WEREWOLFVAMPIRES GOTO HELL. Someone had made a serious effort to erase a wheel logo with the words EARTH FRIEND about it. Beneath the graffiti a workman sat on a crate facing the wall. He had removed an access hatch and was cyborged into a tangle of color-coded wires.
Around a corner they passed a sling city. The burn cases stumbled down, looking for handouts. They babbled in endless monotones, their minds rotted out with God, sex, information, their reflexes shattered, their faces vacant-eyed and twitching. Heisen hissed and stepped up his pace. “Scum!” he gasped once they were safely past.
“They ought to be…” They turned down a yet smaller run where garbage was mulched thin against the street and starting to ferment. The stench of rotting squid and old grease hung in the air, and the soles of Rebel’s feet were going black.
Rebel glanced at Heisen and was shocked to see the man was trembling. Sweat poured down a face gone fishbellywhite. “God damn, sport,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”
“It’s just the wetware.” Heisen waved a hand at his face.
“I keep the imaginative processes cranked way up, so I’ll be fast to pick up on the main chance, right? Makes me a touch… paranoid, though.” They stepped down a slanting gallery where most of the overheads had been smashed or stolen. Exhaust fans grumbled in shadow. Tangles of black cable drooped from the ceiling; they had to duck under the lower loops. “God damn her,” Heisen fretted. “She doesn’t have to have her office down here, she just wants all that space. I wish…” They rounded a final corner and he pointed to a door grey with urban grime. “Here.”
Over the doorway hung a flickering neon switchblade, a piece of antique technology that must have cost a fortune to recreate. It buzzed and crackled, tinging the shadows red. The knife’s blade blinked off and on, as if snapping in and out of the handle. On the center of the door was taped a small white rectangle, a business card: snow the cutting edge ostend kropotkinkorridor bei berkmangallerie neues-hoch-kamden, E.K.