Punishment

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[1]

“NO WAY,” SYD WHISPERED to Egan. He crouched behind a broken concrete barrier, peering across a putrid lot, to the fenced-in warehouse beyond. “If we get caught . . .”

“We won’t get caught!” Egan didn’t even bother to whisper, standing and resting his elbows on the barrier. “It’s perfect. All that stuff just in there for the taking. You realize how much we could get for that amount of wiring if we rolled it to the scrap yard?”

“I realize we’ll get jumped if we show our faces in the scrap yard,” Syd answered. He pulled Egan down beside him. “Thanks to your last perfect scheme.”

“Hey, I didn’t think Toussaint would check the processors.” Egan shrugged. Syd’s best friend had a unique talent for forgetting his own mistakes as soon as the bruises healed.

Syd never forgot a mistake of Egan’s, maybe because he bruised more easily than his friend did.

“Anyway,” Egan added, “I never actually told the man that they worked.”

Syd shook his head. Egan thought he was quite the criminal mastermind, but half his plans fizzled out before they started, and the other half usually cost more in beatings than they earned in credit. Egan did, however, share everything with Syd, the beatings and the cred.

“You could pay for a whole year of school with this score.” Egan continued to make his argument for the proposed heist. He lowered his hood, revealing the shock of white hair he’d styled—last week it was green, blue the week before. He liked to coordinate with his outfits, no matter how much it cost him. He’d just borrow more. His patron never got in trouble, so it didn’t bother him. Unlike Syd’s.

Syd’s patron hardly went a week without one crime or another for which Syd took the punishment as his proxy. It seemed to Syd that between his patron and his best friend, he was always paying for someone else’s mistakes. It was, however, good motivation to avoid making any of his own.

 “No new debt,” Egan told him. “You’ve only got what? Three years left stuck with that knockoff patron of yours? We pull off this job, and you won’t need to take another minute of punishmentafter you turn eighteen. Not a second.”

That got Syd’s attention. Eighteen was only three years away.

Egan grinned. Syd didn’t like taking stupid risks, but he liked taking on new debt even less. School was expensive, and if the system expected slumrats like him to pay for it, they had to expect a robbery here and there. It was a free market after all. There was always a buyer.

 Some of the Upper City businesses used warehouses in the Valve for storage because space was cheap. They could simply pay some local thugs to clear out a building, dump their material inside, and protect the place. The bigger corporations paid for Guardians to watch over their warehouses. No one could sneak past them. Guardians were genetically modified with patches and biodata and all kinds of programming that made them the perfect enforcers of corporate order. A warehouse under their protection was impenetrable.

But this place? It didn’t look like anyone with any connections, legitimate or otherwise, was looking after it.

“Somebody is going to rob that place,” Egan assured Syd. “It might as well be us.”

Syd tapped nervously at the birthmark behind his ear. The tapping calmed him down, helped him think. It was a habit he’d had for as long as he could remember. As far as he knew, he’d never sucked his thumb as a baby, just tapped his fingers on his birthmark.

“I don’t know why I always agree to this stuff,” he said.

“Because we’re partners in crime,” Egan said. “For now and forever.”