process of planning a comeback. He'd revived the operation sufficiently to start taking orders for custom-made sex dolls.

The man's family had used their status, money, and power to lead Commonwealth officials around by the nose. Their sudden fall resulted in a desperate struggle for power among the government elites. The shrill charges of "conspiracy" ultimately rang hollow.

Or did they? Didn't evil men continue to spin their webs in the shadows? Could anyone prove they did not?

"No matter how rich, blood can always spoil. A giant organization will crush the little man, yet a single weak link can bring the whole edifice crashing to its knees," Katze continued.

"Was he really that rotten and spoiled everything, or was he a hero? Shouldn't it be decided by people involved and not strangers?"

"You find this all too irrational?"

"It's all the same to me. I figure what others label just and right is only one version of the truth. In any case, I'll do as I see fit."

"Even knowing that you'll be despised by the person right in front of you?" Katze gave Riki a hard look with his ash-gray eyes.

For some reason, Riki's breath caught in his throat. He couldn't avert his gaze. He didn't understand why Katze would say such a thing, but he had to believe that it was motivated by something other than the story of the man who'd driven his family to destruction.

This was not like Katze. Riki got the feeling that he'd caught a glimpse of real Katze though a crack in his cold, imperturbable mask.

"Maybe if it's beyond compromise, then you just learn to deal?" Riki said, feeling the need to speak under Katze's heavy gaze. "Once you come to the realization that some people are never going to be happy with you and you can be okay with that, you give up the half-assed effort to be some sort of saint, don't you think?"

Riki was saying die kinds of things he rarely gave voice to.

"If you've only got two hands to hold onto the most important things in life, then no matter how much you may loath it, the third one's got to go."

It was a universal truth that no human being could ever scratch an itch hard enough to make it right. The hands of the slum dwellers that did scratch that itch were empty of hopes and dreams. And yet, Riki held this thought in his head: You've only got two hands to hold onto the most important things in life.

The weight of that aphorism was even now deeply engraved on the face of the person saying it.

"So whatever you can't hold in your own two hands, you get rid of?" Katze said to himself, his cheek twisting as he reflected on the meaning of those words. And when he did, the wound that ran like a rift across the attractive visage of his fixed, emotionless countenance seemed to tremble. That scar had earned Katze the nickname "Subzero Scarface."

Riki was startled by the unexpected vividness of the reaction. Katze plucked a cigarette from his favorite cigarette case and lit it with practiced ease. He took a deep drag and slowly exhaled, a scene that had also become quite familiar to him.

"I see. That constitutes your unshakable policy then." Katze returned to his usual form, "I don't recall learning anything of the sort at Guardian. A conclusion you came to on your own? Or one you learned at someone else's knee?"

The mention of Guardian caught Riki off guard. Ordinarily when Katze had a face-to-face with Riki, he didn't breathe a word about the slums. He never engaged in long bull sessions about subjects unrelated to work in the first place.

Riki couldn't exactly fathom the reasons why, but Katze was acting differently from normal today. Recently Riki had sensed a curious wind blowing through the place, a puzzle he couldn't figure out. It was a strange sensation, though not off-putting, so he'd passed it off as just his imagination.

In the black market there was a single person, a slum brother, who shared his past. He had no intention of vesting himself totally in this fact, but the hard reality of Katze's existence became a kind of compass needle for him. That was no denying that it set his mind at ease.

"When I left Guardian, Aire said that to me."

"Aire? Oh, you mean the big sister on your cell block?"

"She wasn't my big sister. She was a friend."

"So a block mate?"

"Not quite. She wasn't a Donny," Riki stated in clear terms, using the slum slang for a personal friend. "She was a Mary." He meant a close colleague or associate.

Hearing the words used in this context, Katze briefly hesitated. With a motion similar to that of a fisherman reeling in a line he tapped the ash from the end of his cigarette. "Not a Donny but a Mary, eh? You're splitting the hairs mighty fine there."

"I wasn't the one splitting the hairs," Riki said with a slightly forlorn expression on his face. "They were." No matter how many years had passed since leaving Guardian, some things never changed.

Katze neither smiled nor cynically grimaced, but only turned his quiet eyes on him.

Riki had no "friends" at Guardian. What he had were timid bystanders and onlookers who kept their distance, and enemies who sooner or later would extend their claws and bare their fangs. Yet there was one healing presence who understood him.

He'd shared his past and his childhood only with colleagues and associates. A relationship that he could honestly call a "friendship" had been as good as nonexistent. The only so-called garden in Ceres, Guardian was to Riki neither home nor hell, but a closed asylum.

"Of course. And? I take it Aire was your senior?"

"Three years my senior, to be precise."

"Three years is practically a lifetime at Guardian. And women have such glib tongues. She must have been quite a precocious girl to be handing out such wisdom at that age."

"I suppose. I just know she was beautiful. Everybody called her Saint Langeais. The Angel."

A sparkling platinum blonde with curly hair and eyes like two large emeralds. The nannies, as they were called, were wont to spiff her up and dress her from head to toe. Aire glimmered like one of the decorative angels painted on the ceilings.

"Now don't you go wandering off anywhere, okay, Riki? You're my good-luck charm. Promise you'll stay with me forever and ever?"

Nothing in this world could be as pleasing as the candy-sweet words Aire spun out of her cherry-pink lips or the goodnight kiss she bestowed with her charming mouth. Such a long time ago, and yet the memory remained green in his mind. Aire had been the entirety of his world.

And then that day, the screams and shouts echoing about in an uproar. The end result was a swarm of adults no one had seen before descending upon them and tearing their world apart. When Riki thought about it now, that was when dream ended and everything else began.

The Riki then didn't understand anything. All he knew was that he had been bound to the cruel wheel of fate and that as a child he was powerless to do anything about it.

But Riki's sentimental memories moved Katze little. "Huh. Sounds to me like an exception to the rule. In that place the rule was that all children were the same. Nobody was going to address you so coyly or single you out for special treatment. Had things changed all that much during your time there?"

The nonchalance of Katze's words wrenched in Riki's gut. He and Katze were referring to two completely different places. Riki steeled his thoughts and didn't lose his cool. "Isn't the idea that all children are equal and equally lovable just a lie? The kids who do as they're told and are easy to handle are labeled lovable. The stubborn ones that prove to be a handful aren't. And even then, the little bastards who insist on having things their own way are the worst. Everybody knows, even if nobody wants to say so. Even my cell block mother said I was a problem child without the whisper of a cooperative spirit." He pursed his lips in a sour pout.

Seemingly to grasp the essence of what he was saying, Katze stubbed out his cigarette and said, "Well, mother or sister, they're all human beings after all, aren't they? Whether children or partners, there's got to be some kind of chemistry going on between them."

Taking that to be the final word, Riki spoke. "I'm headed out to the number three warehouse. So I'll see you around."

He turned to leave and get to the job, and as he'd expected, Katze didn't try to stop him, Riki got onto the elevator, letting out a heavy sign as the doors closed.

A Mary, huh?

Unbelievable to think that he'd managed to recall a word like that at this time of his life. Only eight other people—his cohorts—shared a past with him beyond Guardian. Where they'd come from he couldn't say for certain, except that for as long as he could remember it seemed only natural that they should be together.

His room decorated in bright colors and angels and fairies and dragons—his downy bed—drifting off to sweet dreams—the carefree smiles and fragrant aromas—Riki didn't know what that place was and he didn't think he wanted to know. Because, in a way, that world had been everything he needed it to be.

"Bonbons" was what the men who visited now and then called Riki and the others. Riki hated it when they came. Nobody was allowed to leave his room on that day. Nobody was allowed out to play the whole day long. And what was worse, the juice the nannies made them drink on that day tasted like piss. It always made him feel like shit.

What the hell did it all mean? The dream world they were living in suddenly blew apart and Riki knew for the first time. The truth was thrust upon them whether they liked it or not. According to the commiserating adults of Guardian, they were adorable children sacrificed to service the desires of adults.

The shock of their reason for living, the full estimation of their self-worth being rejected outright. The shock petrified them to the core.

This is your new family now.

You have nothing to worry about anymore.

Hidden beneath those words, the pitying looks told them: What was was, and you can't make it go away, as they brought them into the web of their influence.

Perhaps because Riki was the youngest, or as a consequence of rounds of medical treatments called "counseling," the memories he flashed back to here and there seemed nebulous and faded through the mists of time. Yet if he could barely even recall the faces of the block mates he lived with between the ages of six and eleven, then why did he so clearly remember the names and faces of his friends there—?

The platinum blonde Aire. Lean's blue-black hair and ice-blue eyes. Sheila's fiery red hair and amber irises. Ghil's unblemished white hair and scarlet eyes. Heath's straight, honey blonde hair and brown eyes. Raven's silver hair and gray eyes. No matter how many years passed, every face remained forever young in his mind.

By the time Riki had left Guardian at the age of thirteen, their number had fallen to five.

Women who could one day bear children became the communal properly of Guardian. They wanted for nothing. No matter what the disturbance to heart or mind, in one way or another, the way was smoothed to becoming a member of the new family that was Guardian.

As Raven put it, "The good-for-nothing boys ride in on the girls' coattails." In the end the only survivor among them would be Riki.

Heath and Ghil and Raven—the pressure and stress accompanying the violent upheavals in their environment all too easily crushed them. They were too heterodox for a place like Guardian, bound hand and foot by decree that everything be "equal."

"Don't turn out like me. Promise me." Heath was the same age as Aire. Tears welled up in his eyes as he grasped Riki's hand.

"I'm really beat too," were Raven's parting words, his eyes glassy, his voice cracked.

"I definitely won't be like them!" Ghil had declared. With a worn out, terribly contorted expression on his face, "I'm sorry—I'm sorry, Riki. I tried—I tried—but—"

His voice fell away. Riki grasped his hand. Ghil wept as he clung to him. Groaning, his voice subdued, cleaving to him, sobbing, his arms like thin sticks, a pitiful sight.

But he had to say something. "It's OK. It's OK. You don't have to keep trying—" Riki patted his dull, desiccated hair.

The next day he heard Ghil had slipped away as if taking a nap. Riki wept softly. He'd told him to stop trying—isn't that why Ghil's will to live had exhausted itself and the thread of his life snapped...?

The thought made his heart tighten like a vise. The pain grew unbearable. Guy hugged him. "You're wrong, Riki. You only gave Ghil goodnight kiss. He wanted you to tell him that it was OK for him to finally fall asleep. He was happy in the end."

first one, then two, then three of his friends had gone. Riki was the last one left. He didn't know whether to call himself lucky or not. In any case, Guardian had never seen such a troublemaker in all its history. The royal pain in the ass of all the "mothers" and "sisters."

Nevertheless, in a way, Riki was blessed. Though confined to this "garden" filled with lies and deceit, he'd been fortunate enough to find the one person who could understand him—Guy.

The day before they left Guardian, Aire came to see them. "Riki," she said. "Remember this: you've only got two hands to hold onto the only really important things in life. No matter how dear you may believe that third thing might be, it will have to go. Never let go of what's most important. Make no mistake. Once you let it go, there's no getting it back again."

Girls were moved to a different building once they started menstruating, after which they were rarely ever seen. But since it was departure day, Aire got permission to come and see him.

Having not seen her for quite a long time, Aire looked all grown up. For a moment Riki just gawked at her. The girl had become an almost unrecognizably radiant young woman. She did not cast off the raw aura of the female sex, but rather it seemed that the beautiful angel had arisen to heaven and become a goddess.

Perhaps someday she would sprout wings from her back and soar into the sky along with Ghil and the others. That was the vision that haunted his thoughts.

Aire held him gently the way she had before. Always remember—never let go—make no mistake— The sincerity of her words penetrated the depths of his soul and the emotions filled his heart, rendering him speechless.

And with that tight bear hug of an embrace Aire patted from his life forever.

Following the authorized route to the official jump gate at maximum velocity, it was a three-day flight to borderland district of Laocoon in the Veran star system.

During that time, as always, Riki treated the two dolls as so much merchandise. He spared no time for useless chitchat and did everything according to the book, in a businesslike manner and without a hitch.

They were accompanied by androids who sewed as full-time guardians and nursemaids, and so everyday life aboard ship was relatively trouble-free. But Riki couldn't flush the unpleasantness from his mind. His only recourse in the face of such deceitful ugliness was to maintain a constantly cool facade.

The evolutionary origin of the species and the mysteries of life had by now passed from the domain of the gods. Even so, the weight of fate was not born equally. The sheep who knew nothing but what was required to live out the years inside the walls of their jail only had to do as they were told and accept whatever life threw at them.

In other words, a man knew no regrets who harbored no dreams.

One week later.

After the merchandise was delivered without incident and Riki returned to Midas, Alec had him around for a round of heavy drinking to cheer him up. This time alone Riki had been getting low, and needed some sort of distraction.

Riding that head of steam, he went to see Guy for the first time in a long time. Though without a good deal of liquor in him it was fair to say he never would look him in the face.

Riki quit Bison shortly after deciding to be a courier for Katze. Even though he'd started out as a mere errand boy, and even if he ended up as Katze's lapdog, he didn't think he could do both. The other couriers and Katze didn't think so either. Nobody knew how far this would take them, but once they had set forth on that course they drew the line clearly.

Each wanted something to show for it. That was Riki's immediate goal as well. He didn't fear failure. A slum mongrel had nothing left to lose. His myopic eyes blind to the future, the smoldering present in the slums was a low tide that never came in. There was no place to go but up.

Or so he thought. The reality was that Riki had attachments of his own to Bison, but no special fondness for it, and no particular loyalty to his title as the biggest badass of Hot Crack.

The only thing he couldn't afford to lose was his own self-respect. What he wanted to preserve was the connection between himself and Guy. When he really thought things through, that was it.

He hadn't gotten involved in the power struggles of his own initiative. He hadn't gone scavenging for leftovers or looking for chances to sneak in from the sidelines and grab something for himself.

In his own way, he simply brushed aside the sparks and embers that alighted upon him. Having built the reputation of Bison to what it was, that was the last thing anybody expected.

From the beginning Riki loathed "hanging out." Even though it meant swimming against the tide, it wasn't his intent to put on airs. He wasn't good at overriding his own ego and cooperating with others, and he hated having favors thrust upon him just as vociferously.

Riki took command of Bison as the situation demanded, and did what he had to do the way he wanted to do it. He couldn't have done it alone. Where he was lacking, Guy filled in the gaps. Luke backed him up. Sid tied up the loose ends and Norris smoothed out the edges. That, Riki believed, is what made Bison into what it became.

But Riki didn't want to get so attached to the name of Bison that he was just doing what other people wanted. That didn't mean he wanted to destroy Bison. That just made this moment in time the one Riki had to seize.

All the better if he stepped aside and somebody new took his place at the top. Or if they seized the opportunity to find themselves new homes to call their own. Riki wasn't particularly worried about Bison continuing on as Bison. His determination to get out hadn't changed.

But he'd have to be crazy to imagine that Guy and the others would cut their ties to Bison just like that. Even if Bison dissolved, Riki wasn't about to give up Guy as his pairing partner. Even if the current state of their relationship bordered on estrangement, Guy remained the foundation of Riki's heart. That wasn't going to change anytime soon.

"Never let go of what's most important." Aire's words echoed in his ears.

He'd become a courier without first asking Guy's advice. At this late hour he didn't intend to start regretting that act of selfishness, but Riki didn't want to lose the warmth of Guy's presence.

But he had only two hands to hold onto the most important things in his life.

His own pride in what he could do—the ties that bound him to Guy—a dream job worth doing— Which of these could he afford to throw away?

Although Katze struck a convincing pose, the more Riki through it over, the worse his head hurt. A satisfactory answer had not been forthcoming for a long time.

"Make no mistake, Riki. Cast it aside and you'll never get it back again." Aire's words stabbed at him. Riki found himself gored on the horns of this dilemma.

Might it be better to abandon this policy entrenched in his mind? In that case, he wouldn't have to abandon anything else. But if he allowed himself to be pushed that far, Riki thought derisively to himself, what soul would be left?

"Riki? What's up? What's going on?" Guy said, seeing Riki unexpectedly staggering toward him.

His brow was furrowed, but not to find fault with or condemn Riki's presumptuousness as he took possession of the one comfortable bed. Guy greeted him in his always pleasant manner. "You certainly seem to be in a good mood. Things going your way?"

Things going my way?

Well, he had his job under control and the money was rolling in. So he'd given Guy the gift of some high-quality stout, a rare treat in the slums. That's probably what he was referring to when he talked about things "going his way."

His mood was on an even keel. His mind was oddly awake, though his heart ached. A sense of malaise he couldn't quite put his finger on might have been what prompted him to blurt out, "Watch me crawl my way out of here, Guy—"

No, making such a clear statement to Guy must have been his way of pushing himself into a place where there was no turning back. Which of the three? Indecision gripped his thoughts. He was beginning to hate himself.

He had only two hands to hold onto the most important things in his life. If so, rather than be forced to abandon the third, he'd hold tightly to it, even if that meant taking it in his mouth and dragging it along behind him.

For a moment Guy looked at him, as if searching for the words to reply. "Yeah, sure—" he said in the gentle voice Riki was so accustomed to, Guy's lips curling wryly at the corners.

Yet Riki managed not to notice. He had no way of knowing how his words burrowed like poisonous thorns into Guy's heart.