around. You killed her, huh? In Chiba.”
“No,” the boy said.
“Wintermute?”
“No. I saw her death coming. In the patterns you sometimes imagined you could detect in the dance of the street. Those patterns are real. I am complex enough, in my narrow ways, to read those dances. Far better than Wintermute can. I saw her death in her need for you, in the magnetic code of the lock on the door of your coffin in Cheap Hotel, in Julie Deane’s account with a Hongkong shirtmaker. As clear to me as the shadow of a tumor to a surgeon studying a patient’s scan. When she took your Hitachi to her boy, to try to access it—she had no idea what it carried, still less how she might sell it, and her deepest wish was that you would pursue and punish her—I intervened. My methods are far more subtle than Wintermute’s. I brought her here. Into myself.”
“Why?”
“Hoping I could bring you here as well, keep you here. But I failed.”
“So what now?” He swung them back into the bank of cloud. “Where do we go from here?”
“I don’t know, Case. Tonight the very matrix asks itself that question. Because you have won. You have already won, don’t you see? You won when you walked away from her on the beach. She was my last line of defense. I die soon, in one sense. As does Wintermute. As surely as Riviera does, now, as he lies paralyzed beside the stump of a wall in the apartments of my Lady 3Jane Marie-France, his nigra-striatal system unable to produce the dopamine receptors that could save him from Hideo’s arrow. But Riviera will survive only as these eyes, if I am allowed to keep them.”
“There’s the word, right? The code. So how’ve I won? I’ve won jack shit.”
“Flip now.”
“Where’s Dixie? What have you done with the Flatline?”
“McCoy Pauley has his wish,” the boy said, and smiled. “His wish and more. He punched you here against my wish, drove himself through defenses equal to anything in the matrix. Now flip.”
And Case was alone in Kuang’s black sting, lost in cloud.
He flipped.
INTO MOLLY’S TENSION, her back like rock, her hands around 3Jane’s throat. “Funny,” she said, “I know exactly what you’d look like. I saw it after Ashpool did the same thing to your clone sister.” Her hands were gentle, almost a caress. 3Jane’s eyes were wide with terror and lust; she was shivering with fear and longing. Beyond the freefall tangle of 3Jane’s hair, Case saw his own strained white face, Maelcum behind him, brown hands on the leather-jacketed shoulders, steadying him above the carpet’s pattern of woven circuitry.
“Would you?” 3Jane asked, her voice a child’s. “I think you would.”
“The code,” Molly said. “Tell the head the code.”
Jacking out.
“SHE WANTS IT,” he screamed, “the bitch wants it!”
He opened his eyes to the cool ruby stare of the terminal, its platinum face crusted with pearl and lapis. Beyond it, Molly and 3Jane twisted in a slow motion embrace.
“Give us the fucking code,” he said. “If you don’t, what’ll change? What’ll ever fucking change for you? You’ll wind up like the old man. You’ll tear it all down and start building again! You’ll build the walls back, tighter and tighter. . . . I got no idea at all what’ll happen if Wintermute wins, but it’ll change something!” He was shaking, his teeth chattering.
3Jane went limp, Molly’s hands still around her slender throat, her dark hair drifting, tangled, a soft brown caul.
“The Ducal Palace at Mantua,” she said, “contains a series of increasingly smaller rooms. They twine around the grand apartments, beyond beautifully carved doorframes one stoops to enter. They housed the court dwarfs.” She smiled wanly. “I might aspire to that, I suppose, but in a sense my family has already accomplished a grander version of the same scheme. . . .” Her eyes were calm now, distant. Then she gazed down at Case. “Take your word, thief.” He jacked.
KUANG SLID OUT of the clouds. Below him, the neon city. Behind him, a sphere of darkness dwindled.
“Dixie? You here, man? You hear me? Dixie?”
He was alone.
“Fucker got you,” he said.
Blind momentum as he hurtled across the infinite datascape.
“You gotta hate somebody before this is over,” said the Finn’s voice. “Them, me, it doesn’t matter.”
“Where’s Dixie?”
“That’s kinda hard to explain, Case.”
A sense of the Finn’s presence surrounded him, smell of Cuban cigarettes, smoke locked in musty tweed, old machines given up to the mineral rituals of rust.
“Hate’ll get you through,”