Seat 23E remained empty as Chia waited for takeoff, sucking on a peppermint the flight attendant had given her. The only empty seat on the plane, she figured. If nobody arrived to take it, she thought, she’d be able to fold the armrest away and curl up there. She tried putting out a negative mental field, a vibe that would keep anyone from getting on at the last minute and sitting there. Zona Rosa was into that, part of her whole girl-gang martial arts thing. Chia didn’t see how you could seriously believe it would work.

And it didn’t, because here came that blond down the aisle, and wasn’t that an eye-click of recognition Chia saw there?

It had been a weeknight, a Wednesday, when Laney had last seen Kathy Torrance, and her tattoo had not been visible. She’d stood there in the Cage, screaming as he cleaned out his locker. She was wearing an Armani blazer cut from gun-metal fustian, its matching skirt concealing the sign from outer space. A single strand of pearls was visible at the open throat of her white, man-tailored blouse. Her dress uniform. Called on the carpet for her subordinate’s defection.

He knew that she was screaming because her mouth was open, but the syllables of her rage couldn’t penetrate the seamless hissing surf of the white-noise generator provided by his lawyers. He’d been advised to wear the generator at all times, during this last visit to the Slitscan offices. He’d been instructed to make no statements. Certainly he would hear none.

And later he would sometimes wonder exactly how she might have framed her fury. Some restatement of her theory of celebrity and the nature of its price, of Slitscan’s place in that, of Laney’s inability to function there? Or would she have focused on his treason? But he hadn’t heard; he’d only put these things he didn’t really want into a corrugated plastic carton that still smelled faintly of Mexican oranges. The notebook, screen cracked now, useless, that he’d carried through college. Insulated mug with the Nissan County logo peeling away. Notes he’d made on paper, counter to office policy. A coffeestained fax from a woman he’d slept with in Ixtapa, someone whose initials couldn’t be deciphered now and whose name he’d forgotten. Pointless pieces of the self, destined for a cannister in the building’s parking lot. But he’d leave nothing here, and Kathy kept on screaming.

Now, in Death Cube K, he imagined that she’d told him that he’d never work in that town again, and indeed it seemed he might not. Disloyalty to one’s employers being a particularly difficult notch on anyone’s ticket, and perhaps particularly so, in that town, when the act itself had sprung from what Laney recalled had once been called scruples.

The word itself striking him now as singularly ridiculous.

“You smiled.” Blackwell staring at him from across the tiny table.

“Seratonin depletion.”

“Food,” said Blackwell.

“I’m not really hungry.”

“Need to carbo-load,” Blackwell said, standing. He took up a remarkable amount of space.

Laney and Yamazaki got to their feet and followed Blackwell down out of Death Cube K, to descend the O My Golly Building itself. Out of roach-light, into the chrome and neon gulch of Roppongi Dori. A reek of putrid fish and fruit even in this chill damp night, though muted somewhat by the baking-sugar sweetness of Chinese gasohol from the vehicles whirring past on the expressway. But there was comfort in the steady voice of traffic, and Laney found it better to be upright, moving.

If he kept moving, perhaps he could puzzle out the meaning of Keith Alan Blackwell and Shinya Yamazaki.

Blackwell leading the way across a pedestrian overpass. Laney’s hand brushed an irregularity on the alloy rail. He saw that it was an accidental fold or pucker in a bright little sticker; a bare-breasted girl smiling up at him from a palm-sized silvery hologram. As his angle of vision changed, she seemed to gesture at the telephone number above her head. The railing, end to end, was dressed with these small ads, though there were precise gaps where a few had been peeled away for later perusal.

Blackwell’s bulk parted the sidewalk crowd on the far side like a freighter through a bobbing stream of pleasure craft. “Carbohydrates,” he said, over a mountainous shoulder. He steered them down an alley, a narrow maw of colored light, past an all-night veterinary clinic in whose window a pair of white-gowned surgeons were performing an operation on what Laney hoped was a cat. A relaxed little tableau of pedestrians paused here, observing from the pavement.

Blackwell eased himself edgewise into a bright cave, where steam rose from cookers behind a counter of reconstituted granite.

Laney and Yamazaki followed him in, the counterman already ladling out fragrant messes of broth-slick beige to the Australian’s order.

Laney watched Blackwell raise the bowl to his mouth and apparently inhale the bulk of his noodles, severing them from the remainder with a neat snap of his bright plastic teeth. Muscles in the man’s thick neck worked mightily as he swallowed.

Laney stared.

Blackwell wiped his mouth with the back of one vast and pinkly jigsawed hand. He belched. “Give us one of those baby tubes of Dry…” He downed the entire beer in a single swallow, absently crushing the sturdy steel can as though it were a paper cup. “Similar,” he said, rattling his bowl for the counterman.

Laney, suddenly ravenous in spite or because of this gluttonous display, gave his attention to his own bowl, where dyed pink slices of mystery meat, thin as paper, basked atop a sargasso of noodles.

Laney ate in silence, as did Yamazaki, Blackwell downing another three beers to no apparent effect. As Laney drank off the remaining broth, and put his bowl down on the counter, he noticed an ad behind the counter for something called Apple Shires Authentic Fine Fruit Beverage. Misreading it initially as Alison Shires, once the object of his scruples.

“Taste the wet warm life in Apple Shires,” the ad advised.

Alison Shires, glimpsed first as animated headshots, five months into his time at Slitscan, had been a rather ordinarily attractive girl murmuring her stats to imagined casting directors, agents, someone, anyone.

Kathy Torrance had watched his face, as he watched the screen. “ ‘Babed out’ yet, Laney? Allergic reaction to cute? First symptoms are a sort of underlying irritation, a resentment, a vague but persistent feeling that you’re being gotten at, taken advantage of…”

“She isn’t even as ‘cute’ as the last two.”

“Exactly. She’s almost normal-looking. Almost a civilian. Tag her.”

Laney looked up. “What for?”

“Tag her. He could get off pretending she’s a waitress or something.”

“You think she’s the one?”

“You’ve got another three hundred in there easy, Laney. Picking probables is a start.”

“At random?”

“We call it ‘instinct.’ Tag her.”

Laney cursor-clicked, the pale blue arrow resting by chance in the shadowed orbit of the girl’s lowered eye. Marking her for closer examination as the possible sometime partner of a very publicly married actor, famous in a way that Kathy Torrance understood and approved of. One who must obey the dictates of the food chain. Not too big for Slitscan to swallow. But he or his handlers had so far been very cautious. Or very lucky.

But no more. A rumor had reached Kathy, via one of those ‘back channels’ she depended on, and now the food chain must have its way.

“Wake up,” Blackwell said. “You’re falling asleep in your bowl. Time you tell us how you lost your last job, if we’re going to offer you another.”

“Coffee,” Laney said.