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and shut their door, yelling all the while.
    Syd closed his eyes. His fingers ran back to the birthmark again. He rubbed it, but felt nothing. It was smooth and flat. He tapped on it, doing his own trying. He was trying not to worry about what the mark might mean, what kind of blood work he might have to buy to treat it. He was trying to make the thumping of his finger match his heartbeat. Deep breaths. Put the horrible day at school behind him.
    He couldn’t believe the perverted hacks that his classmates had blasted into his datastream all day. Whenever his projector came on, some filthy image would appear, complete with hi-fi sound, and he’d have to debug and delete before the EduCorp PicturePeeper software noticed. Porno on the holos in school? That would mean fines for sure, and maybe a bribe to avoid getting expelled.
    Egan would probably be happy getting expelled. Syd, however, did not want to find himself at the mercy of the streets or Egan’s neophyte criminal enterprises. He knew exactly what became of guys like him outside the system.
    The advos had caught on too, trying to sell him new things to match his public humiliation. Suddenly he was seeing hair products and eyelash extenders and colognes. The advos were as insulting as they were pointless. He didn’t intend to buy any of it.
    He spent most of the day at school ignoring the holos and trying not to pass out from blood loss. It’d been a relief to get to work. Mr. Baram gave him a juice—real fruit juice from who knows where—and his body felt better almost instantly. As for his anxious mind, there was plenty of work to keep that occupied.
    When the South Platte got dammed up, there had been unintended consequences. Toxic sludge pooled where the water once flowed and pestilent mosquitoes flourished in the pools; there had been a brief outbreak of malaria, followed by a longer problem with cholera and some unidentified brain fever. Health deteriorated and debts increased. Thousands died. The squatter settlements on the banks disappeared.
    The consequences probably weren’t unintended at all.
    The squatters had to go somewhere. Housing blocks—giant concrete cruciplexes—were built. The squatters were rounded up and resettled. Some formed new settlements and tried to stay one step ahead of the private security companies paid to shut them down. The threat of eviction hung over everyone below.
    The security companies also enforced minor contracts, coerced new customers for whatever enterprise had hired them, and retrieved payment for unredeemed debts. All of these companies needed cheap parts and repairs and that’s where Mr. Baram and Syd came in.
    The shop wasn’t licensed, so Syd never got to fix any of the high-end stuff. He didn’t really even fix anything new. But Mr. Baram’s shop was the place to go to get junk working again, whether it was spider-sized scanner bots or mechanized holding cells the size of garbage bins. They’d refurbish, repair, and rebuild with no questions asked. They bought and sold parts too, also no questions asked. Syd took care of most of the repairing while Mr. Baram took care of the buying and selling and not asking questions.
    Mr. Baram also had a room off to the side where local kids who didn’t go to school gamed on his old holo sets in the cool of his climate-controlled shop. Some of the kids might have even been his. No one knew for sure. He didn’t charge the young ones for the hours they spent playing games. He took his payment from them in other ways. There were feral kids running around all over the Valve and no one paid them any attention.
    That made them useful to Mr. Baram.
    He used them to gather information and to run messages, to warn him if any of the private security thugs were coming around. Everyone paid somebody for protection, and the security companies targeted one another’s clients as a matter of policy. Businesses often paid three or four different gangs at the same time, but Mr. Baram