“Hell of a job on short notice,” the redhead said.
“No notice,” the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. His hair was pulled straight back, fastened high in a little samurai ponytail.
“What you’re paid for,” Blackwell said.
“We’re paid to tour,” the redhead said.
“If you want to tour again, you’d better hope that these work.’ Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.
Laney saw a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall. It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there, a pair of eye-phones. Unfamiliar cables ran to the nearest console: flat ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The wall behind was plastered with an overlay of old advertising; a woman’s eye was directly behind the pink table, a yard wide, her laser-printed pupil the size of Laneys head.
Laney moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his feet, a motion not unlike cross-country skiing.
“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” 108 William Gibson Zona Rosa kept a secret place, a country carved from what once had been a corporate website.
It was a valley lined with ruined swimming pools, overgrown with cactus and red Christmas flowers. Lizards posed like hieroglyphs on mosaics of shattered tile.
No houses stood in that valley, though sections of broken wall gave shade, or rusting rectangles of corrugated metal set aslanr on weathered wooden uprights. Sometimes there were ashes of a cooking fire.
She kept it early evening there.
“Zona?”
“Someone is trying to find you.” Zona in her ragged leather jacket over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as a quick collage, fragments torn from films, magazines, Mexican newspapers:
dark eyes, Aztec cheekbones, a dusting of acne scars, her black hair tangled like smoke. She kept the resolution down, never let herself come entirely into focus.
“My mother?”
“No. Someone with resources. Someone who knows that you are in Tokyo.” The narrow toes of her black boots were pale with the dust of the valley. There were copper zips down the outer seams of her faded black jeans, waist to ankle. “Why are you dressed that way?”
Chia remembered that she was still presenting in the Silke-Marie
0 2 109 16. Zona KoIb outfit. “There was a meeting. Very formal. Major butt-pain. I got this with Kelsey’s cashcard.”
“Where were you ported, when you paid for it?”
“Where I’m ported now. Mitsuko’s place.”
Zona frowned. “What other purchases have you made?”
“None.”
“Nothing?”
“A subway ticket.”
Zona snapped her fingers and a lizard scurried from beneath a rock. It ran up her leg and into her waiting hand. As she stroked it with the fingers of the other hand, the patterns of its coloration changed. She tapped its head and the lizard ran down her leg, vanishing behind a crumpled sheet of rusted roofing. “Kelsey is frightened, frightened enough to come to me.”
“Frightened of what?”
“Someone contacted her about your ticket. They were trying to reach her father, because the points used to purchase it were his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think they threatened her.”
“With what?’
“I don’t know. But she gave them your name and the number of the cashcard.”
Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.
Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock. Golden dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knife’s pink plastic handles. She thumbed a button of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless. “She has no balls, your Kelsey.”
“She’s not my Kelsey, Zona.”
Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave thin curls from it with the edge of the switchblade. “She would not last an hour, in my world.” On a previous visit, she’d told Kelsey stories of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought through the garbage-strewn playgrounds and collapsing parking garages of vast 110 William Gibson housing projects. How had that war begun? Over what? Zona never said.
“Neither would I.”
“So who is looking for you?”
“My mother would be, if she knew I was here
“That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey.”