Fede nodded to us to sit down on packing crates, lifted the curtain to take a quick glance back into the shop, then sat down himself. Now that he wasn’t hidden inside a booth, I realized what an impressive sight he was. He was only ugly from the neck up. From the neck down, he had the sculpted body of an athlete, so perfect that it must have been the result of muscle augmentation. His elbows and wrists bent and rotated with a fluidity that suggested enhanced articulation, and his legs were cybernetic—my cyberear could pick up the faint whine of hydraulic implants. I’d once had to chase a suspect with similar hydraulics and had been left in his dust when he’d jumped three meters straight up onto the roof of a building—from a standing start, no less. Fede must have made good money at scalping to have been able to afford all of those mods. And that posed a puzzle. Why hadn’t he hired a plastic surgeon to reconstruct his face? Maybe he liked being ugly—or maybe he carried the facial scars like a badge, a visible reminder of some event in his past.