»I don’t think it’s much to ask,« Kid Afrika said, leaning back against a bare metal workbench, wrapped in his mink. »Cherry has a med-tech’s ticket and she knows she’ll get paid. Nice girl, Slick.« He winked. »Kid . . .« Kid Afrika had this guy in the back of the hover who was like dead, coma or something, had him hooked up to pumps and bags and tubes and some kind of simstim rig, all of it bolted to an old alloy ambulance stretcher, batteries and everything. »What’s this?« Cherry, who’d followed them in after the Kid had taken Slick back out to show him the guy in the back of the hover, was peering dubiously up at the towering Judge, most of him anyway; the arm with the buzzsaw was where they’d left it, on the floor on the greasy tarp. If she has a med tech ‘s ticket , Slick thought, the med-tech probably hasn ‘t noticed it ‘s missing yet . She was wearing at least four leather jackets, all of them several sizes too big. »Slick’s art, like I told you.« »That guy’s dying. He smells like piss.« »Catheter came loose,« Cherry said. »What’s this thing supposed to do , anyway?« »We can’t keep him here, Kid, he’ll stiff. You wanna kill him, go stuff him down a hole on the Solitude.« »The man’s not dying,« Kid Afrika said. »He’s not hurt, he’s not sick. . . .« »Then what the fuck’s wrong with him?« »He’s under , baby. He’s on a long trip . He needs peace and quiet .« Slick looked from the Kid to the Judge, then back to the Kid. He wanted to be working on that arm. Kid said he wanted Slick to keep the guy for two weeks, maybe three; he’d leave Cherry there to take care of him. »I can’t figure it. This guy, he’s a friend of yours?« Kid Afrika shrugged inside his mink. »So why don’t you keep him at your place?« »Not so quiet. Not peaceful enough.« »Kid,« Slick said, »I owe you one, but nothing this weird. Anyway, I gotta work, and anyway, it’s too weird. And there’s Gentry, too. He’s gone to Boston now; be back tomorrow night and he wouldn’t like it. You know how he’s funny about people. . . . It’s mostly his place , too, how it is. . . .« »They had you over the railing, man,« Kid Afrika said sadly. »You remember?« »Hey, I remember, I . . .« »You don’t remember too good,« the Kid said. »Okay, Cherry. Let’s go. Don’t wanna cross Dog Solitude at night.« He pushed off from the steel bench. »Kid, look . . .« »Forget it. I didn’t know your fucking name, that time in Atlantic City, just figured I didn’t wanna see the white boy all over the street, y’know? So I didn’t know your name then, I guess I don’t know it now.« »Kid . . .« »Yeah?« »Okay. He stays. Two weeks max. You gimme your word, you’ll come back and get him? And you gotta help me square it with Gentry.« »What’s he need?« »Drugs.« Little Bird reappeared as the Kid’s Dodge wallowed away across the Solitude. He came edging out from behind an outcropping of compacted cars, rusty pallets of crumpled steel that still showed patches of bright enamel. Slick watched him from a window high up in Factory. The squares of the steel frame had been fitted with sections of scavenged plastic, each one a different shade and thickness, so that when Slick tilted his head to one side, he saw Little Bird through a pane of hot-pink Lucite. »Who lives here?« Cherry asked, from the room behind him. »Me,« Slick said, »Little Bird, Gentry . . .« »In this room, I mean.« He turned and saw her there beside the stretcher and its attendant machines. »You do,« he said. »It’s your place?« She was staring at the drawings taped to the walls, his original conceptions of the Judge and his Investigators, the Corpsegrinder and the Witch. »Don’t worry about it.« »Better you don’t get any ideas,« she said. He looked at her. She had a large red sore at the corner of her mouth. Her bleached hair stood out like a static display. »Like I said, don’t worry about it.« »Kid said you got electricity.« »Yeah.« »Better get him hooked up,« she said, turning to the stretcher. »He doesn’t draw much, but the batteries’ll be getting low.« He crossed the room to look down at the wasted face. »You better tell me something,« he said. He didn’t like the tubes. One of them went into a nostril and the idea made him want to gag. »Who is this guy and what exactly the fuck is Kid Afrika doing to him?« »He’s not,« she said, tapping a readout into view on a biomonitor panel lashed to the foot of the stretcher with silver tape. »REM’s still up, like he dreams all the time . . .« The man on the stretcher was strapped down in a brand-new blue sleeping bag. »What it is, he — whoever — he’s paying Kid for this.« There was a trode-net plastered across the guy’s forehead; a single black cable was lashed along the edge of the stretcher. Slick followed it up to the fat gray package that seemed to dominate the gear mounted on the superstructure. Simstim? Didn’t look like it. Some kind of cyberspace rig? Gentry knew a lot about cyberspace, or anyway he talked about it, but Slick couldn’t remember anything about getting unconscious and just staying jacked in. . . . People jacked in so they could hustle. Put the trodes on and they were out there, all the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around and have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to a particular piece of data you needed. Iconics, Gentry called that. »He paying the Kid?« »Yeah,« she said. »What for?« »Keep him that way. Hide him out, too.« »Who from?« »Don’t know. Didn’t say.« In the silence that followed, he could hear the steady rasp of the man’s breath.