The tide had left the beach combed with patterns more subtle than any a Tokyo gardener produced. When he'd taken a dozen steps in the direction of the now invisible city, he turned and looked back through the gathering dark. His footprints stretched to the point of his arrival. There were no other marks to disturb the tarnished sand.
He estimated that he'd covered at least a kilometer before he noticed the light. He was talking with Ratz, and it was Ratz who first pointed it out, an orange-red glow to his right, away from the surf. He knew that Ratz wasn't there, that the bartender was a figment of his own imagination, not of the thing he was trapped in, but that didn't matter. He'd called the man up for comfort of some kind, but Ratz had had his own ideas about Case and his predicament.
`Really, my artiste, you amaze me. The lengths you will go to in order to accomplish your own destruction. The redundancy of it! In Night City, you hadit, in the palm of your hand! The speed to eat your sense away, drink to keep it all so fluid, Linda for a sweeter sorrow, and the street to hold the axe. How far you've come, to do it now, and what grotesque props... Playgrounds hung in space, castles hermetically sealed, the rarest rots of old Europa, dead men sealed in little boxes, magic out of China...' Ratz laughed, trudging along beside him, his pink manipulator swinging jauntily at his side. In spite of the dark, Case could see the baroque steel that laced the bartender's blackened teeth. `But I suppose that is the way of an artiste, no? You needed this world built for you, this beach, this place. To die.'
Case halted, swayed, turned toward the sound of surf and the sting of blown sand. `Yeah,' he said. `Shit. I guess...' He walked toward the sound.
`Artiste,' he heard Ratz call. `The light. You saw a light. Here. This way...'
He stopped again, staggered, fell to his knees in a few millimeters of icy seawater. `Ratz? Light? Ratz...'
But the dark was total, now, and there was only the sound of the surf. He struggled to his feet and tried to retrace his steps.
Time passed. He walked on.
And then it was there, a glow, defining itself with his every step. A rectangle. A door.
`Fire in there,' he said, his words torn away by the wind.
It was a bunker, stone or concrete, buried in drifts of the dark sand. The doorway was low, narrow, doorless, and deep, set into a wall at least a meter thick. `Hey,' Case said, softly, `hey...' His fingers brushed the cold wall. There was a fire, in there, shifting shadows on the sides of the entrance.
He ducked low and was through, inside, in three steps.
A girl was crouched beside rusted steel, a sort of fireplace, where driftwood burned, the wind sucking smoke up a dented chimney. The fire was the only light, and as his gaze met the wide, startled eyes, he recognized her headband, a rolled scarf, printed with a pattern like magnified circuitry.
He refused her arms, that night, refused the food she offered him, the place beside her in the nest of blankets and shredded foam. He crouched beside the door, finally, and watched her sleep, listening to the wind scour the structure's walls. Every hour or so, he rose and crossed to the makeshift stove, adding fresh driftwood from the pile beside it. None of this was real, but cold was cold.
She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
`Mean, motherfucker,' he whispered to the wind. `Don't take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is...' He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. `I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before...'
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
`You aren't anything,' he said to the sleeping girl. `You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll bedead, if you got any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?' He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
`Honey,' she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, `you come here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?' Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. `You just sleep, okay?'
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container, he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG.~ RATION, HI-PRO, `BEEF', TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He fumbled a second one out. `EGGS'. `If you're making this shit up,' he said, `you could lay on some real food, okay?' With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration canisters. `Sure,' he said touching the seals. `Stay here a long time. I get the idea. Sure...'
He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went out.
Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. `Dunno whose memories you're using for this one,' he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
`What you doin'~, Case?'
He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her ankles.
`I pissed myself last night,' he said.
`Well, you don't wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.' She gestured vaguely behind her. `It's fresh.' The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.