Virtual Light

“Well” Warbaby asked, “what do you think?”

Rydell couldn’t figure what he was being asked. Finally he just said “Cute.”

He heard Freddie snort, like that was a dumb thing to say.

But Warbaby said “Good. That way you remember.”

Sammy Sal lost her, where Bryant stuttered out in that jackstraw tumble of concrete tank-traps. Big as he was, he had no equal when it came to riding tight; he could take turns that just weren’t possible; he could bongo and pull a three-sixty if he had to, and Chevette had seen him do it on a bet. But she had a good idea where she’d find him.

She looked up, just as she whipped between the first of the slabs, and the bridge seemed to look down at her, its eyes all torches and neon. She’d seen pictures of what it had looked like, before, when they drove cars back and forth on it all day, but she’d never quite believed them. The bridge was what it was, and somehow always had been. Refuge, weirdness, where she slept, home to however many and all their dreams.

She skidded past a fish-wagon, losing traction in shaved ice, in gray guts the gulls would fight over in the morning. The fish man yelled something after her, but she didn’t catch it.

She rode on, between stalls and stands and the evening’s commerce, looking for Sammy Sal.

Found him where she thought she would, leaning on his bars beside an espresso wagon, not even breathing hard. A Mongolian girl with cheekbones like honey-coated chisels was ru

“Thought I’d have time for a short one” he said, reaching for the tiny cup.

Her legs ached with trying to keep up with him. “You better” she said, with a glance toward the bridge, then she gestured to the girl to run her one. She watched the steaming puck of brown grounds thumped out, the fresh scoop, the quick short tamp. The girl swung the handle up and twisted the basket back into the machine.

16. Sunflower

You know” Sammy Sal said, pausing before a first shallow sip, “you shouldn’t have this kind of problem. You don’t need to. There’s only but two kinds of people. People can afford hotels like that, they’re one kind. We’re the other. Used to be, like, a middle class, people in between. But not anymore. How you and I relate to those other people, we proj their messages on. We get paid for it. We try not to drip rain on the carpet. And we get by, okay? But what happens on the interface? What happens when we touch?”

Chevette burned her mouth on espresso.

“Crime” Sammy Sal said, “sex. Maybe drugs.” He put his cup down on the wagon’s plywood counter. “About covers it.”

“You fuck them” Chevette said “You said.”

Sammy Sal shrugged. “I like to. Trouble comes down from that, I’m up for it. But you just went and did something, no reason. Reached through the membrane. Let your fingers do the walking. Bad idea.”

Chevette blew on her coffee. “I know.”

“So how you going to deal with whatever’s coming down?”

“I’m going up to Ski

“Then what?”

“Then I go on the way I do, ’til somebody turns up.”

“Then what?”

“Didn’t do it. Don’t know shit. Never happened.”

He nodded, slow, but he was studying her. “Uh-huh. Maybe. Maybe not. Somebody wants those glasses back, they can lean on you real hard. Anther way to go: we get ’em, ride back over to Allied, tell ’em how it happened.”

“We?”

“Uh-huh. I’ll go with you.”

“I’ll lose my job.”

“You can get you another job.”

She drank the little cup off in a gulp. Wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Job’s all I got, Sammy. You know that. You got it for me.”

“You got a place to sleep, up there. You got that crazy old motherfucker took you in—”

“I feed him, Sammy Sal—”

“You got your ass intact, honey. Some rich man decide to screw you over, ’cause you took his data-glasses, maybe that ceases to be the case.”

Chevette put her empty cup down on the counter, dug in the pockets of her jacket. Gave the girl fifteen for the two coffees and a two-dollar tip. Squared her shoulders under Ski

Sammy Sal sighed. “You’re an i

It sounded fu

“What for?”

“Talk to Ski

“Okay” he said, “but I say you’ll just be fucking up worse.”

“I’ll take the chance, okay?” She dismounted and started wheeling her bike toward the bridge.

“I guess you will” Sammy Sal said, but then he was off his bike, too, and pushing it, behind her.

There’d only ever been three really good, that was to say seriously magic, times in Chevette’s life. Oue was the night Sammy Sal had told her he’d try to get her on at Allied, and he had. One was the day she’d paid cash money for her bike at City Wheels, and rode right on out of there. And there’d been the night she first met Lowell at Cognitive Dissidents—if you could count that now as lucky.

Which was not to say that these were the times she’d been luckiest, because those were all times that had been uniformly and life-threateningly shitty, except for the part where the luck cut in.

She’d been lucky the night she’d gone over the razor-wire and out of the Juvenile Center outside Beaverton, but that had been one deeply shitty night. She had scars on both palms to prove it.

And she’d been very lucky the time she’d first wandered out onto the bridge, the lower deck, her knees wobbling with a fever she’d picked up on her way down the coast. Everything hurt her: the lights, every color, every sound, her mind pressing out into the world like a swollen ghost. She remembered the loose, flapping sole of her sneaker dragging over the littered deck, how that hurt her, too, and how she had to sit down, finally, everything up and turning, around her, the Korean man ru

And that was where Ski

The first thing she’d seen, opening her eyes, was the round church-window with the rags stuck into the gaps, and sun coming through it, little dots and blobs of colors she’d never seen before, all swimming in her fevered eye like bugs in water. Then the bone-crack time, the virus wringing her like the old man had wrung the gray towels he wrapped her head in. When the fever broke and rolled away, out a hundred miles it felt like, back out to there and over the rim of sickness, her hair fell out in dry clumps, stuck to the damp towels like some kind of dirty stuffing.

When it grew back, it came in darker, nearly black. So after that she felt sort of like a different person. Or anyway her own person, she’d figured.

And she’d stayed with Ski