It wasn’t particularly easy for Kieran to pay attention during his daily AE briefing. Particularly when his daily task was a low-stakes sting operation like the one Honeyman was delivering this morning. Well, the hangover didn’t help either. Honeyman slipped the crude, jagged-edged orders across his desk towards Kieran with his usual flourish. The page would flip and twirl out in the air as he passed it on. It was as if Honeyman was Kieran’s student; turning in an assignment he was particularly proud of completing. Kieran probably took a full second before slowly dragging his eyes from Honeyman’s thick, spindly eyebrows down to the page. The words [i]SUSPECTED PUBLIC ENDANGERMENT[/i] and [i]REQUESTED FOR QUESTIONING[/i] rang out in thick bureaucratic ink on the page. Code for ‘this one is rocking the boat, and we’re going to fix it.’ “…shouldn’t be too hard, now,” Honeyman continued. [i]Goddamn, those eyebrows nearly connect to his hairline.[/i] “Right, Key?” Kieran gave a slow nod as if to say, [i]'Hey, fuckface, I’ve done this daily for the past decade. Do you really need my positive reinforcement right now?'[/i] However, not wanting to stir the pot and listen to the man drone on another twenty minutes about [i]mutual respect,[/i] Kieran conceded. “It’s not a problem.” “You really need to lay off that stuff, Key,” Honeyman said. He had really picked up on calling him ‘Key,’ recently, hadn’t he? He’d heard the port boys call him that one time about a month ago on the way up for the daily briefing, and now he couldn’t go three sentences without inserting it in there. “You can see it in your eyes. At least drink some water.” “Water’s bad here, you know that,” Kieran replied. Which really wasn’t a lie. Trying to get anything decent in Port Apex in terms of water was a shitshow. He usually had to travel upwards to The Square to get some and cart it back like a mule. An unpleasant task he reserved for the day of the week Honeyman left him the fuck alone. Honeyman nodded. A rotund man of who-knows-how-old, he had always acted as paternally as he could during these meetings. Like a jaunty, filthy Santa Claus, or so Kieran figured. All he knew about that character was through the decaying kid's books the port boys had given him as a child. In any case, Honeyman had been his AE rep for as long as he could remember. Retired from working the sectors, Honeyman had set himself up a cushy, warm desk job only interrupted by his routine visits to the Runners. So far as Kieran knew, there was him, some older gentleman who needed to retire soon before snapping his back mid-route, and a new girl Kieran hadn’t gotten to meet yet. Whenever the older Runner finally gave up the ghost, Honeyman would have to find a new Runner to fill his required three slots. Though Kieran was sure Honeyman would be perfectly fit to find a way to lie to his own bosses. That’s typically the way it went with the Runner system. Good old Apex Enforcement would send a representative out into the field six times a week to meet with the three appointed Runners for the subsection. Traditionally, these AE reps would give whatever tasks came in from their higher-ups, the Runners would finish the jobs, plus whatever work they could scrounge up themselves, and the reps would collect a flat twenty percent of the profits. But Honeyman didn’t like doing it that way. Instead, he and Kieran devised a system that better suited them both. Honeyman came in for his daily briefing as 8am sharp. He’d give whatever tasks came down from the higher-ups off, and send Kieran on his way. Kieran would complete the task and all of the work he could find otherwise, and the next day, hand over the entire amount from the tasks given to him by Honeyman. That way, Kieran kept all of his profits from the non-AE work, Honeyman would skim off some for himself, and the remaining amount still looked like twenty percent of a hard day’s work for Kieran. On paper, and according to AE management, Kieran was one of the fastest runners in the city. In reality…well, he was still pretty damn good. Honeyman (or Mike, as Kieran saw his boss call him once) liked to run this racket with all of his Runners, and to be fair to him, Kieran really preferred this method. He got to keep eyes off of Honeyman, keep eyes off of himself, and make more than he could have otherwise. The only real problem was Honeyman’s incessant nice-guy approach to Kieran. Any empathy Honeyman showed to Kieran was fake, and both of them knew it. “Maybe I can talk to my guys in Public Works,” Honeyman continued. Kieran's eyes darted from his hairy face to the puff of curls poking out of his shirt. [i]God, did the man own shears?[/i] “Water’s pretty short, but if I pitch it as a necessity for the port boys, then maybe it’ll pan out.” “Yeah, we’d certainly appreciate it,” Kieran said, barely hiding his disinterest. “So just the one?” he asked, looking down to the standard Suspected Public Endangerment notice. “Yup,” Honeyman said, clipped and short. He clearly wanted to discuss water infrastructure further, for some reason. “They told me he was a tricky ‘un to get, so be careful on your hunt, ya know?” “Yeah, I will be,” Kieran said. He snagged the paper and rose, perhaps a bit too quickly, and smashed his head pretty hard on the low ceiling. [i]Shit,[/i] he wondered to himself, [i]'Am I still drunk?'[/i] “Take care, Key,” Honeyman said. He rose slowly and offered a hand. Kieran grabbed it and offered a curt shake. He then led Honeyman out of the room. He was sure the others needed it. As a makeshift office, Kieran and the port boys turned one of the old rotting shipping containers into a glorified meeting space. There were basic lights, a desk, some chairs, and even a massive barrel of some terrible substance one could easily get drunk on. Typically the space was needed for important business planning for Port Apex. Or, in other words, a place for the boys to get drunk secretly, and without pissing off the random patrollers in AE. As predicted, Kieran saw two teenage boys hanging out on the perimeter, patiently awaiting their turn. Kieran gave a slight nod, which instantly triggered the boys into a full-on sprint to the shipping container. It was still weird, to see people younger than him looking up at him as an authority figure. Just a few years ago, Kieran was like them—a wandering boy, hanging around the port, looking to feed off scraps and make a decent buck helping get the shipments in town. Thank god he became a Runner and got past that life. -- It took Kieran a solid hour to cross town on foot from Port Apex to The Square, where his mark lived. The pathway was rough, but not exactly hard to traverse. Straight roads went from muddy to dirty over the course of the walk, as Kieran slowly shook the mud off his boots from Port Apex and managed to cross into civilization. He had once heard that Port Apex, long ago, was built on top of landfill taken from hills destroyed in the main hub of the city. Funny, Kieran though, how things must have been back then. Entering The Square, Kieran was always surprised at the number of original buildings still standing. ‘Retrograde Construction,’ was what Apex Authority often used to refer to the buildings built before the Blight. Most people just called them retrograde buildings. Regardless, Apex Authority was slowly were working their way through each; either attempting to fix up the dilapidated buildings or condemn them. There weren’t many working machines big enough to take the buildings down, so condemned retrograde buildings usually became a hive for illicit activity. In other words, became promising prospects. Kieran knew a good contact to start with for finding his mark this morning; a butcher on the street corner of 2nd and Main. He was glad his mark was in The Square, which was one of the few areas in his subsection with street names. The others were often so dense and so crowded, the buildings would rise on one side of the street and connect overhead to the other. Giving proper direction to a shop you have to climb through a building like a fucking labyrinth to get to is not exactly feasible. And his subsection was considered one of the nicer ones. “Hey, a surfperch needs a hole in its fin,” Kieran said next to his contact. Recognizing the coded message, his contact gave him a curt nod before turning back to the customers. He was particularly busy today. Once he cleared out the crowd of people, the contact turned to him. “Hey, Key, long time no see.” “Don’t act happy to see me,” Kieran shot back, to the bemusement of the contact. Kieran knew his name, but it was easier to think of him as a means to an end. Neutrality was crucial when working as a Runner. Gangs, factions…each wanted loyalty, but a Runners to work above the fray. Pick no side. Simply continue to work for both. “What can I do you for?” the contact said. Kieran slipped the paper Honeyman gave him over to the contact, who glanced over it for a moment. “Yeah,” the contact muttered, “I know this one. Lives over in Atlantic.” [i]”Atlantic?!”[/i] Atlantic was a real piece of work. Lots of feuding families, fighting to be King of the Hill. What made it wore was Atlantic wasn’t in his subsection. Which was a big fucking problem for him. “Yeah, just moved last month,” the contact continued. “Said AE was hot on his tail.” “They are,” Kieran noted. “Know what he was up to?” The contact shrugged. “Beats me. Be bought a five-pound trout every week for years. Came up a month ago, mentioned I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore, and then scattered off. I found out he moved to Atlantic from his sister. She’s the one buying the trout now.” “Where does she live?” The contact rattled off the directions, and Kieran nodded. He slipped twenty dollars to the man and made way for the sister. He scrambled his brain to remember which Runners ran that subsection, but he couldn’t recall. But in reality, it didn’t really matter. Runners were fiercely territorial, and if he got caught operating in that subsection, the Runners there would wage war. Most likely, Kieran would need to find one of the Runners in that subsection and cut them a part of the profit for completing the task. He couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell Honeyman, and he’d had to pay off the AE he tipped off for the pickup to report it as District B, Subsection 3, instead of whatever district Atlantic was in. Essentially, this job just got more complicated, would pay less, and would probably take all morning. Which really pissed Kieran off, because he had a lot of jobs lined up for today; some of them paying better than he’s made in the past month. Most of them delivering smaller contraband items fresh off the boats, too. Easy transports that sat waiting in his satchel, ready for delivery. It may have been morning, and Kieran may have still been hungover, but he snagged a drink on the way to the sister’s home anyway. Lord knew he needed it.