Chapter 16
play like the young, hitting hard
looking pretty, drawing blood
Following the path of least resistance, I moved into empty spaces, sought avenues and alleyways with fewer people, fewer regs, less of everything. The streets began to clear, the buildings declining in age and quality, windows cracking, pavement turning to potholes and puddles.
I found myself in the Mudlands. A place where there was nothing to celebrate, no day off to enjoy. The poor didn’t get days off, unless they had no work at all. The people here worked themselves to the bone and then collapsed in tired heaps. It was a neighborhood where a week’s wages barely fed one person for a day. A sector of the city where drugs flowed like wine, dulling the hunger, dulling the pain of living in a city that didn’t want
