2.

59.

3.Narita The policeman pulled her pa.s.sport out of the counter-slot and handed it back to her. He hadn't bothered to check the smartcard. "Two week maximum stay," he said, and nodded her on.

Frosted gla.s.s slid open for her. It was crowded here, way more than SeaTac. So many planes mustve come in at once, to have all these people waiting for their luggage. She edged aside to let a little robot stacked with suitcases pa.s.s. It had dirty pink rubber tires and big cartoon eyes that rolled morosely as it made its way through the crowd.

"Now, that was easy," said Maryalice, behind her. Chia turned in time to see her take a long deep breath, hold it, and let it out. Maryalice's eyes looked pinched, like she was having a headache.

"Do you know which way I should go to get the train?" Chia asked. She had maps in her Sandbenders, but she didn't want to have to get it out now.

"This way,' Maryalice said.

Maryalice worked her way between people, Chia following with her bag under her arm. Emerging in front of a carousel where bags were sliding down a ramp, b.u.mping, swinging past and away.

"Here's one," Maryalice said, snagging a black one and sounding so forcefully cheerful that it made Chia look at her. "And ... two." Another one like it, except this one had a sticker on the side from Nissan County, the third largest gated attraction in the Californias. "Would you mind carrying this for me, honey? My back goes our on long plane rides." Pa.s.sing Chia the bag with the sticker. It wasn't too heavy, like maybe it was only half-full of clothes. But it was too large for her; she had to lean over in the opposite direction to keep it off the ground.

"Thanks," Maryalice said. "Here," and she handed Chia a crumpled square of sticky-backed paper with a bar code on it. "That's the check. Now we just want to go this way.

It was even harder getting through the crowd, lugging Mary-alice's bag. Chia had to concentrate on not stepping on people's feet, and not b.u.mping them too hard with the bag, and the next thing she 60 knew, shed lost Maryalice. She looked around, expecting to see hair- extensions bobbing above the crowd, who were mostly shorter than Maryalice, but Maryalice was nowhere in sight.

ALL ARRIVING Pa.s.sENGERS MUST EXIT THROUGH CUSTOMS.

Chia watched the sign twist itself up into j.a.panese letters, then pop back out as English.

Well, that was the way to go. She got in line behind a man in a red leather jacket that said Concept Collision" across the back in gray chenille letters. Chia stared at that, imagining concepts colliding, which she guessed was a concept in itself, but then she thought it was probably just the name of a company that fixed cars, or one of those slogans the j.a.panese made up in English, the ones that almost seemed to mean something but didn't. This trans-Pacific jet lag thing was serious.

'Next.'

They were feeding Concept Collision's suitcase through a machine the size of a double bed, but taller. There was an official of some kind in a video-helmet, evidently reading feed off the scanners, and another policeman, to take your pa.s.sport, slot it in the machine, then put your bags through. Chia let him take Maryalice's suitcase and flip it up, onto the conveyor. Chia handed him her carry-on. "There's a computer in there. This scan okay for that?" He didn't seem to hear her. She watched her carry-on follow Maryalice's bag into the machine.

The man in the helmet, eyes hidden, was bobbing his head from side to side as he accessed gaze-activated menus.

"Baggage check," the policeman said, and Chia remembered she had it in her hand. It struck her as strange, handing it over, that Maryalice had thought to give her that. The policeman ran a hand-scanner over it.

"You packed these bags yourself?" asked the man in the helmet.

He couldn't see her directly, but she a.s.sumed he could see the clips stored in her pa.s.sport, and he could probably see her on live feed as3 well. Airports were full of cameras.o

2.

01.

"Yes," Chia said, deciding it was easier than trying to explain that it was Maryalice's bag, not hers. She tried to read the expression on the helmeted man's lips, but it was hard to say if he even had one.

"You packed this?"

"Yes Chia said, not sounding nearly as certain this time.

The helmet bobbed.

"Next," he said.

Chia went to the other end of the machine and collected her bag and the black suitcase,

Through another sliding wall of frosted gla.s.s: she was in a larger hall, beneath a higher ceiling, bigger ads overhead but no thinning of the crowd, Maybe this wasn't so much a matter of crowds as it was of Tokyo, maybe of j.a.pan in general: more people, closer together.

More of those robot baggage carts. She wondered what it cost to rent one. You could lie down on top of your luggage, maybe, tell it where you wanted to go, and then just go to sleep. Except she wasn't sure she felt sleepy, exactly. She transferred Maryalice's bag from her left to her right hand, wondering what to do with it if she didn't find Maryalice inside the next, say, five minutes. She'd had enough of airports and the s.p.a.ce between them, and she wasn't even sure where she was supposed to sleep tonight. Or if it was night, even.

She was looking up, hoping to find some kind of time display, when a hand closed around her right wrist. She looked down at the hand, saw gold rings and a watch to match, fat links of a gold bracelet, the rings connected to the watch with little gold chains.

"That's my suitcase."

Chia's eyes followed the hand's wrist to a length of bright white cuff, then up the arm of a black jacket. To pale eyes in a long face, each cheek seamed vertically, as if with a modelling instrument. For a second she took him for her Music Master, loose somehow in this airport. But her Music Master would never wear a watch like that, and this one's hair, a darker blond, was swept back, long and wetlooking, from his high forehead. He didn't look happy.

"Maryalice's suitcase," Chia said.

02 "She gave it to you? In Seattle?"

"She asked me to carry it."

"From Seattle?"

"No," Chia said. "Back there. She sat beside me on the plane."

"Where is she?"

"I don't know," Chia said.

He wore a black, long-coated suit, b.u.t.toned high. Like something from an old movie, but new and expensive-looking. He seemed to notice that he was still holding her wrist; now he let it go.

"I'll carry it for you," he said. "We'll find her."

Chia didn't know what to do. "Maryalice wanted me to carry it."

"You did. Now I'll carry it." He took it from her.

"Are you Maryalice's boyfriend? Eddie?" The corner of his mouth twitched.

"You could say that," he said.

Eddie's car was a Daihatsu Graceland with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Chia knew that because Rez had ridden in the back of one in a video, except that that one had had a bath in it, black marble, big gold faucets shaped like tropical fish. People had posted that that was an ironic take on money, on the really ugly things you could do with it if you had too much. Chia had told her mother about that. Her mothet said there wasn't much point in worrying what you might do if you had too much, because most people never even had enough. She said it was better to try to figure out what "enough" actually meant.

But Eddie had one, a Graceland, all black and chrome. From the outside it looked sort of like a cross between an RV and one of those long, wedge-shaped Hummer limousines. Chia couldn't imagine there'd be much of a j.a.panese market; the cars here all looked like little candy-colored lozenges. The Graceland was meshback pure and simple, designed to sell to the kind of American who made a point of trying not to buy imports. Which, when it came to cars, def initely narrowed your options. (Hester Chen's mother had one of those really ugly Canadian trucks that cost a fortune but were guaranteed to last for eighty-five years; that was supposed to be better for the ecology.)