“Don’t,” I said quietly

The kid moaned on the ground at our feet. Behind him, the canine augment lay where the kick had thrown him, twitching feebly. The giant crouched between them, big hands reaching as if to comfort. He looked up at me, mute accusation for something in his face.

I backed away down the alley about a dozen metres, then turned and sprinted. Let my tail work his way through that and catch me up.

The alley made a right-angle turn before spilling out onto another crowded street. I turned the corner and let my speed run down so that I emerged into the street at a fast walk. Turning left, I shouldered my way into the midst of the crowd and started looking for street signs.

Outside Jerry’s, the woman was still dancing, imprisoned in the cocktail glass. The club sign was alight and business seemed, if anything, to be brisker than the previous night. Small knots of people came and went beneath the flexing arms of the door robot, and the dealers I’d injured during the fight with the Mongolian had been replaced several times over.

I crossed the street and stood before the robot while it padded me down, and the synth voice said, “Clear. Do you want cabins or bar?”

“What’s the deal in the bar?”

“Ha ha ha,” went the laugh protocol. “The bar is look, but don’t touch. No money down, no hands on. House rule. That applies to other customers too.”

“Cabins.”

“Down the stairs, to the left. Take a towel from the pile.”

Down the stairs, along the corridor lit in rotating red, past the towel alcove and the first four closed cabin doors. Blood-deep thunder of the junk rhythm in the air. I closed the fifth door behind me, fed a few notes to the credit console for appearances’ sake, and stepped up to the frosted glass screen.

“Louise?”

The curves of her body thudded against the glass, breasts flattened. The cherry light in the cabin flung stripes of light across her.

“Louise, it’s me. Irene. Lizzie’s mother.”

A smear of something dark between the breasts, across the glass. The neurachem leapt alive inside me. Then the glass door slid aside and the girl’s body sagged off its inner surface into my arms. A wide-muzzled gun appeared over her shoulder, pointed at my head.

“Right there, fucker,” said a tight voice. “This is a toaster. You do one wrong thing, it’ll take your head off your chest and turn your stack to solder.”

I froze. There was an urgency in the voice that wasn’t far off panic. Very dangerous.

“That’s it.” The door behind me opened, gusting the pulse of the music in the corridor, and a second gun muzzle jammed into my back. “Now you put her down, real slow, and stand back.”

I lowered the body in my arms gently onto the satin padded floor and stood up again. Bright white light sprang up in the cabin, and the revolving cherry blinked pinkly twice and went out. The door behind me thudded shut on the music while before me, a tall blond man in close-fitting black advanced into the room, knuckles whitened on the trigger of his particle blaster. His moudi was compressed and the whites of his eyes were flaring around stimulant-blasted pupils. The gun in my back bore me forward and the blond kept coming until the muzzle of the blaster was smearing my lower lip against my teeth.

“Now who the fuck are you?” he hissed at me.

I turned my head aside far enough to open my mouth. “Irene Elliott. My daughter used to work here.”

The blond stepped forward, gun muzzle tracing a line down my cheek and under my chin.

“You’re lying to me,” he said softly. “I’ve got a friend out at the Bay City justice facility, and he tells me Irene Elliott’s still on stack. See, we checked out the bag of shit you sold this cunt.”

He kicked at the inert body on the floor and I peered down out of the corner of my nearest eye. In the harsh white light the marks of torture were livid on the girl’s flesh.

“Now I want you to think real carefully about your next answer, whoever you are. Why are you asking after Lizzie Elliott?”

I slid my eyes back over the barrel of the blaster to the clenched face beyond. It wasn’t the expression of someone who’d been dealt in. Too scared.

“Lizzie Elliott’s my daughter, you piece of shit, and if your friend up at the city store had any real access, you’d know why the record still says I’m on stack.”

The gun in my back shoved forward more sharply, but unexpectedly the blond seemed to relax. His mouth flexed in a rictus of resignation. He lowered the blaster.

“All right,” he said. “Deck, go and get Oktai.”

Someone at my back slipped out of the cabin. The blond waved his gun at me. “You. Sit down in the corner.” His tone was distracted, almost casual.

I felt the gun taken out of my back and moved to obey. As I settled onto the satin floor, I weighed the odds. With Deck gone, there were still three of them. The blond, a woman in what looked to me like a synthetic Asian-skinned sleeve, toting the second particle blaster whose imprint I could still feel in my spine, and a large black man whose only weapon appeared to be an iron pipe. Not a chance. These were not the street sharks I’d faced down on Nineteenth Street. There was a cold embodied purpose about them, a kind of cheap version of what Kadmin had had back at the Hendrix.

For a moment I looked at the synthetic woman and wondered, but it couldn’t be. Even if he’d somehow managed to slip the charges Kristin Ortega had talked about and got himself re-sleeved. Kadmin was on the inside. He knew who had hired him, and who I was. The faces peering at me from around the biocabin, on their own admission, knew nothing.

Let’s keep it that way.

My gaze crept across to Louise’s battered sleeve. It looked as if they had cut slits in the skin of her thighs and then forced the wounds apart until they tore. Simple, crude and very effective. They would have made her watch while they did it, compounding the pain with terror. It’s a gut-swooping experience seeing that happen to your body. On Sharya, the religious police used it a lot. She’d probably need psychosurgery to get over the trauma.

The blond saw where my eyes had gone and offered me a grim nod, as if I’d been an accomplice to the act.

“Want to know why her head’s still on, huh?”

I looked bleakly across the room at him. “No. You look like a busy man but I guess you’ll get round to it.”

“No need,” he said casually, enjoying his moment. “Old Anenome’s Catholic. Third or fourth generation, the girls tell me. Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican. We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.”

“You talk too much, Jerry,” said the woman.

The blond’s eyes flared whitely at her, but whatever retort he was mustering behind the curl of his lip quietened as two men, presumably Deek and Oktai, pushed into the tiny room on another wave of junk rhythm from the corridor. My eyes measured Deck and placed him in the same category—muscle—as the pipe-wielder, then switched to his companion, who was staring steadily at me. My heart twitched. Oktai was the Mongol.

Jerry jerked his head in my direction.

“This him?” he asked.

Oktai nodded slowly, a savage grin of triumph etched across his broad face. His massive hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides. He was working through an extreme of hate so deep it was choking him. I could see the bump where someone had inexpertly repaired his broken nose with tissue weld, but that didn’t seem like enough to warrant the fury I was watching.

“All right, Ryker.” The blond leaned forward a little. “You want to change your story? You want to tell me why you’re breaking my balls down here?”

He was talking to me.

Deck spat into a corner of the room.

“I don’t know,” I said clearly, “what the fuck you are talking about. You turned my daughter into a prostitute, and then you killed her. And for that, I’m going to kill you.”