The streets of Queens felt like an entirely different city than the one they had just left.
Here, the gleaming towers of Manhattan were invisible. Homeless encampments sprawled across street corners. Tents patched with blue tarps choked the sidewalks, bordered by overflowing trash bags.
This was the scar tissue of the American economy. The hollowed-out middle class and the crushed lower class, chewed up by medical debt and housing costs, spat out onto the concrete.
The storefront signs were a chaotic mix of Chinese, Spanish, and Korean characters. Pedestrians walked with their heads down and their pace hurried, hyper-aware of the shifting eyes tracking them from the alleys.
John frowned, keeping his face hidden deep inside his hoodie. He kept his hands in his pockets, his body language relaxed but structurally coiled, ready to draw and fire in a fraction of a second.
He couldn't understand why Anthony had dragged him to this specific neighborhood.
Anthony strolled down the cracked sidewalk, sidestepping vendors pushing rusted carts and teenagers smoking blunt ends outside bodegas.
He looked completely at ease, taking in the sights with genuine interest.
A street food cart sat at the corner of a busy intersection. The metal hotplate hissed, sending up thick plumes of smoke smelling of cumin, cheap cooking oil, and heavy chili powder.
An elderly Chinese man with graying hair stood behind the cart. He wore an oil-stained apron and flipped skewers of meat with mechanical, exhausted precision. A piece of cardboard taped to the cart read in thick marker: Lamb Skewers $2 / Tea Eggs $1.
Anthony stopped in front of the cart. He stared at the sizzling fat on the grill and the dark, soy-soaked tea eggs floating in a dented aluminum pot.
The old man glanced up. His eyes were blank, completely hollowed out by the sheer fatigue of surviving. He looked back down at the grill without saying a word.
Anthony recognized that look. It was the universal stare of the working poor -- people who had no energy left to care about the world beyond the daily grind of making enough money to eat.
"You're actually going to eat that?" John asked from over his shoulder.
"Smells alright to me," Anthony smiled.
He hadn't come to Queens to eat. He had come to look.
He wanted to see the true lifeblood of the city. It wasn't found in the boardrooms of Wall Street. It was found here, in the desperate, grinding friction of the streets.
He wanted to know if the Crips' catastrophic losses the night before had caused any immediate ripples in the local ecosystem.
He let [Compensatory Perception] run a passive sweep of the intersection. It cataloged the biometric tension of the people within a hundred-meter radius.
No organized Crips or Bloods signatures.
However, he did pick up elevated adrenaline levels from a few scattered groups of teenagers -- mostly Black and Latino -- lingering near the bus stops. They looked nervous, but excited. Like scavengers smelling blood in the water.
Anthony wanted to test his rusty Chinese on the old vendor, but he decided against it. He just stood there, staring at the lamb skewers like he was studying a museum exhibit.
He checked his pockets, but didn't pull any cash out.
He wasn't disgusted by the cart. But he noticed John staring at him with a look of profound, silent judgment.
"You can't imagine how hard they have to work," Anthony said, shrugging and walking away.
John scoffed. "At least nobody is shooting at them."
"Don't assume you're the only one who knows what a battlefield looks like," Anthony murmured after a few steps.
They hadn't made it past the next block when a voice called out behind them.
"Hey! My guys!"
Anthony and John turned.
A Black teenager, maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, came jogging up the sidewalk. He wore a faded basketball jersey, baggy jeans, and a head of short dreadlocks. He was carrying two greasy paper bags.
He stopped, his eyes darting between Anthony's relaxed posture and the cold, dead-eyed stare coming from under John's hood.
The kid flashed a brilliant, gap-toothed smile.
"Here you go." He shoved the two paper bags toward them.
The bags radiated heat. Inside were fresh lamb skewers and tea eggs.
Anthony looked at the kid, surprised. The grease was already soaking through the paper onto his fingers.
The teenager's tone carried the slippery, fast-talking cadence of a street hustler, but his eyes weren't malicious.
"Saw you staring at the cart for ten minutes," the kid said. "Not a good idea to walk around Queens on an empty stomach."
Anthony weighed the hot food in his hand. He looked at the kid with genuine amusement.
"Why?"
John kept his hands in his pockets. His voice was flat.
"What, are you running a charity?"
"Hey, relax, old man. Name's Dion." The kid tapped his chest, completely unfazed by John's lethal stare. "I'm in the business of networking."
Anthony looked past Dion's shoulder. About thirty feet away, three younger Black teenagers were squatting near a chain-link fence. The youngest couldn't have been more than twelve.
Dion leaned in close, lowering his voice conspiratorially. He smelled heavily of cheap cologne and weed.
"You guys look... well, let's just say you look a little short on cash. I've got a quick job for you. Very easy. Very safe."
When Anthony just stared at him, Dion kept talking.
"You want to make some fast money? You don't gotta rob nobody. You don't gotta steal. You just gotta stand there and look scary."
"Thirty bucks cash. Ten minutes of your time. Better than walking around smelling the garbage." Dion winked.
John frowned. A millimeter shift in his jaw showed his absolute exhaustion with this situation.
"Where do we stand?" Anthony asked. His eyes lit up with the genuine, innocent curiosity of a child. "Do we have to fight?"
"No, no, no! Nothin' like that!" Dion waved his hands frantically. "It's just... moral support. You know? Filling out the numbers."
Dion glanced at John's graying beard under the hood and assumed the man was Anthony's tired, elderly father.
I might have hired the wrong muscle, Dion thought. But bodies were bodies.
"You know the Crips?" Dion asked, stepping closer. "Word on the street is the Bloods completely torched their main crew last night."
"Right now, there's a bunch of crews in Queens looking to grab a piece of their turf. The ABK -- Always Banging Kings. The 18th Street Gang... Tonight, they're all meeting up at the old rail yard to 'discuss' the new borders."
Dion pulled up the sleeve of his basketball jersey, revealing a crude clock tattoo on his bicep. "Me? I run with 42nd Street."
John had no idea what "42nd Street" meant.
Anthony did.
Los Diablos de la 42.
The Little Devils of 42nd Street. A notoriously violent youth faction of the Venezuelan mega-cartel, Tren de Aragua. They recruited kids as young as eleven, using them as swarm-tactic shock troops to rob pedestrians with knives, scooters, and blunt objects.
Anthony took a bite of a lamb skewer and pointed with his chin toward Dion's crew of three literal children.
"You think the four of you are going to claim Crips territory?"
Dion puffed his chest out. "I manage this block. The rest of our boys run Times Square. None of the big crews have the balls to move on the Crips' main turf yet. I figure we slide in while everyone else is talking."
"Ambitious," Anthony nodded, chewing the lamb.
It reminded him of his own reckless high school days before he had fully awakened to the system. And considering Anthony's current goal was to somehow bully his way onto the Twelve Seats of the High Table, he couldn't help but respect Dion's delusional confidence.
Dion pointed back to his three younger friends, who gave synchronized, tough-guy chin nods from across the street.
"We got a connect with a guy named Chico from 18th Street," Dion explained. "I saw you guys looking hungry, figured I'd do you a solid. Bring you along, get you paid."
"Don't worry," Dion assured them. "If a real shootout kicks off, we just run. Thirty bucks in your pocket, guaranteed."
John let out a slow, sharp exhale. It was a sound of profound, existential boredom.
He turned his head away, unwilling to waste another second looking at the teenager.
Anthony shoved the paper bag of food into John's hands.
"Are they really paying thirty dollars?" Anthony asked, his voice rising with excitement.
"Cash in hand!" Dion grinned.
A wide, charmingly stupid smile spread across Anthony's face.
"Sounds like a lively party." He nudged John's shoulder. "John. Shall we go take a look?"
"Are you so bored your brain is rotting?" John said, staring at the brick wall.
"It beats smelling the garbage," Anthony said. He popped half a tea egg into his mouth and wiped his hands on his jacket.
"Besides. I've always wanted to see how Queens handles diplomacy."
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