The darlings behind them, still unnamed, giggled more slightly after their first drink, then began their cryptic conversation in hushed tones. The manager filed by with eight, no, nine, folk, a family, to sit at the extended tables behind the Adjuster. The man winked and hissed, “More cover. All the better. But they irritate me—all so easily adjusted. You know, if I hadn’t become an adjuster, I’d a went the other way…” Drake’s voice rose in calculated adulation “—here she is, with the jerked chicken, and the spring rolls for me; the lady knows her trade.”

Brittany stood and poured more coffee, picking up the stainless steel creamer cup and mixing his as his host drank his black. “Must be the cream, what makes this man so smooth. Brittany, this is the only man to ever pick up a training knife and slice and dice yours truly. No one else can touch me, and I can’t touch him. It is uncanny, I tell you.”

“So it is a sport, like MMA, or fencing?”

Drake sneered a bit, “Not exactly a sport; more or less a ‘what if,’ question certain men ask of each other, just in case ordinary means—such as adjustment, for instance, or the making of peace over coffee—are not available.”

She blinked, made to activate her ear bud, to check her wrist phone, caught herself chaffing against her impulse to readjust, and laughed slightly at herself and asked, “When my sisters and I play corn hole at the Ocean, we use the app; the soundtrack, announcer, color commentary—you know, the crowd that’s not there. Does knife…” and she caught the word in her throat, tossed it, and swallowed it with some variation… “ah, knife-scrapping, does that have an app?”

“Excellent question, My Dear. You see, Mister Brett, how smart, tip toes through the mechanistic rose garden pretty well as you can see. Brittany, before you take our order—old school now—no app: as agreed, ask Mister Brett a question that bears upon his uncanny ability to get a read on others, a question only you have an answer to.”

Brittany of a sudden seemed sixteen again, the twenty-first sweetie standing in virtual line on the dating app to be unburdened of her innocence by the same, handsome, uncaring young man. Brett had avoided looking to her form until now, when her hands unconsciously smoothed her smock and slacks, her apron, all, in her self-critical mind, too tight. Looking down at her sensibly sneakered feet and strong calves, he nodded and took to the coffee, thinking of his granddaughter again, being weighed and measured on the scales of rejection/injection in this greed-stained world, “You played softball, first-base or catcher, a good batting average, not the best. Could have taken a scholarship—but you are here, for us, thank you.”

The stunned, abjectly mystified expression on her face told the Adjuster that it had been so. Her hand shook and she stammered, “You must be… wow… thank you, Mister Brett.”

He looked up into her watery eyes, “You were—are—too honest to be a career athlete or an academic. You’d be a great nurse though…”

She smiled, relieved, “I’m going to hospice school now; third semester.”

Drake smiled at the tableaux, “Now, Miss Brittany, if you find this good guy in ‘the place unnamed, where the food no doubt sucks’ please, take him to the ballpark…”

The manager came by to address Brittany about something. Upon catching the eye of the Adjuster instead, the man swallowed hard, and went back into adjustment. Drake touched Brittany’s hand above the paused wrist phone and brought her out of her past-future loop, to arrive back in the now.

“What will you have, Mister Brett?”

“Prime rib, well done.”

The host then cut in, “Bring him a baked potato, rolls, plenty of butter, bacon—and whatever kind of scotch works as a solvent to get all that down.”

Brett nodded and gave up his menu with a smirk, as Drake continued, “I will have the rockfish, lightly battered, asparagus—the petite stuff, all the best pieces from what you’d give these people behind me. They can have the wooden stalks. With a diet coke please, and keep the coffee coming.”

“Enjoy your appetizers, gentlemen,” spoke Brittany with a serenity she had lacked moments ago. The hostess become waitress who had just aged ten years in her mind’s eye, resisted, with a visible start, the activation of her server app, which certainly had a serenity pause function for such times.

Drake spoke easily, “That’s this man, the gentleman,” then raised his voice for the cover girls—“Ladies, how are you doing there?”

Brittany took the cue and checked on the cute drinks, which helped rescue her from the naked moment concerning her youthful hopes and dreams—slain by the bright of day somewhere still proximate to the who she yet was.

Drake was slicing the cheese steak spring rolls with his custom micro-grip drop point, “So, Mister Brett, if I tell you, that at some point during this meal, I’m going to kill you—we’ve been here before, you’re okay with that?”

Brett nodded, ‘Yes.’

“The rest, they sit and wait, mouth wide open, for me to fold this thing in and press it against the blood pump to their brain—which is a waist of God’s good stuff to begin with. For instance—”

“This coffee,” interrupted Brett as he slowly mimed pitching the topped off glass cup into the eyes of his host.

“That’s why you are here, Mister Brett! I thought you would chose the table cloth, your blessed fork, those steel-toed monster boots from your day job. You always surprise without the need for speed, which leads me to believe you are not so slow as you make out—I did not say pretend—because Mister Brett does not pretend—” came the knife fencing at his eyes, in line, a table setting away, but always in line.

Drake boiled for a second, cussed, “Damn, the Good Lord damned me with you, the puzzle I can’t undo. I don’t put puzzles together. In the old job, we took the puzzles that were people apart. Now, with the new job, we’re just applying the glue, turning the puzzles into portraits.”

With an angry hiss the diamond-sharp blade sunk into a spring roll and the finger of the hand that released it pointed at Brett’s nose, the fierce mind powering it keening through the narrow mouth, “Anyone, anyone else but you, sitting here,” (said the finger, tapping into the table just short of three times before it flashed out for Brett’s right eye, which he avoided with a deft parry of his nose, deflecting the finger with the sharpened, and polymer-coated nail to glance from his old weathered cheek, “is already dead!”

Drake then stood without standing, sitting back and shaking out the sleeves of his coat, “But not you, Mister Brett, you’re the puzzle that can’t be glued until we find that missing piece that every knife and bullet finds…”

Drake hunched over, “I can trust you, totally, out of honor not to strike—but I wish you would—I want it now, Mister Brett. Adjusting you would be a sin against the Gods of War. I know, in your mind, half the place setting has been used to kill me, and that battered boxer face conceals the grin that I know is there. You’re a better man—I’d fuck her, re-adjust her...am I wrong? Am I?” demanded the man who fixed Brett’s tired eyes with a pit viper’s steely stare.

“No, Sir, It’s a rite of old, a Right that the warrior holds. The ones behind me, they know. She knows. That’s why you acquired them and cast her under my protection, to fix my moral position, in case we might become foes.”

Drake sat taller and looked at her whom they had spoken of, returning with drinks, pointing his deadly finger at Brett’s heart, “A better man, darlin’ a, better, man—right there, in that chair, right now.”

The ladies drinks were greeted with hums of approval, an old peaty scotch placed before him to the stronger scent of her hair bouncing on her shoulders, “Drake didn’t kill you with his finger gun, did he?”

As if held under comic indictment the Adjuster raised his right finger and thumb, pressed an imaginary safety. Eased down the cocked thumb, folded the finger muzzle in, and grinned, “The Long Island Stiletto, failed, can you believe that!”

Brittany looked at Brett’s cheek and seemed worried by the depth of the line there, then smiled and tapped the glass, “Twenty-seven year reserve.”

Brett thanked her with a nod, and for his host, another. Drake reacquired his groove, “Darlin’ a double, or the next wrecked finger trick might send me back for Readjustment.”

She patted Brett on the old frozen left shoulder as Drake raised his coffee for a toast, and from under that cool gray fedora snarled, “For just once, for one night, to return to and exceed the Old Job—to frickin’ clear a room full of oxygen thieves!”

Brett nodded in agreement, touched glasses, sipped, and then raised a calming hand, just above his appetizer plate occupied by the now lonely jerked chicken, “I understand…”

The pause brought Drake closer, who snarled, “This is so unnatural, that the living dead are still spewing sound into a once musical world…”

(Trusted calm achieved.)

Brett’s voice was a rasp, a sub-whisper, “Sir, there is a new tech that is beyond tech, on the emotional time & measure plane. I do not understand it—just know it. It’s coming for us, in our respective jobs.”

Drake hissed, “With all due respect, you’re a fuckin’ meat-cutter!”

Brett fixed him with a look that was not meaningful enough, near dead as his left eye was, “You cut more meat than this crumbledown cracker, cut it right out of God’s own design. We’re creatures of a kind, and Time, or something akin, has got something worse than us coming off the redaction line.”

“That’s why you’re here,” noted the Adjuster as he slid two handsome blue rounds across the table. The one with the silver chip he tapped, “For a getaway with Brittany. It grants a restoration [1] and is good for a month of expenses out-of-code. [2] This,” he tapped on the round embedded with the platinum eagle chip, “means you never have to work the day job again. And, and, Mister Brett, there will be no need for Adjustment. We need an unadjusted man in the Scraplands.” [3]

Knowing that he was fully indebted unto death, Brett gave himself no choice but to acknowledge his acquisition as a meat scout for the App Lord ready and willing to extend his reprieve.

He accepted with a nod, “But, I have one last shift to work. I swore to give notice in person.”

“Done,” patted Drake’s hand on his, “a man of honor—but after, you extend the same to me, if you bow out, you give me enough time to put you down, and properly, no sneaking around.”

“Yes, sir,” as they shook right hands, and in his dead left Brett palmed the card rounds that he sensed were his doom.

Notes

0.) Redaction is the loss of Universal App, or UA function

1.) Restoring function to one’s Universal App after travel violation.

2.) Out-of-code is to be out of one’s ERH, being the three adjacent zip codes assigned for employment, recreational and homing activity. C-cards spend at 4 limits: employment, recreational, home code & travel [authorized APP only] with other expenses compounding debt. Adjusters approve travel beyond one’s ERH. A person without a UA, such as Brett, may theoretically go where he pleases, but has no means of legally accessing transportation, food, shelter, etc.

3.) Scraplands are blight zones occupied by redacted people and those who were never adjusted.