Ralph Nightshade wanted to burn the blood farm to ash, but he didn't know which building held it. The regime harvested the city's outcasts there. Every night they took more. Ralph had a name for it, a hatred for it, and a can of gasoline in his cellar. He had no address. Without one, every hour he spent hunting was an hour more bodies drained. He paced the cracked stone floor of his mansion. Broken windows let the night air in. His dog watched from the doorway, a giant black mutant with red eyes and spines down its back. The beast had tracked prey through the city before. Ralph knelt and gripped its jaw. "You've smelled that place," he said. "The blood. You know where it goes." The dog whined. It didn't move. Ralph needed a trail, not a guess. He went to the cellar and found his cage. Inside crouched a sewer rat, big as a cat, fur slick and pocked with sores. He'd trapped it near a drain that ran with rusty water. Rusty because of iron. Iron in blood. The runoff had to come from somewhere. Ralph carried the cage upstairs and set it down. He let the dog sniff the rat through the bars. Then he opened the cage door. The rat bolted out a broken window. The dog tore after it. Ralph ran behind them into the wet streets, past glowing storefronts and parked cars and crowds that scattered from the huge hound. The rat ran straight, not scared but homing, back toward the drains it knew. They stopped at a squat brick warehouse with no windows. Steam rose from a vent in its side. The rat squeezed under a steel door and vanished. The dog stood stiff, growling low, hackles up. Ralph pressed his hand to the door. Warm. He smelled it now too. Copper. Blood, gallons of it, close. He found a gap in the wall where a pipe ran through. He looked inside. Rows of steel tables filled the floor. People lay strapped to them, tubes in their arms. Guards in gray uniforms walked the aisles. Along the far wall grew fat red mushrooms in troughs, their caps split into hungry mouths, fed on the spilled runoff. The farm fed itself on its own waste. Ralph had his address. Then a guard turned toward the pipe. His eyes found Ralph's face in the gap. The man raised a radio to his mouth and spoke fast. Ralph pulled back. The dog was already running. Down the block, a steel shutter clanged open. Boots hit the pavement. Not one guard. A dozen, spreading into the street, cutting off the way he'd come. He knew where the blood farm was now. And the blood farm knew his face.