An intolerably hot Thursday night:

Victoria Street teemed with nightwalkers. Liquid fire pulsed above the sidewalks, washing the streetlife with stammering flares of color. It was late January, and the Fringe Festival was less than a week away. Macquarie Junction was being innudated beneath the annual torrent of interstate visitors and overseas tourists, the local population had fractured and diversified over the last month. The Festival's primary themes were ostensibly multicultural; lately it had assumed a multisexual character. Transgression had begun to spill beyond the Junction's redlight borders, celebrating otherness in every conceivable form. The city had become an electronic saturnalia sweltering in the Great Summer Heat.

Yana Milovic crested a wave of stone wash denim and rode out the King Street rapids. She was making for the shrieking neon heart of the Westside, eyes picking out shifting gaps in the crowd ahead. A window opened between a throng of Kylies and she glided through the rift like a ghost. A complementary set of hermaphrodites squabbled their way past the San Francisco; they looked like a pair of department store mannequins decked out in red vinyl and bubblepack. One of them paused and smiled as Yana glanced curiously in their direction.

Yana had been squatting in the Junction for close on eighteen months now. She recalled the previous summer's cultural eruptions; the endless parades of pierced flesh and jellied hair, the legions of social mutations clustered outside the clubs and cafes. The Westside was awash with drugs and trick, hustlers were dropping Rage and pissing silver. Trade around Federation Gardens would probably quadruple over the Festival. The johns would pay for just about anything this time of year. Yana could jack the price up higher than her lycra stretchskirt, and by the end of the month, she'll have made enough to get them a real place. They could lease one of those big old houses in Crossways or maybe Dawson. Quiet little avenues, colonial verandahs, polite eldster neighbors, none too pricey.

Angie had explained the whole plan to her last night. Angie seemed to know these sorts of things, she was smart that way. Plenty of streetcred when it mattered. She'd never walked the Wall (and therefore never had to dodge the pimps), but she always brought home the big-trick ideas. Squatting in the Meat Packers had been one, hustling the Gardens had been another.

The other girls didn't trust Angie, said she was too straight and easy with the Mouth. Yana saw it sometimes, but her loyalty never really wavered. She'd never have thought of milking the Festival last year, she hadn't known Angie at the time. She hadn't even had a squat back then, she'd been sleeping in the public convenience over by Museum subway.

She dodged a gaggle of Jackets with orange hair and paused by the intersection of Victoria and Wales. Jackets were pretty harmless, in this part of the Westside they were nearly as common as Goths, and neither seemed interested in breeding outside their respective species. Further along she'd need a little vigilance (one of Angie's words - she tossed things like that in everyday speech), up around Royal and Crown, where the neon really started to shriek. That part of the Westside was crawling with Heads; Heads and Ivans. Heads went in slash-packs, Ivans were sole predators, the sort who enjoyed hurting women. Fortunately, both groups generally confined themselves to homophobic bug-hunts during the Festival.

There was a plethora of sleazoid pimps cruising the Junction who'd just love to add Yana to their youth-club hareems. This was a possibility which sent Angie and the others psychotic periodically. The Westside fed on women; hustlers, sugarflesh and streetrick seemed to be the main diet. Sometimes they went down at sunset and simply never came up. Homeless and underaged vanished into the Zone with almost supernatural regularity.

They'd already lost Jacinta.

That had been just three months ago, and she hadn't even been hustling at the time. Took the sub out to Albert Square to score some Haze from Frankie the Shit and managed to forget the way back. No big deal at first; Jacinta was a runaway (they all were), you had to expect sudden disappearances from a midnight runner, even one who'd found a decent squat. But then the rumors started round the circuit. Streetword had it that she'd been 'conscripted' into juvenile service by the Radcliff Brothers, a pair of sugarpimps who specialized in renting jailbait to middle aged Rotarians. Evidently, Frankie handed her over to the Radcliffs in exchange for an armful of Fireskate. She'd been fifteen, same age as Yana herself.

The lights greened and Yana whipped forward, wedging her way between a pair of KenDolls. She'd nearly made farside when she slammed into a tall Goth wearing a weathered black leather overcoat. He glanced down and stepped lightly past, avoiding contact as if she were a child (which she was, although she would have gargled Draino before admitting it), then vanished into the streetide without comment. She often wondered how Goths could afford to hang so much leather from their lupine bodies. She'd never met one who actually did anything.

Yeah, Angie had fears for Yana's safety (not enough to accompany her down to the Gardens or try to figure out a less hazardous way of feeding the kitty, but she was concerned nonetheless), but someone had to bring the trickmoney home if they ever wanted to quit the squats. You walk the Wall, you take the risks. Still, Yana wasn't exactly streetgreen, she had enough Eye to scan a flesh merchant longrange. They usually talked fluent pimpspeak and drove long penile chromes with personalized number plates. They weren't always stereotypes of course, sometimes they morphed out into Flannels or Suits, but after a while you learned to read Face. Angie said Face was a language unto itself, but it was nothing like Mouth. Mouth was almost always a lie, especially when it came attached to a john. Face was more like some book written in cypher. It seemed completely incoherent at first, but once you mastered the code, you could read Face in just about any language.

Selena down at the Wall once told her much the same thing. What a john says isn't worth a pinch of shit at the best of times, it's what you see in the face that matters. That was Selena's great axiom of life, and she didn't just apply it to hustling. It was good to know a bit of Face in any relationship; men always tried to hide behind words and clothes, no matter what the scenario was. The suit may say Armani, but the face will read Asshole in huge, lurid, billboard lettering.

Intuition had saved Selina's life years ago, when she'd been selling it up in the Zone. The johns who approached her there were always bulging with concealed anger. Ivans were her most regular clientele; she had to read pretty deep to see it. Some hid their fury so well that she never saw it until they had the knife at her throat. Up 'til then, they seemed to be nothing more than short balding losers looking for a bit of hump. That's what made them so dangerous. Serial killers could pass for used car salesmen or garage mechanics, sometimes with even greater success than tranzies passed as women.

"You see a lot of both working the Westside," Selina had once told her, lips curving in vague irony.

Yana negotiated a gleaming maze of Kawasakis parked outside the Bluestone Tavern, where a group of Leatherdykes were milling about with their cans of UDL, tooling around and accosting the passing streetlife. Desperados from the Sunshine State according to the license plates, they burst into a ragged symphony of shrilling catcalls as Yana slivered by, giving her the kind of sexlip more often heard around construction sites. Yana grinned and exaggerated her heelwork momentarily, something she'd never have done a year ago.

She'd bummed around with a few lesbians since coming to the Junction, mainly runaways like herself. They'd all been Sigourney Weaver wannabees, shaving their heads and butching up like Ripley from that third Alien movie. The final result, in most cases, was almost farcically androgynous. The majority had looked about as butch as Kate Moss during her waif period.

Yana had tested the water with one of them last June, partly out of curiosity, mainly out a desire to survive the most savage part of Deep Winter. It had been her first time with a female. Her name had been Tish, a grungy little girl with a sexually ambiguous body and a diminutive porcelain face. She had a delicate silver ring looped through her right nipple, a sight Yana never ceased to find wincingly unpleasant. She always felt an impulse to cover her own breasts whenever she saw it.

She crossed Royal Parade and entered the Red Zone, her eyes clicking into high surveillance. This was where the problems would start. Heads were swarming in the cloying heat, their faces long and canine and festering with mindless rage. Of course, they were easy to pick. The Badge presented the main problem, particularly during the Festival. Badge was far more difficult to pick than Head. Police of the plainclothes variety were about as ubiquitous as ratz in a subtube. The Westside was virtually drowning in Suits, and you could never be sure which one was working undercover. You could never fool a Badge. Selina said they practically wrote the book on reading Face, they could spot a runaway with their eyes closed.

Badge had a nose for sugarflesh, sniffing them out like white pointers and hauling them off the street to the proverbial Fate Worse Than. Strip searches and cavity probes weren't exactly legal where child prostitutes were concerned, even under the Special Powers Act, but you heard a lot of horror stories walking the Wall late at night. From what Selina told her, the Badge had a long history of protecting paedophiles and sugarpimps, and it hadn't ended with the Inquiries of the late-nineties. Hidden video evidence had landed a few scapegoats in the pen, but the trials had mostly been media spectacle. Child sexual abuse had been the tabloid fashion at the time. Public hysteria had been satisfied, but the underlying carcinoma had barely been grazed.

Badge still wore the meanest rep in the force, particularly the undercovs. Many of the older hard-asses were still on the take, and teenaged girls came at a premium. Jacinta had almost certainly fallen foul of the Vice Squad. Probably caught her up by Albert Square and sold her off to the Radcliffs for a percentage of the trade. There was no shortage of paying customers, even a pizza-faced slag like Frankie the Shit could afford an hour of quicktime every now and then. Of course, that particular debate had become academic long ago. Jacinta hadn't surfaced since her disappearance, and no one was really certain what had happened to her.

Yana quickened her pace, holding her gaze dead forward, and body-surfed her way along the sidewalk. Federation Gardens was still fifteen minutes distance. The monorail didn't go that far. The subway went close, but the walk from Coronation Station to the Fed was even worse than the last half-kay of Victoria Street. The Zone offered an illusion of safety if nothing else. There were lights and crowds and the possibility of assistance should something go wrong. Coronation Drive offered the possibility of a violent, sudden and agonizing death. Non-natal caesarians, apparently. Heads out there would slice you open for the six dollars you had in your shoulder bag.

Of course, Yana was lucky to have a shoulderbag, let alone six dollars to carry 'round in it. Most homeless owned the clothes they wore and rarely had more than the price of a MacDonald's cheeseburger on their person from day to day. Well, she was squatting now, and life had improved marginally since she quit the midnight run.

Yeah, she was still living on the jagged edge, and she was still punching tickets on the Westside express, but at least she had some place to come home to, even if Meat Packers was nothing more than a dilapidated old theatre out by the School of Art.

Nine weeks ago, she'd been an urban nomad, dodging Badge and turning tricks in the alley behind the Royal Hotel for five dollars a shot. Angie had changed all that; Angie looked out for her. That was what the other girls seemed to forget: Angie looked out for them. Sure, she could be cold and arrogant and had a tongue you could gut a fish with, but she'd turned things around for all of them. No one squatting at the Meat Packers went hungry, none of them had to face the midnight run or fear the rent collectors who worked the shelter circuit. There were a few things Meat Packers couldn't provide; hot water or new clothes or dope, but Angie said they could worry about luxuries once they'd pooled enough cash for a lease. Besides, there were a few perks to be found in the Zone; gifts, trades, favors between hustlers. The Wall was a network of streetlife contacts, and Yana was still finding her place.

She'd only been trading along the Wall for a few weeks, but Yana knew many of the regulars from her Albert Square days. A lot of runaways and sugarflesh used to hang out at the Square, bumming loose change and trade from the locals. Like Yana, they'd seen the economic potential for bleeding the incoming Festival crowd and decided to cruise the Fed. Angie sometimes referred to them as sugarclones because they all looked alike, even the boys. A few could have passed for Yana's older sisters. People had often mistaken she and Jacinta for twins, although the similarities were as superficial as skin color and hairstyle.

The Madges were less familiar, and Yana tended to avoid their company. The majority were meaner than catshit and roughly as territorial as a riverful of saltwater crocodiles. Several of them regarded her with the sneering contempt that can only be felt by aging whores or johns of any vintage. They found her youth and appearance (to say nothing of her pimpless status) irritating beyond all tolerance; Yana always copped a few rounds of slagmouth whenever she turned up in her brief lycra dress and stockings that stayed up by themselves. Only one of them had ever treated her with any respect, and Yana had known her almost as long as she'd been in the Junction.

"Hey!"

Selina raised an ivory palm in greeting. Standing beneath an equine relief, she was a delicate alabaster figurine clothed in lurid indigo shadows. Katie smiled and waved back. She liked Selina. Selina with her surgically reconstructed figure and her technologically perfect features; Selina with her fifty year old mind nestled within a hormonally enhanced adolescent body.

"Hey!" Yana replied and walked over, reaching into her shoulderbag for her heels, "How's trade?" The obligatory question.

"Brisk. Snoid came by looking for you earlier on."

"Oh, God," Yana relied, crimping her face in disgust, "what did he want?"

"Same as always," Selina answered. Snoid was perhaps the most loathsome creature in the entire Westside, lower on the evolutionary scale than even Frankie the Shit. Yana slipped off her flats and stepped into the heels, magically lengthening her thighs by about six centimeters.

"So why's he always asking for me?"

"You're about the only one who'll put up with him." Which was true. Not even the Madges wanted to touch him. Granted, all johns had nauseating habits, it was programmed into their genes, but most of the girls would have preferred to go swimming in a pool full of cold mucus than spend five minutes in vitro with the Snoid.

Yana straightened up, dropping her flats into the shoulder bag abyss, dismissing Snoid and his revolting fantasies.

"You got what I need?"
"Yeah. Right here."
"How much?"
"Twenty." This was cheap, a favor, a big one, but it was still more than Yana had on her.
"Hold it for me?"
Selina shook her head.
"No. Take it now, babe. You can pay me back in an hour. Night's getting old."
"Thanks."

This was a supreme act of trust, rarely witnessed this side of the Wall. Selina produced two small containers, shifting her body to mask the transaction from any covert gaze. She moved with a casual, fluid confidence, the expertise of decades, seeming to touch Yana's elbow, directing her towards the promenade. Selina was a world-class coolhand, she'd spent most of her life under some form of surveillance. The Westside was full of eyes, but Selina knew how to throw up a blind spot. Not even the Badge would have seen anything more unusual than a pair of hustlers parading the Wall, their faces lowered in furtive sugartalk.

Traffic droned incessantly along Memorial Drive, streams of chrome and halogen radiance. Yana put a hand to her mouth as if yawning. The night wound on, intolerably hot.

The night Cathy Hargraves grabbed her kid sister and climbed out the bathroom window of the Stonehaven Children's Home, she imagined that her life would unfold something like this:

First, she and Ellen would run away to Macquarie Junction, where they'd take refuge with the Salvation Army or one of the welfare shelters in the Westside. Cathy would take work as a waitress or kitchen hand or whatever and start putting away money for more permanent lodgings, then, after a few months, she'd meet this big, hunky guy with a drop-dead smile and a red porsche (the guys in Cathy's fantasies always drove red porsches). He'd take her out and spend a lot of money on her, then ask her to shack up with him. They'd move into his big house overlooking the Harbor, Ellen would go to primary school, and Cathy would spend the rest of her life buying clothes, smoking dope, and having spine-clenching sex with her beefcake swain.

Ten months later, her life had turned out something like this:

She and Ellen were living on the midnight run. The Salvos were overflowing with homeless, and the people over at the Junction City Mission had tried to hand them over to the Badge. They were constantly sick and dirty, ate maybe three times a week, and both had been reduced to scrounging out of garbage cans on numerous occasions. Their hairlines were caked with crumbling reefs of dandruff, their clothes reeked like used sanitary pads. Even the stuff they lifted from the Brotherhood Shop began to crawl with microlife after a few days in the Westside heat.

Worse still, Cathy had discovered that the big hunky guys who drove red porsches had absolutely no interest in filthy slagheap runaways such as herself. The Jackets and Straights who frequented places like The Tech or Links in the Westside already had girlfriends, long-legged Kylies in tightblacks and slettoes. The only guys that Cathy seemed capable of attracting were skags, sleezoids and wannabe sugarpimps. Beefcake was on short supply in Cathy's bankrupt demographic, which seemed to consist exclusively of losers, cuntswabs, and the hideously ugly.

No, about the closest she'd come to her red-porsche hunk had been the three months she'd spent with Riko Laguna.

Riko had been a petty thief and persistent dole-fraud; a tall, skinny, weasel-faced tosser with slickback hair and a Latino accent. Said he came from South America, told endless stories about Rio de Janiro; childhood struggles with poverty, gangs, and the law. Claimed that the Westside was a church picnic after the streets of Rio. It had been a long haul spanning two continents and a black market career of international proportions, but Riko had the vision and the drive.

It was all bullshite, pure and unadulterated bullshite, as her old man used to say.

His name wasn't Riko; he sure as hell wasn't Latin. Couldn't even speak Spanish. Looked about as convincing as one of those Saturday night flamencos that hit the Matador every weekend. Took tanning pills and blackrinsed his hair to look Hispanic. Said it made him irresistible to women. This was another example of Riko's amazing capacity for self-delusion.

He had offered them lodgings in his gangrenous little bedsit at the beginning of the previous year's winter. Cathy had only agreed because she'd caught that Malaysian flu which had been decimating the suburbs at the time. Nearly as bad as the thing in that Stephen King movie. Another three days on the street and she'd have been catfood. No choice really. Move in with Riko the chinless wonder or feed the roaches. It wasn't the first time she'd been reduced to abject desperation since leaving Stonehaven. At one point she'd been willing to drop her pants for half a pack of Marlboros. Sharing a hole with Riko Laguna couldn't be any worse than that, nothing could have been worse than that.

She'd been wrong, of course.

Like most of the skags Cathy met on the street, Riko was a walking bag of fecal matter. You could almost see the sleeze dripping from his face like huge gobbets of liquid shit. He contaminated everything he touched. The touching wasn't all that bad in itself, she'd learned to blank out unwanted groping as far back as Stonehaven. Unfortunately, whitenoising simply didn't work where Riko was concerned.

Being horribly unattractive to women, he was obsessed with the humiliation and victimization of his desired objects. Cathy became the surrogate for all the Kylies he'd never had, the ones who'd turned him down, pissed him off, made him feel short and weak and ugly. The ones who had treated him with the utter contempt he deserved. He'd stored up decades of hate and anger and self-loathing, for which Cathy's body became the vessel.

However, his revenge hadn't happened all at once. Riko may not have looked too bright, but he was about as cunning as a shitpoke full of sewer rats. Cunning enough to move slowly, gradually poisoning her already depleted reservoir of self-esteem and building up to a crescendo of perversion. Looking back, Cathy wondered how she hadn't seen it coming. She'd been on the midnight long enough to recognize the signs. Standard pimptrick, right down to the promises and the addictive substances.

That year's poverty special had been Rage, a comparatively inexpensive synthetic which replicated the effects of XTC without the lethal side effects, at least according to the publicity. Riko got her started almost as soon as she'd moved in. Didn't even wait for her fever to subside; said it would 'speed up' her recovery. Kill the virus, lower her temperature. No, don't worry, sweetchunks: Rage is non-addictive. Pure as rainwater, sweeter than crystal springs.

Lying prick.

She'd been hooked by her third rock, and Riko moved in like the failed barracuda he was. Left nothing undefiled. Made her do things that she never would have done, even back in her starvation days. The sort of things that only a man could imagine doing to a fifteen year-old girl. Made her feel like offal. Like shit from the body of some diseased animal. Two months in sexual purgatory, the starring attraction of a freakshow's wetdream. Cathy still had nightmares about it, particularly when she'd gone straight too long.

Well, that was history, or at least Riko was.

Dumb fuck had pushed his luck too far one night down at the Matador. Picked a fight with some wimpy little geek from the western suburbs. Started with some stupid argument and a lot of macho posturing. Streetword said Riko went in playing Rambo. Thought he'd kick the geek's runty asshole and get a medal for doing it. Ended up pleading on his knees with tears running down his scrawny face. Turned out the wimp had a switch blade and a truckload of meanstreet friends. That was Riko, no argument. He'd been pretty handy with his fists where she and Ellen were concerned, but no real balls when it looked like he might get hurt.

Cathy had tried to keep the bedsit after Riko's heroic demise, convinced that she could claim squatter's rights. That was one of the great urban myths of the midnight run: if you found a decent hole and managed to hold onto it for more than a week, you got to stay there. No one could throw you out. Not even the legitimate owners. You had squatter's rights, which under Cathy's definition amounted to the right to do anything you pleased. Didn't matter that you weren't paying rent, didn't matter that you were only fifteen years old and had once traded sexual favors for the price of a couple of Big Macs. Didn't even matter if the Suit came 'round waving his papers and threatening to call the Badge. You had squatters rights, which meant you could stand at the door, stick your bird in his face and tell him to go lick your ring.

Didn't last too long, of course.

Badge did come by one morning, and she didn't ask them to lick anything. Barely managed to shove Ellen out the back window while the Boys kicked down the door and shouted for them to stop. Even closer than that day at the City Mission. They'd been riding the Westside express ever since, with Cathy punching tickets for whatever the johns were willing to pay. Which wasn't much at the best of times. Sometimes they didn't pay jackshit, just fetched her a backhand upside the face if she gave them Mouth.

Rent collectors posed similar difficulties.

Collectors were homeless Skag, basket cases for the most part, but occasionally you ran into the odd psychotron who went about extorting money from streetkids and anyone too small to fight back. Common practice in homeless circles, as common as sexual abuse and blagging. Three of them had forced her out of an empty hole she and Ellen had been sharing with a boy named Kerryn. Just turned up one night and gave them a choice between paying rent or getting out. One of them slapped Kerryn around when he tried to do that hunter-gatherer thing teenage boys do whenever someone threatens their turf. Not being stupid, Cathy took Ellen and got out before the collectors decided they wanted more than a bit of loose change.

She never saw Kerryn again. Bit of a pity; he was the only decent guy she'd met since Stonehaven.

Winter might have passed, but the streets were just as vicious. They'd been sleeping in doorways and lifeline bins for weeks now. Squatting was no longer an option since the Festival came to town. Space was shrinking, no room anywhere, even out by the industrial section. Festival was a lightning conductor for homeless. They seemed to be drifting in from all over the City, probably attracted by the drugs and trade. Meanstreet kids from places like Ashtown or 'Drute, armed with pigsticks and slazors. Pre-generation Heads, conurban bacteria multiplying in the arcades and back alleys and commission districts. Gott Allmächtige would've had trouble finding a squat during Festival.

Then there was the excess baggage to consider. Being homeless in the Westside was asspain enough, but having to constantly look out for a whining ten year-old girl was a full-scale Rectinol. Ellen was a constant burden, slowing her down, clinging like a pre-pubescent octopus, simping and crying whenever she got frightened or tired. Jesus, the little shit hardly ever spoke at all, except to complain that she was hungry or thirsty or too hot or too cold or whatever else was bothering her. Sometimes Cathy felt like grabbing her by the back of the head and slamming her dumb face into the nearest wall until she shut the fuck up.

Of course, Ellen wasn't really the problem, was she?

Fact was, the only legacy of her season at Casa Riko was a Rage habit that registered eight on the Richter scale. Streetprice had been jacking up over the last month, and Cathy couldn't turn the trick fast enough to raise what the street doctors were asking nowdays. Festival prices. Hustlers down by the Wall were making the big cash, but they were professionals, all of them, even the sugarflesh. Got around in stretchskirts and heels and torsos. Cathy would have been lucky to own a clean pair of underpants.

Not that underwear figured high on her list of priorities at the moment. She'd been straight for three days now, and she was shaking worse than that Tokyo 'quake a few years back. She'd managed to score a little Haze from Frankie the Shit last time she saw him, but Haze was to Rage what jacking off was to sex. No comparison, no satisfaction, no real edge. If she didn't get a few rocks pretty soon, she'd go premenstrual with a bullet.

Still, there was the alternative Frankie had hinted at the day she'd wheedled the Haze out of him. Told her he knew a way she could earn herself an even tenner and enough Rage to last out the next month. Pretty extreme, but so was her habit...

Visit the Transfiction Wiki