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Crossing the arcade to stand beside her, high on the deal he'd made, he saw her glance up. Gray eyes rimmed with smudged black paintstick. Eyes of some animal pinned in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.

The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he'd frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat.

An angel passed. The Chinese, bellowed a drunken Australian, Chinese bloody invented nerve-splicing. Give me the mainland for a nerve job any day. Fix you right, mate.... Now that, Case said to his glass, all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile, that is so much bullshit. The Japanese had already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn't repair the damage he'd suffered in that Memphis hotel.

All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void....

Dedication to commerce? The bartender's small brown eyes were nested deep in wrinkled flesh. I think I liked you better, with her. You laughed more. Now, some night, you get maybe too artistic, you wind up in the clinic tanks, spare parts. You're breaking my heart, Ratz. He finished his beer, paid and left, high narrow shoulders hunched beneath the rainstained khaki nylon of his windbreaker.