'It's good you're here,' he said.

'You should stop doing this, Ed. It isn't worth it.'

'Do you think they'll let me stop? Do you think she'll let me stop? Everyone but you wants to kill me or use me. Maybe both.'

Annie smiled and shook her head slowly.

'That's ridiculous,' she said.

She gazed out to sea. Alter a minute or two she said in a different voice, 'Ed, don't you sometimes want someone smaller? Really? Someone nice and small to fuck, and not just that: to be with?'

He squeezed her huge hand.

'You're a rock,' he told her. 'Everything breaks on you.'

She pushed him away and went down to the water.

'Jesus, Ed,' she shouted into the sea wind. 'You fucking twink.'

Ed watched her striding up and down at the tideline, picking up large stones and pieces of driftwood and hurling them far out into the ocean. He got himself carefully to his feet and left her there to her demons.

The spaceport was empty. Everyone had gone home long ago. The night was just chain-link rattling in the wind, smell of the tide, a voice calling out from some motel cabin. Mercury vapour light made everything look half real. Empty sheds, intermittent traffic. It was like that most nights. Nothing for hours, then four ships in twenty minutes-two tubby freighters in from the Core; the tender of a vast Alcubiere ship hanging somewhere up in the parking lot like an asteroid; some semi-corporate short-hauler, skulking down on business no one could afford to acknowledge. There would be bursts of flame the orange colour of New Men hair, then darkness and cold wind until morning. Ed didn't feel like going back to the room until Annie was asleep. Instead he wandered over and stood between the rocket sheds, looking up at the huge ships, enjoying their smells of stressed metal and burnt pSi fuel.

After a while he noticed a figure pushing a wheeled waste bin slowly across the concrete in his direction. It was Bella Cray. Since her sister's death her skirts were tighter. Bella was making-up for two, with several colours of eye shadow and lips that resembled a pumped-up rosebud. Those lips were the first thing you saw coming towards you. Going away, she presented as buttocks. Somewhere in between was her handbag full of guns.

'Hey, Ed,' she said, 'look at this!"

The waste bin was almost as big as her. Folded awkwardly into it, their long legs hanging over the side, were Tig and Neena Vesicle. Their expressions were puzzled. They were dead. Up from the bin came a smell of alien fluids, bitter and hopeless. Neena's eyes were still open, and she was looking up at the Kefahuchi Tract the way she had looked at Ed while he was fucking her in the warren, so that he expected her to laugh breathlessly and say, 'Oh I'm so far in you!' Tig Vesicle didn't even look like Tig any more.

Bella Cray chuckled.

'Like it, Ed?' she said. This is what's going to happen to you. But first it's going to happen to everyone you know.'

Neena Vesicle's long legs hung out of the waste bin. Bella Cray, as if she needed something to busy herself with, began to try and stuff them back in. 'If I could fold the bugger up a bit more,' she said. She leaned in over the bin until her feet came off the ground, then gave up. They're just as fucking awkward as they were alive, your friends,' she said. She wrenched at her skirt and blouse until she got them back into place. She patted her hair.

'Well, Ed,' she said.

Ed looked on at this performance. He felt cold; he didn't know what he felt. Annie would be next, that was obvious enough. Annie was the only other person he knew.

'I could pay you something now,' he said.

Bella pulled a lace-edged handkerchief out of her bag to wipe her hands. While she was at it she checked her look in a little gold compact mirror. 'Whoa!' she said. 'Is that me?' Out came the lipstick. 'Tell you what, Ed,' she said, applying it freely. 'Money isn't going to help with this.'

Ed swallowed.

He had another look in the bin. 'You didn't have to do this,' he said. Bella Cray chuckled.

At that moment Annie Glyph, who had worn off her irritation throwing stones into the tide, walked up out of the darkness, calling, 'Ed? Ed, where are you?' She saw him standing there. 'Ed, you shouldn't be out here in the cold like this,' she said. Then she seemed to notice the contents of the waste bin. She stared at it puzzledly, and then at Bella Cray, and then Ed, with a sort of slow, patiently dawning anger. Finally, she said to Bella: 'These people got no one to speak for them, they live in a warren, they get the shit end of every stick: you got no call to stuff them in a waste bin too.'

Bella Cray looked amused.

' "You got no call",' she mimicked. She stared interestedly up at Annie, who was perhaps twice her height, then went back to working with the lipstick. 'Who's this horse?' she asked Ed. 'Hey, let me guess. I bet you're fucking her, Ed. I bet you're fucking this horse!'

'Look,' Ed said. 'It's me you want.'

'That's clever of you, to work that out.'

Bella replaced the compact in her purse and started to zip the purse up. Then she seemed to remember something.

'Wait,' she said. 'You've got to see this-'

She had the Chambers gun half out when Annie Glyph's hands -big-knuckled and clumsy, callused from five years in the rickshaw shafts, trembling a little from all that cafй йlectrique-closed over it. Ed loved those hands but he never got the wrong side of them. There was a barely noticeable struggle then Annie had passed the pistol to him. He checked the load, which resembled a black oily fluid but was really a kind of particle-jockey's nightmare held in place by magnetic fields. He swept the shadows for tell-tale signs of gun-punks, which were generally raincoats, shoes with big soles, anyone with a nova grenade or a bd haircut. Meanwhile, Annie had one hand still clamped over both of Bella's: this simple grip she used to hoist Bella slowly off the floor.

'Now we can talk face to face,' she said.

'What's this?' Bella said. 'Is this your dubious shot at fame? You think you won't get hurt for this?' She raised her voice. 'Hey, Ed, you think I don't have guys out there?'

'That's a valid point,' Ed told Annie.

'There's no one out there,' Annie said. 'It's the night.'

Her free hand went up, curled all the way round Bella's neck and met itself coming the other way. Bella made a noise. Her face got red, she milled her arms about like a baby. One of her shoes fell off.

'Jesus, Annie,' Ed said. 'Put her down and let's get out of here.'

The fact was, it filled him with anxiety to see one of the Cray sisters treated like this. He owed his recent personality to being her victim. Bella was everywhere. In this city at least she was broadband, nationwide. She earned from everyone she saw. She had her finger in every pie from Earth-heroin to giftwrap. Bella bought gun-punks and love-kiddies. For relaxation she had a patch which made her come all day then, like a female mantis, eat Mr Lucky with her favourite sauce. This was the woman who had sworn to revenge herself after Ed killed her sister. If she proved so easy to show up on her own turf, where did that leave Ed? Besides, no one, as he knew from the personal evidence in the waste bin, turned the tables on Bella Cray for long. He shivered.

'There's a fog coming up, Annie,' he said.

Annie was explaining to Bella, 'You don't see the consequences of your acts, you might as well be in a twink-tank.' She forced Bella to look in the waste bin. 'I want you to understand what you did when you did this,' she said. 'What you really did.'

Bella tried to laugh. What came out was, 'Guck guck guck.'

Annie's grip tightened. Bella's colour deepened. She squeezed out one more guck and went limp. At that Annie seemed to lose interest. She dropped Bella on the floor and picked up Bella's purse instead. 'Hey Ed, look! It's full of money!' She sheafed the money into her hands and held it up and laughed like a kid. Annie's delight never knew any bounds. She was a rickshaw girl. Everything she did, she was full-on inside it. They would have called her simple in another age; but that was the last thing she was. 'Ed, I never saw so much money!' While she was counting it, Bella Cray scraped herself off the concrete and limped quickly away into the fog. She seemed a little one-sided.