"He's not here," the voice said, and seemed to recede. "Round the corner, half a block, left into the alley."

Kumiko would remember the alley always: dark brick slick with damp, hooded ventilators trailing black streamers of congealed dust, a yellow bulb in a cage of corroded alloy, the low growth of empty bottles that sprouted at the base of either wall, the man-sized nests of crumpled fax and white foam packing segments, and the sound of Sally's bootheels.

Past the bulb's dim glow was darkness, though a reflected gleam on wet brick showed a final wall, cul-de-sac, and Kumiko hesitated, frightened by a sudden stir of echo, a scurrying, the steady dripping of water ...

Sally raised her hand. A tight beam of very bright light framed a sharp circle of paint-scrawled brick, then smoothly descended.

Descended until it found the thing at the base of the wall, dull metal, an upright rounded fixture that Kumiko mistook for another ventilator. Near its base were the stubs of white candles, a flat plastic flask filled with a clear liquid, an assortment of cigarette packets, a scattering of loose cigarettes, and an elaborate, multiarmed figure drawn in what appeared to be white powdered chalk.

Sally stepped forward, the beam held steady, and Kumiko saw that the armored thing was bolted into the brickwork with massive rivets. "Finn?"

A rapid flicker of pink light from a horizontal slot.

"Hey, Finn, man ... " An uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice ...

"Moll." A grating quality, as if through a broken speaker. "What's with the flash? You still got amps in? Gettin' old, you can't see in the dark so good?"

"For my friend."

Something moved behind the slot, its color the unhealthy pink of hot cigarette ash in noon sunlight, and Kumiko's face was washed with a stutter of light.

"Yeah," grated the voice, "so who's she?"

"Yanaka's daughter."

"No shit."

Sally lowered the light; it fell on the candles, the flask, the damp gray cigarettes, the white symbol with its feathery arms.

"Help yourself to the offerings," said the voice. "That's half a liter of Moskovskaya there. The hoodoo mark's flour. Tough luck; the high rollers draw 'em in cocaine."

"Jesus," Sally said, an odd distance in her voice, squatting down, "I don't believe this." Kumiko watched as she picked up the flask and sniffed at the contents.

"Drink it. It's good shit. Fuckin' better be. Nobody shortcounts the oracle, not if they know what's good for 'em."

"Finn," Sally said, then tilted the flask and swallowed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, "you gotta be crazy ... "

"I should be so lucky. A rig like this, I'm pushing it to have a little imagination, let alone crazy."

Kumiko moved closer, then squatted beside Sally.

"It's a construct, a personality job?" Sally put down the flask of vodka and stirred the damp flour with the tip of a white fingernail.

"Sure. You seen 'em before. Real-time memory if I wanna, wired into c-space if I wanna. Got this oracle gig to keep my hand in, you know?" The thing made a strange sound: laughter. "Got love troubles? Got a bad woman don't understand you?" The laugh noise again, like peals of static. "Actually I'm more into business advice. It's the local kids leave the goodies. Adds to the mystique, kinda. And once in a while I get a skeptic, some asshole figures he'll help himself to the take." A scarlet hairline flashed from the slit and a bottle exploded somewhere to Kumiko's right. Static laughter. "So what brings you this way, Moll? You and," again the pink light flicked across Kumiko's face, "Yanaka's daughter ... "

"The Straylight run," Sally said.

"Long time, Moll ... "

"She's after me, Finn. Fourteen years and that crazy bitch is on my ass ... "

"So maybe she's got nothin' better to do. You know how rich folks are ... "

"You know where Case is, Finn? Maybe she's after him ... "

"Case got out of it. Rolled up a few good scores after you split, then he kicked it in the head and quit clean. You did the same, maybe you wouldn't be freezing your buns off in an alley, right? Last I heard, he had four kids ... "

Watching the hypnotic sweep of the scanning pink ember, Kumiko had some idea of what it was that Sally spoke with. There were similar things in her father's study, four of them, black lacquered cubes arranged along a low shelf of pine. Above each cube hung a formal portrait. The portraits were monochrome photographs of men in dark suits and ties, four very sober gentlemen whose lapels were decorated with small metal emblems of the kind her father sometimes wore. Though her mother had told her that the cubes contained ghosts, the ghosts of her father's evil ancestors, Kumiko found them more fascinating than frightening. If they did contain ghosts, she reasoned, they would be quite small, as the cubes themselves were scarcely large enough to contain a child's head.

Her father sometimes meditated before the cubes, kneeling on the bare tatami in an attitude that connoted profound respect. She had seen him in this position many times, but she was ten before she heard him address the cubes. And one had answered. The question had meant nothing to her, the answer less, but the calm tone of the ghost's reply had frozen her where she crouched, behind a door of paper, and her father had laughed to find her there; rather than scolding her, he'd explained that the cubes housed the recorded personalities of former executives, corporate directors. Their souls? she'd asked. No, he'd said, and smiled, then added that the distinction was a subtle one. "They are not conscious. They respond, when questioned, in a manner approximating the response of the subject. If they are ghosts, then holograms are ghosts."

After Sally's lecture on the history and hierarchy of the Yakuza, in the robata bar in Earls Court, Kumiko had decided that each of the men in the photographs, the subjects of the personality recordings, had been an oyabun.

The thing in the armored housing, she reasoned, was of a similar nature, though perhaps more complex, just as Colin was a more complex version of the Michelin guide her father's secretaries had carried on her Shinjuku shopping expeditions. Finn, Sally called it, and it was evident that this Finn had been a friend or associate of hers.

But did it wake, Kumiko wondered, when the alley was empty? Did its laser vision scan the silent fall of midnight snow?

"Europe," Sally began, "when I split from Case I went all around there. Had a lot of money we got for the run, anyway it looked like a lot then. Tessier-Ashpool's AI paid it out through a Swiss bank. It erased every trace we'd ever been up the well; I mean everything, like if you looked up the names we traveled under, on the JAL shuttle, they just weren't there. Case checked it all out when we were back in Tokyo, wormed his way into all kinds of data; it was like none of it ever happened. I didn't understand how it could do that, AI or not, but nobody ever really understood what happened up there, when Case rode that Chinese icebreaker through their core ice."

"Did it try to get in touch, after?"

"Not that I know of. He had this idea that it was gone, sort of; not gone gone, but gone into everything, the whole matrix. Like it wasn't in cyberspace anymore, it just was. And if it didn't want you to see it, to know it was there, well, there was no way you ever could, and no way you'd ever be able to prove it to anybody else even if you did know ... And me, I didn't wanna know. I mean, whatever it was, it seemed done to me, finished. Armitage was dead, Riviera was dead, Ashpool was dead, the Rasta tug pilot who took us out there was back in Zion cluster and he'd probably written it all off as another ganja dream ... I left Case in the Tokyo Hyatt, never saw him again ... "

"Why?"