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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.

And he was going to need it. Because-still smiling-they were going to make sure he never worked again. They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.

It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic. You are too much the artiste, Herr Case. Ratz grunted; the sound served him as laughter. He scratched his overhang of white-shirted belly with the pink claw.

I saw your girl last night, Ratz said, passing Case his second Kirin. I don't have one, he said, and drank. Miss Linda Lee. Case shook his head.

The bartender's smile widened. His ugliness was the stuff of legend.

You watch your back, man. He nodded, anxious to be gone.