Jimmy looked startled, but he duly brought the Sunjet up to check the setting, then lowered it and looked at the woman opposite him.

“On your call,” she repeated.

“Now,” he snapped.

It was almost impossible to follow. Jimmy was swinging the Sunjet as the word left his mouth, and in approved firefight fashion, he cut the charge loose before the barrel even reached the horizontal. The air filled with the particle thrower’s characteristic angry crackle. The beam licked out. Virginia Vidaura was not there. Somehow she had judged the angle of the beam to perfection, and ducked away from it. Somehow else, she had closed the five-metre gap by half and the jacket in her right hand was in motion. It wrapped around the barrel of the Sunjet and jerked the weapon aside. She was on Jimmy before he realised what had happened, batting the particle thrower away across the training room floor, tripping and tumbling him and bringing the heel of one palm gently to rest under his nose.

The moment stretched and then broke as the man next to me pursed his lips and blew out a long, low whistle. Virginia Vidaura bowed her head slightly in the direction of the sound, then bounced to her feet and helped Jimmy up.

“A weapon is a tool,” she repeated, a little breathlessly. “A tool for killing and destroying. And there will be times when, as an Envoy, you must kill and destroy. Then you will choose and equip yourself with the tools that you need. But remember the weakness of weapons. They are an extension—you are the killer and destroyer. You are whole, with or without them.”

Shrugging his way into the Inuit jacket, he met his own eyes in the mirror once more. The face he saw looking back was no more expressive than the mandroid at Larkin & Green. He stared impassively at it for a moment, then lifted one hand to rub at the scar under the left eye. A final glance up and down and I left the room with the sudden cold resurgence of control flooding through my nerves. Riding down in the elevator, away from the mirror, I forced a grin.

Got the frags, Virginia.

Breathe, she said. Move. Control.

And we went out into the street. The Hendrix offered me a courteous good evening as I stepped through the main doors, and across the street my tail emerged from a tea-house and drifted along parallel to me. I walked for a couple of blocks, getting the feel of the evening and wondering whether to lose him. The half-hearted sunlight had persisted for most of the day and the sky was more or less unclouded, but it still wasn’t warm. According to a map I’d called up from the Hendrix, Licktown was a good dozen and a half blocks south. I paused on a corner, signalled an autocab down from the prowl lane above and saw my tail doing the same as I climbed aboard.

He was beginning to annoy me.

The cab curved away southwards. I leaned forward and passed a hand over the visitors’ blurb panel.

“Welcome to Urbline services,” said a smooth female voice. “You are linked to the Urbline central datastack. Please state the information you require.”

“Are there any unsafe areas in Licktown?”

“The zone designated Licktown is generally considered to be unsafe in its entirety,” said the datastack blandly. “However, Urbline services guarantee carriage to any destination within the Bay City limits and—”

“Yeah. Can you give me a street reference for the highest incidence of violent criminality in the Licktown area?”

There was a brief pause while the datahead went down rarely used channels.

“Nineteenth Street, the blocks between Missouri and Wisconsin show fifty-three incidences of organic damage over the last year. One hundred seventy-seven prohibited substance arrests, one hundred twenty-two with incidence of minor organic damage, two hun—”

“That’s fine. How far is it from Jerry’s Closed Quarters, Mariposa and San Bruno?”

“Straight line distance is approximately one kilometre.”

“Got a map?”

The console lit up with a street grid, complete with location cross hairs for Jerry’s and the names of the streets fired in green. I studied it for a couple of moments.

“All right. Drop me there. Nineteenth and Missouri.”

“As part of our customer charter, it is my duty to warn you that this is not an advisable destination.”

I sat back and felt the grin creeping back onto my face, unforced this time.

“Thanks.”

The cab set me down, without further protest, at the cross of Nineteenth and Missouri. I glanced around as I climbed out and grinned again. Inadvisable destination had been a typical machine understatement.

Where the streets I’d chased the Mongolian through the night before were deserted, this part of Licktown was alive, and its inhabitants made Jerry’s clientele look almost salubrious. As I paid off the autocab, a dozen heads swivelled to focus on me, none of them wholly human. I could almost feel mechanical photomultiplier eyes ratcheting in from a distance on the currency I’d chosen to pay with, seeing the notes in ghostly luminescent green; canine-augmented nostrils twitching with the scent of my hotel bath gel, the whole crowd picking up the blip of wealth on their street sonar like the trace of a bottleback shoal on a Millsport skipper’s screen.

The second cab was spiralling down behind me. An unlit alley beckoned, less than a dozen metres away. I’d barely stepped into it when the first of the locals made their play.

“You looking for something, tourist?”

There were three of them, the lead vocalist a two-and-a-half-metre giant naked to the waist with what looked like Nakamura’s entire muscle graft sales for the year wrapped around his arms and trunk. There were red illuminum tattoos under the skin of his pectorals so his chest looked like a dying coal fire and a glans-headed cobra reared up the ridged muscle of his stomach from his waistline. The hands that hung open at his sides were tipped with filed talons. His face was seamed with scar tissue from the freak fights he had lost and there was a cheap prosthetic magnilens screwed into one eye. His voice was surprisingly soft and sad sounding.

“Come slumming, maybe,” the figure on the giant’s right said viciously. He was young and slim and pale with long, fine hair falling across his face and there was a twitchiness about his stance that said cheap neurachem. He would be the fastest.

The third member of the welcoming committee said nothing, but lips peeled back from a canine snout to show transplanted predator teeth and an unpleasantly long tongue. Below the surgically augmented head, the body was male human beneath tightly strapped leather.

Time was shortening. My tail would be paying off his cab, getting his bearings. If he’d decided to take the risk. I cleared my throat.

“I’m just passing through. You’re wise, you’ll let me. There’s a citizen landing back there you’ll find easier to take.”

There was a brief, disbelieving pause. Then the giant reached for me. I brushed away his hand, fell back a step and wove a rapid pattern of obvious killing strikes into the air between us. The trio froze, the canine augment snarling. I drew breath.

“Like I said, you’re wise you’ll let me pass.”

The giant was ready to let it go. I could see it in his broken face. He’d been a fighter long enough to spot combat training and the instincts of a lifetime in the ring told him when the balance was tipped. His two companions were younger and knew less about losing. Before he could say anything, the pale kid with the neurachem lashed out with something sharp and the augment went for my right arm. My own neurachem, already ticking over and probably more pricey, was faster. I took the kid’s arm and broke it at the elbow, twisting him round on his own pain and into his two companions. The augment ducked around him and I kicked out, connecting hard with nose and mouth. A yelp and he went down. The kid dropped to his knees, keening and nursing his shattered elbow. The giant surged forward and fetched up with the stiffened fingers of my right hand a centimetre from his eyes.