In Garvey, Case screamed.

"It took you long enough," Riviera said, as he searched her pockets. Her hands vanished at the wrists in a matte black sphere the size of a bowling ball. "I saw a multiple assassination in Ankara," he said, his fingers plucking things from her jacket, "a grenade job. In a pool. It seemed a very weak explosion, but they all died instantly of hydrostatic shock." Case felt her move her fingers experimentally. The material of the ball seemed to offer no more resistance than temperfoam. The pain in her leg was excruciating, impossible. A red moire shifted in her vision. "I wouldn't move them, if I were you." The interior of the ball seemed to tighten slightly. "It's a sex toy Jane bought in Berlin. Wiggle them long enough and it crushes them to a pulp. Variant of the material they make this flooring from. Something to do with the molecules, I suppose. Are you in pain?"

She groaned.

"You seem to have injured your leg." His fingers found the flat packet of drugs in the left back pocket of her jeans. "Well. My last taste from Ali, and just in time."

The shifting mesh of blood began to whirl.

"Hideo," said another voice, a woman's, "she's losing consciousness. Give her something. For that and for the pain. She's very striking, don't you think, Peter? These glasses, are they a fashion where she comes from?"

Cool hands, unhurried, with a surgeon's certainty. The sting of a needle.

"I wouldn't know," Riviera was saying. "I've never seen her native habitat. They came and took me from Turkey."

"The Sprawl, yes. We have interests there. And once we sent Hideo. My fault, really. I'd let someone in, a burglar. He took the family terminal." She laughed. "I made it easy for him. To annoy the others. He was a pretty boy, my burglar. Is she waking, Hideo? Shouldn't she have more?"

"More and she would die," said a third voice.

The blood mesh slid into black. The music returned, horns and piano. Dance music.

C A S E : : : : : : : : : : J A C K O U T : : : : : :

Afterimages of the flashed words danced across Maelcum's eyes and creased forehead as Case removed the trodes.

"You scream, mon, while ago."

"Molly," he said, his throat dry. "Got hurt." He took a white plastic squeeze bottle from the edge of the g-web and sucked out a mouthful of flat water. "I don't like how any of this shit is going."

The little Cray monitor lit. The Finn, against a background of twisted, impacted junk. "Neither do I. We gotta problem."

Maelcum pulled himself up, over Case's head, twisted, and peered over his shoulder. "Now who is that mon, Case?"

"That's just a picture, Maelcum," Case said wearily. "Guy I know in the Sprawl. It's Wintermute talking. Picture's supposed to make us feel at home."

"Bullshit," the Finn said. "Like I told Molly, these aren't masks. I need 'em to talk to you. 'Cause I don't have what you'd think of as a personality, much. But all that's just pissing in the wind, Case, 'cause, like I just said, we gotta problem."

"So express thyself, Mute," Maelcum said.

"Molly's leg's falling off, for starts. Can't walk. How it was supposed to go down, she'd walk in, get Peter out of the way, talk the magic word outa 3Jane, get up to the head, and say it. Now she's blown it. So I want you two to go in after her."

Case stared at the face on the screen. "Us?"

"So who else?"

"Aerol," Case said, "the guy on Babylon Rocker, Maelcum's pal."

"No. Gotta be you. Gotta be somebody who understands Molly, who understands Riviera. Maelcum for muscle."

"You maybe forget that I'm in the middle of a little run, here. Remember? What you hauled my ass out here for. . ."

"Case, listen up. Time's tight. Very tight. Listen. The real link between your deck and Straylight is a sideband broadcast over Garvey's navigation system. You'll take Garvey into a very private dock I'll show you. The Chinese virus has completely penetrated the fabric of the Hosaka. There's nothing in the Hosaka but virus now. When you dock, the virus will be interfaced with the Straylight custodial system and we'll cut the sideband. You'll take your deck, the Flatline, and Maelcum . You'll find 3Jane, get the word out of her, kill Riviera, get the key from Molly. You can keep track of the program by jacking your deck into the Straylight system. I'll handle it for you. There's a standard jack in the back of the head, behind a panel with five zircons."

"Kill Riviera!"

"Kill him."

Case blinked at the representation of the Finn. He felt Maelcum put his hand on his shoulder. "Hey. You forget something." He felt the rage rising, and a kind of glee. "You fucked up. You blew the controls on the grapples when you blew Armitage. Haniwa's got us good and tight. Armitage fried the other Hosaka and the mainframes went with the bridge, right?"

The Finn nodded.

"So we're stuck out here. And that means you're fucked man." He wanted to laugh, but it caught in his throat.

"Case, mon," Maelcum said softly, "Garvey a tug."

"That's right," said the Finn, and smiled.

"You havin' fun in the big world outside?" the construct asked, when Case jacked back in. "Figured that was Wintermute requestin' the pleasure. . ."

"Yeah. You bet. Kuang okay?"

"Bang on. Killer virus."

"Okay. Got some snags, but we're working on it."

"You wanna tell me, maybe?"

"Don't have time."

"Well, boy, never mind me, I'm just dead anyway."

"Fuck off," Case said, and flipped, cutting off the tornfingernail edge of the Flatline's laughter.

"She dreamed of a state involving very little in the way of individual consciousness," 3Jane was saying. She cupped a large cameo in her hand, extending it toward Molly. The carved profile was very much like her own. "Animal bliss. I think she viewed the evolution of the forebrain as a sort of sidestep." She withdrew the brooch and studied it, tilting it to catch the light at different angles. "Only in certain heightened modes would an individual – a clan member – suffer the more painful aspects of self-awareness. . ."

Molly nodded. Case remembered the injection. What had they given her? The pain was still there, but it came through as a tight focus of scrambled impressions. Neon worms writhing in her thigh, the touch of burlap, smell of frying krill – his mind recoiled from it. If he avoided focusing on it, the impressions overlapped, became a sensory equivalent of white noise. If it could do that to her nervous system, what would her frame of mind be?

Her vision was abnormally clear and bright, even sharper than usual. Things seemed to vibrate, each person or object tuned to a minutely different frequency. Her hands, still locked in the black ball, were on her lap. She sat in one of the pool chairs, her broken leg propped straight in front of her on a camelskin hassock. 3Jane sat opposite, on another hassock, huddled in an oversized djellaba of unbleached wool. She was very young.

"Where'd he go?" Molly asked. "To take his shot?"

3Jane shrugged beneath the folds of the pale heavy robe and tossed a strand of dark hair away from her eyes. "He told me when to let you in," she said. "He wouldn't tell me why. Everything has to be a mystery. Would you have hurt us?"

Case felt Molly hesitate. "I would've killed him. I'd've tried to kill the ninja. Then I was supposed to talk with you."

"Why?" 3Jane asked, tucking the cameo back into one of the djellaba's inner pockets. "And why? And what about?"

Molly seemed to be studying the high, delicate bones, the wide mouth, the narrow hawk nose. 3Jane's eyes were dark, curiously opaque. "Because I hate him," she said at last, "and the why of that's just the way I'm wired, what he is and what I am."

"And the show," 3Jane said. "I saw the show."

Molly nodded.

"But Hideo?"

"Because they're the best. Because one of them killed a partner of mine, once."