I left Ryker’s face in the mirror, and staggered back out to a table piled high with candles where Trepp was sipping at a long ivory pipe.

“Micky Nozawa? Are you serious?”

“Fuck, yes.” Trepp nodded vigorously. “The Fist of the Fleet, right? Seen it four times at least. New York experia chains get a lot of imported colonial stuff. It’s getting to be quite chic. That bit where he takes the harpoonist out with the flying kick. You feel it right down to the bone, the way he delivers that fucking kick. Beautiful. Poetry in motion. Hey, you know he did some holoporn stuff when he was younger.”

“Bullshit. Micky Nozawa never did porn. He didn’t need to.”

“Who said anything about need. The couple of bimb-ettes he was playing around with, I would have played around with them for free.”

“Bull. Shit.”

“I swear to God. That sleeve with the sort of Caucasian nose and eyes, the one he wrote off in that cruiser wreck. Real early stuff.”

There was a bar, where the walls and ceiling were hung with absurd hybrid musical instruments and the shelves behind the bar were stacked solid with antique bottles, intricately worked statuettes and other nameless junk. The noise level was comparatively low and I was drinking something that didn’t taste as if it was doing my system too much immediate harm. There was a faint musk in the air and small trays of sweetmeats on the tables.

“Why the fuck do you do it?”

“What?” Trepp shook her head muzzily. “Keep cats? I like ca—”

“Work for fucking Kawahara. She’s a fucking abortion of a human being, a fucked up Meth cunt not worth the slag of a stack, why do you—”

Trepp grabbed the arm I was gesturing with, and for a moment I thought there was going to be violence. The neurachem surged soggily.

Instead, she took the arm and draped it affectionately over her own shoulders, pulling my face closer to her own. She blinked owlishly at me.

“Listen.”

There was a longish pause. I listened, while Trepp frowned with concentration, took a long slug from her glass and set it down with exaggerated care. She wagged a finger at me.

“Judge not lest ye be judged,” she slurred.

Another street, sloping downward. Walking was suddenly easier.

Above, the stars were out in force, clearer than I had seen them all week in Bay City. I lurched to a halt at the sight, looking for the Horned Horse.

Something. Wrong here.

Alien. Not a single pattern I recognised. A cold sweat broke along the insides of my arms, and suddenly the clear points of fire seemed like an armada from the Outside, massing for a planetary bombardment. The Martians returned. I thought I could see them moving ponderously across the narrow slice of sky above us …

“Whoa.” Trepp caught me as I fell, laughing. “What you looking for up there, grasshopper?”

Not my sky.

It’s getting bad.

In another toilet, painfully brightly lit, I’m trying to stuff some powder Trepp gave me up my nose. My nasal passages are already seared dry and it keeps falling back down, as if this body has definitively had enough. A cubicle flushes behind me and I glance up into the big mirror.

Jimmy de Soto emerges from the cubicle, combat fatigues smudged with Innenin mud. In the hard bathroom light his face is looking particularly bad.

“All right, pal?”

“Not especially.” I scratch at the inside of my nose, which is beginning to feel inflamed. “You?”

He makes a mustn’t-grumble gesture and moves forward in the mirror to stand beside me. Water fountains from the light-sensitive tap as he leans over the basin, and he begins to rinse his hands. Mud and gore dissolve off his skin and form a rich soup, pouring away down the tiny maelstrom of the plughole. I can sense his bulk at my shoulder, but his one remaining eye has me pinned to the image in the mirror and I cannot, or don’t want to, turn.

“Is this a dream?”

He shrugs and goes on scrubbing at his hands. “It’s the edge,” he says.

“The edge of what?”

“Everything.” His expression suggests that this much is obvious.

“I thought you only turned up in my dreams,” I say, casually glancing at his hands. There is something wrong with them; however much filth Jimmy scrubs off, there is more underneath. The basin is splattered with the stuff.

“Well, that’s one way of putting it, pal. Dreams, high stress hallucinations, or just wrecking your own head like this. It’s all the edge, see. The cracks down the sides of reality. Where stupid bastards like me end up.”

“Jimmy, you’re dead. I’m getting tired of telling you that.”

“Uhuh.” He shakes his head. “But you got to get right down in those cracks to access me.”

The soup of blood and soil in the basin is thinning out and I know suddenly that when it is gone, Jimmy will be too.

“You’re saying—”

He shakes his head sadly. “Too flicking complicated to go through now. You think we’ve got the handle on reality, just ‘cause we can record bits of it. More to it than that, pal. More to it than that.”

“Jimmy,” I make a helpless gesture, “what the fuck am I going to do?”

He steps back from the basin and his ruined face grins garishly at me.

“Viral Strike,” he says clearly. I go cold as I remember my own scream taken up along the beachhead. “Recall that mother, do you?”

And, flicking water from his hands, he vanishes like a conjuror’s trick.

“Look,” said Trepp reasonably, “Kadmin had to check into the tank to get sleeved in an artificial. I figure that gives you the best part of a day before he even knows if he killed you or not.”

“If he wasn’t already double-sleeved again.”

“No. Think about it. He’s cut loose from Kawahara. Man, he doesn’t have the resources for that kind of stuff right now. He’s fucking out there on his own, and with Kawahara gunning for him, he’s a strictly limited item. Kadmin’s sell-by date is coming up, you’ll see.”

“Kawahara’s going to keep him on tap for just as long as she needs him to drive me.”

“Yeah, well.” Trepp looked at her drink, embarrassed. “Maybe.”

There was another place, called Cable or something synonymous, where the walls were racked with colour-coded conduits out of whose designer-cracked casings wires sprouted like stiff copper hair. At intervals along the bar were hooks draped with thin, lethal-looking cables that ended in gleaming silver minijacks. In the air above the bar, a huge holographic jack and socket flicked spasmodically to the off-beat music that filled the place like water. At times, the components seemed to change into sex organs, but that could he been tetrameth-induced hallucination on my part.

I was sitting at the bar, something sweet smouldering in an ashtray at my elbow. From the sludgy feeling in my lungs and throat, I’d been smoking it. The bar was crowded but I suffered the strange conviction I was alone.

On either side of me, the other customers at the bar were jacked into the thin cables, eyes flickering beneath lids that seemed bruised, mouths twitched into dreamy half smiles. One of them was Trepp.

I was alone.

Things that might have been thoughts were tugging at the abraded underside of my mind. I picked up the cigarette and drew on it, grimly. Now was no time for thinking.

No time for—

Viral Strike!!!

— thinking.

Streets passing beneath my feet the way the rubble of Innenin passed under Jimmy’s boots as he walked along beside me in my dreams. So that’s how he does it.