“If you’re looking to promotion, remember what I said, okay?” He rehung his mirror, then pressed palms to temples, smoothing back his hair just so. Some would call it preening, but to me it was about getting himself ready to face the city for another day. “And when the time comes, you know where to find a little friendly coaching.”

“Yeah. If you can fit me into your busy schedule.”

His blue eyes were as innocent as a rain-washed sky, but he was pleased I’d noticed. Hard not to, the way he went at it. Not much privacy in a den.

Meanwhile, not like I was a virgin or anything. The docs had surveyed me inside and out after Rousseau hauled me in from the debris. But whatever my sex life was before, lost now in the memory gap, there was a shadow on it, expressed in unruly dreams, in my sudden panics, in the way I flinched when even friends laid a hand on me. The door to that recall was locked and bolted. Fine with me. I wasn’t ready to open it yet.

“Home, sweet home, an’ the gang’s all here!” Peeto, our cross-the-aisle neighbor and a night-shifter like me, slouched around the edge of the tier still in wet streeties and dropped heavily on his bunk to haul off sodden, cracked-sole high-tops. “Rainin’ like a bastard out there.”

Jake’s nose crinkled. “Man, don’t bring those stinkers in here! What’s the mudroom for, huh?”

“I leave ’em there, someone’ll steal ’em!”

“Who the hell’d want them?”

“So where’s the Rubester? He didn’t get back?”

“He got back.” Did Peeto really think the three of us were his ‘gang’?

Rubio had the bunk just above Jake, which put him opposite Peeto and gave him and Jake common cause. When not bitching together about Peeto, they talked about women and Manhattan in the old days—pre-Abel, pre-Felix, still some theatres, clubs, restaurants around. You’d think it was Eden. Not much else to share, certainly not their den politics, but enough to keep them friendly. A girl we rarely saw had the third between me and Rubio. Her lover in B-Tier wouldn’t set foot in our side after Peeto spread a nasty rumor about her.

Peter Sweeney was small and soft-bodied, not with fat but like his muscles had all gone slack from lack of conviction. He had a narrow face and a pointy little rat nose. My evil brain always drew on whiskers. Jake and Peeto were not friends, though they’d both been with Unca Joe since the beginning. Rubio was sure Peeto had something serious on Rousseau or some other senior member. Why keep him around otherwise?

Jake stood braced against the tier, glaring at Peeto’s shoes.

Time to play referee. “Things quiet down out there yet?”