“I dunno, man. It’ll take a bit. You got yourself a lot of damage here.” Slim drapes his lanky body over the bar and props himself up on his forearm. He looks at the tattoo on that arm and begins making a series of taps and gestures on it. “I mean, your floor’s about fixed, so reinstalling the array won’t be a problem. But the control unit is hosed. I’ll need time to print out new parts for that. My guess? You’re lookin’ at about … fifty thousand nits.”

“Fifty?” Jack stops pouring Slim’s drink well below full. “That’s almost as much as the cost to install those things the first time! No way, man. I risked enough just bein’ a guinea pig for your new tech.”

“But it worked, didn’t it?” Slim stops tapping on his tattoo and turns his narrow, shaved head to look around the barroom. His grin is huge. “I would’ve loved to have been here when the subsonics fired up; seen the whole room froze up in person.”

“I shared the playback with you. You saw what it looked like. And yeah, it worked. At first. Aside from maybe tightening down the deadzone behind the bar, the problem wasn’t while it was on. The problem was what happened when the array shut off. People weren’t calm. They were pissed.”

Slim swivels around slowly and looks Jack in the eye. The smile is gone. He’s not using his wheeling-and-dealing face. This is his more sincere side, or his best attempt at one.

Here it comes, Slim’s version of a pep talk. “I saw your playback. Heard it, too. Well, the clip that you wanted to show at least. In any case, you probably shouldn’t have been standing up here on the bar, gloating.” He snags the partially full drink and pours it down his throat before continuing, “It wasn’t the kit that pissed them off. It was you.”

Jack grabs the glass from Slim’s hand and turns away. You’re startin’ to sound like the old man, Slim. He pours the second half of Slim’s drink, careful to account for the amount he’d already poured. “Yeah, well, all the same, fifty is too high a price. I ain’t payin’ that much to be an experiment, not twice.”

The thin-framed maker goes back to tapping his tattoo. “Look. I tell you what. We can redistribute the array pieces you have left and probably get about the same coverage. The only thing that actually needs to be made fresh is the control unit. How about I only charge you the cost for that and my time to do the install?”

“How much?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Ten.”

Slim squints at Jack. It’s difficult to tell if he’s seriously considering the counteroffer. “Alright. Ten thousand nits, plus first dibs on a bottle from your next batch of shine.”

Jack does some quick math in his head. There’s a lot of demand for his cornshine. Even outsiders come to the bar asking for it. A whole bottle goes a long way, even though it’s just a portion of the overall batch size. He peers at Slim and slides over the second half of the drink. “You sure you don’t just want a bottle from inventory?”

“Nah. Gotta be fresh.”

“Slim, man. You ain’t gonna try to burn it for fuel again, are ya?” Jack points to Slim’s shaven head, where singed tips of hair pepper the left side. “You lost quite a bit last time around.”

The lanky maker smiles in earnest. “Progress don’t come without risk, little man.”

Jack sighs. “Alright, ten plus a first bottle. But if you’re gonna waste perfectly good drinking shine, I wanna tack on one more little project for you.”

He pulls a cloth-wrapped bundle from under the bar and sets it in front of Slim. The maker’s eyes light up, curiosity piqued. He tries to pull up a corner of the cloth to see what’s inside, but Jack slaps his hand away.

Slim doesn’t take his eyes off the bundle. “That the old man’s gun?”

“Nah. I can handle repairin’ that myself. This is something else. I want you to get the traps off and get ’em functional again. Thought you might find it fun.”

“Traps are tough to work around, little man. But”—Slim picks up the bundle and tucks it under his arm before continuing—“you do know how I like a challenge. You’ve got yourself a deal.”

Not waiting for a response, Slim swallows the second half of his drink in a single gulp and heads for the exit.

“Hey! You gonna pay for that?”

The skinny maker waves his tattooed arm back at Jack as he heads out the door. “Down payment!”