The neighborhood reminded Janni of the part of town where she’d been living with Raleigh and Kitten, where the residents policed themselves and the public security forces usually didn’t dare visit.

The tenements were shorter and smaller, though, and sunlight actually hit the street. She spotted only two drug deals going down, and there were even some children playing unsupervised on the street level.

Samstag had an arm about her shoulders, and he pulled her to him and kissed her cheek. “No need to be nervous.”

Nervous? She gave a little shake of the head and smile. “Are narcotics generally illegal, here, or can they be purchased legally?”

“Only for medical conditions. Rest of it’s illegal.”

Pity she and TamLin couldn’t have settled here. Maybe he wouldn’t have become such a drug whore.

“This is gang territory. They make us, they shoot us.”

There were a handful of shadows or at least shadowborn around them. Janni merged enough to match the auras to the persons, then slipped out of Samstag’s embrace, holding herself separate from him.

“Jannis—”

She held up a hand for him to wait. They needed to let the fellow illegal immigrants to get a read on her—to notice how she’d merged her bio-identity to the somewhen she was in, even though she obviously couldn’t be from there.

There was some jostling among those watching them, and then a slight, small woman who looked younger than she surely was came hurrying over, head hidden in the hood of the sweatshirt and her hands tucked in the unipocket, probably gripping a gun.

The girl was a tweaker, grade purple or so. Not trained enough to be able to rearrange Janni’s thoughts without her cooperation, but plenty strong enough to make sure she wasn’t noticed or remembered by most, when she didn’t want to be.

“I traced someone with a penchant for human experimentation to this neighborhood,” Janni said outright. “Care to narrow that for me?”

“What’s in it for me?”

Janni shrugged lightly. “You want to risk him plucking test subjects from your people and ’hood, that’s on you. It’s just that if you help me, there’s a greater chance I’ll stop him before something nastier than me shows up.”

“What’s your breed of nasty?”

She just looked at the girl. She appreciated the tactfulness that avoided publicly announcing she had special abilities, but asking at all was rude. Someone in the girl’s crew had doubtless recognized what she was—and if not, then that wasn’t something Janni was going to volunteer.

“You think you can stop the Corps,” the girl said, so she hadn’t expected an answer to her question.

“I can remove a reason for them to jump on your ’hood.”

“Maybe we’re working with him. Maybe he’s why we can do what we do.”

The lie would’ve been transparent even if she couldn’t sense it.

To her credit, the girl didn’t bother to try to persuade Janni to believe her lie. “Who’s your friend?”

“Native guide,” she explained—basic etiquette, when a person planned to meddle in a somewhen.

“Not native to my ’hood.”

Was she saying Janni needed a native guide from the neighborhood, for them to be willing to help her find who she was tracking? “You offering?”

The woman turned her grimace into a shrug. “His kind ain’t welcome, here.”

A grade-purple tweaker was plenty strong enough to pick up on lies.

“His kind?” Janni scoffed, making sure she stuck to truth. “Natives have as much to lose if the Corps shows up as you do, Shadowborn.”

But Janni’s own psy abilities were plenty strong enough to tell that the woman still wasn’t thinking his presence worth the risk—not that he’d been made as a public security operative, exactly, but she knew he didn’t belong.

“Look,” Janni added, drawing closer and in on herself as if feeling self-conscious. “A favor for a favor? I’m not asking you to spare him if he comes in here with some buddies, guns blazing. I’m just—”

She sprang for Samstag and shoved him out of the way on instinct, before she’d even consciously processed that someone had hit ‘hostile enough to take a shot whether the boss lady orders it or not’.

The bullet struck Janni in the back, slipping through ribs to tear up a lung and nick her heart. She shunted her trachea to only pull air from the intact lung and focused on patching the wound, most dangerous part first, followed by inward to outward…

She was well-fed, well-rested, and her emergency patch was fully charged and primed, so it took less than a minute for the bullet to slip out with the blood that had escaped where it was supposed to be. She caught the metal as she processed that the gang had surrounded them and the tweaker was chewing out her guy.

Janni cautiously readjusted her trachea and tested the fixed lung. Her emergency patch would have to recollect the necessaries to be able to do that again.

And the ‘fun’ was just starting.

Well, shit.