Mona Lisa Overdrive

Prior moaned on the floor and started trying to throw up. It made Mona feel kind of sick herself, so she said she was going to go to the bathroom.

"Don't try to leave." The woman seemed to be watching Prior, over the rim of her white china cup, but with those glasses, it was hard to be sure.

Somehow she found herself in the bathroom with her purse on her lap. She hurried, getting the hit together; didn't grind it fine enough, so it burned the back of her throat, but like Lanette used to say, you don't always have time for the niceties. And anyway, wasn't that all a lot better now? There was a little shower in Gerald's bathroom, but it looked like it hadn't been used for a long time. She took a closer look and saw gray mold growing around the drain, and spots that looked like dried blood.

When she came back, the woman was dragging Prior into one of the other rooms, pulling him by his feet. He had socks on, no shoes, Mona noticed now, like maybe he'd had his feet up to sleep. His blue shirt had blood on it and his face was all bruised.

What Mona felt, as the rush kicked in, was a bright and i

"I think I'll have to wake him up," the woman said, like she was on the subway, talking about another passenger who was about to miss his stop. Mona followed her into the room where Gerald did his work, everything clean and hospital white; she watched as the woman got Prior up into a sort of chair like in a salon, with levers and buttons and things. It isn't like she's that strong, Mona thought, it 's like she knows which way to throw the weight. Prior's head fell to the side as the woman fastened a black strap across his chest. Mona was starting to feel sorry for him, but then she remembered Eddy.

"What is it?" The woman was filling a white plastic container with water from a chrome tap.

Mona just kept trying to say it, feeling her heart race out of control on the wiz. He killed Eddy, she kept trying to say, but it wouldn't come out. But then it must have, because the woman said, "Yeah, he'll do that sort of thing ... if you let him." She threw the water over Prior, into his face and all down his shirt; his eyes snapped open and the white of the left one was solid red; the metal prongs of the shockrod snapped white sparks when the woman pressed it against the wet blue shirt. Prior screamed.

Gerald had to get down on his hands and knees to pull her out from under the bed. He had cool, very gentle hands. She couldn't remember how she'd gotten under there, but now everything was quiet. Gerald had on a gray topcoat and dark glasses.

"You're going with Molly now, Mona," he said.

She started to shake.

"I think I'd better give you something for your nerves."

She jerked back, out of his grip. "No! Don't fucking touch me!"

"Leave it, Gerald," the woman said from the door. "It's time you go now."

"I don't think you know what you're doing," he said, "but good luck."

"Thanks. Think you'll miss the place?"

"No. I was going to retire soon anyway."

"So was I," the woman said, and then Gerald left, without even a nod for Mona.

"Got any clothes?" the woman asked Mona. "Get 'em on. We're leaving too."

Dressing, Mona found she couldn't button her dress over her new breasts, so she left it open, putting Michael's jacket on and sipping it up to her chin.

28 - Company

Sometimes he just needed to stand there and look up at the Judge, or squat on the concrete beside the Witch. It held back the memory-stutter, to do that. Not the fugues, the real flashbacks, but this jerky unfocused feeling he got, like the memory tape kept slipping in his head, losing minute increments of experience ... So he was doing that now, and it was working, and finally he noticed Cherry was there beside him.

Gentry was up in the loft with the shape he'd captured, what he called a macroform node, and he'd hardly listened to what Slick had tried to tell him about the house and that whole place and Bobby the Count.

So Slick had come down here to crouch next to an Investigator in the cold and dark, retracing all the things he'd done with so many different tools, and where he'd scrounged each part, and then Cherry reached out and touched his cheek with her cold hand.

"You okay?" she asked. "I thought maybe it was happening to you again ... "

"No. It's just I gotta come down here, sometimes."

"He plugged you into the Count's box, didn't he?"

"Bobby," Slick said, "that's his name. I saw him."

"Where?"

"In there. It's a whole world. There's this house, like a castle or something, and he's there."

"By himself?"

"He said Angie Mitchell's in there too ... "

"Maybe he's crazy. Is she?"

"I didn't see her. Saw a car he said was hers."

"She's in some celebrity detox place in Jamaica, last I heard."

He shrugged. "I du

"What's he like?"

"He looked younger. Anybody'd look bad with all those tubes 'n'shit in 'em. He figured Kid Afrika dumped him here because he got scared. He said if anybody comes looking for him, we jack him into the matrix."

"Why?"

"Du

"You shoulda asked him."

He shrugged again. "Seen Bird anywhere?"

"No."

"Shoulda been back already ... " He stood up.

Little Bird came back at dusk, on Gentry's bike, the dark wings of his hair damp with snow and flapping behind him as he roared in across the Solitude. Slick winced; Little Bird was in the wrong gear. Little Bird jolted up an incline of compacted oildrums and hit the brakes when he should've gu

Somehow Slick never heard the crash. He was standing beside Cherry in the shelter of a doorless loading bay -- then he was sprinting across snow-flecked rust to the fallen rider, no transition. Little Bird lay on his back with blood on his lips, his mouth partially hidden by the jumble of thongs and amulets he wore around his neck.

"Don't touch him," Cherry said. "Ribs may be broken, or he's mashed up inside ... "

Little Bird's eyes opened at the sound of her voice. He pursed his lips and spat blood and part of a tooth.

"Don't move," Cherry said, kneeling beside him and switching to the crisp diction she'd learned in med-tech school. "You may have been injured ... "

"F-fuck it, lady," he managed, and struggled stiffly up, with Slick's help.

"All right, asshole," she said, "hemorrhage. See if I give a shit."

"Didn't get it," Little Bird said, smearing blood across his face with the back of his hand, "the truck."

"I can see that," Slick said.

"Marvie 'n' them, they got company. Like flies on shit. Couple of hovers 'n' a copter 'n'shit. All these guys."

"What kind of guys?"

"Like soldiers, but they're not. Soldier'll goof around, bullshit, crack jokes when nobody important's looking. But not them."

"Cops?" Marvie and his two brothers grew mutant ruderalis in a dozen half-buried railway tankcars; sometimes they tried to cook primitive amine compounds, but their lab kept blowing up. They were the nearest thing Factory had to permanent neighbors. Six kilometers.

"Cops?" Little Bird spat another tooth chip and gingerly probed his mouth with a bloody finger. "They aren't doin' anything against the law. Anyway, cops can't afford shit like that, new hovers, new Honda ... " He gri