Alone Again Or | Page 2

green?" she
said.
"I really was on my way out," Syd said, "you want brown, it's four
dollars a spoon. I don't have any white, no one here can afford white
and not enough of your types come down to my apartment to make it
worth the risk to have around. You in or out?"
"Three dollars," she said.
"Done. How many spoons?"
"Twenty."
They made the exchange. When she was gone Syd put the money in the
box under his bed which was filled with money and waited for the
alarm in the ceiling to go off, and for the doors to automatically lock.

He saw the girl outside walking quickly up the street. When she turned
a corner Syd pictured her giving the bag to an agent from the MP and
waited. Nothing happened.
You're not going to get arrested, not on your wedding day, he thought.
He waited ten more minutes to make sure he wasn't going to be under
arrest and got up. He put his coat on and left for the agency.
Jennifer sat on the round wooden bar stool and tried to ignore the music
around her. Bodies sweated, lights flashed, and the whole place shook
with the noise of drunken college students.
She swiveled in her bar chair, her glass of straight vodka half empty.
The students looked young to her, almost babyish, although she could
remember being their age. The bar wasn't strict about making sure
everyone was of age, she knew. Most of the people dancing on the
crowded cement dance floor were probably eighteen or nineteen. The
kid throwing up in the corner she was certain was eighteen at the most.
A bouncer already was descending on him as Jennifer watched. She
knew the boy would end up in the alley behind the bar. Maybe he
would make his drunken way to a street where a cab could be hailed;
maybe he would sleep in the alley and wake up without shoes or a
wallet.
If the second happened, she knew, he'd have company. For some time
she'd been one of the pickpockets who sat behind the dumpsters,
throwing dice to decide who caught the next drunk kid to be thrown out.
It hadn't been a bad way to make money; she'd been in a group of five
people, three of which were girls, and she'd been able to stay drunk all
the time on the money. They'd made sure that none of the kids got
beaten, or raped, or anything. She'd considered stealing their petty cash
a small payment in return for not waking up topless in the street with a
pain in your crotch or asshole, depending.
On one night one of her group went after someone who wasn't drunk
enough, someone who'd merely been in a fight inside over a girl. The
mark had had a fighting chain in his sleeve, a Manriki, and he almost

killed Jona, the girl who went after his wallet. He'd been very drunk,
but very good with the chain. Jona sobered up in the hospital, they
discovered she was telepathic; and so she was arrested and sent to The
Agency. Jennifer's group stopped robbing college kids behind Allen's.
They all went their separate ways.
But she still had to make money, to keep the vodka coming. She
needed the vodka in a way that none of the kids gyrating under the
distorted music would ever understand. She looked at the clock. It was
only two thirty. Closer to three she'd make her final decision and go
after the mark. Her eyes scanned the room and picked out three
potentials.
Her glass of vodka emptied, she turned around and signaled the bar
keep.
He must know that she was there often, that sometimes she would tip
well, and that she was too old to be in the bar for a legitimate reason,
she thought. He probably thought she was a drug dealer or a pedophile.
She didn't care.
He poured straight vodka into her glass, the kind made synthetically
from the starchy waste of the city. Clothes, starchy foods gone bad,
paper to flimsy to be made into more paper. She sipped it.
I wonder when I stopped noticing the taste, she thought.
Syd walked in the direction the pretty follower of Kenna had walked.
He did not have a car; with the amount of money he had under his bed
he could have purchased a gasoline car or several battery cars if he
wanted. But Steeple City had good transportation, even in the outer arc.
He hated cars. He wondered if his wife would want one.
The first time he'd ever been in a car was on the way to his
grandmother's funeral. His father, a