"Who knows? Nothing much. I was young, it just seemed over."

"But you'd left her up the well. In Straylight."

"You got it. And I'd think about that, once in a while. When we were leaving, Finn, it was like she didn't care about any of it. Like I'd killed her crazy sick father for her, and Case had cracked their cores and let their AIs loose in the matrix ... So I put her on the list, right? You get big enough trouble one day, you're being got at, you check that list."

"And you figured it for her, right off?"

"No. I gotta pretty long list."

Case, who seemed to Kumiko to have been something more than Sally's partner, never reentered her story.

As Kumiko listened to Sally condense fourteen years of personal history for the Finn's benefit, she found herself imagining this younger Sally as a bishonen hero in a traditional romantic video: fey, elegant, and deadly. While she found Sally's matter-of-fact account of her life difficult to follow, with its references to places and things she didn't know, it was easy to imagine her winning the sudden, flick-of-the-wrist victories expected of bishonen. But no, she thought, as Sally dismissed "a bad year in Hamburg," sudden anger in her voice -- an old anger, the year a decade past -- it was a mistake to cast this woman in Japanese terms. There were no ronin, no wandering samurai; Sally and the Finn were talking business.

She'd arrived at her bad year in Hamburg, Kumiko gathered, after having won and lost some sort of fortune. She'd won her share of it "up there," in a place the Finn had called Straylight, in partnership with the man Case. In doing so, she'd made an enemy.

"Hamburg," the Finn interrupted, "I heard stories about Hamburg ... "

"The money was gone. How it is, with a big score, when you're young ... No money was sort of like getting back to normal, but I was involved with these Frankfurt people, owed 'em, and they wanted to take it out in trade."

"What kinda trade?"

"They wanted people hit."

"So?"

"So I got out. When I could. Went to London ... "

Perhaps, Kumiko decided, Sally had once been something along ronin lines, a kind of samurai. In London, however, she'd become something else, a businesswoman. Supporting herself in some unspecified way, she gradually became a backer, providing funds for various kinds of business operations. (What was a "credit sink"? What was "laundering data"?)

"Yeah," the Finn said, "you did okay. Got yourself a share in some German casino."

"Aix-la-Chapelle. I was on the board. Still am, when I got the right passport."

"Settled down?" The laugh again.

"Sure."

"Didn't hear much, back here."

"I was running a casino. That was it. Doing fine."

"You were prizefighting. 'Misty Steele,' augmented featherweight. Eight fights, I made book on five of 'em. Blood matches, sweetmeat. Illegal."

"Hobby."

"Some hobby. I saw the vids. Burmese Kid opened you right up, living color ... "

Kumiko remembered the long scar.

"So I quit. Five years ago and I was already five years too old."

"You weren't bad, but 'Misty Steele' ... Jesus."

"Gimme a break. Wasn't me made that one up."

"Sure. So tell me about our friend upstairs, how she got in touch."

"Swain. Roger Swain. Sends one of his boys to the casino, would-be hardass called Prior. About a month ago."

"Swain the fixer? London?"

"Same one. So Prior's got a present for me, about a meter of printout. A list. Names, dates, places."

"Bad?"

"Everything. Stuff I'd almost forgotten."

"Straylight run?"

"Everything. So I packed a bag, got back to London, there's Swain. He's sorry, it's not his fault, but he's gotta twist me. Because somebody's twisting him. Got his own meter of printout to worry about." Kumiko heard Sally's heels shift on the pavement.

"What's he want?"

"A rip, warm body. Celeb."

"Why you?"

"Come on, Finn, that's what I'm here to ask you."

"Swain tell you it's 3Jane?"

"No. But my console cowboy in London did."

Kumiko's knees ached.

"The kid. Where'd you come by her?"

"She turned up at Swain's place. Yanaka wanted her out of Tokyo. Swain owes him giri."

"She's clean, anyway, no implants. What I get out of Tokyo lately, Yanaka has his hands full ... "

Kumiko shivered in the dark.

"And the rip, the Celeb?" the Finn continued.

She felt Sally hesitate. "Angela Mitchell."

The pink metronome swinging silently, left to right, right to left.

"It's cold here, Finn."

"Yeah. Wish I could feel it. I just took a little trip on your behalf. Memory Lane. You know much about where Angie comes from?"

"No."

"I'm in the oracle game, honey, not a research library ... Her father was Christopher Mitchell. He was the big shit in biochip research at Mass Biolabs. She grew up in a sealed compound of theirs in Arizona, company kid. About seven years ago, something happened down there. The street said Hosaka fielded a team of pros to help Mitchell make a major career move. The fax said there was a megaton blast on Maas property, but nobody ever found any radiation. Never found Hosaka's mercs, either. Maas announced that Mitchell was dead, suicide."

"That's the library. What's the oracle know?"

"Rumors. Nothing that hangs together on a line. Street said she turned up here a day or two after the blast in Arizona, got in with some very weird spades who worked out of New Jersey."

"Worked what?"

"They dealt. 'Ware, mostly. Buying, selling. Sometimes they bought from me ... "

"How were they weird?"

"Hoodoos. Thought the matrix was full of mambos 'n'shit. Wanna know something, Moll?"

"What?"

"They're right."

She came out of it like somebody had thrown a switch.

Didn't open her eyes. She could hear them talking in another room. Hurt lots of places but not any worse than the wiz had. The bad crash, that was gone, or maybe muted by whatever they'd given her, that spray.

Paper smock coarse against her nipples; they felt big and tender and her breasts felt full. Little lines of pain tweaking across her face, twin dull aches in her eyesockets, sore rough feeling in her mouth and a taste of blood.

"I'm not trying to tell you your business," Gerald was saying, above a running tap and a rattle of metal, like he was washing pans or something, "but you're kidding yourself if you think she'd fool anyone who didn't want to be fooled. It's really a very superficial job." Prior said something she couldn't make out. "I said superficial, not shoddy. That's quality work, all of it. Twenty-four hours on a dermal stimulator and you won't know she's been here. Keep her on the antibiotics and off stimulants; her immune system isn't all it could be." Then Prior again, but she still couldn't catch it.

Opened her eyes but there was only the ceiling, white squares of acoustic tile. Turned her head to the left. White plastic wall with one of those fake windows, hi-rez animation of a beach with palm trees and waves; watch the water long enough and you'd see the same waves rolling in, looped, forever. Except the thing was broken or worn out, a kind of hesitation in the waves, and the red of the sunset pulsed like a bad fluorescent tube.

Try right. Turning again, feeling the sweaty paper cover on the hard foam pillow against her neck ...

And the face with bruised eyes looking at her from the other bed, nose braced with clear plastic and micropore tape, some kind of brown jelly stuff smeared back across the cheekbones ...

Angie. It was Angie's face, framed by the reflected sunset stutter of the defective window.