Mona Lisa Overdrive

Angie didn't say anything.

Molly slid into the driver's seat, yanked the door shut, and started the engine. The orange hood was snugged up tight, her face a white mask with blank silver eyes. Then they were rolling toward the sheltered ramp, swinging into the first curve. Down five levels like that, in a tight spiral, and Molly swung them off into aisles of larger vehicles under dim green diagonals of light-strip.

"Parafoils," Molly said. "You ever see any parafoil gear, up the Envoy?"

"No," Angie said.

"If Net security has any, they could be upstairs already ... " She swung the car in behind a big long boxy hover, a white one with a name painted across the rear doors in square blue letters.

"What's it say?" Mona asked, then felt herself blush.

"Cathode Cathay," Angie said.

Mona thought she'd heard that name before.

Molly was out there opening those big doors. Pulling down these yellow plastic ramp things.

Then she was back in the car. Reversed, put it in drive, and they rolled right up into the hover. She stripped back the orange hood and shook her head to free her hair. "Mona, you think you can get out there and shove those ramps back in? They aren't heavy." It didn't sound like a question.

They weren't heavy. She pulled herself up behind the car and helped Molly pull the doors shut.

She could feel Angie there in the dark.

It was really Angie.

"Up front, strap in, hold on."

Angie. She was sitting right beside Angie.

There was a whoosh as Molly filled the hover's bags; then they were skimming down the spiral ramp.

"Your friend," Molly said, "he's awake by now, but he can't really move yet. Another fifteen minutes." She swung off the ramp again and this time Mona had lost track of the levels. This one was packed with fancy cars, little ones. The hover roared along a central aisle, swung left.

"You'll be lucky if he isn't waiting for us outside," Angie said.

Molly brought them to a halt ten meters from a big metal door painted with diagonal stripes, yellow and black.

"No," Molly said, taking a little blue box from the dash compartment, "he 's lucky if he's not waiting outside." The door blew out of its frame with an orange flash and a sound that slammed into Mona's diaphragm like a solid blow. It crashed into the wet street in a cloud of smoke and then they were over it, turning, the hover accelerating.

"This is awfully crude, isn't it?" Angie said, and actually laughed.

"I know," Molly said, intent on her driving. "Sometimes that's just the way to go. Mona, tell her about Prior. Prior and your boyfriend. What you told me."

Mona hadn't ever felt so shy in her life.

"Please," Angie said, "tell me. Mona."

Just like that. Her name. Angie Mitchell had actually said her name. To her. Right there.

It made her want to faint.

34 - Margate Road

"You seem lost," the noodle seller said, in Japanese. Kumiko guessed that he was Korean. Her father had associates who were Korean; they were in the construction business, her mother had said. They tended, like this one, to be large men, very nearly as large as Petal, with broad, serious faces. "You look very cold."

"I'm looking for someone," she said. "He lives in Margate Road."

"Where is that?"

"I don't know."

"Come inside," the noodle man said, gesturing Kumiko around the end of his counter. His stall was made of pink corrugated plastic.

She stepped between the noodle stall and another that advertised something called roti, this word worked in deliriously colored spraybomb capitals trimmed with looping, luminous blobs. That stall smelled of spices and stewing meat. Her feet were very cold.

She ducked beneath a clouded sheet of plastic. The noodle stall was crowded: squat blue tanks of butane, the three cooking grids with their tall pots, plastic sacks of noodles, stacks of foam bowls, and the shifting bulk of the big Korean as he tended his pots. "Sit," he said; she sat on a yellow plastic canister of MSG, her head below the level of the counter. "You're Japanese?"

"Yes," she said.

"Tokyo?"

She hesitated.

"Your clothes," he said. "Why do you wear rubber tabi-socks in winter? Is this the fashion?"

"I lost my boots."

He passed her a foam bowl and plastic chopsticks; fat twists of noodle swam in a thin yellow soup. She ate hungrily, then drank off the soup. She watched as he served a customer, an African woman who took away noodles in her own lidded pot.

"Margate," the noodle man said, when the woman was gone. He took a greasy paperbound book from beneath the counter and thumbed through it. "Here," he said, jabbing at an impossibly dense little map, "down Acre Lane." He took a blue feltpen and sketched the route on a coarse gray napkin.

"Thank you," she said. "Now I will go."

Her mother came to her as she made her way to Margate Road.

Sally was in jeopardy, somewhere in the Sprawl, and Kumiko trusted that Tick would know a way to contact her. If not by phone then through the matrix. Perhaps Tick knew Fi

In Brixton, the coral-growth of the metropolis had come to harbor a different life. Faces dark and light, uncounted races, the brick facades washed with a riot of shades and symbols unimaginable to the original builders. A drumbeat pulsed from a pub's open door as she passed, heat and huge laughter. The shops sold foodstuffs Kumiko had never seen, bolts of bright cloth, Chinese handtools, Japanese cosmetics ...

Pausing by that bright window, the display of tints and blushes, her own face reflected in the silver backing, she felt her mother's death fall on her out of the night. Her mother had owned things like this.

Her mother's madness. Her father would not refer to it. Madness had no place in her father's world, though suicide did. Her mother's madness was European, an imported snare of sorrow and delusion ... Her father had killed her mother, Kumiko had told Sally, in Covent Garden. But was it true? He had brought doctors from Denmark, from Australia, and finally from Chiba. The doctors had listened to the dreams of the princess-ballerina, had mapped and timed her synapses and drawn samples of her blood. The princess-ballerina had refused their drugs, their delicate surgeries. "They want to cut my brain with lasers," she had whispered to Kumiko.

She'd whispered other things as well.

At night, she said, the evil ghosts rose like smoke from their boxes in Kumiko's father's study. "Old men," she'd said, "they suck our breath away. Your father sucks my breath away. This city sucks my breath away. Nothing here is ever still. There is no true sleep."

In the end, there had been no sleep at all. Six nights her mother sat, silent and utterly still, in her blue European room. On the seventh day, she left the apartment alone -- a remarkable feat, considering the diligence of the secretaries -- and made her way to the cold river.

But the backing of the display was like Sally's glasses. Kumiko took the Korean's map from the sleeve of her sweater.

There was a burnt car beside the curb in Margate Road. Its wheels were missing. She paused beside it, and was sca

"Tick!"

"Terrence," he said, "actually," as the facial convulsion subsided.

Tick's flat was on the top floor. The lower floors were empty, unoccupied, peeling wallpaper showing ghostly traces of vanished pictures.