She went for lunch at a restaurant on Main Street that had been a big bank around 1910, when Buffalo was thriving. There was a modern hotel next door, and the opening between the two buildings was a monumental arch that had been one of the bank’s original entrances. It was impressive, and that kind of amused her. The old bank must have looked like a temple for the worship of money.

Leah never thought much about money. Part of her indifference had come from being raised in a family supported by her father’s pay as a police officer, and then living on her own pay as a police officer. A cop would never starve to death, but she wouldn’t get rich either, so it had seemed best not to think about it much.

In her personal experience, the people who had money to share were nearly all men. She’d heard it pointed out many times that this was unfair and was changing. To Leah this process was simply one of the features of the planet Earth as she had found it. Unfairness was like the Rocky Mountains, west of where she grew up. She never doubted that the mountains were being eroded away, but in the meantime, when she’d climbed there, she’d reached about the same altitude as she would have if she’d arrived with the first Indians tens of thousands of years ago.

Lots of other problems were built into the planet, and she was always striving decisively to mitigate them instead of devoting much time to resenting them. Leah Hawkins was a woman who met freezing weather with warm clothes instead of complaints.

Leah had taken on a dangerous and difficult job, but for the first time in her life, she had what amounted to an unlimited budget—the million dollars the council had diverted from the government grant. She knew that if she was going to search the theater area where the expensive and fancy bars were, she was going to have to spend some money on clothes. She had the debit cards with her today, so when she finished lunch, she was going to search for the right outfit.

She liked the dress that the restaurant hostess was wearing, so she asked her where she bought her clothes. The hostess gave her a quick recitation of the boutiques in the area—Brassard, Adrianna Marsh, Montrose, Enfer—and the blocks where they could be found. Leah thanked her, but the implied compliment seemed to be a sufficient reward. Leah spent the next hour picking out a couple of outfits that would get her noticed favorably in expensive restaurants, and some flat shoes that wouldn’t exaggerate her height or incapacitate her if she needed to run or fight.