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In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug.

But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like live wire voodoo and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.

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.

New lines of pain were starting to etch themselves permanently at the corners of her mouth.