Still editing this one…standby!

“Keep talking creep.” Dredd waved the Lawgiver in the not-quite-a-perp’s face. “And in thh…thh…the third grade, I stole Betty Marshall’s p…p…p…pogs,” Geff Klemp said, his voice shaky as a slum-block escalator. The rest of the bar pretend to nurse their drinks, to go about their business—just as Dredd had ordered. As expected, most weren’t. Instead they peered over untouched glasses, and out of the corners of eyes.

It wasn’t exactly a job you applied to. Have you ever heard “paid for your trouble?” That was it, in a nutshell. An Experience-Smith’s job was to take their fucked-up life, with its ups, downs, lefts, and rights and repackaged those experiences for consumption. But not like how a filmmaker does it, making the vid-shows for the unwashed masses. And not like some novelist slaving over a manuscript.

Valska swaggered so hard that Sudrstjarna thought he might burn divots into the hide rugs. Without asking (nor waiting for Sudrstjarna to sit), his hands swinging at his side, Valska pulled out the chair at the opposite head of the table, sloppily landed his immense frame into its high-backed seat. He took a chicken wing from the table, bit it, belched as if this were his own home, and not the tribes Great Hall.

Retreat was not a word Thudboota knew. Then again, Thudboota knew vanishingly few words. Even if the word existed in his limited lexicon, he had no intention of growling it. They were facing humies. And humies were puny and weak. Thudboota was a nob. Big and strong. His grasp of logic was even shakier than his vocabulary, but big and strong was certainly greater than puny and weak.

I keep all the notes. Little scraps you pass to me, like a wannabe truent. Speaking our secret language. And speaking it fluent. There is a book of them. Over flowing. Taken one by one, they seem a jest. But together a binding that would pass any Turing test. An uncrackable enigma, us two. It’s okay if they don’t see who’s who.

Palatine Honna Zhen would never tell her Sisters. They already thought her a zealot. Already worried her fervor would get them all killed. Often she wondered if they would believe her, and for that alone wanted to share the truth, but she didn’t. Wouldn’t. Besides, it wasn’t for them. When the Saint speaks to you, that is for you and you alone.

Who creates a tool that is meant to break? For many years—once the defects in the others became obvious—Dal wondered this. Why had the Emperor made the Thunder Warriors so flawed? And why had he done nothing to correct this imperfection? Even when the deterioration afflicting his own body; the shakes in his hand; sudden fury that erupted like an ember in a promethium drum—even then he wondered.