OINK!

The city never slept, but it did bleed. EpicScar City got its name the old-fashioned way — something tore through it once, years before any living creature could remember, and left a mark so deep it became geography. The Great Scar ran northeast to southwest across the lower quarter of the city, a ragged canyon twenty feet wide and God-knows-how-deep, crossed by eleven bridges, all of them named after battles that had no winners. This is important context. What is also important context: the forty-seven-pound boar standing on top of Bridge Nine, loading a magazine into a sidearm while two of his crew swept the street below with flashlights. His name was Horace, but nobody called him that. Everybody called him Oink. He had earned it the hard way — specifically, in the second year of the Crossroads War, when he'd taken a hit to the jaw that should have ended things and instead had made a sound like a shotgun blast and a pig squealing at the same time, and Oink had kept moving. The enemy had scattered. His crew had laughed for six hours and then never stopped calling him that. He didn't mind. "We clear?" he said, not loudly. "Northeast quadrant's clean," said Petra, from below. She was smaller than Oink by a significant margin but moved faster and held grudges longer, which Oink had always felt were the two qualities that mattered most. "Southwest's got a problem." "Define problem." "Four of them. Armed. Not ours." Oink slid the magazine home, checked the chamber, and looked out across the Scar. The city lights caught the edges of the canyon walls and turned them amber and rust, like something on fire. Somewhere in the northeast, there was music — loud, synthetic, the kind that came from the casino district when someone was winning big and wanted everyone to know. "Faction?" he asked. "Plates are Iron Court." A pause. "But they're driving a Collective vehicle." Oink didn't like that. Iron Court used the Collective's vehicles when they didn't want to be tracked, and they didn't go to the trouble of not being tracked unless they were doing something they expected to be held accountable for. "What's on that end of the block?" he said. Another pause, longer. "Oink." "Petra." "The contact point. Our contact point. The drop is supposed to happen in twenty minutes." Oink exhaled through his flat nose. The bridge railing was cold under his hooves. Below, the Scar breathed its usual smell — old metal and standing water and something chemical that nobody had ever identified, despite several attempts. He had fourteen members of his crew within four blocks. He had a job that was already paid for, which meant the money was already distributed, which meant the job was already everyone's problem. He had a city that had been trying to kill him since the day he arrived in it, and he had kept right on living in it anyway out of nothing more complicated than spite. He had nineteen minutes. "Pull Remi from the east position," he said. "And wake up Ghost — I know he's sleeping on the third floor of that laundry." "He's going to complain." "He can complain and move at the same time. That's what I pay him for." Oink holstered his weapon and looked one more time at the lights of the city, glittering and indifferent. Whatever was waiting on the southwest end of that block, it was about to find out exactly how EpicScar City got its name.