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it down, Thumbs chuckled at the sight. They’d get no real money for the clothing, but it was good practice for them. Best schooling a young troll could get these days. This was his third stop on the way to his doss in Riverside. The first had been to recover some credsticks stashed moments before the Lone Stars nabbed him. Wonder of wonders, the sticks were still there waiting for him. Next had been to turn the stolen nuyen into untraceable Carib League dollars and there too he encountered good fortune.
    Now Thumbs was prowling the main drag of Overtown, checking the scene and looking for any chummer who might want a bit of R&R with the happy pack in his vest pocket. The drug/chip combo, which tripled the simsense experience of Better Than Life chips but didn’t burn out your brain like 2XS, was a real find—too good to sell since Thumbs was flash at the moment. And the original elf owner wasn’t in any condition to complain. The nullhead organleggers had sliced and bagged all the good vitals from the corporate pixie, but not gone through his pockets. Incredibly stupid. Staggeringly dumb. No, this special treat was being saved purely for the family of his go-gang. But if Thumbs didn’t locate some warm bodies soon, it was going to be just him and the lovely ladies in his head for the rest of the day. Not a bad proposition, at that. Thumbs had a secret taste for the group thing.
    Briefly, the moving shadow of a sports car swept along the busy broiling street like a dagger-shaped cloud. Thumbs snorted in contempt. Fragging tourists getting a 45kph look-see at the amusing local inhabitants. Most of the crumbling buildings in this part of the sprawl were only shells, burned-out ruins from that fiery night in Miami three years ago. The Night of Law, the gov called it. But that wasn’t what they called it on the street. Fragging cops had come out shooting with everything they had. And not too many people had dared bother a tourist ever since. Much less eat one, the way the Morlocks had.
    Hey, it was just a gang initiation. Members of the Morlocks had copied the hinky bit from some stony biker gang from way up north in Philadelphia long before the Awakening of the Sixth World. Sounded arctic, so they did a mirror. Just kids playing. They didn’t take a bite out of anybody important or local. But, geez, did the city gov blow a vein.
    They’d sent in panzers and trucks and helos full of Lone Star, Atlantic Security, and any other troops they could recruit, with orders to shoot ’em up and burn ’em out. Ask questions later. Thousands of locals who had nothing to do with the incident died in the fire that night: norms, trolls, elves, kids, dogs, everybody. Rape and theft were apparently acceptable street dangers for tourists, but cannibalism was bad for the city’s rep. Go figga.
    The next day, heavily armed Slap Squads arrived to quickly spray-paint over any walls still standing in brilliant monotone colors of pink and blue. They’d also dropped a plasti-film covering over the destroyed structures so that the sprawl looked good to the tourists who still flocked to the coastal city for sun and tox-free surf.
    Looked good from the air, that is. But here on the cracked sidewalks and stinking streets no such illusion was maintained. Metacrabs infested the palm trees that lined the boulevards like chewed weeds, while gang graffiti and posters from simsense parlors or local boom bands layered the monotones into a jumbled collage, the plas strips sun-bleached and acid rain-washed until only sagging strips of rotting plas hung limply from the garish walls. At least the plasti-film roofs offered the starving squatters living in the ruins some meager protection from the deadly northern swamp rains.
    Only a couple of the barred shops and stores along the wide boulevard had walls strong enough and intact enough to keep out the metacrabs and devil rats, who regularly fought over anything edible that didn’t move, and thus these shops