“Can you stand?”

A clenched nod. I gestured at the door.

“Out. Try not to breathe.”

Lurching, we made it past the remains of the New Revelation commando.

Those who had not already started to haemorrhage from mouth and eyes were too busy hallucinating to present any further threat. They stumbled and slipped in their own blood, bleating and flapping at the air in front of their faces. I was pretty sure I’d got them all one way or another, but on the off chance I was losing count I stopped by one who showed no apparent wounds. An officiator. I bent over him.

“A light,” he drivelled, voice high-pitched and wondering. His hand lifted towards me. “A light in the heavens, the angel is upon us. Who shall claim rebirth when they would not, when they await.”

He wouldn’t know her name. What was the fucking point.

“The angel.”

I hefted the Tebbit knife. Voice tight with lack of breath. “Take another look, officiator.”

“The an—” And then something must have got through the hallucinogens.

His voice turned suddenly shrill and he scrabbled backwards away from me, eyes wide on the blade. “No! I see the old one, the reborn. I see the destroyer.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

The Tebbit knife bioware is encoded in the runnel, half a centimetre off the edge of the blade. Cut yourself accidentally, you probably don’t go deep enough to touch it.

I slashed his face open and left.

Deep enough.

Outside, a stream of tiny iridescent skull-headed moths floated down out of the night and circled my head, leering. I blinked them away and drew a couple of hard, deep breaths. Pump that shit through. Bearings.

The wharfway that ran behind the hosing station was deserted in both directions. No sign of Plex. No sign of anyone. The emptiness seemed pregnant, trembling with nightmarish potential. I fully expected to see a huge pair of reptilian claws slit through the seams at the bottom of the building and lever it bodily out of the way.

Well, don’t, Tak. You expect it in this state, it’s going to fucking happen.

The paving …

Move. Breathe. Get out of here.

A fine rain had started to sift down from the overcast sky, filling up the glow of the Angier lamps like soft interference. Over the flat roof of the hosing station, the upper decks of a sweeper’s superstructure slid towards me, jewelled with navigation lights. Faint yells across the gap between ship and wharf and the hiss/clank of autograpples firing home into their shore side sockets. There was a sudden tilting calm to the whole scene, some unusually peaceful moment drifting up from memories of my Newpest childhood. My earlier dread evaporated and I felt a bemused smile creep out across my face.

Get a grip, Tak. It’s just the chemicals.

Across the wharf, under a stilled robot crane, stray light glinted off her hair as she turned. I checked once more over my shoulder for signs of pursuit, but the entrance to the bar was firmly closed. Faint noises leaked through at the lower limits of my cheap synth hearing. Could have been laughter, weeping, pretty much anything. H-grenades are harmless enough long-term, but while they last you do tend to lose interest in rational thought or action. I doubted anyone’d work out where the door was for the next half hour, let alone how to get through it.

The sweeper bumped up to the wharf, cranked tight by the autograpple cables. Figures leapt ashore, trading banter. I crossed unnoticed to the shadow of the crane. Her face floated ghost-like in the gloom. Pale, wolfish beauty. The hair that framed it seemed to crackle with half-seen energies.

“Pretty handy with that knife.”

I shrugged. “Practice.”

She looked me over. “Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom?”

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well, you sure—” Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. “Shit, they got you.”

I shook my head. “Different party. Happened a while back.”

“Yeah? Looks to me like you could use a medic. I’ve got some friends could—”

“It isn’t worth it. I’m getting out of this in a couple of hours.”

Brows cranked. “Re-sleeve? Well, okay, you got better friends than mine. Making it pretty hard for me to pay off my giri here.”

“Skip it. On the house.”

“On the house?” She did something with her eyes that I liked. “What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

“No? Comeback flic, ‘bout ten years back.”

“Missed it. I’ve been away.”

Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party.

Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.

“They’re putting out a call,” she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. “I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.”

“It wasn’t shaping up for much anyway.”

She took a couple more steps away, then stopped. Under the vague caterwauling from the bar and the noise of the hosing station, I thought I could hear something massive powering up, tiny insistent whine behind the fabric of the night, sense of shifting potential, like carnival monsters getting into place behind a stage curtain. Light and shadow through the stanchions overhead made a splintered white mask of her face. One eye gleamed silver.

“You got a place to crash, Micky-san? You said a couple of hours. What do you plan to do until then?”

I spread my hands. Became aware of the knife, and stowed it.

“No plans.”

“No plans, huh?” There was no breeze coming in off the sea, but I thought her hair stirred a little. She nodded. “No place either, right?”

I shrugged again, fighting the rolling unreality of the H-grenade comedown, maybe something else besides. “That’s about the size of it.”

“So. Your plans are play tag with the TPD and the Beards for the rest of the night, try to see the sun come out in one piece. That it?”

“Hey, you should be writing experia. You put it like that, it sounds almost attractive.”

“Yeah. Fucking romantics. Listen, you want a place to crash until your high-grade friends are ready for you, that I can do. You want to play Micky Nozawa in the streets of Tekitomura, well.” She tilted her head again. ”I’ll ‘trode the flic when they make it.”

I grinned.

“Is it far?”

Her eyes shuttled left. “This way.”

From the bar, the cries of the deranged, a single voice shouting murder and holy retribution.

We slipped away among the cranes and shadows.