The Blues are an odd bunch, sort of a union that got out of hand, much older than the other groups and almost all of them with families, little houses, lawns they mow on Sundays; they brawl with scabs and strikebreakers more often than they do with any of the other collectives. They never try to expand, but they’re vicious to anyone who comes into their area. You’ll send a Green back south with a broken arm or a couple of bullets in his guts as a memento, but the Blues never send anyone back except on a gurney.

Mostly it’s the Greens you tangle with. You’re both expanding, and you’re both trying to corner the market on drugs, hoodoo, and professionals, so there’s always a firefight somewhere in the city between your knuckleheads and theirs. You don’t know much about the Greens, except that they’re a pain; nobody in the gang does, either, some sort of a pride thing, maybe, that you don’t talk to the enemy. The Greens are your enemies, and that’s as much as anyone will say. If it weren’t for a bloodstains and the scars you’d think they were the boogeyman.

There are three main gangs kicking around the city, not counting yours. They’ve got a slew of different names – your own group, for instance, is variously the Wolves of the North, the 400s, the Highland Games, the Kings of a Community United in Friendship (you’d like to meet the person who coined that one and give him the ‘Happy Birthday’ treatment, and no fooling; KCUF? Really? That thing’s older than you are by at least a generation), and on and on – but everyone’s got a color that’s consistent whatever the name, so that’s how you mostly think about them. You’re the Yellows, across the river is Green territory, the warehouses are controlled by the Blues, and the Pink Ladies are everywhere.

Despite their name, the Pink Ladies are about equally men and women, but the name’s a legacy, and a badge of pride in a weird sort of a way. It’s not enough to be tough to be a Lady, you have to be cool, too; random fighting is grounds for expulsion. The Ladies are strategic. The Ladies change allegiance daily, depending on who’s up or down at any given time. The Ladies like underdogs; more than once you’ve seen them switch sides during the middle of a scrap just to keep the game alive.

The old lady is diabetic, has to keep a really limited diet, and makes you share it with her. She’s got the soul of a bully. You get to hate the sight of a simple chop, a scoop of plain white rice, whipped cream cheese. You have elaborate dreams of food, starches and sugars piled high to the ceiling, swimming pools of lime jello and whipped cream, and wake up to find the old woman sitting at the foot of the bed watching you. She laughs at you all the time, snorts really, as though you’re too ridiculous for words and she barely has time for you. You haven’t felt so redundant since you were seven and your older brother let you hang out with him and his friends. Still, it’s exciting in that same sort of way, you feel like you’re being let in on something that you’re not supposed to know about yet (if at all), so you put up with the snorting and the watching and even the chops and the rice and the whipped cream cheese.

She crams you full of knowledge brutally but efficiently, the way a butcher stuffs a sausage, and with about as much concern for you as he’d have for the sausage casing. You never get your feet under you, you always feel like you’re being whirled from point to point without a second to catch your breath, but there’s no denying it’s an effective method. After the second month the old woman puts you in charge of half the gang and says run it and that’s it. She doesn’t tell you how to run it, doesn’t tell the other gang members why you’re in charge, doesn’t tell them to play nice, leaves you out to dry, in short. It’s touch and go for awhile until you build your power base, until they learn that you’re not the sort of person to be trifled with (though you’re always fair), until you kick some sort of loyalty into them. You don’t have to kill anybody, not kill, exactly, but you certainly put one or two through the wringer hard enough that they go away and don’t come back. Afterwards things settle down and you can get to work.

One night you go out on a run and things go wrong, as wrong as it’s possible to go. You get left behind, marooned in the middle of the worst district in the state, out of ammunition and simples, with six different gangs fighting a war in the street over who gets to claim you. Medicos are big business; you’re worth at least your weight in gold to whoever grabs you. Around dawn the fires die down and the survivors come for you, ring you about and put the whammy on you faster than you can think. You don’t even have time to scream.

They cart you off to the gang leader, an old woman, ancient as the seven hills that support the city, seamed and withered and reeking, and lock you in the room with her. You know you should say something, but you’re terrified, teeth knocking against each other like bumper cars, so you just sit there and shake. She walks around you and pokes at you with her stick, and the witchcraft rolls off her in waves. You make the cross and she laughs at you. God, she says, pfui, we are old friends. She tells you that you can go if you’ll agree to be her apprentice. You’ve impressed her somehow, she sees something in you that says you could be her successor if you wanted to, but there’s a price, your life for your freedom. It’s a symbolic gesture, but it means never seeing your friends again, or your family; you have to renounce everything. You don’t have much of a choice, and anyway it’s not that high of a price to pay. Your only friends are people from the job you quit and your parents died years ago and weren’t that fond of you in the first place.

You get hired as an EMT, or start training to be one, anyway. You don’t have to quit your job to do it, but you do anyway. You’ve been working twenty years at the same desk, watching the same overweight slob pick his nose and flick his fingers at the trash can, making the same sad animals out of push pins and erasers, and you’re tired of it. It’s hard work, harder than you’re used to, but you’re still pretty young, you can handle it. You had to lie about your age to get the job, had to invent a whole new personality, had (in fact) to forge your papers, birth certificate, driver’s license, social security number, a whole new life, but other than that everything goes like clockwork. You discover you like studying, like helping people. You start to feel younger, as young as your ID says you are, a better person, kinder and more patient.

You go out with the EMT crews, get used to strapping on a bulletproof vest and providing covering fire when you have to. Some of the neighborhoods are worse than others; not just gunfire but all kinds of things, explosives and witchcraft all over the place. You learn to clear a door before you go through it, learn that sometimes it’s better to put a round in someone that might be trouble and add an extra body to your run than risk it, learn to keep a bag of salt and rosemary hidden under your clothes at all times. You learn, in a roundabout way, about patients that vanish, corpses that rise right through the roof of the van, DOAs that walk out of the morgue in the middle of the night as dead as they came in. Your Two Girls are just one more mystery in a sea of mystery.