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paid none. He did business with everyone and everyone needed his skills. He also had a concrete storefront with heavy bars on the windows and a military-grade fracture cannon behind the counter. You’d need an army to lay siege to his store. As far as places to live went, it wasn’t so bad at all.
    If it weren’t for the nightmares, Syd could have slept easy inside Baram’s.
    “Tell me something, Sydney.” Mr. Baram surprised Syd, appearing in the open door to the back alley. Syd dropped his finger from behind his ear. He didn’t like revealing his personal tics. Mr. Baram raised his eyebrows for a quick instant, then took a drag on one of the expensive Upper City cigarettes he always seemed to have a carton of.
    “Yes, sir?” Syd took his feet off the workbench and sat up straight.
    “Is it true you are giving away more repairs to the needy urchins of this forsaken city?” Mr. Baram chuckled to himself because he already knew the answer. He always already knew the answer.
    “I’ll keep track of anything I use,” said Syd. “You can take it out of my pay.”
    “Ah, who would I be to punish a boy for his charity?” He stubbed his cigarette out with his toe just outside the doorway. He stepped inside. “But you should keep your kindness in a harder place. You wear it in your hair and every schnorrer from here to the Upper City can smell it.”
    “They can smell it in my hair?” Syd ribbed him. “Is that some kind of saying?”
    Mr. Baram was always making up little turns of phrase as if everyone said them. Half the time they made no sense. He claimed his great-grandfather Amichai was a chief rabbi in the Holy Land, before the wars. He claimed he had the blood of sages in his veins. And he figured if he threw some of his old language into it, it made the saying authentic.
    “It could be a saying,” Mr. Baram declared. “I just said it, didn’t I? And what do you know about proverbs? Your people were goat herders in the Holy Land.”
    “Who says my people were ever in the Holy Land? You don’t know who my people were. I don’t know who my people were. No one knows who my people were.”
    “I can tell these things.”
    “Because I’m brown?”
    “Because, my ignorant young friend, we are kindred spirits. Somewhere, long ago, I think your people were in the Holy Land. Backwards, goat-herding idol worshippers, but there in the mix, certainly. Why else do you think I hired you?”
    “Because I have small hands and I don’t steal.”
    “These things are all true,” Mr. Baram answered. “But that doesn’t make them my reasons. Perhaps not even I know my reasons.”
    “I’m sure your reasons are as noble as your visage,” Syd joked.
    “My visage, eh?” Mr. Baram chuckled. “You’ve been reading through my library.”
    “You should password protect it if you don’t want readers.”
    “Oh, I want readers, my boy.” Mr. Baram sighed. “A world of readers I want, and yet, all I have is you. You want information, mere data, just like everyone else. That’s not reading. Wisdom? Inspiration? Phfft! Their time has passed, eh?” He waved his hand in the air. “You cannot nourish the soul with data!”
    “You’re worried about something, huh?” Syd asked. Mr. Baram only got philosophical when he was nervous.
    “The world being what it is, only a fool is not worried about something.”
    “Yeah, but you’re not worried about earthquakes or solar flares or Sino-Nigerian arms pacts,” said Syd. “You’ve got a new worry.”
    “And how do you know?” Mr. Baram leaned on the table. He’d taught Syd how to cold-read people and now he was testing him.
    “Well, first off, you were spouting deep nonsense about the Holy Land and goat herders and nourishing the soul, which you only do when you’re nervous. Second, you put your cigarette out outside, which you only do when you don’t want the store to smell like smoke, which you only want when someone important is coming by. Third, you’re