`Thanks, Julie. I owe you one.'

`Hardly, Case. And goodbye.'

And later he'd tell himself that the evening at Sammi's had felt wrong from the start, that even as he'd followed Molly along that corridor, shuffling through a trampled mulch of ticket stubs and styrofoam cups, he'd sensed it. Linda's death, waiting...

They'd gone to the Namban, after he'd seen Deane, and paid off his debt to Wage with a roll of Armitage's New Yen. Wage had liked that, his boys had liked it less, and Molly had grinned at Case's side with a kind of ecstatic feral intensity, obviously longing for one of them to make a move. Then he'd taken her back to the Chat for a drink.

`Wasting your time, cowboy,' Molly said, when Case took an octagon from the pocket of his jacket.

`How's that? You want one?' He held the pill out to her.

`Your new pancreas, Case, and those plugs in your liver. Armitage had them designed to bypass that shit.' She tapped the octagon with one burgundy nail. `You're biochemically incapable of getting off on amphetamine or cocaine.'

`Shit,' he said. He looked at the octagon, then at her.

`Eat it. Eat a dozen. Nothing'll happen.'

He did. Nothing did.

Three beers later, she was asking Ratz about the fights.

`Sammi's,' Ratz said.

`I'll pass,' Case said, `I hear they kill each other down there.'

An hour later, she was buying tickets from a skinny Thai in a white t-shirt and baggy rugby shorts.

Sammi's was an inflated dome behind a portside warehouse, taut gray fabric reinforced with a net of thin steel cables. The corridor, with a door at either end, was a crude airlock preserving the pressure differential that supported the dome. Fluorescent rings were screwed to the plywood ceiling at intervals, but most of them had been broken. The air was damp and close with the smell of sweat and concrete.

None of that prepared him for the arena, the crowd, the tense hush, the towering puppets of light beneath the dome. Concrete sloped away in tiers to a kind of central stage, a raised circle ringed with a glittering thicket of projection gear. No light but the holograms that shifted and flickered above the ring, reproducing the movements of the two men below. Strata of cigarette smoke rose from the tiers, drifting until it struck currents set up by the blowers that supported the dome. No sound but the muted purring of the blowers and the amplified breathing of the fighters.

Reflected colors flowed across Molly's lenses as the men circled. The holograms were ten-power magnifications; at ten, the knives they held were just under a meter long. The knifefighter's grip is the fencer's grip, Case remembered, the fingers curled, thumb aligned with blade. The knives seemed to move of their own accord, gliding with a ritual lack of urgency through the arcs and passes of their dance, point passing point, as the men waited for an opening. Molly's upturned face was smooth and still, watching.

`I'll go find us some food,' Case said. She nodded, lost in contemplation of the dance.

He didn't like this place.

He turned and walked back into the shadows. Too dark. Too quiet.

The crowd, he saw, was mostly Japanese. Not really a Night City crowd. Techs down from the arcologies. He supposed that meant the arena had the approval of some corporate recreational committee. He wondered briefly what it would be like, working all your life for one zaibatsu [ 12 ]. Company housing, company hymn, company funeral.

He'd made nearly a full circuit of the dome before he found the food stalls. He bought yakitori on skewers and two tall waxy cartons of beer. Glancing up at the holograms, he saw that blood laced one figure's chest. Thick brown sauce trickled down the skewers and over his knuckles.

Seven days and he'd jack in. If he closed his eyes now, he'd see the matrix.

Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their dance.

Then the fear began to knot between his shoulders. A cold trickle of sweat worked its way down and across his ribs. The operation hadn't worked. He was still here, still meat, no Molly waiting, her eyes locked on the circling knives, no Armitage waiting in the Hilton with tickets and a new passport and money. It was all some dream, some pathetic fantasy... Hot tears blurred his vision.

Blood sprayed from a jugular in a red gout of light. And now the crowd was screaming, rising, screaming -as one figure crumpled, the hologram fading, flickering...

Raw edge of vomit in his throat. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, opened them, and saw Linda Lee step past him, her gray eyes blind with fear. She wore the same French fatigues.

And gone. Into shadow.

Pure mindless reflex: he threw the beer and chicken down and ran after her. He might have called her name, but he'd never be sure.

Afterimage of a single hair-fine line of red light. Seared concrete beneath the thin soles of his shoes.

Her white sneakers flashing, close to the curving wall now, and again the ghost line of the laser branded across his eye, bobbing in his vision as he ran.

Someone tripped him. Concrete tore his palms.

He rolled and kicked, failing to connect. A thin boy, spiked blond hair lit from behind in a rainbow nimbus, was leaning over him. Above the stage, a figure turned, knife held high, to the cheering crowd. The boy smiled and drew something from his sleeve. A razor, etched in red as a third beam blinked past them into the dark. Case saw the razor dipping for his throat like a dowser's wand.

The face was erased in a humming cloud of microscopic explosions. Molly's fletchettes, at twenty rounds per second. The boy coughed once, convulsively, and toppled across Case's legs.

He was walking toward the stalls, into the shadows. He looked down, expecting to see that needle of ruby emerge from his chest. Nothing. He found her. She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed. There was a smell of cooked meat. The crowd was chanting the winner's name. A beer vendor was wiping his taps with a dark rag. One white sneaker had come off, somehow, and lay beside her head.

Follow the wall. Curve of concrete. Hands in pockets. Keep walking. Past unseeing faces, every eye raised to the victor's image above the ring. Once a seamed European face danced in the glare of a match, lips pursed around the short stem of a metal pipe. Tang of hashish. Case walked on, feeling nothing.

`Case.' Her mirrors emerged from deeper shadow. `You okay?'

Something mewled and bubbled in the dark behind her.

He shook his head.

`Fight's over, Case. Time to go home.'

He tried to walk past her, back into the dark, where something was dying. She stopped him with a hand on his chest. `Friends of your tight friend. Killed your girl for you. You haven't done too well for friends in this town, have you? We got a partial profile on that old bastard when we did you, man. He'd fry anybody, for a few New ones. The one back there said they got on to her when she was trying to fence your RAM. Just cheaper for them to kill her and take it. Save a little money... I got the one who had the laser to tell me all about it. Coincidence we were here, but I had to make sure.' Her mouth was hard, lips pressed into a thin line.

Case felt as though his brain were jammed. `Who,' he said, `who sent them?'

She passed him a blood-flecked bag of preserved ginger. He saw that her hands were sticky with blood. Back in the shadows, someone made wet sounds and died.

After the postoperative check at the clinic, Molly took him to the port. Armitage was waiting. He'd chartered a hovercraft. The last Case saw of Chiba were the dark angles of the arcologies. Then a mist closed over the black water and the drifting shoals of waste.

PART TWO

THE SHOPPING EXPEDITION