And there was something else to it, too, that came from what she’d seen when she was crouched down in the back of that van, between the little Japanese guy with the sleeve of his jacket hanging down, and Masahiko: she’d looked out the window and seen the faces, as the van inched away. None of them knowing that that was 0 281 Rez hunched down in there, under a jacket, but maybe sensing it somehow. And something in Chia letting her know she’d never quite be like that again. Never as comfortably a face in that crowd. Because now she knew there were rooms they never saw, or even dreamed of, where crazy things, or even just boring things, happened, and that was where the stars came from. And it was something like that that worried her now when she thought of Rez coming to see her. That and how he really was her mother’s age.
And all of that made her wonder what she was going to tell the others, back in Seattle. How could they understand it? She thought Zona would understand. She really wanted to talk with Zona, but Arleigh had said it was better not to try to reach her now.
The longest-running top was starting to teeter, and they were cutting from that to the eyes of the girl who’d spun it.
Masahiko opened the door that connected their rooms.
The top gave a last wobble and kicked over. The girl covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes filled with the pain of defeat.
“You must come with me to Walled City now,” Masahiko said.
Chia used the manual remote to turn the television off. “Arleigh asked us not to port.”
“She knows,” Masahiko said. “I’ve been there all day.” He was wearing the same clothes but everything had been cleaned and pressed, and the legs of his baggy black pants looked strange with creases in them. “And on the phone with my father.”
“Is he pissed off at you because those gumi guys came?”
“Arleigh McCrae asked Starkov to have someone speak with our gumi representative. They have apologized to my father. But Mitsuko was arrested near Hotel Di. That has caused him embarrassment and difficulty.”
“Arrested?”
“l~or trespassing. She went to take part in the vigil. She climbed a fence, triggering an alarm. She could not climb back out before the police came.”
“Is she okay? 282 William Gibson “My father has arranged her release. But he is not pleased.”
“I feel like it’s my fault,” Chia said.
He shrugged and went back through the door.
Chia got up. Her Sandbenders was beside her bag on the luggage rack, with her goggles and tip-sets on top of it. She carried it into the other room.
It was a mess. Somehow he’d managed to turn it into something like his room at home. The sheets were tangled on the bed. Through the open bathroom door, she saw towels crumpled up on the tiled floor, a spilled bottle of shampoo on the counter beside the sink. He’d set up his computer on the desk, with his student cap beside it. There were opened mini-cans of espresso everywhere, and at least three room-service trays with half-empty ceramic bowls of ramen.
“Has anyone there seen Zona?” she asked, shoving a pillow and an open magazine aside on the foot of the bed. She sat down with her Sandbenders on her lap and started putting her tip-sets on.
She thought he gave her a strange look, then. “I don’t think so,” he said.
“Take me in the way you did the first time,” she said. “I want to see it again.”
Hak Nam. Tai Chang Street. The walls alive with shifting messages in the characters of every written language. Doorways flipping past, each one hinting at its own secret world. And this time she was more aware of the countless watching ghosts. That must be how people presented here, when you weren’t in direct communication with them. A city of ghost-shadows. But this time Masahiko took another route, and they weren’t climbing the twisted labyrinth of stairs but winding in at what would have been ground level in the original city, and Chia remembered the black hole, the rectangular vacancy he’d pointed out on the printed scarf in his room at the restaurant.