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predominately by a gang called the Judas Street Hangmen.
     
         Cal mounted its short flight of front steps, and touched a key on its entry panel. The screen displayed the names of the tenants. He was afraid that the man would have opted to remain anonymous, as some of the tenants had. He ran his finger down the list. A mix of human and alien names. He thought he could tell the alien names were Choom, with one Tikkihotto, from the sound of them. Nothing that sounded Jiinese, though from the man’s disguise that didn’t surprise him.
     
         A woman came clicking her shoes up the steps, and Cal stepped away from the panel guiltily to let her buzz herself in. Dark, maybe with Indian blood given that a holographic eye was pasted on her forehead like a bindi. She gave him a sideways look. He hesitated, then asked, “Excuse me, ma’am? I’m trying to find someone...he has scars on his cheeks? He dropped this in the subway and I thought I saw him go in here.” From his back pocket he produced his own wallet.
     
         “Third floor. I don’t know his name,” the woman said brusquely. The holographic third eye followed him distrustfully, and blinked. “But I can’t let you in with me.”
     
         “Oh...okay, I understand.” He didn’t want to alarm her. He backed off some more while she buzzed herself inside. She watched him through the door’s window as she pushed it closed and made sure it locked.
     
         Third floor. Cal activated the display monitor again. He isolated the names of those on the third floor. A few anonymous, but he copied the available male names onto a scrap of paper from his wallet. He would enter these names into his computer, in his own flat, and see what he might glean from them.
     
         As he returned to the sidewalk, staring at the scrap of paper, another woman came near him and said something he didn’t get. Cal looked up, a bit startled, and she smiled at him with long red lips that curled forever. From her scanty clothing he could tell she was a prosty. But she was a Choom, not an Earther, not of Asian blood. That was good. Good for her, and good for him, too. He ignored her when she repeated her comment, hurrying off down the street toward the subway so that he might descend into the tunnels below the city – like those he had fought in not so long ago, among the ghostly ancestors of the enemy he sent to join them.
     
     
     
    6
     
         Neither tubes nor buses would make stop s in the ghetto of Tin Town anymore, and any cabbie willing to do so would have to be so crazy that Jeremy Stake would have been more afraid of him than the ghetto’s denizens themselves – of which he had formerly been one. So he got as close as he could by hoverbus, and went the rest of the way on foot.
     
         He walked past a series of tenement houses that had all burned into charred skeletons, looking like they’d been bombed. Children balanced along the girders of a floorless second floor as if they were putting on a circus performance. From the hugeness of one child’s head and the weirdly bent figure of another, it was clear they were mutants. Like his mother had been. Like himself.
     
         Under his jacket he carried the Wolff .45. When two large men walking close together approached him on the sidewalk, he became extra-conscious of the holstered semiautomatic. But it was actually one man, with an overabundance of flesh and limbs, and he didn’t even glance at Stake as they passed each other. They were all ghosts of what they had been or what they could have been, in Tin Town.
     
         He located the apartment building where he had last known his father to be living, but he wasn’t there anymore, and the tenant who had replaced him knew nothing of the former occupant. Stake was disappointed – not only because he wanted to see his father again after his four years away in another plane of existence, but because he had hoped that looking into