I sat in the cell, disliking the greasy feel of the borrowed cloak. I opened it and rubbed at the glyph on my right breast, the paint remained stubbornly in place. I scratched more enthusiastically but the pigment was bound tight. I would need solvent to remove it, or perhaps to literally scrape my skin away to disrupt them. I looked around the room for something that might do the job but nothing jumped to mind. Perhaps I could break the flakboard desk and use a fragment of it. I cut my eyes to the door and saw two gangers watching me through the bars.

"Priest told you to read," one of the gangers said, though he seemed as intereted in trying to get a look under my cloak. 

"So did my scholam marm but here I am," I responded acidly. I picked up the scroll and tapped it on the tabletop.

"Read," the ganger growled. I glanced at the scroll, wondering why they were so interested in it. Whatever it was I wasn't eager to follow the script.

"You going to come in here and make me?" I demanded.

"I'm going to come in there and do something to you," he threatened. I lifted the scroll as though I was going to open it, then ripped it in half. The ganger shouted and ripped the door open, lifting a truncheon as he stalked into the room. I kicked the desk at him as he came. Sneering he dogdged aside, baring his teeth in a snarl. I dived under the table, rolling between the legs and out the door. The second ganger grabbed at me and seized a handful of my cloak. I let go of the cloak and bolted, running naked down the gangway and deeper into the  guts of the giant machine. Shouts of alarm rang behind me. I was gambling that they wouldn't shoot me, which was a hell of a thing, but it beat waiting in a cell for whatever they had in store for me. I skidded around a girder and ran into a slender ganger with an autogun, he bounced back then swept the butt of his weapon at me. I twisted sideways and plunged off the edge of the gangway with a scream. I tumbled through empty air for a heatstopping second the crashed into a network of cables. I made a desperate grab and got hold of a handful of greasy cords arresting my fall into a palm burning slide. I crashed onto a lower level and scrambled to my feet, bolting away along a line of pylons. A moment later I reached an open hatch big enough to admit a rhino. I ducked through into a large cathedral like vault that had been filed with machinery. Dozens of gangers with flamers were down on the main floor, each of them had a flamers and were in the process of hosing down some kind of machinary with gouts of prometheum. The whole place stank of burning petrochemicals and hot metal. As I watched a ganger with a mallet came forth and struck one of the burned machines with his weapon. It shattered into shards of hot metal.

"What the frak?" I asked, then ducked into an alcove as I heard shouting gangers rushing down metal access stairs.