Chump Change

Начало книги

The slitter whined against his throat. Bilobi felt the painless parting of his skin, then a line of flowing warmth. Heat pooled in the hollow of his throat, and the scent of his blood came to him.

«Be still, breakerboy,» the ganger whispered. «Don't want any more of your blood, but easy to make mistake, so?»

The ganger's free hand fumbled through Bilobi's pockets, flipped out the pin knife, the glass wire, the dazzlebombs — essential tools, amulets against the other harsh men who roamed the robot dump. Bilobi held himself very still, thinking: This will pass. This is nothing I've lived through worse; I’ll live through this. After a while he began to believe.

A million metal bodies lay in shining drifts, piled high. Occasionally an arm or leg rattled — the last spasm of a not-quite-dead power cell Otherwise the dump was silent. His gaze drifted up the high steel wall that encircled the dump, sealing it safely away from the rest of the world. And imprisoning the men who scratched a living from those dangerous corpses. No inspectors stood in the official observation blister today. Whatever happened next, no one would see. He stopped himself from smiling.

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