Grouch’s compound was deep inside one of Terrace’s modest highrises, parts of several floors of office space converted into what seemed to be both his home and his base of operations. It was fortified and guarded. Left and Right each had their own quarters, and there were bunks for security and whatever other goons came and went.
And there was a jail. That was where Geir was staying.
It was a small and bare room with only a mattress in it, a harsh fluorescent light up above and a drain in the floor. Geir spent three days on that mattress, recovering from the damage Right had done to him. He was sure he wasn’t the only one to have bled into the fabric. Someone tossed him two-packs or painkillers and cheap protein bars through a slot in the door, and there was a glass of water waiting for him on the floor every morning. He had gotten by with fewer amenities.
The first day Geir was up and about the cell, Grouch came to see him. Like before, the human left any retinue outside. He forced Geir to shake his hand, so Geir’s thumb implant would meet one on the side of his hand.
“Your first installment is everything you won,” he said.
“I’m glad to pay it.”
“Don’t be cheeky. You’re on a trial run today.”
That appeared to mean that Geir was to fill in for the still-recovering Right on a muscle job today. Some of Grouch’s humans escorted the vulture out of his cell and into the nest of halls and closed-off rooms that surrounded the main domicile, to a staging room. Left was already there, arms folded and eyes narrowed at the bird. Geir kept his hands in his pockets and his face neutral.
At the center of the room was a huge table display, a cheap modern cathode ray tube screen facing upward beneath a glass touch screen. Grouch sent a file to it from his wristband device. The face of a zoan, horse model, appeared on the screen. The human jabbed at it hard, twice, with two fingers, and left.
The rhinoceros zoan looked over the face on the screen, and then back at Geir, no less acid than before.
“That’s our mark,” he said. His voice was deep and it rumbled, but was quiet. He scrolled the screen to a second page that had more information.
The contract was addressed to Grouch, by what Geir assumed to be his nom de guerre. Anthony, as the horse was named, owed one hundred and ten thousand dollars in protection fees, to whoever had hired Grouch to collect it. The horse was a facilitator, the middle-man for a number of rackets who connected people with the unattainable supplies they needed. He operated out of his home, an apartment a couple districts over from Wakefield.
Geir read the information over and looked to Left. He thought it best to stay quiet.
“Collect and warn,” the rhino growled.
The vulture nodded. It was familiar work, but it was clear that he was to follow his partner’s lead. They each took a pistol from one of several drawers of weapons, and no other supplies. It was a simple and low-risk job; even the pistols were mostly for show, anyway. Though an important part of it.
Left glared at Geir throughout the car ride over. They sat on either end of an unmarked ground-van navigating the winding network of streets, in silence but for the rumble of the wheels on the rough asphalt. Geir didn’t try to avoid the rhino’s eyes, but he kept his face even.
“Why did you get in the way?” Left said finally.
“Right’ll be fine,” Geir said.
“We had a good thing. We had a rhythm.”
Geir tapped his gun against his knee, idly.
“Rhythms change,” he said. “If it weren’t me it’d be someone else.”
The rhino’s disdainful eyes shifted appraisingly.
“House or Adopt?” he grumbled. He’d already narrowed it down.
“House.”
“Street. And Manny: street.”
“Manny?”
“Right. Street.”
Geir nodded. Both of Grouch’s zoans, just released into a city at birth, to survive or not, like about one sixth of all zoans. The vulture’s childhood had been in the lap of luxury by comparison.
“I’ve had time on the street,” Geir assured him.
“No, you haven’t. Whatever you think, you haven’t.”
Geir didn’t argue. Of course leaving the liberated receiving home in his later teens was a fraction the hardship of navigating the inner city alone with the body of a five-year-old and only vague pre-imprinted instincts to work with.
“But you’re zo,” Left looked away. “Better than nothing.”
The van rocked and shook when it stopped to deposit them at the target’s location. When they climbed out the back, they were on the uppermost level of inner Terrace, three streets above the ground, and awash in the glint of sunlight on metal.
A Stamper had been dropped only a block away.
From this angle the colossal machine was like a fortress, its chrome curtain an outer wall stretched between four yellow turrets at its corners. It had been lowered into place to print something at the edge of Uptown, another statue or maybe some low-rise condominiums. The vertical slivers that made up the curtain, covered in layers of graffiti, fit firmly over the buildings on either side of the lot it occupied. Behind them the real machine, the vast and complex printer head and the mechanism that moved it, was invisible. The drones that had dropped it into place sped back to their dispatch.
If he hadn’t spent fourteen years in the shadow of the Mover, Geir might not have believed such a machine could exist. But here in the decaying hive that used to be his home, there were three of them.
Unimpressed, Left waved Geir on.
Jared, the facilitator horse, lived in a tenement on the eastern side of the inner city, just a few blocks from Uptown. It was a cold, gray concrete slab with walkways along its front above the street. Human and zoan children who had been playing out front were running to watch what they could see if the Stamper, while their tired-looking elders sat quietly in folding chairs by their doors. None of them paid much mind to the two toughs climbing the stairs with pistons in their waistbands. The air smelled thickly of tobacco.
Their target’s home was far down a hall inside. Cramped, smelled faintly of mold, lit only by an LED strip down the middle of the ceiling. That was how most people lived in Terrace, even before Uptown took off. Geir stood to the side of the door while Left banged on it without a word.
“I swear—” the horse’s voice came through the door moments after the peephole darkened. “You don’t have to come in, I’ll find the money!”
Left backed up and kicked the door, heel hitting just above the handle so the deadbolt tore straight through the wall and sprayed splinters. The zoan inside only barely avoided being hit by the solid wood, fallen to his seat and scrabbling away.
“I’ll pay!” he shouted again, holding an arm in front of his face.
Left stepped over him and into the apartment. Geir followed suit. It was much nicer inside than he would have expected. It was small but clean.  Light-colored walls hung with benign–and real–paintings, short but lush carpet, a nice leather couch with a glass coffee table.  A humble kitchenette, a couple closed doors to other rooms.  The first thing Left did was knock a teapot off the one-eye stove, cracking the real tiles on the floor below it and spraying steaming water across the room.
Geir lifted the cowering horse by his shirt and sat him hard on the couch, gesturing with a slight smile to watch.  While Jared 13R-C88 sank, wide-eyed, into the leather, the vulture gathered the paintings off the wall and slit them open one by one with a talon.  As if he were looking for something behind the canvases, but of course there wouldn't be any cash hidden.  The ruined artwork he discarded on the carpet.
One door led to a bathroom.  Geir emptied the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet into the sink and wrenched it from the wall to threw on the ground.  In the space behind it, he found a manilla envelope that contained a number of handwritten IOUs made out to Jared, and informal barter contracts.  Geir waved it at the facilitator and moved on to the other door.  Left was still zealously working the den, stomping chairs and throwing beer bottles out of the refrigerator.
The second door was locked, but it didn't take as much force as the front.  It opened onto an adjoining apartment, which Jared appeared also to own.  His real base of operations.
The second den was stacked all around with cardboard boxes, televisions and monitors, pairs of shoes wrapped in plastic. The only furnishings were a desk and several small filing cabinets, presumably for records too sensitive to be kept online.  Mostly suppliers, probably.
Each item had a tag that would probably tell Jared where he had acquired it, whom for, and how much was owed on it.  None of it that Geir saw was very expensive, so it wouldn't be worth the effort for Grouch's client to fence.  He flipped a few flat screens over and tore up a few pairs of shoes, and scattered some of the paper records on the floor.
Left finished tossing the bedroom and came back to the horse shaking on the couch.  He took Jared by the collar and made to hit him in the face, but stopped and looked to Geir.
"You like to fight so much," he growled.
Geir hesitated, but nodded and handed his seized envelope to Left to take over.  He hit the facilitator twice in the eye and cheek, not like he would in a fight but hard enough for a noncombatant.  Jared pleaded uselessly before either blow but stopped after the second, head lolling in a daze.
"You have thirty more days," Left shoved the horse back onto the couch.
Before they left, the rhino took Jared's hand in his, to transfer whatever money he had.  Probably only a couple hundred; this wasn't the home of someone who was trying to skim.
The van was on its way back when they reached the street.  While they waited, bloody-knuckled and buzzed with adrenaline, the asphalt vibrated with the motions of the Stamper's hidden printer head.  The steel curtain around it cast a heavy shadow over the block.  Geir had to wonder if the client who had just ordered the facilitator shaken down would someday lose everything when someone tore down their building to print something else in its place.
“He’ll never make it,” Geir observed as the van pulled up.
“So?”
Shrug. Geir had seen it dozens of times. The different protection rackets did it in different ways: some out a person out of business after one missed payment, others shook them down deadline after deadline while they racked up more debt, actively hurting their chances of ever getting paid. In thirty days, Jared 13R-C88 would be hassled again, or else Grouch’s client would kick him out and absorb his operation into their own.
Most outfits didn’t want the trouble of cleaning up after killing someone. Geir could hope that was the case with this one.
“If someone doesn’t pay, they pay,” Left added when they were loaded up, as if insulted that Geir seemed not to know it.
“It’s my first day,” Geir spread his hands apologetically.
Left grunted.
“I’m Geir.”
The rhino gave him a sharp look.
“No,” he said. “You’re not. If Grouch takes you on, maybe he’ll call you something. The name they put on you in the factory doesn’t exist.”
“Even Manny?”
Growl.
“Okay. What’ll he call me?”
“I don’t know. Left, Right, Center.”
“I’ve never been center-anything in my life.”
“Maybe he’ll just call you The Third One.”
“Yeah. Does that mean you’ll get a smaller cut?”
“We don’t get ‘cuts.’ We get a bed indoors.”
“Oh. So he used zoans for free labor. Like we were made for.”
Left rolled his eyes.
“That’s Housie shit,” he said. “I never had a bed indoors before him.”
Geir backed off. This wasn’t the time to sow division. He’d never been an argued, anyway.
“What are you going to say, it’s illegal?” Left surprised him by pursuing. Moreso, in that it was obviously a joke.
“They don’t need us anymore anyway,” Geir waved his beak back in the direction they’d come from. “They’ve got Stampers and Movers now.”
“If they made muscle bots Grouch would throw us out right away.”
“If he could bet on them in fights too, anyway.”
That was too far; Left soured again at the reminder of where Geir had come from, and turned away. Fair enough.
After a few minutes of silence, the rhinoceros opened the envelope in his hands and shook out its contents to look over.
“You know he’s going to make us collect on these,” he shook his head when he recognized them.