The Shambling Guide to New York City by Mur Lafferty Page B

wrench?”
    Granny Good Mae stopped and looked in Zoë’s eyes, the matter-of-fact look that always made Zoë feel very stupid. “Then carry a big wrench. You should be armed anyway.”
    On Friday, Zoë saw no sign of the woman. She looked around on the block where Granny Good Mae usually intercepted her, saw no one, then shrugged and went home.
    She slept a lot that weekend.
    Between working with monsters and training with the crazy homeless kung fu master, Zoë didn’t have many chances to workon her social life. She managed to get Carl to be a bit warmer to her, and his barista, Tenagne, called her “pale as butter on a cockwaffle” one day, which left her feeling accepted and pleased. Morgen accompanied her to coffee breaks and to lunch once, and seemed to be the closest thing she had to a friend.
    What really bugged her, however, was that her neighbor Arthur never seemed to be home. She had hoped to run into him in the hall, naturally, as neighbors do, as she had on the night she’d gone out with Phil, but she and Arthur never seemed to be home at the same time. She even went to his door after work once, with the lame “cup of sugar” excuse, but he wasn’t home.
    She wasn’t looking for love, or a fling, but dang, if you had a cute neighbor, it was a shame if you couldn’t look at him from time to time.
    “All right, what’s with Public Works?” Zoë asked the following Tuesday, waving one of her writers’ first reports of the Upper East Side. “I’ve heard you mention them once, now my writers are mentioning them, and I have no idea who they are. I thought they did, like, the sewers and water and power lines?”
    Phil winced and looked up from his desk, where he had been reading a newspaper. “Did I fail to explain them?”
    “Yes,” Zoë said, her voice stony. “And it sounds like they’re a big deal.”
    “The humans and coterie live in a balance, that much should be obvious. If we ate everyone, we would be out of food. If the humans drove us out—well, they would probably be fine, but we don’t support our own extinction. Centuries ago, the humans invented Public Works to control coterie movement.”
    “The dirty guys in the sewers? They’re Buffy?”
    Phil snorted. “Forget sexy vampire hunters; today’s slayersare the same guys about whom the term ‘plumber butt’ was invented.”
    Zoë winced. “OK… that’s news to me. How does it work?”
    “Ideally, they keep an eye out for when coterie break the rules, murder humans, et cetera. In reality, they have spies everywhere, and whenever one of us attacks one of you, they assemble. We’re supposed to go to the legitimate places for food, blood banks, morgues, et cetera. But everyone wants to hunt. It’s our nature. When we do, then they have to act.” His voice sounded slightly bitter.
    “I thought they just handled water and sewer and stuff? Hard hats with lights on them?”
    “First, where do you think the majority of coterie live? Above ground?” Zoë blushed; the number of coterie living in the sewers should have been an obvious thing, she realized. “Secondly, it’s been this way for years. Colonization. Humans try to establish a new city; those whose job it is to develop the foundation of the new city encounter the coterie first. They clear the land and find the sprites, they dig up the subterranean demons. There are battles. If the humans hang on long enough, they can manage to do ethnic cleansing on a city. Seattle is sterilized, for one. So is Belfast. More likely, the humans and coterie eventually draw up treaties, create rules for living in balance. They provide us with food, we don’t eat them. Often the coterie understand that if humans move in, their food supply will increase, so a balance is in their best interest.”
    He frowned. “Although having a police force watching one is less desirous. Anyway, during these battles, if the coterie win and drive the humans out entirely, then places like the Mayan ruins