"You don't want to talk about it?"

Laney looked up from his empty cup, meeting Blackwell's eyes across the table.

WUhi~im (Uk "I've never really told this to anyone," he said, and it was true.

"Let's walk," Blackwell said, and stood, his hulk seeming to li't effirtlessly, as though he were a heliLim Parade float. l.aney wondered what time it might be, here or in L.A. Yamazaki was taking care of the bill.

He left Amos 'n' Andes with them, out into a falling mist that wasn't quite rain, the sidewalk a bobbing stream of black umbrellas. Yamazaki produced a black object no larger than a business card, slightly thicker, and flexed it sharply hetween his thumbs. A black umbrella flowered. Yamazaki handed it to him. The curve of the black handle felt dry and hollow and very slightly warm.

"How do you fold it?"

"You don't," Yamazaki said. "It goes away." He opened another for himself. 1-lairless Blackwell, in his micropore, was evidently immune to rain. "Please continue with your account, Mr. Laney."

Through a gap between two distant towers, Laney glimpsed the side of another, taller building. He saw vast faces there, vaguely familiar, contorted in inexplicable drama.

The nondisclosure agreement Laney had signed was intended to cover any incidences of Slitscan using its connections with DatAmerica in ways that might be construed as violations of the law. Such incidences, in Laney's experience, were frequent to the point of being constant, at least at certain advanced levels of research. Since DatAmerica had been Laney's previous employer, he hadn't found any of this particularly startling. DatAmerica was less a power than a territory; in many ways it was a law unto itself.

Laney's protracted survey of Alison Shires had already involved any number of crjmiI~a1 violations, one of which had provided him with the codes required to open the door into her building's foyer, activate the elevator, unlock the door of her fifth-floor apartment, and

55.

cancel the private security alarm that would automatically warrant an armed response if she did these things without keying in two extra digits. This last was intended as insurance against endemic home invasion, a crime in which residents were accosted in parking garages and induced to surrender their codes. Alison Shires' code consisted of her month, date, and year of birth, something any security service strongly advised against. Her back-up code was 23, her age the year before, when she'd moved in and become a subscriber.

Laney softly reciting these as he stood before her building, its eight-story facade feinting toward someone's idea of Tudor Revival. Everything looking so sharply and comprehensively detailed, in these first moments of an L.A. dawn.

"So," Blackwell supposed, "you just walked in. Punched up her codes and bang, there you were." The three of them waiting to cross at an intersection.

-Bang.

No sound at all in the mirrored foyer. A sense of vacuum. A dozen Laneys reflected there as he crossed an expanse of new carpet. Into an elevator smelling of something floral, where he used part of the code again. It took him straight to five. The door slid open. More new carpet. Beneath a fresh coat of cream enamel the corridor's walls displayed the faint irregularities of old-fashioned plaster.

502.

"What do you think you're doing?" Laney asked aloud, though whether to himself or to Alison Shires he did not nor would he ever know.

The bra.s.s round of an antique security fish-eye regarded him from the door, partially occluded by a cataract of pale paint.

The key-pad was set flush with the door's steel frame, not quite 56 NiHiarn Gab~on level with the fish-eye. I-Ic watched his finger finding its way through the sequence.

But Alison Shires, naked, opened the door before the code could key, Upful (iroupvine soaring joyfully behind her as Laney grabbed her blood-slick wrists. And saw there in her eyes what he took then and forever as a look of simple recognition, not even of blame.

"This isn't working," she said, as though she were indicating a minor appliance, and Laney heard himself whimper, a sound he hadn't made since childhood. He needed to see those wrists, but couldn't, holding her. He was walking her backward, toward a wicker armchair he wasn't even aware he'd seen.

"Sit," he said, as if to a stubborn child, and she did. He let go of her wrists. Ran for where he guessed the bathroom had to be. Towels there and some kind of tape.

And discovered himself kneeling beside her where she sat, red fingers curled in toward red palms, as if in meditation. He rolled a dark green hand towel around her left wrist and whipped the tape around it, some rubbery beige product meant to mask specific areas during the application of aerosol cosmetics. He knew that from her product-purchase data.

Were her fingers turning blue, beneath their coat of red? He looked up. Into that same recognition. One cheekbone brushed with blood.

"Don't," he said.

"It's slowing."

Laney wrapping her right forearm now, the tape-roll dangling from his teeth.

"I missed the artery."

"Don't move," Laney said, and sprang up, tripping over his own feet, crashing face-first into what he recognized, just before it broke his nose, as the work of the editor of lamps. The carpet seemed to whip up and smack him playfully in the face.

"Alison-"

57.

Her ankle stepping past him, kitchenward. "Alison, sit down!"

'Sorry,' he thought he heard her say, and then the shot.

Blackwell's shoulders heaved as he sighed, making a sound that Laney heard above the traffic, Yamazaki's gla.s.ses were filled with jittering pastels, the walls here all neon, a glare to shame Vegas, every surface lit and jumping.

Blackwell was staring at Laney. "This way," he said, finally, and rounded a corner, into relative darkness and an edge of urine. Laney followed, Yamazaki behind him. At the far end of the narrow pa.s.sage, they emerged into fairyland.

No neon here at all. Ambient glow from the towers overhead. Austere rectangles of white frosted gla.s.s, the size of large greeting cards, were daubed with black ideograms, each sign marking a tiny structure like some antique bathing cabin on a forgotten beach. Crowded shoulder to shoulder down one side of the cobbled lane, their miniature facades suggested a shuttered sideshow in some secret urban carnival. Age-silvered cedar, oiled paper, matting; nothing to pin the place in time but the fact that the signs were electric.

Laney stared. A street built by leprechauns.

"Golden Street," said Keith Alan Blackwell.

58 S.

Chia deplaned behind Maryalice, who'd had a couple of those vitamin drinks and then tied up one of the toilets for twenty minutes while she teased her extensions and put on lipstick and mascara. Chia couldn't say much for the result, which looked less like Ashleigh Mo-dine Carter than something Ashleigh Modine Carter had slept on.

When Chia stood up, she felt like she had to tell her body to do every single thing she needed it to. Legs: move.

She'd gotten a few more hours sleep, somewhere back there. She'd packed her Sandbenders back in her bag, and now she was putting one foot in front of the other, as Maryalice, in front of her, shuffle-swayed along the narrow aisle in her white cowboy boots.

It seemed to take forever to get out of the plane, but then they were breathing airport air in a corridor, under big logos that Chia had known all her life, all those j.a.panese companies, and everything crowded and moving in one direction. "You check anything?" Maryalice asked, beside her.

'No,' Chiasaid.

Maryalice let Chia go ahead of her through Pa.s.sport Control, where Chia gave the j.a.panese policeman her pa.s.sport and the Cash-flow smartcard Zona Rosa had forced Kelsey to come up with because this was all Kelseys idea anyway. In theory, the amount in the card represented the bulk of the Seattle chapter's treasury, but Chia suspected Kelsey would wind up footing the bill for the whole thing, and probably wouldn't even care.0