"I could take you too," she offered.

At that moment, Alice Nylon stepped round the trunk of the Cadillac. "Paulie wants you to know he's had it with you, Vic," she said formally. She thought for a moment. "We been good friends you and me, and I'm sorry I got to do this." Even with Vic sitting on the floor, she had to point her gun up at his face, gripping it hard in both hands and squinting one eye across the sights at him. "But I'm being as tuff about it as I can."

"For fuck's sake, Alice," they heard Paulie call out, "just kill him. I got a right to feel betrayed here."

"You can see his point," Vic told Alice. "Paulie should be on his way home to Beddington Gardens now, in the hope he can get baked enough to forget what's happening to him."

"Fuck you," DeRaad said. "I heard that."

During all of the foregoing, Paulie had walked about nervously, sweating and gesturing; or sat on the concrete for a minute or two with his hands between his knees and followed everything that was going on, his expression quiet and knowing. He stared up at the Baltic Exchange building, then down at his own skin, leaden and white at the same time, and as shiny as if it had a resin laminate, and, once, across at the site. He said, "I think it's in my legs. I can feel it in my legs somehow." Then he was up again and lurching around, thrusting his face into the face of Aschemann the police detective, to whom he spoke only when he needed a break from sneering at Vic Serotonin. "You and me, Lens, we're above this crap," he said. He examined the facade of the Baltic Exchange once more, as though puzzled by its iron pillars, its rows of windows in the blue-grey weather light. Then he added:

"We're at another level from crap like this."

Aschemann's arrival on the Lots had nothing to do with Paulie DeRaad; it had, especially, nothing to do with DeRaad's myth-odology. So when Paulie spoke to him like this, he couldn't think what to say in return, but stood with the rain in his white hair, feeling disarranged and contentless, while smoke from the wrecked vehicle caught in his throat and Paulie shouted in his ear. Nothing was happening for Aschemann's intelligence to get leverage on; it wasn't his kind of situation. In a moment everyone might be dead. "Paulie," he managed to say finally, "things here have tipped in the worst possible direction." But Paulie's attention had wavered and moved on. A level of ADHD was written into his cuts, as a professional requirement. He indicated the policewoman, locked in her inexplicable fugue out on the Lots; shook his head to illustrate that, despite his depth of experience, even he could be at a loss.

"Lens, those chops of hers aren't military," he guessed.

"She came to me from Sport Crime," Aschemann admitted, glad to find something they could talk about, "on a one-month trial. God knows what she had them do to her there."

At last Paulie looked worried. "Shit," he said.

"To be fair, she drives well and she's good at languages."

"I got connexions could switch her off," Paulie offered. "If that's the problem."

Aschemann had a clear little vision of DeRaad's connexions, floating in restless fragmentary orbits somewhere miles above, dipping down at random so their stochastic resonance software could slice through the electromagnetic clutter from the event site. Unlike him, they knew exactly where they were; where everything was. Miles away seemed too close. "Paulie, Paulie, you frighten me!" he said, although it wasn't Paulie he could see so well in his mind's eye. "I won't need that," he promised hastily. "It's generous of you to offer, but I won't need that." He dialled up the assistant again. "For God's sake, answer," he begged her. He was already opening a second pipe in case he needed more help. Meanwhile, he laid his hand on DeRaad's upper arm in what was intended to be a reassuring gesture.

Of late, Paulie's tailoring package had been preoccupied. Its dialogue with the daughter-code wasn't going well. Nanopatches bolted on to Paulie's adaptive immune system, back in the El Rayo X glory days, had not held up. Now the daughter was chewing its way through the system itself (slowed only by the discovery that in Paulie's case the military Zip had used, in place of the usual im-munoglobins, proteins with leucine-rich repeats generated from lamprey DNA). Nevertheless the package overall had been excellent in its day, and despite these difficulties remained aware enough of the world outside Paulie to misinterpret Aschemann's motives. Nerve impulse propagation speeds ramped up by factors of four; simple instructions were issued to the rags of Paulie's central nervous system. The conscious mind processes at forty bits a second, the CNS at millions. Disorder is infinitely deep. Before he even knew he what he was doing, Paulie DeRaad had kicked the detective twice in the upper torso and once each in the throat and left ear. He looked down. He looked surprised. He shrugged and said, "Fuck you, Lens."

Then he said, "Hey, I honestly didn't mean to do that. Sorry."

Across the concrete, the policewoman woke up in a startled way and looked around her just in time to see Aschemann stumble backwards and fall over. She took a generous millisecond to assess the situation, then disappeared into the weather and reappeared quite suddenly in front of Alice Nylon.

"Uh oh," Alice said.

The assistant smiled and let her tailoring take over. After it had finished with Alice, it blurred its way over to Paulie DeRaad and put him down too. Then somehow she was back on Vic's side of things again, kneeling shoulder-to-shoulder with him, so close he could feel her skin on his, staring in the same direction as him- her body quivering, the air around her soupy with waste heat from her mitochondrial add-ons and exotic ATP transport upgrades- as if she wanted to see exactly what Vic was seeing. She smelled as sharp and sour as an animal cage. She had a look on her face he couldn't interpret. She was smiling. "Come on, Vic Testosterone," she whispered. "Try me out. Show me your special move." Vic shivered. He kept as still as he could. The minutes passed. He closed his eyes until he felt her chops shut down and she laughed and ran one finger lightly across the pulse in his neck and said, "Hey, Vic, you're safe now," and moved away. Next time he saw her she had dragged Aschemann into the back of the Cadillac, where she could work on him out of the weather. Except for the datableed running its perpetual Chinese Chequers down her forearm, she seemed so ordinary. She was some Sport Crime tailor's experiment or joke, laid like an ambush for people like Vic. She was something new.

Vic had a struggle to get to his feet.

He felt cold and stiff from sitting in the rain.

Alice Nylon lay in a shallow puddle, one arm flung out, her blue slicker ballooning up intermittently in the wind to reveal pink pedal-pushers. Her hat had fallen off. A single line of blood ran from the left corner of her mouth. Alice had bitten her tongue when she fell, but the damage was elsewhere. Vic found guarding in the muscles of the abdomen and lower back-she was as hard as a pear down there. The whites of her eyes were yellow. His diagnosis, the spleen had let go; there were ruptures to other organs too. Not a mark on her, but everything was pureed inside. Her eyes looked tired, her teeth were rotten from speed use, her spoiled, peaky, unlined little face looked very old.

"Shit, Alice," he said.

Her eyes opened. "I lost my gun, Vic," she whispered.

"Paulie will buy you a new one."

"You know what?" she said.

"What, Alice?"

"Me and Map Boy did it. We had a fuck, Vic!"

She chuckled. A small convulsion went through her.

"I'm that bit younger than him," she said, "so I wasn't so interested. But he's nice enough, and at least I got to do it before I died. Vic, you ever meet Map Boy?"