Masahiko, who'd been trying to get one of his feet into one of his

black shoes, was looking at the Russian too. He still had a paper slipper on the other foot.

"You are going?" the Russian said.

"It's on the bed," Chia said. "We didn't have anything to do

with it."

The Russian noticed the stungun on the carpet, beside the pointed toe of his boot. He raised the boot and brought his heel 255.

down. Chia heard the plastic case crack. "Artemi, my friend of Novokuznetskaya, is doing himself great indignity with this." He prodded the fragments of the stungun with his toe. "Is wearing very tight jeans, Artemi, leather, is fashion. Putting in front pocket, trigger is pressing accident. Artemi is shocking his manhood." The Russian showed Chia his large, uneven teeth. "Still we are laughing, yes?"

"Please," Chia said. "We just want to go."

The Russian stepped past Eddie and Maryalice, who lay tangled on the carpet. "You are accident like Artemi to his manhood, yes? You are only happening to this owner of fine nightclub." He indicated the unconscious Eddie. "Who is smuggler and other things, very complicated, but you, you are only accident?"

"That's right," Chia said.

"You are of LoIRez." It sounded like Lor-ess. He stepped closer to Chia and looked down into the bag. "You are knowing what this is."

"No," Chia lied. "I'm not."

The Russian looked at her. "We are not liking accident, ever. Not allowing accident." His hands came up, then, and she saw that the back of the third joint of each of his fingers was pink with those dots, each one the size of the end of a pencil eraser. She'd seen those at her last school and knew they meant a laser had recently been used to remove a tattoo.

She looked up at his face. He looked like someone who was about to do something that he might not want to do, but that he knew he had to.

But then she saw his eyes slide past her, narrowing, and she turned in time to see the door to the corridor swing inward. A man wider than the doorway seemed to flow into the room. There was a big X of flesh-colored tape across one side of his f~tce, and he was wearing a coat the color of dull metal. Chia saw one huge, scarred hand slip into his coat; the other held something black that ended in a mag-strip tab.

"Yob tvoyu mat," said the RUSSIan, soft syllables of surprise.

The stranger's hand emerged, holding something that looked to Chia like a very large pair of chrome-plated scissors, but then Un- 256 folded, with a series of small sharp clicks, and apparently of its own accord, into a kind of glittering, skeletal axe, its leading edge hawk-like and lethal, the head behind it tapering like an icepick.

"My mother?" said the stranger, who sounded somehow delighted. "Did you say my mother?" His face was shiny with scar tissue. More scars crisscrossed his shaven, stubbled skull.

"Ah, no," the Russian said, lifting his hands so that the palms showed. "Figuring of speech, only."

Another man stepped in, around the man with the axe, and this one had dark hair and wore a loose black suit. The headband of a monocle-rig crossed his forehead, the unit covering his right eye. The eye she could see was wide and bright and green, but still it took a second before she recognized him.

Then she had to sit down on the pink bed.

"Where is it?" this man who looked like Rez asked. (Except he looked thicker, somehow, his cheeks unhollowed.)

Neither the Russian nor the man with the axe answered. The man with the axe closed the door behind him with his heel.

The green eye and the video-monocle looked at Chia. "Do you know where it is?"

"What?"

"The biomech primer module, or whatever it is you call it...." He paused, touching the phone in his right ear, listening. "Excuse me: 'Rodel-van Erp primary biomolecular programming module Cslash-7A.' Ilove you."

Chia stared.

"Rei Toei," he explained, touching the headband, and she knew that it had to be him.

"It's here. In this bag."

He reached into the blue and yellow plastic and drew the thing out, turning it over in his hands. "This? This is our future, the medium of our marriage?"

"Excuse, please," the Russian said, 'hut you must know this is helonging to mc." Lie sounded genuinely sorry. 0 0.

257.

Rez looked up, the nanotech unit held casually in his hands. "It's yours?" Rez tilted his head, like a bird, curious. "Where did you get it?"

The Russian coughed. "An exchange. This gentleman on floor."

Rez saw Eddie and Maryalice. "Are they dead?"

"Volted, yes? Being most-time nonlethal. Your girl on bed."

Rez looked at Chia. "Who are you?"

"Chia Pet McKenzie," she said automatically. "I'm from Seattle. I'm. . . I'm in your fan club." She felt her face burning.

The brow above the green eye went up. He seemed to be listening to something. "Oh," he said, and paused. "She did? Really? That's wonderful." He smiled at Chia. "Rei says you've been totally central to everything, and that we have a great deal to thank you for."

Chia swallowed. "She does?"

But Rez had turned to the Russian. "We have to have this." He raised the nanotech unit. "We'll negotiate now. Name your price."

"Rozzer," the man at the door said, "you can't do that. This b.a.s.t.a.r.d's Kombinat."

Chia saw the green eye close, as if Rez were making a conscious effort to calm himself. When it opened, he said: "But they're the government, aren't they, Blackwell? We've negotiated with governments before."

"It's for the legals," the scarred man said, but now there was an edge of worry in his voice.

The Russian seemed to hear it too. He slowly lowered his hands. "What were you planning to do with this?" Rez asked him. The Russian looked down at the thing in Rez's hands, as if considering, then raised his eyes. A muscle was jumping, in his cheek. He seemed to come to a decision. "We are developing ambitious public works project," he said.

"0 jesus," Maryalice said from the carpet, so hoa.r.s.ely that at first Chia couldn't identify the source. "They must've put something in that. They did. I swear to G.o.d they did. And then she threw up.

258 Wiiliani Gibson Yamazaki lost his balance as the van shot up the narrow ramp, out of the hotel. Laney, holding Arleigh's phone to the dashboard map, toning the number of the Hotel Di, heard him crash down on the shredded bubble-pack. The display bleeped as Laney completed the number; grid-segments clicked across the screen. "You okay, Yamazaki?"

"Thank you," Yamazaki said. "Yes." Getting to his knees again, he craned around the headrest of Laney's seat. "You have located the hotel?"

"Expressway," Arleigh said, glancing at the display, as they swung right, up an entrance ramp. "Hit speed-dial three. Thanks. Gimme." She took the phone. "McCrae. Yeah. Priority? f.u.c.k you, Alex. Ring me through to him." She listened. "Di? Like D, I? s.h.i.t. Thanks." She clicked off.

"What is it?" Laney asked, as they swung onto the expressway, the giant bland brow of an enormous articulated freight-hauler pulling up behind and then past them, quilted stainless steel flashing in Laney's peripheral vision. The van rocked with the big truck's pa.s.sage.

"I tried to get Rez. Alex says he left the hotel, with Blackwell. Headed the same place we are."

"When?"