Shadowboxer Read Online Free

eyes supported on ridiculous bouncy stalks. It was a silly-looking thing, and fooled a lot of newbies. Its claws could cut steel, its mouth chewed concrete, and they liked to eat the damnedest odd things. And once they got hold of you, you either blew their heads off or died. They never let go. Only good point was that the crabs seemed to be especially fond of devil rats, which brought them a lot of goodwill from the locals.
    Kicking at the ten-legger, which sent it scuttling off to find easier prey, Laura turned from her birthing spot and began to stride across the beach. Out here, beyond the great adamantine ferrocrete barrier that separated the luxury resorts from the public beach, the local prison didn’t use prisoners to hand-clean the sand every night so that the tourists had a nice place to lay down their fat bodies and get tan in the free sun. The only fragging thing free in this town. The locals could fend for their own amid the corporate filth. Off in the distance, she could see the shining towers of downtown rising high above the rainbow neon ribbon of the monorail that encircled Miami proper.
    Reaching a battered wooden ramp that led to the boardwalk next to the elevated road, Laura started climbing. Reaching the boardwalk, she headed southward for downtown and the nearest cab stand. First things first. She had to get to the rendezvous point at the old warehouse and locate Blackjack. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see her!
    * * *
    Dawn was tinting the horizon pink as Erika Johnson drove the Caravaner along the Miami canal toward downtown. She maintained the speed limit religiously, despite the many blast craters and pot holes. Just as she rounded a curve near the desalinization plant, a barricade of overturned cars momentarily slowed her, the hungry gang awakening to the possibility of fresh meat.
    Calmly, almost amused, Erika radically shifted gears and wheeled into an alley. Garbage, both human and food, lined the passageway as one of those groups frantically jumped out of her way. A single shot hit the rear of the Caravaner and musically ricocheted off the military armor plating hidden by the artistically bad paint job. No further rounds came her way, the locals merely shouting their displeasure at the unseen driver’s rank callousness.
    Rejoining traffic heading to the west, she rode along with all the other various vehicles—limos, sports coupes, rusted wrecks looking like her own, and lots of remote-controlled semis, some with, but most without, their lights on. This was supposedly an industrial section of town, but from the reports she’d seen the prime activity here was smuggling. Several go-gangs of norms and trolls roared by on their gleaming bikes, talismans and scalps flailing in the wind.
    Streetlights lined the road, the twenty-meter posts topped with wire-reinforced quartz lenses that offered only feeble illumination down from the sheer distance so necessary to keep the locals from shooting out the lights. The weak glare was tinted gray by the inner-city smog and general miasma of the decaying streets. The pink of the dawn was slowly turning yellowish when all of the streetlamps winked out, officially heralding the city’s declaration that day was here.
    They were wrong as usual. Or maybe just saving a few kilowatts, cheap bastards.
    Standing forgotten on debris-piled corners was the occasional Lone Star callbox, the panic button showing only as dangling wires. Nobody here wanted the law; it only got in the way of making a few nuyen. And justice, like everything else in the Awakened world of returned magic, was something you made yourself or did without.
    Turning onto a side street, Erika now headed south, deeper into the heart of the urban sprawl. Every window was barred or boarded. Tattooed joyboys and garish slotmachine girls called out for anybody’s trade at this hour, while grim people in ballistic dusters and metahumans of assorted types in steel-studded leather coats jostled for