“All firearms sold within Tago must bear valid corporate certification confirming materials compliance, tolerance verification, and safety testing.”— Tago Arms Compliance Code, Section 9.1
The street outside Maqha al-Hilal had gone gold while we were inside.
The sun was doing the thing it did here, low and sideways off the water somewhere I still couldn’t see, and it came up the street between the bone-white buildings and turned the blue doors a deeper blue and the brass trays on the outdoor tables into little fires. The two old men were still at the holo-board. The dice cup came down on the brass with its sharp tap as we passed, and neither of them looked up.
Omar walked with his hands in his pockets, easy, nodding at people. A man behind a fruit stall lifted his chin at him. A kid on a stoop said something fast that made Omar laugh and fire something back, and the kid grinned like he’d won.
“So,” I said. “Are you going to tell me what I signed up for, or is it a surprise?”
“I’ll tell you. It’s boring, I keep saying.” He steered us around a delivery cart bot that was announcing itself to nobody. “You know the feds have been all over. The crackdown. Yeah? So the district’s tense, everyone’s careful, nobody wants attention.” He tilted his head. “There’s a shop. Small one. Not us—not Al-Sirr. Independent. Somewhere in Barani they’re fabbing guns.”
I grinned. “Fabbing guns is half of Tago. Including me.”
“Cheap copies of licensed guns,” he said. “That’s the part. They take a real gun—a Midorikawa, a Kallum, whatever—and they fab a garbage version, and then they stamp it with a fake corporate cert so it passes for the real thing. Cert says it’s licensed, tested, safe. It’s not any of those. But it sells, because the sticker says it’s fine.” He shrugged. “Selling cheap guns, nobody upstairs cares. But cheap guns wearing a Kallum badge? A Midorikawa badge? Now the corpos are interested. Now their little logo is turning up on a gun that blew someone’s hand off, and they send people to ask about it. And their people bring the feds. In Barani. Now. During the crackdown.”
I got it. “So they’re pulling heat into your district.”
“Onto everyone. Including us, and we didn’t do anything.” He said it without heat, just laying it out. “So somebody upstairs told the Kātim to make it stop. And the Kātim gave it to me.” A little of the earlier nerves came back into his face, and he pushed them down. “Because it’s simple. Find where they are. Then either the cops get told, or I take it to the Kātim and she handles it. That’s the whole test. Find the shop.”
“And you found it.”
“I found where they sell.” He stopped at a corner and nodded down a side street, not pointing, just a tilt of the chin. “There’s an alley. Buyers go in, talk to a guy. If the guy likes you, he takes your money and two of them walk off and come back with the piece. They don’t keep the guns in the alley. They keep them somewhere, and they go get them.” He turned back to me. “I’ve watched it twice. I couldn’t follow them the second time—by then the seller knew my face, and if I’m the guy who buys and then goes for a walk in the same direction they walked, I’m made.”
“So you buy,” I said slowly, getting there. “And I follow the two who go to get the gun.”
“You follow them home.” He grinned, and it had that terrible, giddy edge from the teahouse. “Because you, habibi, have the suit.”
“There it is.”
“You told me it goes invisible.”
“Adaptive camo,” I said. “It’s not invisible, it bends light, it’s got limits, if someone’s looking right at me in the wrong light—”
“Can you follow two guys down a street without them seeing you?”
I thought about it honestly. Barani was dense and busy and full of movement, which was good, and the light was going soft and complicated, which was better. “Yeah.”
“So it’s invisible.” He spread his hands, case closed. “You follow, you find the shop, you come back, you tell me where. I never went near it. The seller only ever sees the buyer. Clean.” He looked pleased with himself, and then he looked at my hip, and the pleased slid off. “The revolver. Tell me you’ve still got the—”
I pulled the hoodie back. The Palistra Apex seal sat there over the Sentinel mark, cheerful and blue and glossed, and the little Escalante sticker rode the grip.
“Beautiful,” Omar said with feeling. “Leave those on. A guy walks around Barani with a Sentinel gun; that’s a problem. A guy walks around with a Palistra sticker over a gun, that’s just a guy who buys his gear at a mall.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You look like a tourist. Perfect.”
I shot him a glare Comma taught me. “I hate that this works.”
“Everything about you works because of a sticker, habibi. Welcome.” He pointed down the side street. “Alley’s the second left, past the shuttered barber. I go in the front, from the market side, so I come at it clean. You get somewhere high or somewhere dark, and you wait. When two of them peel off, you go with them. And—” he held up a finger, the giddy gone, “—if it looks wrong, if it goes bad, you don’t do anything. You don’t help. You walk away, and you message me, and it never happened. Yeah? You’re eyes. That’s all. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Say it like the sword’s not right there.”
I looked at him. “I’m eyes. I don’t fight. I follow, I find it, I come back.” I let a corner of my mouth turn up. “No champion.”
“No champion.” He breathed out. “Okay. Give me ten minutes to get around front. Then move.” He backed off a step, walking away sideways so he could keep grinning at me. “This is going to be so easy. Yalla.”
[MIRAGE Adaptive Camouflage System: ACTIVE][Power: 99%]
Ninety-nine percent. A careful tail across a few dark streets wouldn’t cost me much of it, and the reserve cell was in my pocket if it did.
Good enough. I stepped off the wall, and the street didn’t notice.
The alley was a slot between two buildings, three feet of gap widening to maybe ten, with a bend in it that killed the sightline halfway back. A man sat on a plastic crate at the mouth of it, where the bend let him watch the street without being watched from it.
He had a tea in one hand and a holoband screen up on the other wrist, and he was doing a good impression of a man who was nobody.
Omar came up the street from the market side, exactly like a guy who didn’t know where he was going and was trying not to show it, which was hard to hit on purpose, and he hit it. He slowed at the alley's mouth.
The lookout’s eyes came up off the band.
I put myself in a doorway ten meters up the street, in the deep part of the shade where the MIRAGE had the easiest job and the drain was lowest.
I couldn’t hear it from where I was. Omar said something short. The lookout said something shorter. Omar gave a half a shrug, and then his hand went to his pocket and came out with an offline chit and thumbed it, showing a balance, not handing it over.
Proof of funds. Fifty sol’s worth of I’m serious.
The lookout looked at him for a long moment.
Then he stood and put two fingers to his mouth, and made a short low whistle back into the bend of the alley.
Two men came out of the dark part.
The first was big and bored, and he stayed near the lookout, near Omar, near the money.
The second was younger and quicker, and he had a gun already out, not pointed, just out, carried loose at his side. He held it up and turned it in the light for Omar, selling it, and even from ten meters and through the bend I could see it was ugly, the finish wrong, a seam along the receiver that no licensed line would let out the door.
He waved it while he was talking.
Muzzle crossing his own leg, crossing the big man, crossing the mouth of the alley, the careless arc of somebody who’d never once thought of the thing in his hand. The younger one said something to the big one.
The big one nodded, and the two of them, the young quick one with the sample gun and a second man I hadn’t seen coming out of the dark, turned and went deeper into the alley, around the bend, gone. Going to get the real order. Leaving Omar with the lookout and a tea he hadn’t been offered.
I came off the doorway and went after them.
The back of the alley let out through a gap in a chain-link that had been cut and folded back and cut again, into the guts of the block. Service lanes. The undersides of the pretty buildings. Bundled cables running along the walls at head height, dripping condensate. A smell of fish and hot electronics and the sea underneath all of it.
The two men walked slowly, not talking much, the young one still swinging the sample piece at his side.
I stayed back and stayed high where I could, up on a loading step here, in the deep shade of a stairwell there, letting distance and the dropping light do the work the MIRAGE couldn’t do alone. The camo was good, but it wasn’t a cloak; it smeared me into whatever was behind me, and it hated edges and hated movement and hated, most of all, a clean sightline down a straight corridor. Twice the lane ran straight, and I had to hang back at the corner and let them get small before I followed, trusting that two men who’d never been followed in their lives wouldn’t start now.
Once the young one stopped.
Just stopped, and half-turned, and looked back down the lane, right up it, right at the stretch I was standing in. I froze against a roll-up door with a dead Bhavsar ad flaking off it, and I did not breathe, and the suit held my outline against the door and the rust, and the light was on his side of the lane and not mine.
He looked for three seconds that lasted a great deal longer than three seconds.
Then the big one said something impatient, and the young one spat, and turned, and walked on, and I remembered how to run my lungs.
They went through a door.
It was a plain door in a plain wall, a service entrance in the back of a building that showed the world a shuttered storefront and a corrosion-eaten sign for something that hadn’t sold anything in years.
No crescent on it.
No mark at all, which in a district where every second doorframe wore somebody’s sigil was weird.
They didn’t fully close it behind them, because it looked like it was hot inside without AC.
I got to the gap.
I should have pinned the location and left. That was the job. Find where they were, come back, and tell Omar.
I had where they were.
But where they were and what they were weren’t the same thing, and Omar’s whole test turned on being able to say to the Kātim, or to a cop, this was the shop, and I could give him confirmation, if I spent thirty seconds I wasn’t supposed to spend.
So I spent them.
Through the gap: a long room, hot and bright, lit hard by work-lamps clamped anywhere they’d clamp. Two fabricators running, older than mine and louder, the print heads laying down receiver blanks in a haze the extractor fans weren’t keeping up with. Racks along the far wall. Bins of parts. And on a workbench under the nearest lamp, laid out in neat little rows like the one careful thing in a careless room, a tray of decals.
Certification seals.
Foil-backed, holo-glossed, peel-and-stick, cloned corporate certs, a hundred of them at least, sorted by corporation. I was too far to read the small ones. The big ones I knew by their color from across a bright room, because I’d grown up around the real ones and I could pick the fake at a glance.
A row of them was Kallum.
Something went cold in my chest, and I did not have time for it.
Farther down the bench a man was doing the actual work of the operation, which was taking a fabbed pistol out of a bin, wiping it, peeling a cert off the tray, and pressing it onto the receiver with his thumb; the exact motion Omar had done to my holster an hour ago with a free Palistra sticker off a rack, except the thing under this man’s thumb would go out the door tomorrow certified safe, and it would not be safe, and someone would trust it because a corporation’s name said they could.
Behind him, open, a keg of propellant with a scoop sitting in it, next to a running machine, in a room with no extraction worth the name.
It was the shop.
I peeled off the gap and went back the way I’d come, faster now that I had the corridors, because I was late and Omar was waiting and I hadn’t decided yet what my face was going to do.
We’d set the meet behind a half-built extension two streets off the alley, a raw block of permacrete with the rebar still showing and a tarp for a roof.
Omar was there.
He was turned half away from me, in the last of the good light coming under the tarp, and he had the gun in his hands.
Turning it over.
Grinning at it, that pure, uncomplicated grin. He’d walked in with fifty sol and walked out with the piece and the location was in my head and the test was as good as passed, and he was standing in a half-built room admiring the ugly little gun that meant he’d done it.
“There he is,” he said, without turning, hearing me or feeling me or just knowing. “Ghost boy. Tell me you got it. Tell me you followed them.”
“I got it.” I flipped the switch and let the street pour back off me.
[MIRAGE Adaptive Camouflage System: OFFLINE][Power: 61%]
Quite the drain for the whole tail there and back. “I looked inside. It’s the shop, no question, I can walk you to the door.”
“Yes!“ He turned, beaming, and held the gun up like a prize. “And look at this. Look what fifty sol buys in Barani. Feels real, right? Heavier than I thought. They said Kallum, wallah, a Kallum for fifty—”
“Give it here.”
Something in my voice moved his eyebrows. He handed it over.
I turned it in the light.
It took a glance and a second glance.
The finish was fabbed and unpolished. The seam ran the receiver where no line would allow a seam. The action, when I worked it, had the gritty imprecision of tolerances nobody had held. It was a bad copy of a good gun.
And on the flat of the receiver, holo-glossed, catching the last of the light, sat a Kallum certification seal. The real one. Or the clone of the real one, pressed on by a man’s thumb an hour ago, indistinguishable from the real one to anyone who hadn’t grown up with the real one.
I stood in the half-built room and looked at my own name lying about a gun that would hurt whoever believed it.
“Dash?” Omar’s grin had gone uncertain. “What. It’s bad? I know it’s bad, that’s the—that’s the whole thing, they’re bad, that’s why—”
“The ammo,” I said. “Did they give you rounds? Did you load it?”
“No, just the—no. Why?”
“Don’t.” I turned the cylinder, and I looked at the fabbed chamber, at the tolerances a machine with no one watching it had held, at the gun that had been printed in a haze twenty meters from an open keg of propellant with a scoop in it. “This isn’t a gun that shoots the wrong way sometimes. This is a gun that lets go in your hand. The chamber’s fabbed loose, the metal’s whatever came off the printer, and they’re selling it certified so nobody checks.” I looked up at him. “The one the kid was waving around in the alley. Swinging it at your face while he talked price. That one could’ve gone off just from being carried wrong. You were standing right there.”
The grin was gone now. “Wallah,” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
Omar set the gun down on a stack of permacrete blocks, carefully, muzzle at the wall—he’d taken the point—and scrubbed a hand back through his hair.
“Now I decide,” he said. “The Kātim said, find it, then choose. I take it to her, and she handles it in-house, quiet, and she gets the credit up the chain, and I did well but I’m still—” he turned his bare forearm up, the skin where the ink wasn’t, “—still Ṣifr. Still nobody. Or.” He blew out a breath. “Or I’ll do the harder one. I call it in. The cops. That’s the better play, habibi, and I know it’s the better play, because if the Kātim buries it quiet then it’s just moved, they set up again three streets over and the heat’s still on us. But the feds—the feds end it. Bust the shop, it’s a corporate-counterfeit case. The heat goes onto them and off us. That’s the real fix.”
“So call it in.”
“With what?“ He laughed. “I call Tago PD anonymous, they don’t move on it, tips like that die in a queue. And if I make it real, if I give them enough that they do move, now they’ve got a source, and the source is a Ṣifr who knew exactly where an illegal gun shop was and exactly what was in it. You think they don’t ask me how I know? You think that ends well for me, or for the Kātim, or for anybody?” He shook his head. “That’s why it’s a test and not an errand. Finding it’s easy. Using it without lighting myself on fire is hard.”
“I’ve got a way to help,” I said.
Omar looked at me.
“The calling-it-in part. It won’t come back on you, or the Kātim.” I shrugged, and it came out steadier than I felt. “I just make the call go through.”
“Habibi.” He was looking at me carefully now. “What are you talking about. You’re going to call the cops. You. And they’ll—what, they’ll just listen to you?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?“
I put a hand on my hip, over the sticker, and lifted the flap of it with a thumb so the Sentinel mark showed under the cheerful Palistra.
Omar looked at it.
“You know a fed,“ he said. “You have a—you have a personal fed.” He was quiet for a second, and then something opened up in his face, the giddy thing but bigger. “If you do this,” he said. “If this works. Habibi. I am in your debt. But only if you’re sure. You’re more important that the whole Al-sirr.”
“You’ve been in the plus with me since I was a pleb with a fake ID and trash gear,” I said. “Consider it a payment.”
“That’s not how it wor—”
“Omar.” I was already lifting my wrist. “Let me make the call.”
He shut his mouth and nodded. He stepped back and gave me the space I opened the band to make the call.
“Hello again, Inspector,” I said. “Do you want to bust a counterfeit op?”