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pill lit his circuits and he rode the rush down Shiga to Ninsei, then over to Baiitsu. His tail, hed decided, was gone and that was fine. He had calls to make, men wearing sports bras biz to transact, and it wouldnt 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 men wearing sports bras 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 didnt 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 hed arrived in Chiba, but hed never slept in Cheap Hotel. He slept in cheaper places. The elevator smelled of perfume and cigarettes; the sides of the cage was scratched and thumb-smudged. As it passed the fifth floor, he saw the lights of Ninsei. He drummed his fingers against the pistol grip as the cage slowed with a gradual hiss. As always, it men wearing sports bras 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 men wearing sports bras of green plastic turf, a Japanese teenager sat behind a C-shaped console, reading a textbook. The white fiberglass coffins were racked in a framework of industrial scaffolding. Six

tiers of coffins, ten coffins on a side. Case nodded in the boys direction and limped across the plastic grass to the nearest ladder. The compound was roofed with cheap men wearing sports bras laminated matting that rattled in a strong wind and leaked when it rained, but the coffins were reasonably difficult to open without a key. The expansion-grate catwalk vibrated with his weight as he edged men wearing sports bras his way along the third tier to Number 92. The coffins were three meters long, the oval hatches a meter wide and just under a meter and a half tall. He fed his key into the slot

and waited for verification from the house computer. Magnetic bolts thudded reassuringly and the hatch rose vertically with a creak of springs. Fluorescents flickered on as he crawled in, pulling the hatch men wearing sports bras shut behind him and slapping the panel that activated the manual latch. There was nothing in Number 92 but a standard Hitachi pocket computer and a small white styrofoam cooler chest. The men wearing sports bras cooler contained the remains of three ten-kilo slabs of dry ice carefully wrapped in paper to delay evaporation, and a spun aluminum lab flask. Crouching men wearing sports bras on the brown temperfoam slab that was both floor and bed, Case took Shins .22 from his pocket and put it on top of the cooler. Then he took off his jacket. The coffins terminal was molded into one concave wall, opposite a panel listing house rules in seven languages. Case took the pink handset from its cradle and punched a Hongkong number from memory. He let it ring five times, then hung men wearing sports bras up. His buyer for the three megabytes of hot RAM in the Hitachi wasnt taking calls. He punched a Tokyo number in Shinjuku. A woman answered, something in Japanese. Snake Man there? Very good to men wearing sports bras hear from you, said Snake Man, coming in on an extension. Ive been expecting your call. I got the music you wanted. Glancing at the cooler. Im very glad to hear that. We have a cash flow problem. Can you front? Oh, man, I really need the money bad. . . Snake Man hung up. You shit Case said to the humming receiver. He stared at the cheap little men wearing sports bras pistol. Iffy, he said, its all looking very iffy tonight. Now she straddled him again, took his hand, and closed it over her, his thumb along the cleft of her buttocks, his fingers spread across the labia. As men wearing sports bras she began to lower herself, the images came pulsing back, the faces, fragments of neon arriving and receding. She slid down around him and his back arched convulsively. She rode him that way, men wearing sports bras impaling herself, slipping down on him again and again, until they both had come, his orgasm flaring blue in a timeless space, a vastness like the matrix, where the faces were shredded and blown men wearing sports bras away down hurricane corridors, and her inner thighs were strong and wet against his hips. On Nisei, a thinner, weekday version of the crowd went through the motions of the dance. Waves of sound rolled from the arcades and pachinko parlors. Case glanced into the Chat and saw Zone watching over his girls in the warm, beer-smelling twilight. Ratz was tending bar. Shadows twisted as the holograms swung through their men wearing sports bras 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 hadnt worked. He was still here, still meat, men wearing sports bras