And gone. Into shadow. Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he’d never be sure. Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes. Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran. Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms. He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser’s wand. The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly’s fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case’s legs. He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner’s name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head. Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor’s image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.
“Case.” Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. “You okay?” Something mewlcd and bubbled in the dark behind her. He shook his head. “Fight’s over, Case. Time to go home.” He tried to walk past her. back into the dark, where something was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. “Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven’t done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He’d fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money…. I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.” Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line. Case felt as though his brain were jammed. “Who,” he said, “who sent them?” She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.
After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He’d chartered a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.
PART TWO. THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION
Home. Home was BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis. Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta. . .
Case woke from a dream of airports, of Molly’s dark leathers moving ahead of him through the concourses of Narita, Schipol, Orly…. He watched himself buy a flat plastic flask of Danish vodka at some kiosk, an hour before dawn. Somewhere down in the Sprawl’s ferro-concrete roots, a train drove a column of stale air through a tunnel. The train itself was silent, gliding over its induction cushion, but displaced air made the tunnel sing, bass down into subsonics. Vibration reached the room where he lay and caused dust to rise from the cracks in the dessicated parquet floor. Opening his eyes, he saw Molly, naked and just out of reach across an expanse of very new pink temper foam. Overhead, sunlight filtered through the soot-stained grid of a skylight. One half-meter square of glass had been replaced with chipboard, a fat gray cable emerging there to dangle within a few centimeters of the floor. He lay on his side and watched her breathe, her breasts, the sweep of a flank defined with the functional elegance of a war plane’s fusilage. Her body was spare, neat, the muscles like a dancer’s. The room was large. He sat up. The room was empty, aside from the wide pink bedslab and two nylon bags, new and identical, that lay beside it. Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel fire door. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space. He knew this kind of room, this kind of building; the tenants would operate in the inter zone where art wasn’t quite crime, crime not quite art. He was home. He swung his feet to the floor. It was made of little blocks of wood, some missing, others loose. His head ached. He remembered Amsterdam, another room, in the Old City section of the Centrum, buildings centuries old. Molly back from the canal’s edge with orange juice and eggs. Armitage off on some cryptic foray, the two of them walking alone past Dam Square to a bar she knew on a Damrak thoroughfare. Paris was a blurred dream. Shopping. She’d taken him shopping. He stood, pulling on a wrinkled pair of new black jeans that lay at his feet, and knelt beside the bags. The first one he opened was Molly’s: neatly folded clothing and small expensive-looking gadgets. The second was stuffed with things he didn’t remember buying: books, tapes, a Simstim deck, clothing with French and Italian labels. Beneath a green t-shirt, he discovered a flat, origami-wrapped package, recycled Japanese paper. The paper tore when he picked it up; a bright nine-pointed star fell–to stick upright in a crack in the parquet. “Souvenir,” Molly said. “I noticed you were always looking at ’em.” He turned and saw her sitting cross legged on the bed, sleepily scratching her stomach with burgundy nails.