Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. His total assets were quickly converted to New Yen, a fat sheaf of the old paper currency that circulated endlessly through the closed circuit of the world's black markets like the seashells of the Trobriand islanders.

He smoothed it automatically, under the table, folded it in quarters, and passed it to her. You need that, honey.

Case, good buddy.... He looked up, met gray eyes ringed with paintstick.

The skin below her eyes was pale and unhealthy-looking, but the flesh was still smooth and firm. She was twenty.

Somebody's gotta be funny around here. Sure the fuck isn't you. The whore's giggle went up an octave. Isn't you either, sister. So you vanish, okay?

He stole from his employers. He kept something for himself and tried to move it through a fence in Amsterdam. He still wasn't sure how he'd been discovered, not that it mattered now. He'd expected to die, then, but they only smiled.

No girl? Nothing?

At twenty-two, he'd been a cowboy a rustler, one of the best in the Sprawl. He'd been trained by the best, by McCoy Pauley and Bobby Quine, legends in the biz.

Not if I remember to take my pills, he said, as a tangible wave of longing hit him, lust and loneliness riding in on the wavelength of amphetamine. He remembered the smell of her skin in the overheated darkness of a coffin near the port, her locked across the small of his back.

He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a web work of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone's whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars. Wage was in here early, with two Joe boys, Ratz said, shoving a draft across the bar with his good hand.

He looked back as the plastic door swung shut behind him, saw her eyes reflected in a cage of red neon.

Maybe some business with you, Case? Case shrugged.

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. It's not like I'm using, Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Chat. It's like my body's developed this massive drug deficiency. It was a Sprawl voice and a Sprawl joke.

Man can't have a drink. Ha, Ratz said, swabbing the scarred wood with a rag, Zone shows a percentage. You I let work here for entertainment value. As Case was picking up his beer, one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause. Then the whore's giggle rang out, tinged with a certain hysteria. Ratz grunted.

Their night together stretching into a morning, into tickets at the hover port and his first trip across the Bay. The rain kept up, falling along Harajuku, beading on her plastic jacket, the children of Tokyo trooping past the famous boutiques in white loafers and cling wrap capes, until she'd stood with him in the midnight clatter of a pachinko parlor and held his hand like a child. It took a month for the gestalt of drugs and tension he moved through to turn those perpetually startled eyes into wells of reflexive need.

You get your money, Case, you find Wage quick. I'll see you, Linda, he said, getting up. Sure. A millimeter of white showed beneath each of her pupils. Sanpaku.

He'd operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a byproduct of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the con sensual hallucination that was the matrix. A thief he'd worked for other, wealthier thieves, employers who provided the exotic software required to penetrate the bright walls of corporate systems, opening windows into rich fields of data. He'd made the classic mistake, the one he'd sworn he'd never make.

And that was the part of him, smug in its expectation of death, that most hated the thought of Linda Lee. He'd found her, one rainy night, in an arcade. Under bright ghosts burning through a blue haze of cigarette smoke, holograms of Wizard's Castle, Tank War Europa, the New York skyline.... And now he remembered her that way, her face bathed in restless laser light, features reduced to a code her cheekbones flaring scarlet as Wizard's Castle burned, forehead drenched with azure when Munich fell to the Tank War, mouth touched with hot gold as a gliding cursor struck sparks from the wall of a skyscraper canyon.

Mona. Her new squeeze is one of Wage's boys. I don't owe him enough. He does me, he's out the money anyway. He shrugged.

He'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. He'd watched her track the next hit with a concentration that reminded him of the mantises they sold in stalls along Shiga, beside tanks of blue mutant carp and crickets caged in bamboo.