Prior put her bag down on the bed, a wide slab of beige temperfoam, and touched a panel that caused a wall of drapes to open. »It’s not the Ritz,« he said, »but we’ll try to make you comfortable.« Mona made a noncommittal sound. The Ritz was a burger place in Cleveland and she couldn’t see what that had to do with anything. »Look,« he said, »your favorite.« He was standing beside the bed’s upholstered headboard. There was a stim unit there, built in, and a little shelf with a set of trodes in a plastic wrapper and about five cassettes. »All of Angie’s new stims.« She wondered who’d put those cassettes there, and if they’d done it after Prior had asked her what stims she liked. She showed him a smile of her own and went to the window. The Sprawl looked like it did in stims; the window was like a hologram postcard, famous buildings she didn’t know the names of but she knew they were famous. Gray of the domes, geodesics picked out white with snow, behind that the gray of the sky. »Happy, baby?« Eddy asked, coming up behind her and putting his hands on her shoulders. »They got showers here?« Prior laughed. She shrugged out of Eddy’s loose grip and took her bag into the bathroom. Closed and locked the door. She heard Prior’s laugh again, and Eddy starting up with his scam talk. She sat on the toilet, opened her bag, and dug out the cosmetic kit where she kept her wiz. She had four crystals left. That seemed like enough; three was enough, but when she got down to two she usually started looking to score. She didn’t do jumpers much, not every day anyway, except recently she had, but that was because Florida had started to drive her crazy. Now she could start tapering off, she decided, as she tapped a crystal out of the vial. It looked like hard yellow candy; you had to crush it, then grind it up between a pair of nylon screens. When you did that, it gave off a kind of hospital smell.
They were both gone, by the time she finished her shower. She’d stayed in until she got bored with it, which took a long time. In Florida she’d mostly used showers at public pools or bus stations, the kind you worked with tokens. She guessed there was something hooked up to this one that measured the liters and put it on your bill; that was how it worked at the Holiday Inn. There was a big white filter above the plastic shower- head, and a sticker on the tile wall with an eye and a tear meant it was okay to shower but don’t get it in your eyes, like swimming pool water. There was a row of chrome spouts set into the tile, and when you punched a button under each one you got shampoo, shower gel, liquid soap, bath oil. When you did that, a little red dot lit up beside the button, because it went on your bill. On Prior’s bill. She was glad they were gone, because she liked being alone and high and clean. She didn’t get to be alone much, except on the street, and that wasn’t the same. She left damp footprints on the beige carpet when she walked to the window. She was wrapped in a big towel that matched the bed and the carpet and had a word shaved into the fuzzy part, probably the name of the hotel. There was an old-fashioned building a block away, and the corners of its stepped peak had been carved down to make a kind of mountain, with rocks and grass, and a waterfall that fell and hit rocks and then fell again. It made her smile, why anybody had gone to that trouble. Drifts of steam came off the water, where it hit. It couldn’t just fall down into the street, though, she thought, because it would cost too much. She guessed they pumped it back up and used it over, around in a circle. Something gray moved its head there, swung its big curly horns up like it was looking at her. She took a step back on the carpet and blinked. Kind of a sheep, but it had to be a remote, a hologram or something. It tossed its head and started eating grass. Mona laughed. She could feel the wiz down the backs of her ankles and across her shoulderblades, a cold tight tingle, and the hospital smell at the back of her throat. She’d been scared before but she wasn’t scared now. Prior had a bad smile, but he was just a player, just a bent suit. If he had money, it was somebody else’s. And she wasn’t scared of Eddy anymore; it was almost like she was scared for him, because she could see what other people took him for. Well, she thought, it didn’t matter; she wasn’t growing catfish in Cleveland anymore, and no way anybody’d get her back to Florida again. She remembered the alcohol stove, cold winter mornings, the old man hunched in his big gray coat. Winters he’d put a second layer of plastic over the windows. The stove was enough to heat the place, then, because the walls were covered with sheets of hard foam, and chipboard over that. Places where the foam showed, you could pick at it with your finger, make holes; if he caught you doing it, he’d yell. Keeping the fish warm in cold weather was more work; you had to pump water up to the roof, where the sun mirrors were, into these clear plastic tubes. But the vegetable stuff rotting on the tank ledges helped, too; steam rose off when you went to net a fish. He traded the fish for other kinds of food, for things people grew, stove alcohol and the drinking kind, coffee beans, garbage the fish ate. He wasn’t her father and he’d said it often enough, when he’d talked at all. Sometimes she still wondered if maybe he had been. When she’d first asked him how old she was, he’d said six, so she counted from that. She heard the door open behind her and turned; Prior was there, the gold plastic key tab in his hand, beard open to show the smile. »Mona,« he said, stepping in, »this is Gerald.« Tall, Chinese, gray suit, graying hair. Gerald smiled gently, edged in past Prior, and went straight for the drawer thing opposite the foot of the bed. Put a black case down and clicked it open. »Gerald’s a friend. He’s medical, Gerald. Needs to have a look at you.« »Mona,« Gerald said, removing something from the case, »how old are you?« »She’s sixteen,« Prior said. »Right, Mona?« »Sixteen,« Gerald said. The thing in his hands was like a pair of black goggles, sunglasses with bumps and wires. »That’s stretching it a little, isn’t it?« He looked at Prior. Prior smiled. »You’re short what, ten years?« »Not quite,« Prior said. »We aren’t asking for perfection.« Gerald looked at her. »You aren’t going to get it.« He hooked the goggles over his ears and tapped something; a light came on below the right lens. »But there are degrees of approximation.« The light swung toward her. »We’re talking cosmetic, Gerald.« »Where’s Eddy?« she asked, as Gerald came closer. »In the bar. Shall I call him?« Prior picked up the phone, but put it back down without using it. »What is this?« Backing away from Gerald. »A medical examination,« Gerald said. »Nothing painful.« He had her against the window; above the towel, her shoulderblades pressed against cool glass. »Someone’s about to employ you, and pay you very well; they need to be certain you’re in good health.« The light stabbed into her left eye. »She’s on stimulants of some kind,« he said to Prior, in a different tone of voice. »Try not to blink, Mona.« The light swung to her right eye. »What is it, Mona? How much did you do?« »Wiz.« Wincing away from the light. He caught her chin in his cool fingers and realigned her head. »How much?« »A crystal . . .« The light was gone. His smooth face was very close, the goggles studded with lenses, slots, little dishes of black metal mesh. »No way of judging the purity,« he said. »It’s real pure,« she said, and giggled. He let her chin go and smiled. »It shouldn’t be a problem,« he said. »Could you open your mouth, please?« »Mouth?« »I want to look at your teeth.« She looked at Prior. »You’re in luck, here,« Gerald said to Prior, when he’d used the little light to look in her mouth. »Fairly good condition and close to target configuration. Caps, inlays.« »We knew we could count on you, Gerald.« Gerald took the goggles off and looked at Prior. He returned to the black case and put the goggles away. »Lucky with the eyes, too. Very close. A tint job.« He took a foil envelope from the case and tore it open, rolled the pale surgical glove down over his right hand. »Take off the towel, Mona. Make yourself comfortable.« She looked at Prior, at Gerald. »You want to see my papers, the bloodwork and stuff?« »No,« Gerald said, »that’s fine.« She looked out the window, hoping to see the bighorn, but it was gone, and the sky seemed a lot darker. She undid the towel, let it fall to the floor, then lay down on her back on the beige temperfoam. It wasn’t all that different from what she got paid for; it didn’t even take as long.