New York: Allie's War, Early Years

Jon thought everything essentially came back to that, though. For me, personally, the idea of keeping them around for sex seemed like the simpler explanation. We'd already passed at least four seer fetish clubs and we hadn't even gone through the sex district yet.

But what she was didn't really matter to me right then. Seeing a woman who looked about my age being hit with a military-grade cattle prod because I was spacing out and bumped into her on the street was more than my brain could compute.

"Hey," I said to the military guy. I held up a hand, smiling, trying diplomacy. "It was my fault, okay? I wasn't watching where I was going...really. You don't need to discipline her. I'm not hurt at all...and she really didn't do anything wrong."

"We saw what happened, ma'am," the man said grimly.

"Then get your fucking boot off her neck!" I snapped, losing my cool.

Jon tugged harder on my arm. When I glanced at him, he shook his head at me warningly. Then he looked pointedly at the other two men who had joined the military guy.

By then, the crowd had grown. We were in the area where all the horse carriages gathered by the park, looking for fares, so the sidewalk was crowded anyway with sidewalk painters and knick knack kiosks and the horses eating mash and tolerating children rubbing their sticky hands on them. Some of the tourist crowd got pushed partway out into the road when they stopped to gawk at the downed seer, causing taxis to honk, and other cars to slow down.

I glanced around at the ring of people staring down at the sidewalk.

"Seriously," I said, to anyone and no one. "She didn't do anything!"

None of the other pedestrians seemed to want to acknowledge my outrage, or even meet my gaze. Behind me, Jon was still trying to pull me out of range of that black cattle prod.

I looked at the other two people who had joined military guy, standing over the downed seer. None of the three looked like NYPD. They could have been company security, plainclothes police...even SCARB, the branch of the World Court that maintained the racial laws across all borders. There was no way to tell, not by their clothing.

Whoever they worked for, they were a mismatched bunch.

The first guy I'd seen wore what looked like a uniform, with dark armored plating and a headset that looked like it had to be military issue. He still held that electric prod, which also looked military issue, and wore at least two visible guns in holsters strapped around his person, armored gloves, and those goggles of that overly-shiny, green metal.