Scourge's head lifted briefly, pale eyes turning toward him. He saw that strange gaze as a faint reflection in the dark, rain-slicked window. Scourge rustled in anticipation.

"Soon, my faithful one," Edward said. He returned his attention to the scene beyond the glass. "Sin city. They only use it to describe one, you know. But it's all of them. And not just the cities. The towns, the burgs, the hamlets, the villages. Anywhere man settles, he brings his sin."

He clasped his hands behind his back and watched the traffic lights change from red to green, to amber, to red again. The colors glistened on the concrete sidewalks like spilled paint, and played to no audience, scant traffic to heed their direction.

Most of the towering streetlamps were dead, their bulbs shot out. The few that had survived cast a sickly glow that served more to intensify than eradicate the deep shadows.

Scourge rustled again, sliding from the cot to the bare planks of the floor. Edward could hear the raspy, yet slithery sound her skin made against the wood, and reminded himself that when God had made them in His image, it hadn't been their physical form but their capacity for spiritual grace and giving. Helping their fellows. Showing them the error of their ways and bringing them into enlightenment and salvation.

She uttered a low, needy cry that touched something similar in his soul.

"Yes," he said. "It is time."

Ronnie dug in his pocket - not the one that contained the knife - for his lighter. He flicked the wheel and thin flame rose in an inverted teardrop struggling valiantly against the drizzling rain. It provided enough illumination to give him a better look at the woman than he really wanted.

He lit his smoke, dragged deep, and let the flame go out. The heady fumes of formaldehyde, in which the cig had been soaked, rushed into his head like the slipstream of wind in the wake of a subway.

As darkness dropped around him again, it cloaked his view of the woman. Now she was just a shape walking beside him, slat-thin even in the brown man's trenchcoat she wore. He could remember the haggard sallowness of her face, with waxy skin drawn so tight over the bones that he half expected it to split, and eyes as empty as those of a picked skull.

Her hair wasn't bad, or wouldn't have been if it was clean and combed. Long, nearly to her waist, it was strawberry-blond and thick. The mats in it made it look even thicker. It bunched around her head like a scarecrow's wig.

She plucked at his sleeve with nervous, jittering fingers, and nodded at the smoke. He took one last drag and passed it to her, not wanting it back once she'd wrapped those scabby lips around the filter. He supposed it was squeamish, under the circumstances. Given that soon there'd be all sorts of bodily fluids coming into contact. Squeamish, but when she offered it back, he shook his head.

They'd come to an alley, a narrow stone throat between two sooty brick buildings, but the mouth of the alley was blocked by a mountain of trash bags thanks to the three-week sanitation strike. Some had split open, the contents bulging in festering masses. The stench was enough to make Ronnie grimace, when here he'd thought he'd gotten used to it by now.

"Aww, damn," said the woman, in a voice that was scratchy and husky from years of hard drinking and hard smoking, barely feminine at all. "Now where we gonna go?"

"Climb over," Ronnie said.

She scowled up at him, and he waved a twenty in her face. That did the trick. They'd originally only negotiated for a fiver, and the sight of the bill was enough to get her scrambling over the bags with greedy enthusiasm.

Ronnie followed the woman, steeling himself against the way his feet punched through taut plastic and released gouts of stink. He slipped in a congealing mass of he didn't want to know what, put a hand into a clot of cold coffee grounds, and finally reached the peak. On the other side, the pile sloped down to the floor of the alley, which was more conventionally filthy with wet newspapers, cardboard cartons and broken bottles.

None of the windows that looked down on this lovely view were lit. They had the alley to themselves except for a few fat rats and a tomcat slinking around down by a gate in the rear wall.

"Money," the woman demanded.

He gave it to her, putting one hand into the pocket with the knife and feeling its hard ivory hilt and chrome fittings. Where to make the first cut? He didn't want it to be too quick. They had privacy, and it wasn't like he was late for any pressing appointments. Doing it quick took away some of the thrill. Doing it slow, having some fun with them, that was what he really liked.

The woman shrugged out of her coat. Underneath, she had on a short black skirt that constricted her boyishly flat hips, and a red ribbed tank top. Her bony shoulders and long, sticklike limbs were bare. She hiked the skirt.

"You need any help, or are you ready?" she asked.

"Oh, I don't need any help," Ronnie said. "I'm ready. Are you?"

"I think you're both ready," intoned a resonant voice. "Ready to confess your sins."

Ronnie whirled, hands rising in a defensive gesture. The woman squawked in alarm and thrust her skirt the little way down it could possibly go.

Standing in the center of the alley, cool as a cucumber and certainly not looking like he'd crawled over a pile of garbage to get there, was a tall man dressed in sweeping black. Ronnie had a glimpse of white skin and burning eyes, and fumbled his lighter back out for a better look.

The guy was wearing a robe. Not a bathrobe, but a big black thing that made Ronnie think of the high-school graduation he'd missed, or the outfits the judges wore in old movies. The man's arms were folded so that his hands were tucked up the opposing sleeves. His head was bare, with dark hair combed straight back from a sharp widow's peak. His face was lean and thin, his mouth set and his brows lowered in an unforgiving glower.

The lighter in his left hand, Ronnie brought out the knife in his right. "Look, buddy, I don't know who you are and I don't rightly give a --"

"Confess your sins," the man said, and he had the rolling oration of an evangelist, the firm command of a drill sergeant.

Ronnie's mouth fell open and what came out was, "I've killed six women this year, most of them hookers. Cut them up with knives."

He absolutely could not believe what had just happened. The woman made an offended old-maid huffing gasp that would have been funny if things hadn't suddenly gone so crazy. And his traitor mouth kept right on going.

"I've robbed two convenience stores and a diner. Mugged three people at ATM's."

The man in the black robe nodded soberly. His burning gaze - his eyes were brown, ordinary, but piercing hot as pokers - moved to the woman.

"I do drugs and have sex for money," she said, and the look on her face was as astonished and horrified as Ronnie's must have been. "And I've got AIDS-beta, and I never use protection. On purpose."

"You bitch!" Ronnie blurted, aghast. "You could've killed me!" The hypocrisy of his statement struck him as ludicrous, but nothing in this situation was exactly normal.

But still! AIDS-beta, the medication-resistant and far more virulent form of the dreaded disease … whether or not she'd been planning on using a condom didn't matter, since it hadn't been her skinny tail he was after. The blood, though … a knife was such an up-close-and-personal weapon, and Ronnie got off more on the hot spray of scarlet on his hands, even on his face, than he ever had by pumping between a woman's legs.

"Enough," the man said, bringing one hand from within his sleeve. "You are both sinners, base and vile sinners. But you have confessed, and that is a beginning." The robed man turned his head to the side, looking toward the gate and the pooled shadows.

That was the moment Ronnie should have jumped at him and put the blade in his neck. The guy was creepy, the guy had somehow made him spill his guts, and he was terrified of what might come out if he was ordered to speak again.

He even took a step forward, meaning to do just that. His palm was sweaty and slippery on the haft of the knife but it would just take one swing. He saw right where it would go. Just under the bump of the man's prominent Adam's apple.

Something else came into the alley. Ronnie paused and tried for a better look. It was a mistake. A big one. He threw down his lighter, but the flame guttered and held on rather than going out, and caught a wad of mostly-dry newspaper that flared into a sullen orange fireblossom.

He'd hoped for darkness. Now he wished he'd been born blind.

The woman with the long, matted hair screamed. It was the sort of scream that would have made Ronnie stifle her with a punch to the stomach or a hand clapped over her mouth if things had been going as planned, but he was glad to hear it now. Let all the city hear it! Let all the world! Because then someone would come, and save them from the horrible thing that had squelched out of the shadows. The thing that made such an awful, reptilian sound.

"Scourge," said the man, his tone low and almost caressing. "Tend to these sinners. Punish them. Drive the sin from their flesh."

Ronnie stumbled backward, hitching for enough breath to join his screams to the woman's. He never loosed it, because the shape coming toward him moved with snakelike suddenness. Something slim and limber snapped the air, lashed around his arm. Stinging, needling pain burst through him.

Once, when he'd been a kid, young and innocent with all his sinning still ahead of him, he'd blundered into a jellyfish at the beach. That had been like this, a terrible stinging all acid and fire. He strangled on the scream in his throat, oblivious to everything but the agony.

Then it was gone. He found himself on his knees, gasping for air, his arm held stiffly out at an angle. He began to look up, and the limber thing snapped again.

It wrapped his head.

The final exchange played over and over in Judith Drake's mind as she trudged deeper into the labyrinth of streets called The Warren.

Once you took up the gun and the badge, you took up everything that went with it. Your first and only loyalty is to us. We are your real family. Your brothers and sisters in grey. You betrayed that trust when you let him go.

I thought I could talk to him. I thought he'd listen to me.

"You were wrong," Judith finished aloud, mirroring the captain's voice.

How much of it was her fault? How many signs had she missed, or deliberately chosen not to see, because she was afraid it would lead her to this awful truth?

The high buildings leaned around her like conspirators. The last rays of the setting sun slanted red down the alleys, grasping fingers of a bloodstained hand finding only graffiti-marked walls, and stripped groundcars at the curbs. A waxing gibbous moon, like a cataract-filmed yellow eye, peered between the dirty monoliths of the buildings.

The steel spires that made up the SkyGrid network pulsed with dull, steady beats. No aircars moved along its preordained paths. The Warren was alive with motion, yet oddly dead. The way that a corpse, lifeless and decomposing, was busy with the scuttling of insects, the teeming growth of bacteria.

The Warren.

Police didn't come here. Yet here she was, Detective Judith Drake. Suspended Detective Judith Drake. For six months without pay, unless she could undo the mistake that had gotten her in this mess.

She was in ordinary clothes instead of her severe grey uniform, feeling naked because she'd worn the grey since she was nineteen. She didn't have her badge or her service pistol, though she was armed with a standard pedestrian revolver of the sort that nearly every citizen carried.

None of it mattered. It didn't matter how she was dressed, what she carried. They'd know. The denizens of the Warren would know she was a cop the moment they clapped eyeballs on her. It might as well have been written on her forehead in inch-high letters.

She lowered her head, letting her hair fall forward in shaggy rust-colored wings. She was so used to wearing it pinned back beneath her grey cap that she hadn't noticed until today how much white had salted itself through that russet red-brown.

People passed her, sometimes singly, more often in protective pairs or groups. They went into shops and delis whose fronts were guarded by iron bars, like the portcullises of medieval castles. They emerged from the huge dingy factories that farted brown smoke and produced groundcar parts, flimsy electronic gadgets, canned recyc food products. They went into bleak and anonymous bars.

All of them, whether they looked at her or not, whether they registered it or not, gave Judith a wide berth. Maybe they believed she was conducting some sting operation and a host of greys would sweep down at the first sign of trouble.

Maybe they just took in the picture she presented - a woman of medium height but powerful build, not graced with much in the way of feminine curves, with a hard jaw and harder eyes that had all the color and warmth of polished steel - and decided it wasn't worth the pain she was bound to hand out.

The night closed in as she walked, shadows lengthening, the blood-red sunset fading into dust and ashes. Ahead, heard before it was seen, even smelled before it was seen, was the Last Dive. Specialties of the house: beer, cigarettes soaked in everything from vodka to formaldehyde, deep-fried recyc patties, eardrum-rupturing music, and an assortment of drugs.

The interior was black with tubes of orange neon, giving the place an atmosphere weirdly reminiscent of the inside of a Halloween pumpkin, two weeks into November. It had that same flavor of rot and sagging corruption and old smoke.

Judith sat at a corner table and ordered a drink from a hard-faced man, thinking for a moment that he wasn't going to serve her, that he was going to throw her out. He weighed this option, but slammed down a beer in front of her and took her money.

The crowd grew apace with the darkness outside. Judith sipped and listened, and in half an hour of overheard snippets of conversation, gleaned enough to assure any of the Last Dive's patrons a long stay in the Pen. They knew she was there, but they didn't care. Let her try.

A flash of silver caught her eye. She glanced as casually as she could toward the kid - a mag-skater, by the look of him - with the knife. He wasn't threatening with it, but showing it off to his buddies. Ivory handle, spring-loaded blade.

"… bastid owed me a hunnert bucks anyway," the mag-skater kid was saying, turning the knife this way and that to admire the liquid run of neon along polished metal. "Only had twenny on him, so I took this for the difference."

"You kill him?" one of his companions asked. "You kill Ronnie Switchblade?"

"Nah," said the kid, flipping a lock of electric-blue hair out of his eyes. "Dead already, him and the whore what was with him. Not a mark on ‘em, weirdest thing, unlessen you want to count the rat-chews."

Judith was up and moving before she was entirely sure she wanted to. The cluster of youths drew together as she approached, their eyes chips of stone in belligerent faces. The one with the switchblade held it up as if to remind her it was there, while the others reached into their own pockets.

"Where'd you find them?" she demanded, in a low, carrying tone. "Tell me where."

The mag-skater scoffed. "So you can Pen me for killing ‘em? No chance. I said I din' do it."

"I'm off-duty. Not here to Pen anybody."

"You rilly a feme?" one of the others asked, with a snide leer pasted to his lips. "Look more like a football player."

"Let's find out." A third, a gangly scarecrow of a kid with a cattle brand on each cheek, made a playful grab in the direction of Judith's chest.

A split second later, he was on the floor, uttering high squealing noises and cradling a snapped wrist. Judith straightened up from a fighting crouch and looked around at the rest. Anger smoldered in their eyes, not stone chips now but lumps of hot coal. But they held back, uncertain, and some of them darted quick glances as if expecting the doors to bang open and dozens more cops pour into the room.

"All I want to know is where," she said, focusing solely on the mag-skater. "Then I'll go my way while you go yours. There's ten bucks in it for you."

He studied her, sullen and searching. The others were tensed, poised, waiting for the signal. Then they'd overwhelm her, gun or no gun, and she'd never have to worry about being on suspension again.

She opened her jacket, making sure they got a good look at the holster under her left arm, and fished carefully into her shirt pocket. A single wrinkled bill came out tweezed between her fingers. She laid it on the table.

The blue-haired mag-skater reached for it and she caught his arm.

"Where?"

"Alley," he said. "On Fourth Street, halfway between Broad and Carerra."

"Good enough." She let go of him. He picked up the ten. Now was the moment when all would be decided. Would they go for her, or let it go?

They let it go. Playing at macho nonchalance as if she wasn't worth their time. They strutted off into the dim recesses of the Last Dive. Even the one with the broken wrist didn't do more than give Judith one smokingly furious look.

"Fourth Street," she said, and finished her drink because she knew she'd need it for the mission ahead.

"Carrion eaters," Edward said. He pondered, then amended. "Grave robbers, corpse defilers, to be more precise. Another sign that this world is hurtling toward Hell, faster and faster every day."

Scourge burbled something that sounded like agreement, and to Edward's ears it was as sweet as any rousing chorus of amens and hallelujahs.

"We'll see about this," he said. "Oh, yes. We'll see about this indeed. They must be punished. They must all be punished. Our work is not done, my faithful darling. Not done by a long chalk."

Carerra Avenue was a long stretch of sex clubs and shops that sold what might in some other part of town be coyly referred to as ‘marital aids.' Groundcars crawled along at a slow pace so that the drivers could check out the strolling meat. Male, feme, and the occasional altie for those wanting something on the exotic side announced their offers and prices to passers-by.

At the intersection of Carerra and Fourth, Judith turned onto a street consisting mostly of shabby apartment buildings. A pair of Dumpsters had been hauled into the middle of the road, where they were heaped and surrounded by garbage. Someone had scaled this mountain to plant a flag at the top, a flag made from an old-fashioned aluminum crutch and a pair of gigantic yellowed underpants.

Shouts and cruel laughter brought her to a halt. Halfway down the street, a gang of kids were pummeling and kicking at something on the ground. Judith heard a pitiful animal's crying, and had a brief impression of something pale and spindly. A dog, maybe, an emaciated dog guilty of nothing more than trying to scavenge in the bounty of the trash.

She pressed on, looking for the alley. Most of the buildings were crammed so close together that neighbors would have no privacy whatsoever, but a few had narrow gaps between.

"Freak! Get outta here, you freak!" one of the kids cried, and smashed a bottle on the curb. Green glass glinted in sharp points under the yellow moonlight. He jabbed at the creature on the ground.

A boy. Not a dog, but a little boy.

"Hey!" Judith yelled. "Leave off! Right now!"

These ones weren't so tough or experienced as their older ilk at the Last Dive. They scattered, the one with the bottle flinging it so that it shattered in the gutter.

Judith reached the boy crumpled on the sidewalk, and drew back with a gasp. What little light there was, from a single streetlamp far down on the corner of Broad, showed her enough.

Freak, she thought. A gengie. A gengie gone wrong.

It had been a fad back in the 10's, until the reality had been exposed. Until the dark side had been discovered. How for each apparent success, like Judith's first partner Rick with his good looks and his above-average everything, there were a dozen failures. Most of these never made it to the womb, let alone being carried to term. They were slated for destruction, hastily and efficiently disposed of.

Some made it through all the testing only to change hideously either at birth or later in life, the time bomb of their engineered genes ticking in their DNA. Other gengie monstrosities survived thanks to a cult of religious crazies who, insisting that each life deserved living no matter what, stole defective embryos and found willing - or at least brainwashed and coerced - surrogates to bear them.

The child in front of her, slowly sitting up and wiping blood from his cheek, was not that freakish, not compared to some that Judith had seen. His body looked normal enough, that of a pre-teen with mild malnutrition. His skin was bone-white. Albino. Almost translucent, showing intricate tracings of blue and red veins. His hair was white too, cropped indifferently into a cap. Those things in and of themselves wouldn't have earned him the status of freak. His eyes did that.

His eyes. Twice the size they should have been. They bulged in reddish, milky, multi-faceted orbs that lacked whites or pupils. Clouded rubies, mottled red jade, those rounded, protruding eyes.

The boy wore a long threadbare coat, too-big jeans, and a head-covering garment, sort of a cross between a hood and a scarf. It had come loose when the kids surrounded him, draping over his thin shoulders.

Against that stark white skin, the beads of blood welling from the pinpricks made by the jagged points of glass looked nearly black.

He looked up at Judith. She had never realized before how much of a person's essential humanity was conveyed by the eyes. She couldn't read his expression. All she knew for certain was that she could see her own image reflected over and over in the facets.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

The boy nodded. He groped on the sidewalk and came up with a pair of dark-tinted goggles. They were large, contoured, specially made to fit over his eyes. He drew up his hood to cover his hair and wrapped the trailing scarf ends around his face.

"Here," she said, extending a hand. "Let me help you up. Do you live near here?"

"There." His voice was surprisingly clear and sweet, an altar-boy's voice. "In that building."

"Can you see?" She supposed she could have phrased it more diplomatically, but the little gengie grinned a faint and fleeting grin.

"Better than you, in the dark. Not so good in bright light."

"Well … good, fine, that's good." She was a cop, not a social worker. Not equipped to deal with any child, let alone one like this. "I've got to be moving along now. Things to do."

"Sure."

She glanced up and down the street, but the gang was gone and the only other living things in sight were an old woman in a tattered housecoat lugging a bag of trash to add to the ever-growing piles, and a veritable swarm of rats frolicking on the slick, steaming, plastic hills.

Across and two buildings down was an alley, gaping like a maw. The rats were heavy there, coming and going in two-way traffic streams. As if they'd found something really juicy, a delicacy among the refuse. Steeling herself, Judith crossed the street headed for the alley.

"Lady!" the boy called.

Surprise at the term - who called anyone a lady anymore? - Judith stopped. "What?"

"You don't want to go in there."

"Got that right. But I have to."

"There's dead people in there."

"That's why I have to go."

Without waiting for his response, she began picking her way over the mound of garbage bags. The smell, oh, the smell was ripe and thick, moldy and dank and gassy. She slipped on the far side, sat down hard on a bag that popped like a balloon and bathed her in slimy fumes, and slid to the alleyway like a kid on a greased chute.

She landed with a jolt that went up both legs to her brain. Her jaw clacked, pinching the side of her tongue and making her eyes water. Blinking, she got up and swiped ineffectually at the gunk clotting on her pants.

Night had claimed the street, but it ruled here in the alley. None of the overlooking windows were lit and the cataract moon hadn't yet risen far enough to be of any use. She had a thumb-sized flashlight in her pocket and pulled it out, sweeping the beam until she found a leg extending stiffly from the shadows.

The beam moved up the body. Rats scattered, much the way the gang of kids in their checked bandannas had scattered. A few of the boldest ones, huge city rats as big as healthy six-week puppies, held their ground and bared their snaggle-teeth at the interloping biped.

Two bodies. One was Ronnie Switchblade, all right. She recognized him from the mug shots even though the rats had eaten away most of the soft tissues of his face. The other was a scrawny woman who had been largely left alone by the scavengers; she looked sickly even by the Warren's standards, and perhaps they didn't care for tainted meat.

"I told you," said the gengie boy, and Judith jumped. He'd come over the garbage silently, a feat she would have sworn was impossible.

"What are you doing?"

"You helped me so I owe you one." That attitude was astounding enough in any part of town, let alone here, that Judith could only gape at him. "Leave them. Forget about them. The Confessor-Man judged them, and there's no telling who he'll go after next."

Edward closed his eyes and let his consciousness separate from his body with a sensation like falling, like flying, like spinning, like dying.

He rose up, astral and invisible, unencumbered by the burdens and the temptations and the needs of the flesh. If the rest of humanity could do that, detach themselves from their hungers and hatreds, and see the world as he saw it … why, there'd be no need for him. No work for him. No purpose.

Not that he begrudged it. This cup had been put before him, and he drank of it willingly.

The city beneath him, as he soared above it like a phantom raven harbinger, was alight with such splendor that it would have taken his breath away if he had breath to take. The souls of the Warren were on display. Walls could not block his sight. He saw the auras around every living thing, from roaches and rats to men and women. Each aura had its own pattern of colors, the shifting hues of emotion.

Beautiful. Terrible and beautiful. When he first began experimenting, seeking this path to enlightenment, he never would have expected to find that hatred and fear were, in their way, as exquisitely vivid as love, kindness, and generosity. They were brighter, too, especially here. Here in the Warren, where love was fleeting if found at all, and kindness was as much a rumor as the alligators of the sewers.

With the merest glance at an aura, he could measure the worth of a man. Or a woman. He could sense those who were within reach of redemption and those who were beyond saving. Their whorls and patterns were as individual as fingerprints. He singled out the one he sought, passing over others whose auras were no less troubled with sin's dark marbling hues, and read the guilt in the unformed thoughts of the mind.

Edward returned to himself and opened his eyes. As always, the world looked flat and drab, two-dimensional, until his eyes readjusted.

Scourge slithered to him and waited at his feet, patient and faithful but brimming with eagerness. Edward touched the bald, plated bulge of her head and smiled down at her, and his smile was as beamingly radiant as that of any saint caught in stained glass.

"It's time to go," he said.

"The Confessor-Man …" Judith repeated. "How do you know that?"

The boy hugged himself with his frail arms and shook his head, lips pressed tightly together. "I don't want him coming after me. I haven't done anything that bad, not bad enough to be killed for. Just go, okay? Just leave it."

"I can't do that." She looked at the corpses again. The rats had begun their stealthy creep back to their dinner. A shudder twisted down her spine. "Look. Let's get out of here. We can talk about this someplace else. I'll buy you a burger and we can talk. What do you say?"

"I better not …"

"A real burger, not recyc."

That did it. She could almost hear the boy's stomach groan, saw him swallow the involuntary saliva that had flooded his mouth. Before he could say anything one way or the other, she led him back out of the alley and down Fourth Street.

Five minutes later, they were in a back corner booth at the Blue Owl, a struggling diner still trying to get by on serving genuine meat and produce instead of the cheaper recyc. Though, Judith thought sickly, if the sanitation strike went on much longer, the recyc plants were going to run out of raw materials …

The place was haphazardly clean and more-or-less well lit, enough so that the boy kept his goggles on and explained to her that bright light not only made it hard for him to see, but was painful as well.

"My name's Judith." She almost gave her title, an automatic reflex after twenty years as a grey, but caught herself in time. "You got a name?"

"Ghost."

"Do you live on your own?"

He bobbed his head. "There was a guy, Sam, a gengie like me. Kind of like an uncle. But he died a year ago. Cancer. So I'm an orphan again."

The waitress, mouth set in a disapproving scowl but not quite daring to say anything outright to Judith over her choice of dining companions, returned and put two plates in front of them. The burgers were greyish-brown, with limp lettuce and stale buns, but Ghost dove in with gusto.

"Tell me about the Confessor," Judith said, upending ketchup over her underdone fries. "How does he kill them? There's never a mark on them, no clear cause of death. It just looks like their entire nervous systems collapse and shut down, and they die. How? What sort of weapon does he have that can do that?"

It spewed from her in a torrent, the frustrated questions of several long months of hard work. Ghost froze, a strand of lettuce dangling from his chin. She wished she could read his strange eyes, barely visible through the tinted lenses. Everything else about him, posture and expression, spoke of something more than ordinary wariness.

"You do know about him," he said.

"I'm a police officer," she hedged. "We've found bodies. Sometimes notes." She remembered one of them word for word - this time, they must die for their sins themselves. It had been written in black ink on creamy vellum, the letters an artful monk's calligraphy. "Ghost, tell me what you saw that night. Please."

"My room's right there," he admitted. "The window's on the alley. I didn't turn a light on … I never turn a light on. So I saw it all. I did. I saw it. Happy?"

He wolfed down the rest of his burger in three huge bites and made to slide out of the booth. Judith blocked his way, aware that they were drawing glances from the waitress, the handful of other patrons, even the cook peering out from behind his mesh screen.

"I need your help. I have to find this Confessor-Man."

"You don't want to do that," the boy said.

"True. But I have to. Will you help me?"

"Why? Why do you care?" It was his turn to have the words come bursting out, unbidden. "You're a cop, an uptown cop, what's it to you what goes on down here? The police hardly ever come to the Warren. Who cares about us, down here?"

"I won't tell you that you're wrong about most of that," Judith said, lowering her voice and warning the onlookers off with a glare. "But I'm here, and I do care. I want to find this man and stop him before he kills more people. I can't do it without you. What do you say?"

Anyone could skate the mag-tracks laid into the street, leftovers from before the SkyGrid. It took agility and style to skate the elevated mag-rails that had once been used for commuter trains speeding through the city. A skater screwed up on a street-track, he might lose some skin off his knees and elbows. A skater lost it on the rails, and it'd be a thirty-foot drop.

Nick had agility. He had style. He had a finders-keepers switchblade and thirty bucks that he hadn't started the day with. He was skating high.

Except he might also be in hot guac with the greys. The feme cop had said she wasn't going to do anything, but anyone who believed a cop deserved what they got.

Once she'd left the Last Dive, Nick had followed. He'd hopped the rail that ran behind the building, scaling the pylons until he could balance on the magnetized strip. The soles of his shoes were set with rows of magnets of different polarities, and by angling his feet he could speed up, slow down, turn, jump, do tricks, you name it.

He didn't do anything fancy now, just skated swiftly along until he got close to the alley where he'd found Ronnie Switchblade. He spotted the feme cop a couple of times along the way, but reached the street well ahead of her and settled down in hiding to scope the place out.

True enough, she went into the alley. Her and some white gengie kid. Nick waited for her to call it in - the police might not venture into the Warren often, but one of the few things that could get their interest was a nice inexplicable double-hom, provided one of their own was the one to report it. He waited for the greys to descend.

Nothing like that happened. The feme cop and the gengie came out and headed toward Broad Street. Nick waited another half-hour to see if they came back, maybe with others. Still nada. He didn't want to go in there and get caught standing right over the bodies, that was for sure, but he didn't want to miss his chance. There were a lot of rats, busy rats, but they weren't doing the job fast enough.

Nick entered the alley as if he had every right in the world to be there, casual, not looking around to see if anyone was watching.

Ronnie and the woman were still there, still dead under a moon like a skull. In fact, the moon looked a lot like Ronnie's face. Waxen and half-eaten.

He wasn't sure of the best way to dispose of them. He thought briefly of bagging them and hiding them deep in the mountain of trash, so that if the strike ever ended and the cleanup ever began, they'd be hauled off to the recyc plants. Probably wouldn't be the first time, regulations or no regulations, that a corpse had gone through and come out in a can.

That would be the first place the greys would check. He had to get them out of the alley and far away. Bagging and burying was still a good idea, just not here. A few blocks over would be good enough.

Nick went to Ronnie, shooing away rats. They'd done a number on him, all right. If Nick hadn't known who it was, he never would have guessed. He leaned over, meaning to grab Ronnie by one stiff ankle.

"Hello, sinner."

Fifth Street was much the same as Fourth, minus only the proud-flying underwear flag. Judith and Ghost came to an alley that butted into the one where the bodies were. A wall, eight feet high and made of crumbling brick, divided the alley in two.

"There," whispered Ghost. "That gate, that metal gate. I saw the man and the woman come into the alley, and then he came in. Through the gate. And then …" He bit off the rest of whatever he'd meant to say, and huddled in on himself as if expecting cruel hands to snatch at him for his impertinence.

Judith touched him on the shoulder. She no longer was revolted by the contact, feeling only an aching pity for the orphaned boy. She tried to think of something comforting to say, came up blank, and settled for, "Thanks, Ghost. I'll take it from --"

A scream spiraled high from the other side of the crumbling brick wall. It was cut off by a wet snap that reminded Judith of a sopping towel flicked hard against flesh. The sharp noise was followed by a high, breathless wail that lacked the strength to carry more than a few yards.

"Repent!" roared a stentorian voice that struck immediate dread into Judith's heart.

"Stay put!" Judith snatched her gun from the holster and ran to the gate. The opening was just wide enough to admit her, and running around her head like a rabbit on a racetrack was: before me, he walked this way right before me, he was right here!

She went through fast, into a scuttling horde of rats. Their hotly loathsome fur brushed against the fabric of her pants and their naked pink tails lashed at her ankles as they parted and flowed around her.

The moon had finally risen far enough to shine into the alley, a dim smog-filtered light. It lent the robe swirling around Ghost's ‘Confessor-Man' a sheen like velvet, and turned his pale skin to jaundice-yellow as he turned to face her.

Behind him, half-hidden, was a kneeling wretched body with arms upraised in defense. Judith recognized the mag-skater by his thick-soled shoes and the shock of his hair, tinged aquamarine by the moonlight. Something dark and glistening was wrapped around his forearm, extending away from him to …

She fixed her attention on the man. Now that they were finally face to face, all of her carefully-prepared words, all of her pleas, had deserted her. "Edward …"

"Judith." He tucked his hands up the sleeves of his robe and regarded her loftily. His eyes burned like votive candles. "So they've sent you, have they? To redeem yourself in their sight. Their blinded sight. By stopping my work."

"You can't go around killing people for what you think they've done."

"Each of them have confessed their sins. Only through suffering for them can they find absolution. The Lord our God gave up His only son to try and show mankind the true nature of goodness, but that was long ago, and He's not so understanding this time."

She gave up, knowing that words would not reach him. The gun was at her side and she'd made no effort to hide it. Now she brought it up and leveled it at him, refusing to surrender to the tears that stung. Again, she wondered. How much of this was her fault? How long had this madness been building in him, unnoticed by her as their marriage dissolved? She'd sought refuge in her job, taking on extra shifts, filling her life with the business of the greys to take her mind off things she tried to forget. Sometimes she'd failed, and been overcome by the terrible memories. The shrieks of horror from the nurses. The inhuman needy cry of the pulsing, dark thing …

"You won't shoot me, Judith." His tone was soft, gentle, but there was a mocking condescension in it as well. "You're a good person. Even now, a good person. If I commanded you to tell me your sins, the worst you could say is what I already know. How you rejected your child. Your only child."

"What about your sins?" she countered shakily, shying away again from those unwelcome memories. "You lied to me, went to a gengie company behind my back! And now you're killing people. Whether you think they deserve it or not, it's not for you to decide. It's for the law, for the courts --"

"For the greys," he sneered. "I've seen how well they do. How can you stand it, Judith? You were always a good person. You didn't join them for the power. You joined them to do right."

"I did."

Edward laughed, but it was a terrible, doomed sound. "How can you stand being among them? Do you think it makes a difference? You may be honest, but the rest are tainted. Criminals are fined and let loose, and the only criminals they bother with anymore are the technospies preying on the big companies. The same big companies who finance the greys. Down here, crime is real. Sin is real. The police might not care. The churches might have gone the same way, caring only for money and power. But I care, Judith. I make them pay, and not in money." He spat the last word.

"It's still murder."

"It's my duty. I have been given the gift of enlightenment. I can see the patterns of the human soul, and --"

"Stop it!" She nearly fired into the air to shut him up, caught herself in time. "We've been through all this. I should have arrested you last time. I let you go because I thought you'd listen to me, you'd get help. I'm not going through that again. You're coming with me, Edward. You're going to answer for what you've done."

"I fully understand facing up to one's responsibilities. That's something sadly lacking in this world. And it is one area, my dear Judith, in which you've been lacking. I'll go with you … but first, shouldn't you atone for your one great sin?"

This wasn't Edward. This wasn't the quiet, bookish man she'd fallen in love with so many years ago, drawn to him primarily because he was so unlike the tough greys she saw day in and day out. That Edward hadn't been meek, but he had been soft-spoken and kind, and he hadn't been insane.

He stepped aside.

The mag-skater had fallen into a fetal position, whimpering in what sounded like unfathomable anguish but bearing no visible wounds. Judith barely spared him a glance. Her breath was locked in her lungs.

The thing was shaped vaguely like a young girl, but plated with dark scales. It dragged one malformed leg as it lurched closer. Judith saw, not wanting to see but unable to stop looking, that it wore no clothes, no ornaments except for a rosary from which a large cross dangled.

The eyes, yellow-white ovals that glowed, not in the way that a cat's did but as if lit from within by their own eerie radiance, were vertically slit with black pupils. Two holes marked where a nose should have been, and except for a tiny sphincterlike aperture, the creature had no visible mouth.

One arm ended in a hand that was normal enough except for thick, blunt claws where fingernails should have been. The other arm tapered into a long narrow tentacle, limber as a whip. It was this whiplike appendage that had been wrapped around the mag-skater.

"Scourge," said Edward lovingly, "say hello to your mother."

Ghost crept closer, horrified but drawn by the compulsion of curiosity. He could see them all clearly. Man, woman, strange gengie girl even more deformed than he was, more deformed than anyone he'd ever known.

"They told me the baby died," Judith said.

The gritty toughness that Ghost had admired in her was still there, but overlaid with this bewilderment, and a dread so intense it approached awe. Her hand, holding the gun, shook and lowered until it hung at her side.

"I took her away," the Confessor-Man said. "I knew it was a sign. This blessing, this curse, my cross to bear and the means by which I could bring about salvation. Look at her, Judith. See how she is? See how she lives with constant agony that we cannot even imagine? Her every waking moment is torture. And yet she endures. She perseveres. She accepts her suffering as the price for her gift, and through her gift, finds surcease from her suffering."

"Is it her? Is that … that … really our daughter?"

The gengie called Scourge made a wistful keening noise and lurched closer to her father. Her posture was hunched and twisted over the leg that was so bent it barely looked like a leg at all, and more like a tentacle with joints. But she could move fast when she wanted to. Ghost had witnessed that for himself.

Edward set his hand on her hairless, scaled head. "Show your mother your arm, my faithful one."

Scourge raised the appendage, held it out toward Judith the way a child might come seeking consolation for a scrape or a splinter.

"When she strikes with it, she drives the sin from them," Edward went on. "Drives the sin from them, and the pain from herself. For a short time, anyway. Their pain eases hers. Don't you see, Judith? Don't you see the good we are doing? It's not too late. You can come with us. You can help us. You've always been a fair-minded person. I shall bring their confessions from them. You can decide how severely they must be punished. And Scourge will mete it out. Together, we can bring true justice to this city. This city of sin."

"I can't do that, Edward. I'm a --"

"A police officer," he cut in harshly. "A cop. A grey. Your real family. Oh, Judith, don't you think I've heard it all before? That's what happened to us. Your real family never had room for me, and when you had to choose between us, you chose them. I'm giving you a second chance."

To Ghost, the muzzle flash was a hundred times louder than the report of the gunshot. He cringed back, blinking madly behind his tinted goggles and seeing nothing but the orange and green afterimage floating in kaleidoscope shapes. He heard the sloppy thud of a body tumbling into a litter of garbage bags, heard Scourge's banshee cry, heard the flick of that whip-tip, heard the second shot.

Heard, in the stillness that followed, sobbing.

He made his way to her slowly, groping along with his eyes still dazzled and full of searing pain. At one point, he stumbled over something chitinous and recoiled as he realized it was Scourge, flung back by the impact of the bullet. At last, he found Judith, down on one knee with her gun pointed at the ground and her other hand over her face.

"Judith?"

"He was doing what he thought was right," she said hollowly. "But I did what I had to do. Which of us does that make better?"

Ghost floundered, having no idea what to say. His vision was returning, enough to let him see her hard, careworn face framed by shaggy greying hair. She looked even older now than she had when she'd found him, as if something had been torn out of her.

Before he had to come up with some answer, any answer, Judith stood up and drew a deep breath, heedless of the smells of old death and new. Ghost bit at his lower lip and waited, unsure.

"Come on, kid," she said, and now she was all grit and toughness again. "Let's get out of here."

Ghost glanced at the dark glass window to his small, shabby room. He took a step in that direction but her hand on his arm stopped him.

"No," Judith said. "Out of here. Out of the city. Away."

"You mean … both of us?"

"Yeah," she said, and tried on a smile like she hadn't worn one in ages. Like it was too small, and hurt to put on, but she was determined to make it fit. "We orphans, we have to stick together."

"Okay," Ghost said, and fell in beside her as they left the alley.

The End

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