“You should have seen the rush! It was like a riot and an earthquake and a war, all at once. Went on for months. Families separated. Kids left behind. Banks closing their doors, and mobs breakin’ ’em down, only to find their money’d been taken out long ago. People running every which way. When the dust finally cleared, the City was declared officially abandoned—empty, nobody here. So they sealed it off.”

“Then how did you get in? And the others?”

Dewey laughed. “We never left! I sat here and watched ’em boiling out of the City. I figured I had plenty of time. And anyway, the more of ’em left, the better for me. I’d have the whole City to myself. Pick up a few things the others had left behind.”

“Is that how—”

But the old man wasn’t listening to Ron. “After a couple months, Manhattan got to be right livable, with everybody gone. I knew there was a few others like me; a couple thousand of us, at least. We never got out of the City, and as far as the Government was concerned, they wasn’t going to come in looking for us. They had enough to do, handling the eight million or so who had come screaming out. So the Government wrote us off their records. Officially, I’m dead. You’re talking to a dead man!”

“Not really,” Ron said.

Dewey shrugged. “Somewhere Outside there’s a Government computer with my death certificate coded into its memory banks, signed and official and everything. Just like all the kids that got stuck inside here. Officially, none of us exist. No social security, no IRS identification number, nothing. We don’t exist. None of us.”

But I’ve got an ID record, Ron insisted to himself. They know I exist!

“That was twenty years ago,” Dewey said, his voice sinking to a dark muttering. “Had a woman with me then. She was awful pretty. She died the first winter . . . got sick . . . couldn’t find a doctor, no medicine . . .”

The old man slumped against the back of the sofa, eyes closed, head down against his chest, empty glass slipping from his thick fingers. Ron took the glass and placed it quietly on the table next to the nearly empty bottle.

“I’ll help you to your bed,” Ron said softly. He couldn’t tell if Dewey was already asleep or not.

“Thanks, but I can make it by myself,” the old man replied, without opening his eyes. “Been getting myself to bed without help for twenty years now. Won’t be able to do it much longer, though.” Dewey’s eyes snapped open and he stared at Ron fiercely. “Tell you what. How’d you like to be my partner? I’m getting too old to keep alive all by myself. The eyes are getting real bad. You could live right here. We could fix a place upstairs for you, deck it out with furniture . . .”

Without even thinking about it, Ron said, “But I’ve got to get back to my home. As soon as they open the gates next summer—”

Dewey put a hand on Ron’s shoulder. “Son, they’re never going to let you out. You’re not the first kid to get stuck in here. If you show up at a gate without your ID, you’ll go straight to the Tombs. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up in the Army. If you’re lucky.”

Ron shook his head stubbornly at the old man, but his mind whispered to him, Forever. You’re going to be stuck in here forever. He turned and stared out the broad windows at the darkened City, where only a pitiful few glimmers of light broke the darkness. Forever.

Dewey showed Ron to a bedroom. The old man walked very straight and sure-footed, in spite of all he had drunk. Ron felt as if he were the one who was staggering.

“Good night, son,” Dewey said, leaving Ron at the doorway to a small, clean, and well-lit bedroom.

Ron said, “If . . . if I come here to work with you—live with you—could I bring a girl with me?”

Dewey seemed to hold his breath for a moment or two. Then he let it out with a long sigh. “Some kinds of girls are nothing but trouble, you know.”

“She’s not like that.”

“You sure?”

Nodding, Rod added, “She’s got a brother, too. Six or seven years old. He’s a good kid. Interested in machinery.”

Dewey ran a hand through his shaggy white hair. “I ask for a partner and I get a family. Okay . . . I’m probably crazy, but—bring ’em along. We’ll see how it works out.”

“Thanks! Thanks an awful lot!”

“Good night. Get some sleep,” Dewey said. He started to turn away, then he looked back at Ron. “You’re really sure now?”

“About Sylvia?”

“About our partnership. You’ll come back? You won’t disappoint an old man?”

“I’ll come back,” Ron said firmly. “Don’t worry.”

Ron stayed with Dewey all the next day. Toward evening, the Muslims’ trucks started to pull out of the market area. They were loaded with food and supplies. A smudge of smoke rose toward the south, somewhere downtown of the market area, in the direction of the Gramercy turf.

“Trouble,” said Dewey. “One of the white gangs must have had a run-in with the Muslims.”

The trouble never reached the market area, and the day ended quietly. Dewey insisted that Ron stay with him another night. Ron easily agreed. The old man’s food was too good to miss. And sleeping on a real bed again was like being in heaven.

The following morning Ron started for the Gramercy turf. He passed the burned-out section. Buildings were black with smoke. Windows, doors, roofs all gone so that the daylight sifted through the still-smoldering insides of the buildings.

White warriors were patrolling the streets here and there. Either they knew Ron from his earlier trips to the market through their turf, or they didn’t care who he was as long as his skin was white.

Turning a corner, Ron saw a handful of kids sitting quietly on the front steps of an old brown stone house. One of them had the stump of a broken knife tucked in his belt. He couldn’t have been older than Davey. The children were watching the unmoving body of a boy, about twelve years old, that lay under a swarm of flies in the gutter. The corpse lay face up, chest crumpled and brown with dried blood. His eyes were open and his mouth was twisted as if he had been screaming when he died.

Ron felt his teeth clench. The local gang ought to clean up after themselves better than that, he grumbled silently. Those kids are scared half to death. Then he thought of his own retching reaction to the first corpse he had seen, back in the truck on that first raid into Chelsea turf. It seemed like a thousand years ago. Ron realized he had changed, hardened. He wasn’t certain he liked it.

The Gramercy area looked deserted when Ron got there. There was no damage, no sign that fighting had come this far downtown. But there was no one on the streets, either. Everything looked dead and emptier than usual. As he climbed the steps inside their home building, Ron wondered where everyone had gone. There was no one in the halls. No kids playing. Nobody around anywhere.

He took the stairs three at a time and didn’t stop until he was pounding on Sylvia’s door. She opened it and went wide-eyed when she recognized him.

“Oh, Ron!” She threw her arms around his neck. “We thought they killed you!”

He kissed her, long and warm and hard, forgetting about Al and Dewey and everything else except her.

Finally she pulled away from him. “Al’s called a war meetin’,” Sylvia said. “All th’ gangs’re doin’ it. Th’ Muslims made a lotta trouble yesterday an’ all th’ gangs’re tryin’ to figger out what t’ do.”

“The hell with them,” Ron said. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“You and me and Davey. We’re getting out. Right now, while they’re all busy making war talk. We’re going to live in the market, live like real human beings. Get Davey and let’s go.”

“You’re crazy,” Sylvia said, backing away from him. “You can’t just quit th’ gang.”

“Yes we can. And we’re going to do it right now. Where’s Davey?”

But Sylvia was shaking her head. “No, Ron, it won’t work. You can’t quit a gang. They’ll come after you and kill you. They’ll find you, wherever you go. Nobody’s allowed t’ quit.”

Ron stood in the doorway, feeling his face twisting into a frown. “Listen. Nobody owns me. Or you.”

“Al went to bat for you,” Sylvia said, talking more slowly now, trying to explain. “He letcha into th’ gang when he coulda left you out on the street t’ die. Right? He hadda go against Dino t’ bring you into th’ gang. If you buzz off on him now, it’ll make things rough for Al. Catch?”

Ron muttered, “I don’t owe him—”

“He saved your life, Ron!”