Sitting in the bathroom with the cosmetic kit open on her knees, grinding another crystal, she decided she had a right to be pissed off. First Eddy takes off without her, then Prior shows up with this creep medic, then he tells her Eddy’s sleeping in a different room. Back in Florida she could’ve used some time off from Eddy, but up here was different. She didn’t want to be in here by herself, and she’d been scared to ask Prior for a key. He fucking well had one, though, so he could walk in any time with his creep-ass friends. What kind of deal was that? And the business with the plastic raincoat, that burned her ass too. A disposable fucking plastic raincoat. She fluffed the powdered wiz between the nylon screens, carefully tapped it into the hitter, exhaled hard, put the mouthpiece to her lips, and hit. The cloud of yellow dust coated the membranes of her throat; some of it probably even made it to her lungs. She’d heard that was bad for you. She’d hadn’t had any plan when she’d gone in the bathroom to take her hit, but as the back of her neck started tingling, she found herself thinking about the streets around the hotel, what she’d seen of them on their way in. There were clubs, bars, shops with clothes in the window. Music. Music would be okay, now, and a crowd. The way you could lose it in a crowd, forget yourself, just be there. The door wasn’t locked, she knew that; she’d already tried it. It would lock behind her, though, and she didn’t have a key. But she was staying here, so Prior must have registered her at the desk. She thought about going down and asking the woman behind the counter for a key, but the idea made her uncomfortable. She knew suits behind counters and how they looked at you. No, she decided, the best idea was to stay in and stim those new Angie’s. Ten minutes later she was on her way out a side entrance off the main lobby, the wiz singing in her head. It was drizzling outside, maybe dome condensation. She’d worn the white raincoat for the lobby, figuring Prior knew what he was doing after all, but now she was glad she had it. She grabbed a fold of fax out of an overflowing bin and held it over her head to keep her hair dry. It wasn’t as cold as before, which was another good thing. None of her new clothes were what you’d call warm. Looking up and down the avenue, deciding which way to go, she took in half-a-dozen nearly identical hotel fronts, a rank of pedicabs, the rainslick glitter of a row of small shops. And people, lots of them, like the Cleveland core but everybody dressed so sharp, and all moving like they were on top of it, everybody with someplace to go. Just go with it , she thought, the wiz giving her a sweet second boot that tripped her into the river of pretty people without even having to think about it. Clicking along in her new shoes, holding the fax over her head until she noticed — more luck — the rain had stopped. She wouldn’t’ve minded a chance to check out the shop windows, when the crowd swept her past, but the flow was pleasure and nobody else was pausing. She contented herself with sidelong flashes of each display. The clothes were like clothes in a stim, some of them, styles she’d never seen anywhere. I should ‘ve been here , she thought, I should ‘ve been here all along. Not on a catfish farm , not in Cleveland , not in Florida. It ‘s a place , a real place , anybody can come here , you don ‘t have to get it through a stim . Thing was, she’d never seen this part of it in a stim, the regular people part. A star like Angie, this part wasn’t her part. Angie’d be off in high castles with the other stim stars, not down here. But God it was pretty, the night so bright, the crowd surging around her, past all the good things you could have if you just got lucky. Eddy, he didn’t like it. Anyway he’d always said how it was shitty here, too crowded, rent too high, too many police, too much competition. Not that he’d waited two seconds when Prior ‘d made an offer, she reminded herself. And anyway, she had her own ideas why Eddy was so down on it. He’d blown it here, she figured, pulled some kind of serious wilson. Either he didn’t want to be reminded or else there were people here who’d remind him for sure if he came back. It was there in the pissed-off way he talked about the place, same way he’d talk about anybody who told him his scams wouldn’t work. The new buddy so goddamn smart the first night was just a stone wilson the next, dead stupid, no vision. Past a big store with ace-looking stim gear in the window, all of it matte black and skinny, presided over by this gorgeous holo of Angie, who watched them all slide by with her half-sad smile. Queen of the night, yeah. The crowd-river flowed out into a kind of circle, a place where four streets met and swung around a fountain. And because Mona really wasn’t headed anywhere, she wound up there, because the people around her peeled off in their different directions without stopping. Well, there were people in the circle too, some of them sitting on the cracked concrete that edged the fountain. There was a statue in the center, marble, all worn-out and soft-edged. Kind of a baby riding a big fish, a dolphin. It looked like the dolphin’s mouth would spray water if the fountain was working, but it wasn’t. Past the heads of the seated people she could see crumpled, sodden fax and white foam cups in the water. Then it seemed like the crowd had melded behind her, a curved, sliding wall of bodies, and the three who faced her on the fountain rim jumped out like a picture. Fat girl with black-dyed hair, mouth half-open like it stayed that way, tits spilling out of a red rubber halter; blonde with a long face and a thin blue slash of lipstick, hand like a bird’s claw sprouting a cigarette; man with his oiled arms bare to the cold, graft-job muscle knotted like rock under synthetic tan and bad jail tattoos . . . »Hey, bitch,« cried the fat girl, with a kind of glee, »hope y’don’t think y’gonna turn any ‘roun’ here!« The blonde looked at Mona with her tired eyes and gave her a wan grin, an it’s-not-my-fault grin, and then looked away. The pimp came up off the fountain like something driven by springs, but Mona was already moving, cued by the blonde’s expression. He had her arm, but the raincoat’s plastic seam gave way and she elbowed her way back into the crowd. The wiz took over and the next thing she knew she was at least a block away, sagging against a steel pole, coughing and hyperventilating. But now the wiz was all turned around, the way it went sometimes, and everything was ugly. The faces in the crowd were driven and hungry-looking, like they all had their own private desperate errands to run, and the light from the shop windows was cold and mean, and all the things behind the glass were just there to tell her she couldn’t have them. There was a voice somewhere, an angry child’s voice stringing obscenities together in an endless, meaningless chain; when she realized who it was, she stopped doing it. Her left arm was cold. She looked down and saw that the sleeve was gone, the seam down her side torn open to the waist. She took off the coat and draped it over her shoulders like a cape; maybe that made it a little harder to notice. She braced her back against the pole as the wiz rolled over her on a wave of delayed adrenaline; her knees started to buckle and she thought she was going to faint, but then the wiz pulled one of its tricks and she was crouching in summer sunset light in the old man’s dirt yard, the flaky gray earth scribed with the game she’d been playing, but now she was just hunched there, vacant, staring off past the bulks of the tanks to where fireflies pulsed in the blackberry tangle above a twisted old chassis. There was light behind her from the house and she could smell the cornbread baking and the coffee he boiled and reboiled there, till a spoon stood up in it, he said, and he’d be in there now reading one of his books, crumbly brown leaves, never a page with a corner on it, he got ’em in frayed plastic baggies and sometimes they just fell to dust in his hands, but if he found something he wanted to keep he’d get a little pocket copier out of the drawer, fit the batteries in it, run it down the page. She liked to watch the copies spool out all fresh, with their special smell that faded away, but he’d never let her work it. Sometimes he’d read out loud, a kind of hesitation in his voice, like a man trying to play an instrument he hasn’t picked up in a long time. They weren’t stories he read, not like they had endings or told a joke. They were like windows into something so strange; he never tried to explain any of it, probably didn’t understand it himself, maybe nobody did. . . . Then the street snapped back hard and bright. She rubbed her eyes and coughed.