A couple hours later, after Koizumi’s Human Commodities department had finished rolling me around its mouth, I was spit out onto Alameda, at the western edge of Little Tokyo. Since I didn’t have an implant, they’d given me a datacard with seven or eight terabytes of straight text on it — the employee manual, in American English, Japanese, Normalized Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, United Korean, Russian, half a dozen others — and sixteen characters of ID number.

I dropped it into the half-gone self-disposing cup that sat in front of a homeless guy, begging at the corner. “Show up there tomorrow,” I said and jerked a thumb over my shoulder, “and they’ll give you a paycheck at the end of the week.”

“Hey, man,” he said. “I’m just lookin’ to get high.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, “where I come from we earn our drug money.”

It was well past lunch, and without a paramilitary shadow, the streets were crowded with the kind of people who are out well past lunch: they couldn’t muster a sense of urgency to find a bathroom much less something constructive to do. Since propelled transport had been banned inside the Center, downtown had calcified, plugged up like a heart that wasn’t allowed to have blood flowing through it. In the aftermath of D.C., the theory went that it would bring people together, that actually walking places would expose us all to each other and we’d rediscover our common purpose, our common destiny.

There was a lot of that kind of talk after D.C. The second person plural got a workout. It’s been ten years since the military wing of a Republican splinter group detonated a pocket nuke in Washington — “Federalism by any means necessary!” — but people are still going on about it, endlessly. Shut up already. It’s done, over. Net result: Two million dead, some nobody in Florida wakes up to find out that he’s President and you can’t walk through central L.A. without stepping in shit, some of which will curse at you when you do it.

It was a stupid idea, of course; most of the post-D.C. ideas were stupid. But now it would take bulldozers and riot squads and maybe twenty or thirty years of eminent domain lawsuits to clear the streets. Downtown looked like the ebb of a particularly foul tide, with detritus and scum coating the asphalt, clotting and thickening in the corners. Nobody actually lived here, like in the shanty town four blocks west, but that didn’t mean any of them moved much.

So I just made my way through the muck with the standard Center push — head down, shoulders hunched, aggressive and indifferent at the same time. My reputation was enough to keep most people out of my way and there were enough other targets that the Deniers left me alone.

A couple of blocks up Alameda, I passed whatever they had done to Union Station. That was another change from after D.C.: A central transportation hub in every major city in the country had been commandeered by the military. They had swooped down, set up a perimeter and disappeared the building into the night. A curtain of darkness, a full city block, hung over whatever was going on inside, extending all the way up out of the atmosphere. People had tried lighting it up, of course, but weird things happened when the beams hit the gloom. Mag doors were strong enough to throw a little distortion into light as it passed through, but whatever could swallow it up completely — without taking everything else in the neighborhood with it — was beyond anything I’d ever heard of. It was a portable, configurable black hole and if that was the face of the work they were willing to show, I didn’t want to find out what was going on in secret.

Another block past Union Station was Phillippe’s. It’s been there forever, a century and a half, and hasn’t changed all that much during. They couldn’t afford to use beef anymore, of course, but they faked it pretty well, and I got a dip and sat at the long counter downstairs.

Unresponsive appeared next to me — quite literally appeared, again — and awkwardly climbed onto a stool. He wore the same shabby suit he’d had on yesterday.

“Half?” I said.

“Oh, no, Mr. Baxter. No thank you. I don’t eat,” he said, “that.”

“Suit yourself,” I said and bit the sandwich.

“Have you met with Mr. Koizumi?”

“Yep,” I said. “I’m now an employee of Koizumi Extranational.”

“Oh, Mr. Baxter. That was a terrible mistake.”

“I get free coffee,” I said.

“I warned you yesterday, Mr. Baxter, that you should not deal with Mr. Koizumi.”

“And, hey, have you ever heard of health insurance?”

“Mr. Baxter, I say this to you with all available force: do not fulfill the contract that Mr. Koizumi has put on Mr. Danning.”

“I think the receptionist likes me.”

“Mr. Baxter, are you listening to me?”

“Hm?” I said. “What?”

Unresponsive sputtered a little, and seemed to vibrate on his stool. Different parts of his face stopped matching up — his eyes were out of sync, and small changes came to his mouth and chin fast enough that he sort of blurred and went indistinct for a moment.

“Mr. Baxter!” he said, “Are you listening to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You’re hard to avoid.”

“I am threatening your life!”

“And you’re not very good at it, Eddie,” I said, turning to him. “You’re not physically imposing, you perturb easily, and if you were really backed by all the high-end power you claim, you’d either dress better or I’d already be dead.”

“I—” he said.

“Look. I appreciate the effort and your confidence-in-the-face-of-all-available-evidence bit works pretty well for a newber. But you’ve obviously got no idea what you’re doing, and between spastic little you and Yukio Koizumi, I’m going with Koizumi.”

“I—” he said.

“The fact that you know there’s going to be a hit doesn’t impress me. I’m an assassin. I met with someone. Not a big leap. That you know his name is interesting, but only confirms how bad Koizumi’s security is.”

“I—” he said.

“And, besides, he asked me first.”

“I…” he said, and trailed off. “What?”

“I’m old fashioned that way,” I said. “If you want to wait, I’ll be happy to kill whoever you want when I’m done.”

“I want you not to kill someone, Mr. Baxter. Unless you can manage to unkill Mr. Danning when you are done, then we have no further business and you have just made many powerful enemies.”

“Tell them I say, ‘Hi,’” I said.

“Good-bye, Mr. Baxter,” Unresponsive said, sliding down from the stool and leaning in to me. “And I mean that in every sense of the word.”

“Hey, that wasn’t bad—” I said, but he was gone. Poof. I scanned the dining room, half expecting to see him scuttling away, gracelessly trying to pull off a dramatic exit and failing; half knowing that he, somehow, was already gone.

And for a brief moment — just half a second — I wondered if this was how Roland Danning felt. The movement of weight could be sensed, from miles distant, and weight was moving against Danning. He couldn’t know what was coming, but the air might shift in a certain way that would leave him uneasy; the ground he walked on might feel slightly less secure. Mass left a signature, an imprint, across time and space, and what was being brought to bear against this one man would leave him just the slightest smear on the hammer that was coming down. He had no idea — he couldn’t — but deep down, in his gut and in his bones, he must know.

The thing was, I could feel it, too. Weight. Mass. Moving.

But it was coming in the opposite direction.