He crossed the room and sat down on the side of the bed, careful not to wake her. He ran a finger along her arm, watching how her soft skin pinked up at his touch. He stopped at her hand, marveling at how small it was up against his finger.

"How about you?" he whispered. "Do you think I can pull this off, too?"

Her hand came open for an instant, then curled tightly around his finger when he froze, trying to stay still and not wake her. She hung on to him tight.

And he let her.

Kestrel's call came in an hour later, just before eight. It was brief and to the point. "Hidalgo Republic Trading Company is a front for the Seattle Mafia to move contraband around. But Conrad McKenzie pulls the strings."

Skater thanked the fixer and hung up. Elvis, Wheeler, and Duran were already hours gone, taking care of the setups they needed at the meeting site. After he told Archangel and Trey what he'd just learned, he called the others over the commlink, letting them know the op was green.

By ten, Archangel had finished with her part of the mission and presented Skater with an ebony credstick.

"It activates with a cellular scan that registers your DNA," she said.

"Silverstaff has it too?"

"Along with your passcode."

Skater took the slender rod and slipped it into his shirt pocket in a protective case.

"It's loaded with everything I could think of," Archangel promised. "I've got attack utilities programmed into that credstick that'll bring most portable decks to their knees, backed by mirror utilities and a shield program that should buy me the time I need. I also layered in browse and decrypt utilities that will get me to the files and break them into information I can use almost immediately. The deception and sleaze utilities are some of the best' stuff I've ever written. Seconds after that credstick slots into a reader, the programming will unleash a virus that will create a node slaved to my deck that temporarily establishes itself as their system's CPU, giving me control of their deck for a minute or two until the IC reacts and dumps me back out. It should be enough to get what we need."

"We're going to find out soon," Skater said.

At eleven thirty-two. Wheeler called and let Skater know everything was set. The troll chummers of Elvis arrived a few minutes after that. While Trey gave them their orders concerning Emma and Synclair Tone, Skater called Tavis Silverstaff. Once again he left the vid function off.

Archangel jacked into her deck.

"Have you got it?" Skater asked.

"Yes," Silverstaff said.

"You're familiar with the monorail circling the inner city?”

"Board it at the King Street Station at twelve-oh-seven. Car eight. If you leave now, you can make it."

"How will I know you?" Silverstaff asked.

"I'll know you," Skater promised. "And you'll know your wife." He broke the connection and glanced over at Archangel as she surfaced from her deck.

"Hidalgo Republic Trading Company again," she reported. “They were there from the beginning."

Skater nodded as Trey brought Ariadne into the room. She looked tense and nervous. All of them were dressed in the stolen orange repair suits worn by monorail maintenance crews that they'd gotten from a fixer Trey knew.

"Let's do it," Skater said, and led the way to the private elevator.

Skater and his team caught the monorail at the Belmont Avenue station. Midnight was still eleven minutes away when they boarded.

The original Seattle monorail had been destroyed in 2036 during the Night of Rage, and since been rebuilt. Where it had once risen only eight meters off the ground and traveled along a linear track, the new monorail operated on a maglev propulsion system that circled the inner city four stories above the streets. Two trains worked twenty-four hours a day, passing each other in opposite directions. At the front of the trains were the bullet-nosed control stations that regulated the magnetic fields generated that pulled the train along the superconductive metal rail housed in the center of the track. The original monorail had been built for the 1962 World's Fair, and had sailed along an electrified track. With the new maglev system, the trains could never be sabotaged by someone simply shutting down the electricity.

The station was raucous even at this late hour. Few innocents were abroad because the thriller gangs ruled the night and the streets of the inner city. Dressed in their colors, they pushed and shoved at each other, laughing when someone got mad and took a real swing. A knife flashed as Trey reached back to help Ariadne Silverstaff into the monorail car, and one of the thrillers went down with a blade buried in his gut. His companions boarded the next car up from the shadowrunners and yelled obscenities as the downed ganger dragged himself away, leaving a bloody trail.

A double row of seats ran down either side of the car, with synthleather loops hanging from the ceiling for passengers who had to stand. In the mornings and afternoons, the monorails were crowded with commuter traffic. Now, the weak lights barely illuminated the interior of the car.

Trey led Ariadne to a seat, then sat beside her, keeping up a calm and cool front to reassure her. The woman's face had blanched while as they waited for the train and she still looked pale.

Archangel moved immediately to a corner in the back of the car and removed an access plate, quickly dropping a tap into the car's emergency com and booting up her deck, hidden inside a scarred orange toolbox.

"Please secure all items and keep hands and feet inside the cars," the pleasant male voice recording announced over the intercom systems.

With a lurch and a hiss, the monorail took off.

Skater jerked with the sudden acceleration. Adrenaline was pounding inside him, setting him on die razor's edge of awareness. The boosted reflexes were only a heartbeat away.

The monorail car was twenty' meters long, three meters high so most trolls only had to duck slightly, and seven meters across. On the outside, it looked like a flat-gray sausage and bore the blue pattern of Line Two. Line One cars were painted with red patterns. The colors were always layered over with graffiti, and the city had given up trying to keep the trains unmarked. Emergency access doors were at either end, and were never supposed to be opened without authorization. Usually, at night, that rule was violated,

There were four other passengers in the car, all of them looking like late-shift workers just trying to survive the trip home. None of them looked like McKenzie's people. But then, Skater supposed, none of them would.

"Something wrong with this car?" a slender girl asked. She wore ripped clothing, had her face pierced above both eyebrows and through one side of her mouth, and sported a brilliant chartreuse bowl cut. Her eyes were dead behind the rectangular sunglasses.

"No," Skater replied. "Regular monthly maintenance."

"And it takes four of you?"

Skater looked at her. "It's not exactly safe."

"Yeah." The girl showed him a bloodthirsty grin. "No drek." She leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

Looking out the smeared and streaked windows. Skater watched the sprawl pass by four stories below. He seldom rode the monorail. Larisa had liked it, but it always left him feeling exposed and vulnerable. The train wound between some of the buildings, and soared over others, moving along the support track.

During the day, it took almost forty-five minutes to circle the city, even with the automated stops and locked doors keeping the lines moving. But at night the time was nearly halved.

Skater accessed his headlink to make sure they hadn't been jammed as they approached the King Street Station.