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picked up from them books she was so keen on.
    Books, he'd discovered — having trailed her to a little shop on the corner of Marlowe and Deckard — that she'd bought.
    With money .
    His money, cadged from her nightly takes for who knew how long.
    And when he'd followed her a mite further, he found she had a regular little library, tucked away in a Keeper's shed in Rosalind Park, and was usin' them books to teach Ellison's other dodgers to read!
    His ears were getting hot again, just thinking on it.
    As if a dodger had any need of posh learning. If they could dip twenty customers in one round of Shakespeare Circus, tell the difference between a genuine Stolichnaya and a fake Coca-Cola and how to count the starbucks the fence offered, then they'd all the education they'd ever need.
    At least, it was all they needed until they were too old to dodge. Once they hit that age — when they was too tall, too noticeable and too independent — they'd follow the long tradition of dodgers on Fortune by graduating from the hive.
    Not the kind of graduation the dodgers expected, mind, the one that included walking away with shares from their years of earnings. Sure, that was tradition, and how Ellison's own fagin, Dixit, had operated back in the day. The end result of that arrangement had been Ellison deciding he'd be better at running Dixit's turf than Dixit, and Dixit disagreeing, vehemently.
    The disagreement ended when Ellison countered Dixit's argument with an inarguable point (in that Dixit had stopped arguing once Ellison's knife was stuck through his ribs), whereupon Ellison took over the turf, the dodgers, and their shares. And because Ellison knew he wasn't the only selfish bastard in Nike town, he made sure none of his dodgers would get the chance to do unto him as he'd done unto Dixit.
    At first he made sure of this by simply eliminating any potential competition before they had the chance to become actual competition, but he soon realized there was a greater profit in encouraging a lateral career move for those mature enough to leave his hive.
    So, with the help of an independent contractor (slaver being such an ugly term), who docked in Nike twice yearly, he laterally moved several dodgers into the domestic, agrarian and pleasure trades in the Coalition states. A few, the strongest and most cunning, were taken for the Adidan cage matches.
    On the whole, the practice had served Ellison well for going on thirteen years, with only the occasional hornet to muddy the waters. Hornets — troublemakers — tended to move on rather sooner than graduation, though as far as their mates in the hive were concerned they’d just up and run away.
    And Mia, despite being a top earner, was a hornet in the hive — always at them books, her head in the clouds, thinking about a future what didn't include her fagin —and there was every chance the other dodgers would catch Mia's ambition and that would mean being washed of the entire lot.
    All of which meant Mia would be 'running away' in the near future.
    Her talents, while considerable, weren't worth an entire hive of dodgers, and it was gettin' close to the time of year the slaver — sorry, independent contractor — docked in Nike. And in the meantime, there was every chance he'd be getting an honest to comb draco out of her before she moved on.
    Feeling particularly good about his business acumen, Ellison turned away from the tram station, thinking to head in-town. It was still early enough Antonio and Cara should be working the Shakespeare Circus, and Ellison wanted to be sure they weren't usin' the rain as an excuse to slack off.
    And because he turned away in that moment, the fagin missed a second shadow, this one taller than Mia, also following in the footsteps of the draco-bearing mark.
     
     
     

C HAPTER S EVEN
     
    GIDEON PICKED UP the tail two blocks from the tram station. A quick glance in a grocer's window told him his shadow was small, clad in the universal urban