The rain in Veridian City didn't wash things clean; it just made the grime slicker. It turned the soot on the brickwork into a black paste that coated your hands if you touched the walls, and it made the hunger in Max's stomach feel cold and heavy, like a stone swallowed whole.
Max was nineteen, but his eyes were older. They were the grey of the pavement he slept on, darting constantly, scanning for opportunity or danger. Tonight, it was mostly danger. He was in District 4, the "Rust Belt," an industrial graveyard of shuttered factories and skeletal warehouses. It was neutral ground, technically, but in Veridian, neutrality just meant you got beaten by both sides instead of just one.
He pulled the collar of his oversized, thrift-store jacket up around his ears. He needed money. Not for drugs, not for booze—though God knew half the kids at the St. Jude's Orphanage had turned to that before they even aged out—but for food and a way out. Max had a jar buried behind the boiler of his old foster home. It had three hundred dollars in it. He needed two thousand to get a bus ticket to the coast and a deposit on a room where the rats didn't outnumber the tenants.
A black sedan rolled slowly down the street, tires hissing on the wet asphalt. It was a Lincoln, vintage but polished to a mirror shine. Out of place. In the Rust Belt, cars were rusted heaps held together by duct tape and prayers. A Lincoln meant money. Money meant a target.
Max shrank into the shadows of an alleyway, his heart doing a familiar stutter-step against his ribs. He watched as the car parked. A man stepped out. He was wearing a camel-hair coat that cost more than Max would earn in a lifetime. The man left the car running. He left the door cracked. He walked toward a heavy steel door in the side of a warehouse, distracted, talking on a bulky cell phone.
It was stupid. It was arrogant. It was perfect.
Max didn't think; he moved. It was the instinct of a street rat—see the cheese, ignore the trap. He sprinted across the wet cobblestones, his sneakers making no sound over the drumming rain. He slid into the driver's seat. The leather was warm. The smell of expensive cologne and stale cigar smoke filled the cabin.
He reached for the gear shift.
Click.
The sound was small, mechanical, and terrifying. Max froze. He looked to his right.
Sitting in the passenger seat, obscured by the shadows of the darkened streetlights, was a mountain of a man. He was peeling an apple with a knife that looked like it could skin a bear. The man didn't look at Max; he just kept peeling, the skin of the fruit curling away in a perfect red ribbon.
"You know," the man said, his voice like gravel tumbling in a dryer. "Most kids check the passenger seat first. It's day one stuff."
Max scrambled for the door handle, but it was locked. Central locking.
"Don't," the man said, finally turning his head. His face was a map of scars, illuminated by the dashboard lights. "You run, I shoot you in the spine. You stay, maybe you live. Maybe."
The driver's side door opened. The man in the camel coat returned. He looked at Max, then at the large man with the knife. He didn't look angry. He looked amused.
"What do we have here, Silas?" the coat-man asked.
"A volunteer, Boss," Silas grunted, taking a bite of the apple. "A volunteer for the vacancy."