one he’d kicked half off its hinges. The cobra’s bronze pyramid began to bob gently, the spring-steel shaft amplifying his pulse.
Nothing happened. There was only the surging of the alarm, the crashing of the games, his heart hammering. When the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. Not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. He’d lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he’d almost forgotten what real fear was.
This cubicle was the sort of place where people died. He might die here. They might have guns. . . .
A crash, from the far end of the corridor. A man’s voice, shouting something in Japanese. A scream, shrill terror. Another crash.
And footsteps, unhurried, coming closer.
Passing his closed door. Pausing for the space of three rapid beats of his heart. And returning. One, two, three. A bootheel scraped the matting.
The last of his octagon-induced bravado collapsed. He snapped the cobra into its handle and scrambled for the window, blind with fear, his nerves screaming. He was up, out, and falling, all before he was conscious of what he’d done. The impact with pavement drove dull rods of pain through his shins.
A narrow wedge of light from a half-open service hatch framed a heap of discarded fiberoptics and the chassis of a junked console. He’d fallen face forward on a slab of soggy chipboard; he rolled over, into the shadow of the console. The cubicle’s window was a square of faint light. The alarm still oscillated, louder here, the rear wall dulling the roar of the games.
A head appeared, framed in the window, backlit by the fluorescents in the corridor, then vanished. It returned, but he still couldn’t read the features. Glint of silver across the eyes. “Shit,” someone said, a woman, in the accent of the northern Sprawl.
The head was gone. Case lay under the console for a long count of twenty, then stood up. The steel cobra was still in his hand, and it took him a few seconds to remember what it was. He limped away down the alley, nursing his left ankle.
SHIN’S PISTOL WAS a fifty-year-old Vietnamese imitation of a South American copy of a Walther PPK, double-action on the first shot, with a very rough pull. It was chambered for .22 long rifle, and Case would’ve preferred lead azide explosives to the simple Chinese hollowpoints Shin had sold him. Still, it was a handgun and nine rounds of ammunition, and as he made his way down Shiga from the sushi stall he cradled it in his jacket pocket. The grips were bright red plastic molded in a raised dragon motif, something to run your thumb across in the dark. He’d consigned the cobra to a dump canister on Ninsei and dry-swallowed another octagon.
The pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, he’d decided, was gone, and that was fine. He had calls to make, biz to transact, and it wouldn’t wait. A block down Baiitsu, toward the port, stood a featureless ten-story office building in ugly yellow brick. Its windows were dark now, but a faint glow from the roof was visible if you craned your neck. An unlit neon sign near the main entrance offered CHEAP HOTEL under a cluster of ideograms. If the place had another name, Case didn’t know it; it was always referred to as Cheap Hotel. You reached it through an alley off Baiitsu, where an elevator waited at the foot of a transparent shaft. The elevator, like Cheap Hotel, was an afterthought, lashed to the building with bamboo and epoxy. Case climbed into the plastic cage and used his key, an unmarked length of rigid magnetic tape.
Case had rented a coffin here, on a weekly basis, since he’d arrived in Chiba, but he’d never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places.
The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage were scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistolgrip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it came to a full stop with a violent jolt, but he was ready for it. He stepped out into the courtyard that served the place as some combination of lobby and lawn.
Centered in the square carpet of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white