"I've broken the heel of my boot ... " She hobbled back into the shop and sat down beside Colin on the horsehair sofa. The assistant came fussing up to help.

"Get 'em off quick," Colin advised, "before Dickie puts his parcels down."

She unzipped the boot with the broken heel, then the other, pulled off both. In place of the coarse Chinese silk she usually wore in winter, her feet were sheathed in thin black rubber toe-socks with ridged plastic soles. She nearly ran between Dick's legs as she cleared the door, but instead her shoulder struck his thigh as she squeezed past, toppling him into a display of faceted crystal decanters.

And then she was free, plunging through the press of tourists down Portobello Road.

Her feet were very cold, but the ridged plastic soles provided excellent traction -- though not on ice, she reminded herself, picking herself up from her second spill, wet grit against her palms. Colin had directed her down this narrow passage of blackened brick ...

She grasped the unit. "Where next?"

"This way," he said.

"I want the Rose and Crown," she reminded him.

"You want to be careful. Dickie'll have Swain's men here by now, not to mention the sort of hunt that friend of Swain's from Special Branch could mount if he's asked to. And I can't imagine why he shouldn't be asked to ... "

She entered the Rose and Crown by a side door, Colin at her elbow, grateful for the snug gloom and irradiating warmth that seemed central to the idea of these drinking-burrows. She was struck by the amount of padding on the walls and seats, by the muffling curtains. If the colors and fabrics had been less dingy, the effect would somehow have been less warm. Pubs, she guessed, were an extreme expression of the British attitude toward gomi.

At Colin's urging, she made her way through the drinkers clustered in front of the bar, hoping to find Tick.

"What'll it be, dear?"

She looked up into the broad blond face behind the bar, bright lipstick and rouged cheeks. "Excuse me," Kumiko began, "I wish to speak with Mr. Bevan -- "

"Mine's a pint, Alice," someone said, slapping down three ten-pound coins, "lager." Alice worked a tall white ceramic lever, filling a mug with pale beer. She put the mug on the scarred bar and swept the money into a rattling till behind the counter.

"Someone wanting a word, Bevan," Alice said, as the man lifted his pint.

Kumiko looked up at a flushed, seamed face. The man's upper lip was short; Kumiko thought of rabbits, though Bevan was large, nearly as large as Petal. He had a rabbit's eyes as well: round, brown, showing very little white. "With me?" His accent reminded her of Tick's.

"Tell him yes," Colin said. "He can't think why a little Jap girl in rubber socks has come into the drinker looking for him."

"I wish to find Tick."

Bevan regarded her neutrally over the rim of his raised pint. "Sorry," he said, "can't say I know anyone by the name." He drank.

"Sally told me I should find you if Tick wasn't here. Sally Shears ... "

Bevan choked on his lager, his eyes showing a fraction of white. Coughing, he set the mug on the bar and took a handkerchief from his overcoat pocket. He blew his nose and wiped his mouth.

"I'm on duty in five," he said. "Best step in the back."

Alice raised a hinged section of the bar; Bevan ushered Kumiko through with small flapping motions of his large hands, glancing quickly over his shoulder. He guided her down a narrow passage that opened off the area behind the bar. The walls were brick, old and uneven, thickly coated with dirty green paint. He stopped beside a battered steel hamper heaped with terry bar towels that reeked of beer.

"You'll regret it if you're on a con, girl," he said. "Tell me why you're looking for this Tick."

"Sally is in danger. I must find Tick. I must tell him."

"Fucking hell," the barman said. "Put yourself in my position ... "

Colin wrinkled his nose at the hamper of sodden towels.

"Yes?" Kumiko said.

"If you're a nark, and I sent you to find this Tick fellow, assuming I did know him, and he's on some sort of blag, then he'd do for me, wouldn't he? But if you're not, then this Sally, she'd likely do for me if I don't, understand?"

Kumiko nodded. " 'Between the rock and the hard place.' " It was an idiom Sally had used; Kumiko found it very poetic.

"Quite," Bevan said, giving her an odd look.

"Help me. She is in very great danger."

He ran his palm back across thinning ginger-colored hair.

"You will help me," she heard herself say, feeling her mother's cold mask click into place, "Tell me where to find Tick."

The barman seemed to shiver, though it was overly warm in the passageway, a steamy warmth, beer smell mingling with raw notes of disinfectant. "D'you know London?"

Colin winked at her. "I can find my way," she said.

"Bevan," Alice said, putting her head around the corner, "the filth."

"Police," Colin translated.

"Margate Road, SW2," Bevan said, "dunno the number, dunno his phone."

"Let him show you out the back now," Colin said. "Those are no ordinary policemen."

Kumiko would always remember her endless ride through the city's Underground. How Colin led her from the Rose and Crown to Holland Park, and down, explaining that her MitsuBank chip was worse than useless now; if she used it for a cab, or any sort of purchase, he said, some Special Branch operator would see the transaction flare like magnesium on the grid of cyberspace. But she had to find Tick, she told him; she had to find Margate Road. He frowned No, he said wait till dark; Brixton wasn't far, but the streets were too dangerous now, by daylight, with the police on Swain's side. But where could she hide? she asked. She had very little cash; the concept of currency, of coins and paper notes, was quaint and alien.

Here, he said, as she rode a lift down into Holland Park. "For the price of a ticket."

The bulgy silver shapes of the trains.

The soft old seats in gray and green.

And warm, beautifully warm; another burrow, here in the realm of ceaseless movement ...

The airport sucked a groggy Danielle Stark away down a pastel corridor lined with reporters, cameras, augmented eyes, while Porphyre and three Net security men swept Angie through the closing ring of journalists, a choreographed piece of ritual that had more to do with providing dramatic visuals than protection. Anyone present had already been cleared by security and the PR department.

Then she was alone with Porphyre in an express elevator, on their way to the heliport the Net maintained on the terminal's roof.

As the doors opened, into gusts of wet wind across brilliantly lit concrete, where a new trio of security men waited in giant fluorescent-orange parkas, Angie remembered her first glimpse of the Sprawl, when she'd ridden the train up from Washington with Turner.

One of the orange parkas ushered them across an expanse of spotless concrete to the waiting helicopter, a large twin-prop Fokker finished in black chrome. Porphyre led the way up the spidery, matte-black stairway. She followed without looking back.

She had something now, a new determination. She'd decided to contact Hans Becker through his agent in Paris. Continuity had the number. It was time, time to make something happen. And she'd make something happen with Robin as well; he'd be waiting now, she knew, at the hotel.

The helicopter told them to fasten their seatbelts.

As they lifted off, there was virtual silence in the soundproofed cabin, only a throbbing in the bones, and for a strange second she seemed able to hold the whole of her life in mind and know it, see it for what it had been. And it was this, she thought, that the dust had drifted over and concealed, and that had been freedom from pain.