Not long till I was yawning. Enough of that sort of regimen right here in the den, with everyone’s schedule set 24/7 for the good of the community, with Rousseau as the captain of our urban ship, and myself a lowly crew member. Some things never change.

My morning draw was in the West 50s, between Eighth and the river. Which meant mostly Eighth blocks, since everything west of Ninth was more or less in the river. Did the job clerks insist on the old riverbanks as boundary markers out of denial or did they have a darker sense of humor than we gave them credit for?

On the streets, a greenish light hung between the buildings, glaring to my night-adapted eyes but heavy with the sweat of the coming storm and the stink of the slime edging the tidal zone. Even once I moved to dry pavement, the whole town seemed under water. I was way off my game, from the heat, the strangeness of working in daylight, plus still smarting from my run-in with Rousseau. I wasn’t half concentrating.

The avenues felt busy, the side streets almost crowded. A lot of the dens must have gone on day shift due to the weather alert. I usually avoided other pickers or made sure they avoided me, but today that took real effort. I kept turning a corner to find someone speeding my way. The women from Revelations in their long skirts and face-shrouding bonnets stared through me like I wasn’t there. A Tommy might give me a warning snarl, Empires and Ladysmiths a neutral nod. But most were hurrying about their business, eager to be home before the weather turned. All of us kept a close eye on rooftops and open windows, so word was out about the snipers.

The crowd thinned as I moved uptown, which only made me feel more exposed. I imagined armed Adders in every doorway and Stormies at each intersection. Even told myself I heard chanting, closer than I’d like. Instead, as I left a wrecked and long-ago-plundered Eighth Avenue storefront near midday, I got three Macys lined up on the sidewalk, two little girls and an older boy, their grab bags as empty as mine.

We called Macy’s the kid den, but it was more a loose bunch of gangs, like BlackAdder started out, only way younger. They’d divvied up a huge old building on West 34th. They were storm-rescues or runaways from other dens like Revelations, which lost a lot of its young ones to Macy ‘tribes,’ as they called them. Mostly they were kids in love with a lack of adult supervision. These three were the youngest I’d yet seen working the streets.

I halted in the doorway. “Looking for someone?”

The boy curled his lip. “Only yer bag there.”

“Dude, I’m a working stiff, just like you.”

A shrug. “Too bad. Home empty tonight.”

“Already empty.”

“Yeah? Give it over.”