The clinic was nameless, expensively appointed, a cluster of sleek pavilions separated by small formal gardens. He remembered the place from the round he’d made his first month in Chiba. “Scared, Case. You’re real scared.” It was Sunday afternoon and he stood with Molly in a sort of courtyard. White boulders, a stand of green bamboo, black gravel raked into smooth waves. A gardener, a thing like a large metal crab, was tending the bamboo. “It’ll work, Case. You got no idea, the kind of stuff Armitage has. Like he’s gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he’s giving them to tell them how to do it. He’ll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what that’s worth?” She hooked thumbs in the belt loops of her leather jeans and rocked backward on the lacquered heels of cherry red cowboy boots. The narrow toes were sheathed in bright Mexican silver. The lenses were empty quicksilver, regarding him with an insect calm. “You’re street samurai,” he said. “How long you work for him?” “Couple of months.” “What about before that?” “For somebody else. Working girl, you know?” He nodded. “Funny, Case.” “What’s funny?” “It’s like I know you. That profile he’s got. I know how you’re wired.” “You don’t know me, sister.” “You’re okay, Case. What got you, it’s just called bad luck.” “How about him? He okay, Molly?” The robot crab moved toward them, picking its way over the waves of gravel. Its bronze carapace might have been a thousand years old. When it was within a meter of her boots, it fired a burst of light, then froze for an instant, analyzing data obtained. “What I always think about first, Case, is my own sweet ass.” The crab had altered course to avoid her, but she kicked it with a smooth precision, the silver boot-tip clanging on the carapace. The thing fell on its back, but the bronze limbs soon righted it. Case sat on one of the boulders, scuffing at the symmetry of the gravel waves with the toes of his shoes. He began to search his pockets for cigarettes. “In your shirt,” she said. “You want to answer my question?” He fished a wrinkled Yeheyuan from the pack and she lit it for him with a thin slab of German steel that looked as though it belonged on an operating table. “Well, I’ll tell you, the man’s definitely on to something. He’s got big money now, and he’s never had it before, and he gets more all the time.” Case noticed a certain tension around her mouth. “Or maybe, maybe something’s on to him….” She shrugged. “What’s that mean?” “I don’t know, exactly. I know I don’t know who or what we’re really working for.” He stared at the twin mirrors. Leaving the Hilton, Saturday morning, he’d gone back to Cheap Hotel and slept for ten hours . Then he’d taken a long and pointless walk along the port’s security perimeter, watching the gulls turn circles beyond the chain link. If she’d followed him, she’d done a good job of it. He’d avoided Night City. He’d waited in the coffin for Armitage’s call. Now this quiet courtyard, Sunday afternoon, this girl with a gymnast’s body and conjurer’s hands. “If you’ll come in now, sir, the anesthetist is waiting to meet you.” The technician bowed, turned, and reentered the clinic without waiting to see if Case would follow.
Cold steel odor. Ice caressed his spine. Lost, so small amid that dark, hands grown cold, body image fading down corridors of television sky. Voices. Then black fire found the branching tributaries of the nerves, pain beyond anything to which the name of pain is given….
Hold still. Don’t move. And Ratz was there, and Linda Lee, Wage and Lonny Zone, a hundred faces from the neon forest, sailors and hustlers and whores, where the sky is poisoned silver, beyond chain link and the prison of the skull. Goddamn don’t you move. Where the sky faded from hissing static to the non color of the matrix, and he glimpsed the shuriken, his stars. “Stop it, Case, I gotta find your vein!” She was straddling his chest, a blue plastic syrette in one hand. “You don’t lie still, I’ll slit your fucking throat. You’re still full of endorphin inhibitors.”