Flux by Orson Scott Card

off the portico and into the bushes, and by the time I crawl out, Doggy’s nowhere in sight. For about a minute I’m pissed about getting scratched up in the plants, until I realize he was getting me out of the way, so I wouldn’t get shot down or hacked up or lased out, whatever it is they planned to do to him to get even.
    I was safe enough, right? I should’ve walked away, I should’ve ducked right out of the city. I didn’t even have to refund the money. I had enough to go clear out of the country and live the rest of my life where even Occipital Crime couldn’t find me.
    And I thought about it. I stayed the night in Mama Pimple’s flophouse because I knew somebody would be watching my own place. All that night I thought about places I could go. Australia. New Zealand. Or even a foreign place, I could afford a good vocabulary crystal so picking up a new language would be easy.
    But in the morning I couldn’t do it. Mama Pimple didn’t exactly ask me but she looked so worried and all I could say was, “He pushed me into the bushes and I don’t know where he is.”
    And she just nods at me and goes back to fixing breakfast. Her hands are shaking she’s so upset. Because she knows that Dogwalker doesn’t stand a chance against Orphan Crime.
    â€œI’m sorry,” says I.
    â€œWhat can you do?” she says. “When they want you, they get you. If the feds don’t give you a new face, you can’t hide.”
    â€œWhat if they didn’t want him?” says I.
    She laughs at me. “The story’s all over the street. The arrests were in the news, and now everybody knows the big boys are looking for Walker. They want him so bad the whole street can smell it.”
    â€œWhat if they knew it wasn’t his fault?” says I. “What if they knew it was an accident? A mistake?”
    Then Mama Pimple squints at me—not many people can tell when she’s squinting, but I can—and she says, “Only one boy can tell them that so they’ll believe it.”
    â€œSure, I know,” says I.
    â€œAnd if that boy walks in and says, Let me tell you why you don’t want to hurt my friend Dogwalker—”
    â€œNobody said life was safe,” I says. “Besides, what could they do to me that’s worse than what already happened to me when I was nine?”
    She comes over and just puts her hand on my head, just lets her hand lie there for a few minutes, and I know what I’ve got to do.
    So I did it. Went to Fat Jack’s and told him I wanted to talk to Junior Mint about Dogwalker, and it wasn’t thirty seconds before I was hustled on out into the alley and driven somewhere with my face mashed into the floor of the ear so I couldn’t tell where it was. Idiots didn’t know that somebody as vertical as me can tell the number of wheel revolutions and the exact trajectory of every curve. I could’ve drawn a freehand map of where they took me. But if I let them know that, I’d never come home, and since there was a good chance I’d end up dosed with speakeasy, I went ahead and erased the memory. Good thing I did—that was the first thing they asked me as soon as they had the drug in me.
    Gave me a grown-up dose, they did, so I practically told them my whole life story and my opinion of them and everybody and everything else, so the whole session took hours, felt like forever, but at the end they knew, they absolutely knew that Dogwalker was straight with them, and when it was over and I was coming up so I had some control over what I said, I asked them, I begged them, Let Dogwalker live. Just let him go. He’ll give back the money, and I’ll give back mine, just let him go.
    â€œOK,” says the guy.
    I didn’t believe it.
    â€œNo, you can believe me, we’ll let him go.”
    â€œYou got him?”
    â€œPicked him up before you even came in. It wasn’t