At Nathan's direction, Dana rounded Fallen Rose Street in a wide, broken arc, running across the roofs between the Leaden Downpour and Oblique Boulevard. These places are not so named for the sake of a beautiful word. Ten years ago, when gangs began to get impudent and seriously pinch the Average city, the patience of local corporations burst, they calculated the location of the main gangster bases and dropped armored assault squads on top of them, which in a few minutes without any fuss crumbled everything here to the satanic mother. The bandits had no chance to resist- they are only strong against the weak. After the massacre, in the middle of the rubble of buildings and bloody fragments, there were so many used crumbled bullets of different calibers, whole mountains, it was possible to fill buckets with them. And a little further to the north, some geniuses from the corporate pilots littered the street with plasma land mines, which caused the surrounding houses to fall to dust and melt into curved glass slides. When people rebuilt their homes, they were forced to follow a new bizarre landscape. Needless to say that the enchanting corporate retribution of the ordinary poor suffered much more than the bandits who really got what they deserved? Now there are a lot of stairs and suspended walkways, and during the day you can admire the bizarre interlacing of wavy glass arrays in places where they were not closed by houses. Once Dana was ready to swear that she saw someone's face distorted by a grimace of horror in this translucent alloy. It must have seemed to her, because even steel and concrete were sprayed and baked in those explosions, what can we say about unhappy people? And that action did not bring victory over the gangs, as expected - the knocked-out bandits were quickly replaced by others no better than the previous ones. The problem was deeper and it could not be solved by the good old ultra-violence.
The area of the Three Crosses was getting closer with every meter passed. In the distance, among a jumble of crooked streets, a particularly large building resembling a shabby Babel Tower in miniature towered. Its top was crowned by three steel crucifixes, each facing in its own direction of light. Once there were four of them, but one collapsed and hung upside down on a half-broken support on the slope of the roof. Symbolic. No one even began to clean up. Previously, there was a residence of a gang of Good People here, and they thought of using these crosses for their intended purpose - they crucified their enemies captured alive from other gangs and their guilty ones without any fuss on these crosses on the roof of this half-skyscraper, so that from afar in optics everyone could see who is so beautiful but unlucky hanging there. This terrified the surrounding residents and other gangs. But, since the Good people were kicked out of this area by the Black Angels, it is now just a large residential and commercial building in which there is a lot of interesting things. Dana was even there a couple of times on the runners' assignment.
The building itself with crosses was seriously guarded by the militants of the Black Angels - they were afraid that Good People would try to recapture this area again, and Three Crosses serve as a good support point. To the relief of the girl, she needed a conglomerate of buildings a little to the side, bordering the fence separating the area of Angels and Good-natured. It is likely that the militants armed with sniper rifles, drones and optics have noticed Dana and are holding her at gunpoint. But she wasn't too worried about it-the Angels, though bandits, are not as frostbitten as the Good People, they know the runners and often use their services themselves. And old Alonso regularly pays tribute to their current Don Alberto Kramer, nicknamed Al Steel Hand. It is not in their interests to waste expensive ultra-precise sniper cartridges on a messenger girl. And yet a thin string of fear twitched in her soul, feeling a distant gaze at her back. "I hope there are no misogynists with a bad mood among them," Dana joked mentally, but then her concern was in vain - the Angel fighters loved women very much, and in all possible poses.
A couple of minutes of hard running with overcoming obstacles - and Dana got to the right roof of a cascading building along which flimsy emergency stairs descended down to the street. Dana found an energy distributor that was expected to be open, and in addition to indicators and switches, she found a stack of copper money changers there - thin plates of pure copper sealed in varnish tied with a rubber band. They also come in silver gold and from more expensive materials - these are the best cash of our time. She was not mistaken - this is payment! And when she returns, she will be able to take five percent of it for herself. Yes, these are not mountains of loans, pathetic centimes, but everything is better than nothing. Unlike many children of this area, Dana and her friends have the opportunity to buy their own food, water and inexpensive household items. Others have to beg from adult relatives or steal.
The girl immediately put the container with the parcel in the locker and the money in the pocket of her fanny pack. Dana losed the locker. She decided to have a rest- it's still quiet around, there is a small canopy over the door leading inside the building, and the race was long, difficult and she was pretty tired.