The Churn by James S.A. Corey Read Free Book Online Page A

She asks you in, you can go in, but she asks you to leave, you do it, right?”
    â€œOf course. Sure. Christ, Timmy. Your place, your rules, right?” Erich smiled, hoping to coax one in response. “We’ve always respected each other, right? Only, seriously, who is she? Is that your mom?”
    It was like Timmy hadn’t heard him. “I’m gonna get some sleep, but come morning, I can go back in, get some food. And I’ll check in with the man.”
    Erich felt his belly go cold. “You’re going to talk to Burton?”
    â€œSure, if I can find him,” Timmy said. “He’s got the plan, right?”
    â€œRight,” Erich said. “Of course.”
    He opened the deck, ran it through its startup options, and connected to the network. The signal strength wasn’t great, but it wasn’t awful. he’d been in half a dozen basement hack shacks with worse. He opened the newsfeed, still set to passive. The glow from the screen was the only light. Erich was cold, but he didn’t complain. Timmy stood, stretched, considered the skinned knuckles of his hand with what could have been a distant sort of ruefulness, and turned to go back to the old woman and the light.
    â€œHey, we’re friends, right?” Erich said.
    Timmy turned back. “Sure.”
    â€œWe’ve always watched out for each other, you and me.”
    Timmy shrugged. “Not always , but when we could, sure.”
    â€œDon’t tell him where I am, okay?”
    *  *  *
    Security crackdowns, like plagues, had a natural progression. A peak, and then decline. As terrible as they might be at their height, they did not last forever. Burton knew this, as did all of his lieutenants, and he made his plans accordingly. Burton moved through his safe houses, playing shell games with the security forces. The first night, while Erich and Lydia slept in their respective rooms in the little island ruin and Timmy tried to find someone in the organization to report to, Burton slept in a loft above a warehouse with a woman named Edie. In the morning, he moved to the storage in the back of a medical clinic, locking the door and hijacking an untraceable connection so that he could speak to his people with relative safety. Little Cole had closed down her houses, locked away her reports, buried a month’s supply of drugs, and taken a bus to Vermont to stay with her mother until things died down. Oestra was still in the city, moving from place to place in much the same fashion that Burton was. Ragman and Cyrano were missing, but it was early enough that Burton wasn’t concerned yet. At least they weren’t in the newsfeeds. Liev and Simonson were.
    And there was other evidence, indirect but convincing, of where the little war stood. Even in the first morning after the catastrophe began, security teams were calling on Liev’s underlings, sweeping them up for questioning. Some, they held. Others, they released.  Burton had no way of knowing which of those who had been set free had cut deals with security and which had been lucky enough to slip through the net. It hardly mattered. That branch of the business had been compromised, and so it would die. The demand for illicit drugs, cheap goods, off-schedule medical procedures, and anonymous sex could be neither arrested nor sated, and so the thing that mattered most for Burton’s little empire was safe. Would always be safe. The question of how to feed the city’s subterranean hungers was only a tactical one, and Burton could be flexible.
    The temptation, of course, was to fight back, and in the following days, some did. Five soldiers from the Loca Griega left a bomb outside a Star Helix substation. It exploded, injuring two of the security contractors and damaging the building, and all five bombers were identified and taken into custody. Tamara Sluydan, who really should have known better, organized street-level resistance,