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swings on its wire, doing erratic things with the light. I think I hear a rat in the shadows, foraging for crumbs.
    Rowan is snoring on the cot, which is unusual, because he never does. But I don’t mind. It’s nice to hear the sound of another human, to know that I’m not alone. That in a second he would be awake if there were any trouble. As twins, we make a great team. He has the muscles, and his aim with the shotgun never misses, but I’m smaller and faster, and sometimes more alert.
    We’ve only had one thief ever who was armed, the year I turned thirteen. Mostly the thieves are small children who will break windows or attempt to pick the lock, and they only stay long enough to realize there’s nothing to eat or nothing worth. They’re pests, and I would just as soon feed them so they’d go away. We have plenty to spare. But Rowan won’t allow it. Feeding one is feeding them all, and we don’t own the goddamn city, he’d say. That’s what orphanages are for. That’s what laboratory wages are for. Or how about the first generations? he’d say; how about the first generations do something because they caused this whole mess.
    The armed thief was a man twice my size, at least into his twenties. He somehow picked the lock on our front door without making a sound, and he figured out quickly that the residents of our little house were hiding somewhere, guarding what was worth taking. It was Rowan’s watch that hour, but he’d fallen asleep after a full day of physical labor. He takes work where and when he can get it, and it’s always arduous; he’s always in pain at the end of the day. Long ago, America’s factory jobs were outsourced to other industrialized countries. Now, because there’s no importing, most of New York’s towering buildings have been converted to factories that make everything from frozen food to sheet metal. I’m usually able to find work handling wholesale orders by phone; Rowan finds work easily in shipments and delivery, and it exhausts him more than he cares to admit. But the pay is always cash, and we’re always able to buy more than we need in terms of food. Shopkeepers are so grateful to have paying customers—as opposed to the penniless orphans who always try to steal the essentials—that they give us deals on extras like electrical tape and aspirin.
    So there we were, both asleep. I awoke with a blade to my throat, looking into the eyes of a man I did not know.
    I made a small sound, not even a whimper, but that was all it took for my brother to jolt back to consciousness, gun at the ready.
    I was helpless, paralyzed. Small thieves I could handle, and most thieves did not want to kill us, not if they could help it. They only made meager threats on the hope of getting food, a piece of jewelry, and if they were smaller than you, they would just run away when you caught them. They were only trying to survive however they could.
    “Shoot me, and I cut her,” the man said.
    There was a loud sound, like the time one of our pipes burst, and then I saw a line of blood roll over the man’s brow. It took a second for me to realize there was a red bullet hole in his forehead, and then the knife went slack against my neck. I grabbed it, kicked him away from me.
    But he was already dead. I sat up, eyes bulging, gasping. Rowan was on his feet, though, checking to be sure the man was really dead, not wanting to waste another bullet if it wasn’t necessary. “Goddamn it,” he said, and kicked the man. “I fell asleep. Damn it!”
    “You were tired,” I said reassuringly. “It’s okay. He would have gone away if we’d fed him.”
    “Don’t be so naïve,” Rowan said, and lifted the dead man’s arm pointedly. It was then that I noticed the man’s gray coat. The clear mark of a Gatherer on the job. “He wanted—,” Rowan began, but couldn’t finish the thought aloud. It was the first time I’d ever seen him tremble.
    I had thought, before that night, that Gatherers