It’s freaky how everything feels back to normal—on the surface, at least. I don’t know exactly how she did it, what strings she had to pull, or what bodies she might have threatened to unearth, but Lynne Telestrian followed through on her promise to lift the Star’s out-of-sanction order against me. I can walk the streets again with at least some assurance that I won’t get geeked at any moment. The Cutters might still want my blood, but from what I’ve been able to dredge up on the street, the gang’s now history, at least as an organized force to be reckoned with. Maybe that’ll change, but the deaths and the panic and hysteria created by the killer virus seemed to rip the vital social structure of the gang apart. An organization like a major gang depends on a very precarious balance among various social dynamics, and the bug episode seems to have knocked that balance to hell and gone.