“Five years.”

Laney thought of the video, Blackwell’s voice in the darkened club. Two years ago. “Where are we going?”

“Be there, soon enough.”

They entered an area of narrower streets, of featureless, vaguely shabby buildings covered with unlit, inactivated advertising. Huge representations of media platforms Laney didn’t recognize. Some of the buildings revealed what he assumed was quake damage. Head-sized gobs of a brownish, glasslike substance protruded from cracks that ran diagonally across one facade, like a cheap toy repaired badly by a clumsy giant. The limo pulled to the curb.

“ ‘Electric Town,’ ” Blackwell said. “I’ll page you,” he said to the driver, who nodded in a way that struck Laney as being not particularly Japanese. Blackwell opened the door and got out with that same unlikely grace Laney had noted before, the car bucking noticeably with the departure of his weight. Laney, sliding across the gray velour seat, felt tired and wooden.

“Somehow I was expecting a more upscale destination,” he said to Blackwell. It was true.

“Stop expecting,” Blackwell said.

The building with the cracks and the brown, saplike knobs opened into a white-and-pastel sea of kitchen appliances. The ceiling was low, laced with temporary-looking pipes and conduits. Laney followed Blackwell down a central aisle. A few figures stood along other aisles to either side, but he had no way of knowing whether these were salespeople or potential customers.

An old-fashioned escalator was grinding away, at the end of the central aisle, the rectilinear steel teeth at the edges of each ascending step worn sharp and bright. Blackwell kept walking. Levitated ahead of Laney, climbing, his feet barely seeming to move. Laney mounted hard behind him.

They rose up to a second level, this one displaying a less consistent range of goods: wallscreens, immersion consoles, automated recliners with massage-modules bulging from their cushions like the heads of giant mechanical grubs.

Along an aisle walled with corrugated plastic cartons, Blackwell with his scarred hands tucked deep in the pockets of his ninja smock. Into a maze of bright blue plastic tarps, slung from pipes overhead. Unfamiliar tools. A worker’s dented thermos standing on a red toolkit that spanned a pair of aluminum sawhorses. Blackwell holding a final tarp aside. Laney ducked, entering.

“We’ve been holding it open for the past hour, Blackwell,” someone said. “Not an easy thing.”

Blackwell let the tarp fall into place behind him. “Had to collect him from the hotel.”

The space, walled off with the blue tarps on three sides, was twice the size of Laney’s hotel room but considerably more crowded.

A lot of hardware was assembled there: a collection of black consoles were cabled together in a white swamp of Styrofoam packing-forms, torn corrugated plastic, and crumpled sheets of bubble-pack. Two men and a woman, waiting. It was the woman who had spoken. As Laney shuffled forward, ankle-deep through the packing materials, the stuff creaked and popped, slippery under the soles of his shoes.

Blackwell kicked at it. “You might have tidied up.”

“We aren’t set-dressers,” the woman said. She sounded to Laney as though she was from Northern California. She had short brown hair cut in bangs, and something about her reminded him of the quants who worked at Slitscan. Like the other two, men, one Japanese and one red-haired, she wore jeans and a generic nylon bomber jacket.

“Hell of a job on short notice,” the redhead said.

“Nonotice,” the other corrected, and he was definitely from California. His hair was pulled straight back, fastened high in a little samurai ponytail.

“What you’re paid for,” Blackwell said.

“We’re paid to tour,” the redhead said.

“If you want to tour again, you’d better hope that these work.” Blackwell looked at the cabled consoles.

Laney saw a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall. It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there, a pair of eye-phones. Unfamiliar cables ran to the nearest console: flat ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The wall behind was plastered with an overlay of old advertising; a woman’s eye was directly behind the pink table, a yard wide, her laser-printed pupil the size of Laney’s head.

Laney moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his feet, a motion not unlike cross-country skiing.

“Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

16. Zona

Zona Rosa kept a secret place, a country carved from what once had been a corporate website.

It was a valley lined with ruined swimming pools, overgrown with cactus and red Christmas flowers. Lizards posed like hieroglyphs on mosaics of shattered tile.

No houses stood in that valley, though sections of broken wall gave shade, or rusting rectangles of corrugated metal set aslant on weathered wooden uprights. Sometimes there were ashes of a cooking fire.

She kept it early evening there.

“Zona?”

“Someone is trying to find you.” Zona in her ragged leather jacket over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as a quick collage, fragments torn from films, magazines, Mexican newspapers: dark eyes, Aztec cheekbones, a dusting of acne scars, her black hair tangled like smoke. She kept the resolution down, never let herself come entirely into focus.

“My mother?”

“No. Someone with resources. Someone who knows that you are in Tokyo.” The narrow toes of her black boots were pale with the dust of the valley. There were copper zips down the outer seams of her faded black jeans, waist to ankle. “Why are you dressed that way?”

Chia remembered that she was still presenting in the Silke-Marie KoIb outfit. “There was a meeting. Very formal. Majorbutt-pain. I got this with Kelsey’s cashcard.”

“Where were you ported, when you paid for it?”

“Where I’m ported now. Mitsuko’s place.”

Zona frowned. “What other purchases have you made?”

“None.”

“Nothing?”

“A subway ticket.”

Zona snapped her fingers and a lizard scurried from beneath a rock. It ran up her leg and into her waiting hand. As she stroked it with the fingers of the other hand, the patterns of its coloration changed. She tapped its head and the lizard ran down her leg, vanishing behind a crumpled sheet of rusted roofing. “Kelsey is frightened, frightened enough to come to me.”

“Frightened of what?”

“Someone contacted her about your ticket. They were trying to reach her father, because the points used to purchase it were his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think they threatened her.”

“With what?”

“I don’t know. But she gave them your name and the number of the cashcard.”

Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.

Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock. Golden dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knife’s pink plastic handles. She thumbed a button of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless. “She has no balls, your Kelsey.”

“She’s not myKelsey, Zona.”

Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave thin curls from it with the edge of the switchblade. “She would not last an hour, in my world.” On a previous visit, she’d told Kelsey stories of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought through the garbage-strewn playgrounds and collapsing parking garages of vast housing projects. How had that war begun? Over what? Zona never said.

“Neither would I.”

“So who is looking for you?”

“My mother would be, if she knew I was here…”

“That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey.”

“If someone knew my seat number on the flight over, they could get a ticket number and trace it back, right?”