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happened, but the authorities found out about the illegal operation, my mother's freelancing...everything.
    We were in the closing years of the Second Frontier War and the government was looking everywhere for revenue.  So my parents were offered the chance to pay a large fine and escape further punishment. Having just spent every mil they had on the surgery, it was impossible for them to come up with the demanded funds.
    I vaguely remember the inquisitor visiting us.  My father told me to stay in the room I shared with my sisters and not to come out until he came back for me.  It didn't matter that the entire situation was the result of parents desperately trying to save the life of their child.  They had broken the laws, and that was all the inquisitor cared about. 
    After he had left my father came in and told me to go to bed.  I wasn’t even nine, but I could tell he was scared.  It was the first time I'd ever seen my father afraid of anything.  I knew something terrible was happening, but I didn’t say anything – I just said goodnight to my father and got into bed.  He whispered, “Goodnight,” and turned off the light on the way out.  Laying there in the dark I could hear my mother crying in the next room.  All night I could hear my parents talking, the sounds of them walking around the apartment, and most of all, my mother's sobs.
    The next day six armed government marshals summarily seized all of my parents’ property including their occupancy rights to the apartment.  My father was terminated from his employment (his job was excellent and could easily be sold to another qualified candidate), and our residency permit was revoked.
    We were forced to leave the Midtown Protected Zone, and I will never forget the image of the five of us huddled together as the 77th Street gate slowly slid open.  I remember taking a last look behind me before my father wrapped his arm around my shoulder and led me out over the cracked pavement north of the gate.
    Northern Manhattan had once been densely populated, but now it was mostly abandoned.  The two kilometers immediately north of the wall had been completely razed during the Disruptions to prevent rioters and gangs from sneaking up on the Protected Zone.  It was an eerie landscape of ancient, crumbling roadways and scattered pillars of broken masonry - the remnants of demolished buildings that had once housed thousands.  There were deep trenches in several places where the ground had collapsed on abandoned underground rail lines.  Partially filled with putrid brown water, they looked like nightmarish canals making their way northward.
    Slicing through the terrain to the northwest was a clear plastic tube raised 30 meters above the ground on massive steel pillars.  The magtrain connected the MPZ to Fort Tyron Transit Center in the northwest corner of Manhattan Island.  Fort Tyron was the terminus for bullet trains from other major cities as well as a major freight handling center, and the magtrain brought passengers and supplies into the city 24 hours a day.
    But we were heading northeast.  My father's friends had helped him get a contact for a job in a basic materials factory in the South Bronx, located in a neighborhood informally known as The Devil's Playground.
    There was no mass transit operating north of the Zone other than the magtrain, so we had to walk three or four miles to the bridge over the Harlem River and then into the Bronx.  There were a few clusters of occupied buildings along the way, like small villages on the outskirts of the MPZ, but mostly there was just debris from buildings that had been demolished or simply collapsed.  The bridge itself was old but sturdy-looking, and the Manhattan side was protected by a gate and a small guard tower occupied by a squad of police rather more heavily armed than those who patrolled inside the Zone.  My father showed the guards our papers, and after a cursory inspection we were ushered