Rikki Wildside, Bobby called her, and for those first few weeks it must have seemed to her that she had it all, the whole teeming show spread out for her, sharp and bright under the neon. She was new to the scene, and she had all the miles of malls and plazas to prowl, all the shops and clubs, and Bobby to explain the wild side, the tricky wiring on the dark underside of things, all the players and their names and their games. He made her feel at home. “What happened to your arm?” she asked me one night in the Gentleman Loser, the three of us drinking at a small table in a corner. “Hang-gliding,” I said, “accident.” “Hang-gliding over a wheatfield,” said Bobby, “place called Kiev. Our Jack’s just hanging there in the dark, under a Nightwing parafoil, with fifty kilos of radar jammed between his legs, and some Russian asshole accidentally burns his arm off with a laser.” I don’t remember how I changed the subject, but I did. I was still telling myself that it wasn’t Rikki who was getting to me, but what Bobby was doing with her. I’d known him for a long time, since the end of the war, and I knew he used women as counters in a game, Bobby Quine versus fortune, versus time and the night of cities. And Rikki had turned up just when he needed something to get him going, something to aim for. So he’d set her up as a symbol for everything he wanted and couldn’t have, everything he’d had and couldn’t keep. I didn’t like having to listen to him tell me how much he loved her, and knowing he believed it only made it worse. He was a past master at the hard fall and the rapid recovery, and I’d seen it happen a dozen times before. He might as well have had NEXT printed across his sunglasses in green Day-Gb capitals, ready to flash out at the first interesting face that flowed past the tables in the Gentleman Loser. I knew what he did to them. He turned them into emblems, sigils on the map of his hustler’s life, naviga- tion beacons he could follow through a sea of bars and neon. What else did he have to steer by? He didn’t love money, in and of itself, not enough to follow its lights. He wouldn’t work for power over other people; he hated the responsibility it brings. He had some basic pride in his skill, but that was never enough to keep him pushing. So he made do with women. When Rikki showed up, he needed one in the worst way. He was fading fast, and smart money was already whispering that the edge was off his game. He needed that one big score, and soon, because he didn’t know any other kind of life, and all his clocks were set for hustler’s time, calibrated in risk and adrenaline and that supernal dawn calm that comes when every move’s proved right and a sweet lump of someone else’s credit clicks into your own account. It was time for him to make his bundle and get out; so Rikki got set up higher and farther away than any of the others ever had, even though and I felt like screaming it at him she was right there, alive, totally real, human, hungry, resilient, bored, beautiful, ex- cited, all the things she was. . Then he went out one afternoon, about a week before I made the trip to New York to see Finn. Went out and left us there in the loft, waiting for a thunder- storm. Half the skylight was shadowed by a dome they’d never finished, and the other half showed sky, black and blue with clouds. I was s~andsng by the bench, looking up at that sky, stupid with the hot afternoon, the humidity, and she touched me, touched my shoulder, the half-inch border of taut pink scar that the arm doesn’t cover. Anybody else ever touched me there, they went on to the shoulder, the neck…. But she didn’t do that. Her nails were lacquered black, not pointed, but tapered oblongs, the lacquer only a shade darker than the carbon-fiber laminate that sheathes my arm. And her hknd went down the arm, black nails tracing a weld in the laminate, down to the black anodized elbow joint, out to the wrist, her hand soft-knuckled as a child’s, fingers spreading to lock over mine, her palm against the perforated Duralumin. Her other palm came up to brush across the feed- back pads, and it rained all afternoon, raindrops drum- ming on the steel and soot-stained glass above Bobby’s bed.