Prologue 2.

It tells about the city of Laguna Urbana, in which the heroes of the book live and act. If you are not interested, you can skip to the third chapter.

Plot location:

The port city of Laguna in the Central American part of the Atlantic Alliance. Like most cities in this area, it is in decline - in a sparkling center near the coast, with skyscrapers, beaches and luxury villas, everything is fine, while in the industrial and port area people work hard for pennies. The situation is absolutely terrible in the slums where the poor from the surrounding villages have settled. Ever since the Alliance got its hands on the South American region, it has not begun to develop it comprehensively, like the territories of North America and Western Europe, leaving everything at the mercy of local authorities and the largest megacorporations. And they only care about their own enrichment, they don't care about the problems of local people from outside the middle and higher corporate levels, because there are an excess of people here and it is easy to replace anyone who has left with the next one. As a result, an environment of quite classic cyberpunk has formed here - ready-made high technologies coexist with the ignorance and illiteracy of the majority of the inhabitants, there is a high birth rate and mortality, the laws practically lag behind, gangs run the streets, each has its own district and residents are forced to pay them. Drugs, prostitution, and sometimes even slavery are the bitter reality of these places. Even people who are good at heart are forced to do evil in order to survive. Each district has its own sect with unhealthy humane rituals. Here they do not think about tomorrow and thank God for every day they have lived. There are millions of these poor devils and that the last beggar is a cripple begging for alms that the leader of a powerful gang is in fact the same prisoners of this city without hope. Previously, Spanish-speaking descendants of Spaniards and Indians lived here, but megacorporations have been constantly shuffling work groups back and forth over the past few centuries to where they are not enough and are recalled to other places when the production site is closed. As a result, a motley conglomerate of descendants from different countries and peoples now lives here, as a result of which most of the population of the Alliance are representatives of a mixture of all races in the most bizarre combination. The only thing that unites them is the symbolic Slint language and the spoken language "Atlantic"- an enchanting mixture of the main European languages ordered by philologists, which sounds like vulgar Latin with an admixture of English and Spanish.

Only the administrative cores of corporations in the center of cities sparkle with the lights of skyscrapers and can afford everything, but they are separated from the slums by walls with the highest level of protection. Every slum dweller dreams of getting here, but rarely does anyone succeed.

The Laguna is very hot and humid all year round, people sometimes die from extreme heat. But at night and during the winter rainy season it gets cooler.

The following gangs compete in the city:

Red Skull

Black Angel

Little Devils

Kind people (in fact, this is the scariest gang)

The Sect of Death

They are constantly fighting with each other for territory and often arrange shootouts on the street, from which residents can only escape by hiding in the basements of flimsy houses or in the subway with sewers and contraband tunnels.

The heroes of the plot live in the territory of the Black Angels, but are in the vicinity of Little Devils and Kind People.

Normal clothing in slums is a sign of luxury, slum dwellers usually use sprayed clothes- a balloon with a mixture is taken, it is sprayed on the body and turns into a dense flexible material, so you can make a thin elastic T-shirt or leggings. Bags and other things are done in the same way, spraying on a template, then clothes can be painted with paint. It is much cheaper and more practical than ordinary clothes. Small electronics are very cheap, made by smugglers and everyone has it. It breaks down quickly but is easily replaced.

There are problems with water in the city, it is an arid region, there is an ocean nearby, but it is salty. Bottled water or condensed from fog (and fog constantly flies in from the ocean) is used only for drinking, and slum dwellers clean themselves with scrapers and cheap ultrasonic brushes.

Heroes:

Dana Martez is the main character, a girl from the slums of Laguna, she is 10 years old, she is very thin, but very agile and fast. She has wavy shoulder-length black hair, very dark tanned skin, large black eyes. Despite her young age, she has already seen a lot of bad things in her life. Her parents, small shopkeepers and three brothers were killed during the gang wars when she was 6 years old, she miraculously managed to escape. After that, she stole food from passers-by and only fast legs saved her from beatings. She spent a couple of months trying to survive in a dangerous city, hiding where she could and trying to figure out what to do next. And then he noticed her and sheltered her:

old man Alonso is a cunning bald, bearded men, who sells information and runs a small business delivering small parcels with the help of the children he sheltered. He is disabled, he has an artificial leg, in his youth he was blown up by a trap set by bandits who were robbing someone's house. It was a long time ago... Parcels- secret messages, information carriers, drugs, medicines and much more. Alonso takes orders from different residents of the city and the children run to deliver them to customers and recipients. Unlike communication networks and UAVs, it is difficult to intercept child runners - they are very fast and agile, they will crawl into any gap where an adult will not fit, they can jump through the flat roofs of slum self-built high-rise buildings, using wires as ropes, or through holes in fences between districts. Children-runners have formed almost a single subculture, their work is very dangerous, bandits have shot at them more than once and tried to catch them, alas, several children have already died because of this, only the fastest agile and smart ones have survived.

Runners-boys: Nathan Reinkrantz, Miel Lopez, Dio Kamal,

Girls runners: Marie Alves, Linda Flores, and the main character Dana Martez.

All children from 9 to 11 years old. All of them, like most residents of the region, are swarthy, black-haired, black-eyed, thin and fleet-footed. Except for Nathan- he is a little lighter than the others because he had Germans in his family on the male line.