“Do you want to see me see me see me …?”

Cheap echo box on the vocoder.

I pressed the button again. The glass unfrosted and the woman on the other side became visible. She shifted, side to side, showing herself to me, worked out body, augmented breasts, leaned forward and licked the glass with the tip of her tongue, breath misting it again. Her eyes locked onto mine.

“Do you want to touch me touch me touch me …?”

Whether the cabins used subsonics or not, I was getting a definite reaction from it all. My penis thickened and stirred. I locked down the throbbing, forced the blood back out and into my muscles the way a combat call would do. I needed to be limp for this scene. I reached for the debit button again. The glass screen slid aside and she stepped through, like someone coming out of a shower. She moved up to me, one hand slid out, cupping.

“Tell me what you want, honey,” she said from somewhere in the base of her throat. The voice seemed hard edged, deprived of the vocoder effect.

I cleared my own. “What’s your name?”

“Anenome. Want to know why they call me that?”

Her hand worked. Behind her, the meter was clicking over softly.

“You remember a girl used to work here?” I asked.

She was working on my belt now. “Honey, any girl used to work here ain’t going to do for you what I am. Now, how would you—”

“She was called Elizabeth. Her real name. Elizabeth Elliott.”

Her hands fell abruptly away, and the mask of arousal slid off her face as if it was greased underneath.

“What the fuck is this? You the Sia?”

“The what?”

“Sia. The heat.” Her voice was rising. She stepped away from me. “We had this, man—”

“No.” I took a step towards her and she dropped into a competent-looking defensive crouch. I backed up again, voice low. “No, I’m her mother.”

Taut silence. She glared at me.

“Bullshit. Lizzie’s ma’s in the store.”

“No.” I pulled her hand back to my groin. “Feel. There’s nothing there. They sleeved me in this, but I’m a woman. I don’t, I couldn’t…”

She unbent fractionally from her crouch, hands tugging down almost unwillingly. “That looks like prime tank flesh to me,” she said untrustingly. “You just come out of the store, how come you’re not paroled in some bonebag junkie’s sleeve?”

“It’s not parole.” The Corps’ deep-cover training came rocketing in across my mind like a flight of low-level strike jets, spinning vapour-trail lies on the edge of plausibility and half-known detail. Something inside me tilted with the joy of mission time. “You know what I went down for?”

“Lizzie said mindbites, something—”

“Yeah. Dipping. You know who I Dipped?”

“No. Lizzie never talked much about—”

“Elizabeth didn’t know. And it never came out on the wires.”

The heavy-breasted girl put her hands on her hips. “So who—”

I skinned her a smile. “Better you don’t know. Someone powerful. Someone with enough pull to unstack me, and give me this.”

“Not powerful enough to get you back in something with a pussy, though.” Anenome’s voice was still doubtful, but the conviction was coming up fast, like a bottleback school under reef water. She wanted to believe this fairytale mother come looking for her lost daughter. “How come you’re cross-sleeved?”

“There’s a deal,” I told her, gliding near the truth to flesh out the story. “This … person … gets me out, and I have to do something for them. Something that needs a man’s body. If I do it, I get a new sleeve for me and Elizabeth.”

“That so? So why you here?” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice that told me her parents would never come to this place looking for her. And that she believed me. I laid the last pieces of the lie.

“There’s a problem with re-sleeving Elizabeth. Someone’s blocking the procedure. I want to know who it is, and why. You know who cut her up?”

She shook her head, face turned down.

“A lot of the girls get hurt,” she said quietly. “But Jerry’s got insurance to cover that. He’s real good about it, even puts us into store if it’s going to take a long time to heal. But whoever did Lizzie wasn’t a regular.”

“Did Elizabeth have regulars? Anyone important? Anyone strange?”

She looked up at me, pity showing in the corners of her eyes. I’d played Irene Elliott to the hilt. “Mrs. Elliott, all the people who come here are strange. They wouldn’t be here if they weren’t.”

I made myself wince. “Anyone Important?”

“I don’t know. Look, Mrs. Elliott, I liked Lizzie, she was real kind to me a coupla times when I got down, but we never got close. She was close with Chloe and…” She paused, and added hurriedly,“Nothing like that, you know, but her and Chloe, and Mac, they used to share things, you know, talk and everything.”

“Can I talk to them?”

Her eyes flickered to the corners of the cabin, as if she had just heard an inexplicable noise. She looked hunted.

“It’s better if you don’t. Jerry, you know, he doesn’t like us talking to the public. If he catches us…”

I put every ounce of Envoy persuasiveness into stance and tone. “Well, maybe you could ask for me…”

The hunted look deepened, but her voice firmed up.

“Sure. I’ll ask around. But not. Not now. You’ve got to go. Come back tomorrow the same time. Same cabin. I’ll stay free for this time. Say you made an appointment.”

I took her hand in both of mine. “Thank you, Anenome.”

“My name’s not Anenome,” she said abruptly. “I’m called Louise. Call me Louise.”

“Thank you, Louise.” I held on to her hand. “Thank you for doing this—”

“Look, I’m not promising anything,” she said with an attempt at roughness. “Like I said, I’ll ask. That’s all. Now, you go. Please.”

She showed me how to cancel the remainder of my payment on the credit console, and the door hinged immediately open. No change. I didn’t say anything else. I didn’t try to touch her again. I walked out through the open door and left her standing there with her arms wrapped around her chest and her head down, staring at the satin-padded floor of the cabin as if she was seeing it for the first time.

Lit in red.

Outside, the street was unchanged. The two dealers were still there, deep in negotiations with a huge Mongol who was leaning on the hood of the car, looking at something between his hands. The octopus arched its arms to let me pass and I stepped into the drizzle. The Mongol looked up as I passed and a flinch of recognition passed over his face.

I stopped, turning in mid-step, and he dropped his gaze again, muttering something to the dealers. The neurachem came online like a shiver of cold water inside. I moved across the space to the car, and the sparse conversation between the three men dried up instantly. Hands slid into pouches and pockets. Something was pushing me, something that had very little to do with the look the Mongol had given me. Something dark that had spread its wings on the low-key misery of the cabin, something uncontrolled that Virginia Vidaura would have bawled me out for. I could hear Jimmy de Soto whispering in my ear.

“You waiting for me?” I asked the Mongol’s back, and saw how the muscles in it tensed.

Maybe one of the dealers felt it coming. He held up his exposed hand in a placatory gesture. “Look, man,” he began weakly.

I sliced him a glance out of the corner of my eye and he shut up.

“I said—”

That was when it all came apart. The Mongol pushed himself off the car hood with a roar and swatted at me with an arm the size of a ham. The blow never landed, but even deflecting it, I staggered back a pace. The dealers skinned their weapons, deadly little slabs of black and grey metal that spat and yapped in the rain. I twisted away from the traceries of fire, using the Mongol for cover, and shot a palm heel into his contorted face. Bone crunched and I came round him onto the car while the dealers were still trying to work out where I was. The neurachem made their movements into the pouring of thick honey. One gun-filled fist came tracking towards me and I smashed the fingers around the metal with a sideflung kick. The owner howled, and the edge of my hand cracked into the other dealer’s temple. Both men reeled off the car, one still moaning, the other insensible or dead. I came up into a crouch.