There was a hum in S"aven. It fizzed like electricity through the city, crackling and hissing in secluded corners rife with conspiracy. Areas once populated with crime lords and gangsters now rippled with whispers of politics and revolution. S"aven was transforming, shedding her dried Mafioso cocoon to mutate into something very, very different. Charlie had never seen a hive of activity like this. He remembered streets filled with thieves and murderers. But those scoundrels had been replaced by a new kind of hostility. Disgruntled Union workers, men and women that had once been too good for S"aven slums, controlled these poverty-stricken streets. The closed border had forced them into unemployment—a situation which was starting to become desperate. And desperate times called for desperate
