He followed Sophia out.

Reeling from side to side, he bounced between the narrow walls as he managed his way down, catching himself on the handrails as he went. When he'd made it outside, she was facing the street, and he wrapped his arms around her from behind, and planted a heavy kiss on the back of her head. She spun round, looking up at him.

"Thank you," he said, his voice full of gratitude and relief, in equal measure.

"I hope this works," she said, the two of them leaning into each other more and more.

The morning haze had already begun to burn away, but a certain chill yet hung in the air, rosying their cheeks as they stood, breathing in one another's foggy breath, with Mim wondering about what kw3rk had said that'd made her blush. Sophia started to lean into him a bit more, but something held her back.

"Hey—" she said, falling back on her heels, "I'm late for work. I should— I should get going. Boss has us working on a new security patch— after the whole Cyberpix thing, and all."

"Yeah?" he answered, taking a step back. "Guess I gotta go do my part, too. I'll see you later, though?"

"Yeah. Sounds good," she said, giving him one of those smiles he loved, the kind that pulled all to one side. "Later, Mim."

***

Left to loiter by himself on a cold and lonely stretch of pavement, Mimmeo pointed himself toward the corner, and set off down Polk. Shuffling along, he was still piecing together a cogent plan for the day, and soon he reached the corner. There, he knelt down and gently set the paperboard carton containing the leftover pastries beside a sleeping couple. Before he left, he patted at his jeans. This turned up a single kruggerrand that he'd forgotten he'd stashed inside the watch pocket, and he wrenched it loose, slipping it inside the box before rising once more to his feet.

After that, in need of a place to conduct his own mischief, and wanting to make himself drunk, he figured The Monte was as good a place as any. He hooked a right, turning onto Union, and dialed Reuben. It rang only once, then went straight to voicemail. He hung up without leaving a message.

Inside the pawnshop, seated at his usual spot at the bar, Mimmeo got to work on creating the files kw3rk had asked him to pull together. It was a rather lengthy list of fibbed documents and other coded decoys, which he was meant to load onto a fresh datacard he'd been given before he left the cloistered confines of kw3rk's dollar store Faraday cage.

He spent the afternoon at the bar, cranking bottle after brown bottle of Anchor Steam, and listening to Diana & Marvin, before switching over to a chopped and screwed rendition of 'Sara Smile', which he played on repeat. Sitting there, he hacked together a bunch of scripts that he hoped (at least, to someone like Sybil) would look like the kind of thing that had been responsible for having fucked her servers up something proper just a few days prior.

It only took him a couple hours to finish everything. Out of the aether had he pulled a fairy tale interpretation of kw3rk's original attack, along with a rather convincing set of instructions for an attack that was still to come, complete with a lovingly-crafted list of bogus aliases for completely nonexistent confederates. In between the typing of lies, and the swilling of beers, Mimmeo had called Reuben at least three more times. But, as with all his previous attempts on the walk over, nothing came of it.

He hung up his phone after the last of these calls, paid the bartender, saved everything to the datacard, and slipped it into his breast pocket. Then, Mimmeo, bidding the doorman good day, drifted into the bloodless streets of the Financial District, where he hailed a car to take him home.

***

He was standing over his sink when he felt his wrist start to vibrate. He had just finished shaving his cheeks, and part of the underside of his chin, leaving behind just enough to suggest something resembling a Van Dyke, a style, which somewhere along the line he'd decided was his best look.

"Yeah?" he said, gazing vacantly into the looking glass, with one of his hands gripping the knurled surface of the razor's handle, the other one pulling his skin taut.

"Mimmeo?"

"Yeah."

"This is Sybil."

"Oh, uh—"

He set the razor on the edge of the cracked porcelain basin, and moved into the kitchen.

"What's up?"

"I'm calling to follow up on what we discussed the other day," and she paused a beat, "about Marian."

"Right."

"As you know, we still haven't received anything from you, and—"

"Yeah. I know. I know. I'm on it. But, I have to tell you, I've had a real time trying to track 'em down."

He slipped a packet of food into the microwave as he talked into his wrist, something marked only in Arabic, which Saadiq had given to him last time he stopped in for smokes.

"All the same, we need to know you'll be delivering on your promise in a timely manner. We all have our deadlines," she said. "I'm sure you understand."

"I mean, I get it. But that address you gave me? Complete dead-end. I've tracked down some hard-to-finds before, but it seems she's even more slippery than even I would have expected."

"She is that. So, tell me: where do we stand? Have you made any progress?"

"I have. At least, I think I have. One of my people— guy named Itchy, hangs out around the docks a fair piece, says he's pretty sure he knows where th— where she's gonna be tonight."

"And this, this Itchy person, you'd call him a reliable source?"

"Yeah. Dude knows what's up. Bit of a gak-head, Itchy, but, you know, man's always been good to me."

The timer dinged, and he opened the door of the cooker. He still had no idea what it was, but it smelled good, smelled like— like curry-something. it was bound to be better than a gob of stale Proffer, at any rate.

"Alright. I suppose it makes little sense for me to start questioning your methods at this late hour. I only hope your plan works out — for both our sakes."

"In for a penny?" he asked, smiling as he trucked a bite of the mystery meal into his waiting mouth.

"Something like that," she said. "In any case, I'll expect an update from you later tonight. As soon as you have something."

"Fair dues. Oh, hey," he said through a bite of whatever he was jawing on, "where's Reuben? Been trying to raise him on the phone all day."

He could tell from the way she paused, from the way her voice iced over, that the answer to his question was a disagreeable one, or at the very least, complicated.

"Reuben," she said. "Yes. Reuben. We can talk about that when you're through with Marian."

That?

As he'd suspected, that couldn't be good — not for Reuben, and likely not for him, either. He set the remaining lump of food on the edge of the kitchen sink, and moved to the window, casting his eyes down to the people moving on the street below.

She went on.

"It's important we get your footage over to editors as soon as possible, so we can prep for the finale. But, more than that — and I can't stress this enough — it's absolutely critical we send a message to any would-be copycats that our servers are strictly off-limits. We can't afford a repeat of the other night. I'm sure you understand."

"I'm on it."

"Good," she exhaled, conveying something like relief. "Good-good. Okay, then."

And the line went cold.

***

It was a little after eleven o'clock when Mimmeo took a seat at the bar of the saloon, a local joint with an antique checkered floor, very cold beer, and a particularly rude bartender, that — despite their best efforts, and the presence of both unleashed dogs, and Hell's Angels — always struck him as being just a touch too clean to be classified as a proper dive.

Keeping with the day's theme, he ordered an Anchor Steam, then sat there, pretending it didn't exist as he waited for the signal. Two Weimaraners, who'd gone grey around the muzzle and were showing their age, lay coiled around their master's feet at a nearby booth, and from the moment he entered, never once took their agate-coloured eyes off him. This had the effect of setting him even less at ease than he already was, and after a time, when he could resist it no longer, he gripped his bottle by the neck, and slugged it down in three or four heavy gulps, ordered another, along with a shot of Fernet, both of which he swallowed down in exceedingly quick order.

Still waiting on kw3rk, his queasiness only grew. Not knowing whether it would be a salve or a bane, he nonetheless put away yet one more beer, and also one more shot, then paid the bearded bartender, and after disappearing for a moment into one of the private toilets for a lengthy piss, wandered outside to smoke at the corner of 3rd and 22nd.

It was then, at the precise moment he was huffing out the last lungful of unfiltered smoke from his third consecutive cigarette, that, with a film on his tongue that tasted of bitter cherries, he started going over the plan in his head for the last time, realizing, finally, how utterly fucked everything was — how it all felt like a bad dream. The whole thing. Reuben. The show. Veronica. West fucking Pierce. Goddamn Barry Abelman, and Sybil.

Bzzt.

He looked down at his wrist.

UNKNOWN: [dog emoji]

There, looking back at him from the scratched face of his Malum, was the Ur-form of a dog en passant: a fulvid coat of short hair, ears all pricked up, its tail curled.

Time to go.

***

It was all more than a little melodramatic. He'd thought so, even back at the flat, when the three of them were discussing how tonight was to go down. The whole plan had struck him as having been designed by someone who'd read too much Hammett, seen too many Kurosawa films, and now that he was traipsing his way in the foggy dark t'ward Pier 70, alone and bleary-eyed, half-drunk, an unlit Lucky dang-dangling from his lower lip, he thought to himself he should have known better.

He should have skipped. Fuck it. He would have gotten out of town.

It was an eleven-minute walk through The Dogpatch to where he was meant to be, or so LexMaps told him. He started out, and he tried not to take it as portentous that a self-driving shuttle about clipped him as he was crossing 3rd. As the wheel of fortune had it, the thing managed only to graze his jacket before hurtling on through the intersection, likely (he reckoned) on its way to pickup a load of drunks at the nearby ballpark.

Were it not for her.

He passed the long, brick-faced warehouse with the broken fire escapes where he'd once attended a launch party — nothing more than a beer blast, really — for some business or other, which everyone was meant to take very seriously, and which had failed in spectacular fashion less than eighteen months later.

He would have.

And with the electrifying whiff of dogfennel in his nostrils, he continued to move along the shattered pavements, through the vacant lots, and past the chain-linked lock-ups for marooned boats that would never sail again, for camper vans that would never again shelter a young family 'neath a secret spinney of redwoods, noticing for the first time a derelict smokestack peeking out from behind a rusted-out construction crane off in the distance.

He'd be miles away.

For a town that seemed so bent on building a 'scraper on every last heap of landfill, he thought it strange that here, so close to the waterfront, and to one of The City's main arteries, he should be tripping over loose bricks, and broken bottles.

Were it not for her.

It started to rain. Hard. Mimmeo buttoned his jacket to his throat, turned up his collar, and leaned forward, pressing himself into the downpour, determined to reach the pier as quickly as he could, and so conclude this latest episode in his life.

He could have gone across to Oakland for awhile.

As he neared the pier, he passed beneath innumerable lights in cages, shining for no one, throwing harsh shadows on every surface. The rain had begun to come down in broad, diagonal sheets. Taken together, the whole scene reminded him of one of Rodchenko's vertigo-inducing black and whites, like the ones he'd seen that time, years ago, when Sophia'd taken him to SF MOMA.

Or Phoenix.

Soaked through, his denim jacket rode up on him, coming to rest atop the plastic backstrap of his pistol, where his t-shirt clung, plastered to the small of his back. Through the driving rain, and the curtain of mist that lay ahead, he could just make out the outline of the sign for Potrero Point over a shallow rise about a minute's walk away, but as yet, he hadn't seen another living soul since he left his seat at the bar.

And, didn't he have a 'cousin' there, who was someone at The Biltmore?

Soon, he reached the sign. The lights had grown fewer and farther between, but still he thought he could see someone up ahead, perhaps a hundred meters away, or so: a figure, hunched over and with its back to him, its head slung low, and surrounded by a bulky mass that appeared to be moving about them on the ground below.

Fucking Portland would have been better than this.

There, standing midway down the pier, was kw3rk. Only a short distance now lay between them, and as Mimmeo approached the narrow causeway, a picture began to take shape, one of an old woman in a heavy woolen cloak, surrounded by a pack of what appeared to be feral dogs. He could see that they were being fed, fed something bloody, taken by the handful from a crumpled, brown paper bag, before being tossed upon the craggy surface of the ruined pier.

Fuck.

It was time. He plodded along the concrete dock, which cut a course straight into the center of the bay, 'til it began to widen out, taking a sharp ninety-degree bend, where a crumbling, tin-roofed outbuilding sat, sulking in the rain. He wanted to do a runner. He wanted to spin round on his heels, head to the station and hop a Greyhound to anywhere but there. All the same, it was time.

Were it not for her...

***