I set the photo down. —Yeah, tell me something concrete.

—She has gone quite out of control.

—Interesting. I never knew she was ever under control. Last I checked that

was how I got involved in the first place.

Predo taps the end of a pen against a thumbnail. —I am not talking about the delinquencies, teenage drinking and underage sex

her parents fretted about. Her actions are on a new order of magnitude.

The hole where my eye was is throbbing. I knuckle it.

—Guess the new scale of troublemaking goes hand in hand with becoming filthy fucking rich at a young age.

He drops the pen.

—Do not pretend nonchalance, Pitt. If I was not certain you cared, we would not be having this conversation. Whether you would feel some responsibility for the girl had you not killed her parents, I cannot say. But you did. And I trust your year here among the uncivilized masses has not changed your nature so much that you can shrug off such things. However sentimental.

I look at my bare foot, rub the stump that used to be my big toe, flaking away scab. —I only killed her mom.

He squints. —So you've claimed before.

He leans back, his chair giving a little squeak. —A persistent little lie, that. —I only killed her mom.

—A lie I have some trouble penetrating. Why you should be reluctant to take

credit for her fathers death. Repugnant man.

—What can I say, I take credit where its due. I only killed her mom.

I look out of the light, into the darkness, back into the light. —The other thing got her dad.

He picks his pen back up.

—Other thing. Gullible as you are in so many things,  I am still somehow disappointed that you embrace that particular bit of superstition.

Nothing else to say. Seeing as I'm not superstitious.

He puts the end of the pen to his chin. —Another time then.

I peel an especially long and stringy bit of dead skin loose from my foot, look at it and drop it on the floor. —The girl is out of control?

He grips the pen in both hands, flexes the shaft. —Yes.

He bends it just to the breaking point, holds it there, relaxes, looks at it as it springs back into shape, and sets it aside.

—Yes. She is out of control. —In what way?

He aligns the pen with the right-hand edge of the desk. —She has declared a new Clan.

He shifts the angle of the gun, bringing the length of the barrel true with the top edge of the desk.

—Using her wealth to disseminate word through the community. Bribing otherwise loyal members of the Clans to help spread word of this new “Clan.” She has made it clear that any and all are welcome in her...

He looks through the gloom to the ceiling. —Her new organization.

He looks back at the desk, tapping the stack of folders flush with one another.

—Uninfected herself, she is enlisting other uninfecteds to carry word off the Island. Daylight travelers. Renfields and Lucys.

He brushes some unseen fleck of matter from the corner of the desk. —She is, in all these dealings, loud and highly visible. We do not exist within a vacuum. The uninfected world is the medium in which we are forced to live.

Vibrations cannot reach us without first traveling through that medium. Yes, those vibrations must be decoded, but that does not mean that others cannot learn the code. She is putting us all at risk. This is not solely a matter of Coalition doctrine being controverted, this is a case in which the concerns of all the Clans are being drawn under fire by the willful hand of a child who is not even of our ilk.

I stop fiddling with my toe and give him a look. —Of our ilk? Christ, Predo, is that a little racism I hear?

His fist shatters the desktop, pen and papers flying, gun dropping to the floor. —She is trying to find a cure!

His foot lashes and the desk skitters down the ballroom trailing splinters and kindling. —A cure!

His fists ball, knuckles whiten.

I point. —Your ties a bit askew there, Mr. Predo.

He closes his eyes and his mouth twists slightly.

His eyes open. —Word will spread.

I nod. —Yeah, I know.

He lets a breath drop in, lets it out.

—Infecteds that know no better will flock to her. There will be desertions from the Clans. Refugees from off the Island. —I know.

He opens his fists, flexing his fingers back, relaxing them. —Our careful balance will be undone. —I know.

He shrugs the collar of his jacket back into place. —And when she fails, there will be chaos and discord.

He runs fingers through his hair, brushing his bangs back into place. —And finally.

He touches the knot of his tie, pulls it straight. —We will have war.

He tugs at the French cuffs of his shirt. —And we will all die.

The throbbing where my eye was comes from the nerves regenerating. Id be better off if the Vyrus left them dead. Not like they're gonna have anything to plug in to. Without that eye, they'll just be raw and disjoined. Something that can cause pain while serving no real purpose.

I look at him. —You say that like It's a bad thing.

He waits.

I look at the floor, see the picture. Amanda Horde. Changeling child living somehow in the infected world. Genius. Mad. Not as in angry, but as a hatter. I look at the designer gun that's come to rest next to the photo. Wonder how many shots I could get off if I got to it before him. Wonder if I could get any of the bullets into his head with my one eye. Figure he did Mrs. Vandewater easy. Figure I've felt what its like when his fist hits my jaw. Figure he can take me anytime and anyplace. But I look at the gun for a bit longer anyway.

Then I look at him. —I won't kill her for you, Predo.

He smiles.

—I don't want you to kill her, Pitt.

He bends, picks up the photo, looks at it, looks at me. —I want you to join up.

The Andrew Freedman Home was finished in 1924. Endowed by an eponymous millionaire with ties to Tammany Hall and subway financing. And if that doesn't suggest something about the nature of his fortune and how dirty his dollars likely were, nothing else will. But pretty much everything you need to know about this guy you can tell by the house. A massive limestone palazzo on the corner of One Sixty-six and the Concourse, he left pretty much all of his fortune in trust for the thing to be built as a home for the elderly.

Exclusively for the elderly who had at one time been rich, but who had lost their fortunes.

Luxurious in the manner of a Gilded Age private club for rail barons, the Home kept the busted rich in a manner to which they had become accustomed.

Good old Andrew Freedman, looking out for the little people.

Whatever, it was his money. Man should spend it how he wants. Especially after he's dead. Besides, whatever Andy's wishes may have been at one time, the place ended up a broken-down community center for run-of-the-mill poor

old folks.

Proving again that time gives fuck all about who you are or what you want.

I manage to glean this knowledge from a plaque as Predo leads me from the subsiding   ballroom   on   the   third   floor   through   several   corridors   artfully decorated with sagging plaster and rat droppings. —Dregs.

He points ahead and one of the enforcers flanking us moves to a door and opens it. —That's what she's collecting.

We pass through the door into an echoing stairwell, climbing. —Rogues. Off-1 slanders. The dross clinging to the fringes of the Clans. All those who lack the wherewithal and fortitude to understand that the Vyrus has made us different.

He pauses on a landing, waits as I negotiate around some broken glass with my bare, mangled foot. —That there is no going back.

He starts up the next half flight. —Traditionally, that kind of offal weeds itself from the community. Viewed as

an engine of evolution, the Vyrus is a most powerful instrument for defining the fittest of the species. One can argue at length as to whether we are human any longer. Coalition precepts hold that we are. Regardless, the Vyrus insists on extreme levels of fitness, resilience, adaptability. Without those qualities, the runts die out quite rapidly. Our primary concern is not how best to steel them to this life, to aid in their adaptation, but how to make their deaths as rapid and as invisible as possible.

He stops at the top of the stairs, waiting while one of the enforcers opens the door and sweeps the area beyond with the barrel of his weapon.

I point at him. —He making sure no sleeping pigeons are waiting to get the drop on us?

Predo waits for a nod from the enforcer and goes through the door ahead of me.

—Our intelligence on the Bronx is far from extensive. But we have heard about the Mungiki.

I step out onto the roof, a river breeze in the tops of the high trees that grow from the grounds below, a few hazy stars above. —Mungiki are in Queens.

He stops next to one of the half-dozen TV aerials that sprout from the roof.

—We heard some were still left.

—I hear they're all out. Whole crazy pack of them in Queens.

—Is that what the drums tell you, Pitt?

—No, that's what being exiled up here for a year tells me.

He studies a spray-painted tag on the back of a cement urn decorating the edge of the roof. —A year.

He looks at me. —A year in the Bronx.

He looks me up and down. —And, until the last few hours, very little worse for wear.

He resumes his walk, skirting a sag in the tar paper where rainwater has pooled in the shade of one of the trees, greened with scum. —But you have always shown the resilience I was speaking of. I doubted it for some time, thought your sentimentality would get the best of you. Labeled you overly reckless. But I was wrong. Your natural ruthlessness serves you well. A particularly useful adaptation for this neighborhood, I imagine.

I think about what I learned growing up in the Bronx, who taught me the

nature of ruthlessness. I wonder if Predo knows this is home turf for me. Wonder if it matters what he knows.

He looks back at me. —No comment?

He's right, no comment.

He shrugs, stops at the southwest corner of the building where the tops of the trees part, the sky opens up and the view carries straight to the lights and towers across the river. —Perhaps you have some comment regarding that.

I look at the City, but I still have nothing to say.

He lays a hand on the snapped base of another of those urns. —We do not want her killed, Pitt.

He looks at me.

—The wreckage that now floats around her would become un-moored, drift into the open. She has established herself, in her hubris, in the midst of our turf. An entire apartment building in the near center of Coalition territory. She's housing them, providing for their needs. A welfare state. Were she to die, that flotsam would bob into our streets. We could not contain them all. A strike of any scale on the building would draw far too much attention. Our influence spreads to

certain circles in the uninfected community, but not so broadly that we can conceal a paramilitary raid in the heart of the Upper East Side. No.

His hand wraps the jagged stump of cement.

—As appealing as assassination may be, it is out of the question. We must rather proceed with greatest discretion. We know her ultimate goal.

He looks upward. —A cure.

Shaking his head.

—But we need to know by what organizing principles she will proceed. If she is pledged to secrecy, working on her own under the auspices of her fathers biotech labs and with no outside research partners, we have some amount of time and leeway in our plans. If she intends to make this a public effort, marshaling evidence that the Vyrus is some form of illness, and then launching a public-health campaign via a grandstanding news conference or similar stunt, we shall have to act posthaste.

I grunt.

He looks at me. —Yes?

I'm still looking at the City, the Empire State Buildings spire lit up in red,

white and blue.

—Nothing. I just like to make a mental note when people use words I've only

read in books before. Posthaste.

—Well, in an effort to broaden your vocabulary, allow me to use another word:

genocide.

—Yeah, I heard that one before.

—Good. Then I do not need to define it for you. You can picture it on your

own. How it will proceed if she tries to launch an effort to cure the Vyrus as if it

were African famine relief or a similar faddish cause for dissipated fashion

models and rock stars to champion.

I step closer to the balustrade, eyes on the lights. —Maybe wed get our own concert.

—The best we might hope for,  Pitt,  would be an orchestra of our own imprisoned kind to serenade us as we filed into the showers. —Yeah, well I'm not arguing the point.

—No. Nor would I expect you to. Occasional lapses into romanticism aside, you have always been clear on what fate waits us if we are revealed.

I give him a look.

—Wonder.

—Yes?

—What's Bird think of all this? The Society? Rest of the Clans?

He folds his arms.

—Tensions, unsurprisingly, are high. Your former employer, Bird, still feels that our long-term best interests can only be served when we all unite and present ourselves en masse to the public eye. He does, however, allow that the moment is not yet ripe. That the girls efforts are destabilizing. The Hood, while still maintaining a war stance on our northern border, have taken a similar position. D.J. Grave Digga will not pursue hostilities while this matter is unresolved.

I measure my heartbeat, let five slow beats count off before I go further, knowing Predo will fish out my interest if it is not guarded. —I'd think the idea of a cure would send Enclave over the edge.

He pulls his arms tighter around himself.

—Daniel would have had some opinion on the matter. Insane as he was, he would have had a measured response. The idea of a cure for the Vyrus might well have been a heresy to him, but Daniel would never have considered that it was an actual possibility. I expect he would have bided, as he did in most all

Clan matters. But.

I count more heartbeats. —But?

He unfolds his arms.

—But Daniel is dead. And there is a new head of Enclave. And he has declared that Enclave no longer communicate with heretics.

He looks back at the city.

—Daniel was as fanatical as the rest of them in their childish superstitions, but he was, at least, vaguely grounded in the Clans. I could make some judgments regarding how close they might be to launching their eventual crusade. Now they have sealed themselves off, we have no idea of their intentions.

He shakes his head.

—I don't know whether to be relieved or terrified. But, they are, in any case, not at issue just now.

He turns to me.

—At issue is simply the need for information. And so, you will join her Clan. You will gather all the intelligence you can, and you will deliver it to me.