Alice studied the people with more care than she had in months. A product of New York’s brutal orphanages and, afterward, a low-level street gang, Alice had thought she was emotionally resilient. Her time on Mars had been physically and mentally devastating, but even so her first few months as a cop had taken its toll. Mike had watched with sympathy as she tried to assist everyone she met, but New York’s desperate situation meant she couldn’t help, that her job wasn’t To Protect and Serve anymore, despite what the NYPD’s branding said. No, a modern cop was all about riot control—making sure the mile-long lines for tubes of carbohydrate paste kept moving, that the unemployment halls didn’t turn into drug dens or brothels. Over the last year she’d built an emotional shield about herself that meant the unemployed became objects to be moved around and little more. To her shame she no longer saw the clotted crowds as people, but as a backdrop, saving her attention for the troublemakers and strong willed who wouldn’t follow orders. Real crime—the organized variety that ran New York far more efficiently than the mayor and his staff ever did—was looked after by specialist police divisions kept well away from street-meat like her.