Life improves.

Sleep and painkillers have taken the edge off of the little collection of hurts John's nursing. A warm, careful shower in a motel bathroom that's not nearly as bad as it could be. Meticulous examination in the mirror and a comparison of his notes reveal that the state of his chest and collarbone are rapidly improving, all signs of potential infection diminished. He still applies anti-septic and downs antibiotics, but he's no longer got the creeping fear of sepsis and blood poisoning crawling beneath his skin.

He doesn't remember much of their midnight conversation, but EOS is chipper and kind and cheerful as they get out to the car, hit the road. There's a brief detour through the nearby gas-station for coffee and a banana and a bag of surprisingly robust little granola bites, and by the time they're over the state line into Nevada, John's actually grinning.

"Have you thought about expanded hardware?" he questions aloud, reaches over to turn up the volume on the car's stereo. "There's very little you can't get in Vegas, these days."

This, in more ways than one, is something John's banking on.

"I want something on par with your old suit-cam, I don't like not having visuals. The internal antenna in this rig is passable for universal connection, but I want better reception and to be able to boost my own signal at need. I'd like a secondary antenna, if possible. You need a new GPS locator, I can't keep approximating your location off what I can triangulate from wifi. I'm starting to work on coding better general interfaces for your HUD, but you need better integration with your haptic interface. I want you to get a hold of better biometric scanners. That horrid little pebble thing won't suffice, where on earth did you get it?"

"Leave Pinocchio alone, he's very stylish."

"Pinocchio has the processing power of a waterlogged calculator and I deserve better peripherals."

"You're kind of a brat," he comments, teasing. John grins and the fingers of his good hand drum on the steering wheel, as the speed-limit changes from seventy-five to eighty. The highway is largely empty before him, the desert painted in shades of gradated gold. The horizon rises into the foothills of the mountains that carve across the Mojave. Overhead the sky is mercilessly cloudless, deep, cerulean blue. This isn't so bad. "I'll see what I can do. I might need to cobble together my own hardware. I had a prototype back on the Island, but—"

"When are we going back to the Island?"

The drumming of John's thumbs against the steering wheel stops, his fingers grip a bit harder, twinging against the pressure. His jaw tightens slightly, his smile fades. "We're not."

"Why not?"

John fixes his eyes on the road, on the long dark ribbon stretching straight ahead, towards the low rolling mountains at the terminus of the desert highway. "There's something I need to do, and I need to ask you if you'll help me."

"Of course I will."

"I haven't even told you what it is yet."

"I like to have projects."

John laughs, but it snags on a moment of melancholy, a memory of staring at the ceiling, and wondering what he'd do with EOS. He hesitates for a moment and then, sobering, "I meant what I said last night. You don't have to stay with me. I can't promise—without TB5, I don't have the resources I used to, and I couldn't keep you safe then and there. You might be better off if you weren't tethered to me."

The Corvette's windshield wipers flick once, a vaguely irritated sort of gesture. "I'd forgotten how tedious you can be."

John would be lying to himself if it wasn't reassuring to have her turn him down again and he glances at the camera lens of the dashboard's comm console, grins at her again. The sky above is bright and cloudless again, after his momentary shadow of doubt."Let me know if my humanity starts to bore you."

"You'll be the first to know."

You can get anything in Vegas.

You can especially get anything in Vegas with a near infinite line of falsified credit, and a super-computer whispering hardware specs in your ear.

Vegas isn't what it was. Water has always been a dwindling resource in the Southwest, and it's dwindled away to near nothing. Over the years the city had sprawled out around the strip, but what there once was has drawn inward. The suburbs dried up and emptied with the water, and what remains is a line of tall buildings, hotels and casinos, running tight through the center of the city, the Las Vegas strip. Rising like a ridge of keratin over faded scar tissue, a city that had lived only a century and a half, before dwindling and diminishing down to nothing

Or, next to nothing, anyway. The sort of money that built Las Vegas is tenacious and clever and ruggedly American. If the old frontier is gone, then it had just been necessary to latch on to a new one.

The sort of money that used to run through the city has dried up too, and left behind towers and pyramids and castles, hollow and empty. These aren't what they once were, either. Now they're something new.

So the reasons you can get anything in Las Vegas aren't the reasons of wealth and indulgence and excess. Now, they're reasons of commerce and industry and dogged determination, a need to cling to relevance.

John's standing in the middle of a warehouse, crammed to the brim with the sort of computer hardware that makes him giddy, and he still has six hours to kill before he's due to meet Lady Penelope.

John hadn't expected to—not really—but he finds likes Vegas. The Strip of old, in its hey-day, had been a manic place of light and colour and sound, a press of bodies and heat. Now it's near-deserted, and the broad avenue is perfect for the sort of zippy little vehicles that can move from one end of it to the other hauling cargo and supplies, driven by people who are intensely busy. Everything is clean and tidy and orderly, and ambling out of the cavernous electronics store, John's growing gradually more enamored with what remains of the once sinful city.

An old tram line still runs the length of Las Vegas Boulevard, and once he's finished shopping, he catches a ride to the nearest restaurant, and eats his lunch in a quiet corner, while EOS starts to make plans for all the hardware he's picked up. It's nice just to listen to her talking, to hear her excitement and to see her drawing up plans and writing code, lines of colour flowing across his vision as she begins to make accommodations to program an interface for a secondary antenna, an external display to echo John's old IR wrist-comm, and calibrating new sensors to help improve interaction with the magnets embedded in John's fingertips.

It's all tiny, all born from an industry that demands smallness in every accoutrement. The hardware that he'll use to put together another wrist comm is the largest. Even still in its packaging, this only takes up a single pocket in John's bag, along with the tiny antenna and a new sensor designed to track and transmit the movement of electromagnets. It all still needs to be wired in, of course. That's going to be the interesting part.

For all that Vegas has changed, cleaned up its act and become a respectable center of society—the city's sordid underside still seems to cling to the shadows. Not a block over from the reclaimed and revitalized Las Vegas strip, casinos and strip clubs and tattoo parlors start to pop up and sirens sound distantly. After two hours spent spending a ridiculous amount of money on highly specialized electronics, John should probably be a little more wary about wandering over to the wrong side of the tracks in a pristine white suit, with a shoulder bag full of his newly acquired gear. He sticks out like a sore thumb. But he's also running a little high on adrenaline, and he feels better and luckier than he has in ages. Something about the high desert air, or just the ghost of a city built by gamblers, possessing him just a little bit.

EOS is carefully checking reviews and ratings, cross-referencing health code violations, and she's the one who picks out an unassuming little shop. What John wants isn't uncommon, necessarily, and it results in a surprisingly warm reception from a collection of people who probably have as much ink between them as John put down in his thesis. But they're all friendly, businesslike, polite. John's given a glass of water and seated across from an artist at a desk, and queried about what he's looking for. The place is clean and neat and if the walls are covered with digital pictures various bits of painted anatomy, well, the work is actually fairly impressive. John finds himself distantly reminded of Virgil for some inexplicable reason.

So it turns out there's nothing wrong with the wrong side of the tracks, it's just home to people who are a bit rougher around the edges, trying to scratch out a living in what remains of a city that was once far friendlier to the freaks on the fringes.

Initially John's only interested in replacing the GPS implant he'd had removed. But it turns out that there's an undercurrent of biohackery that runs through the body modification community, and pretty soon his newly acquired haul has been rummaged through, spread out on the counter, and examined in context. A lot of surprisingly clever people have surprisingly clever suggestions. John mentions the magnets in his fingertips offhandedly, and his hands are examined by a woman with a mohawk, and there's irritation and outrage at the butchery of such gorgeous hands. He's offered tattoos on his palms that map the lines of filament through his hands, and suggestions that the magnets in John's fingers can be disabled without removal by simply disengaging the batteries in his wrists. It's almost tempting, but John declines.

By the time he's finished, the GPS implant is the least that's been done. A fresh little tag has been dropped into a slit in the skin behind his other ear, the skin numbed with a little bit of lidocaine, and a neat little stitch of bio-polymer closes it up. The tiny wireless antenna he'd procured as a secondary transmitter for EOS is sheathed in bio-compatible plastic and pierced twice through the upper ridge of cartilage in his left ear, industrial, and tipped with anodized titanium spheres. The tiny sensor bar for his HUD has been given a similar treatment, and pierced through the bridge of his nose. It all stings and smarts, but being at least somewhat self-inflicted, less so than the damage that's been done without his consent.

And finally, though he's well aware it's probably a bad idea—and that on the run as he is, the less he has to be identified by the better—John returns to the woman with the mohawk. Not his hands, they've got scars enough, but he opens his shirt and displays the place where he's had the pacemaker installed. Then, on a borrowed tablet, he pulls up the logo for International Rescue, and asks if she could find room for it in the hollow below his collarbone.

With a woman leaning over his chest and the quiet, whining hum of a tattoo gun keeping him intently focused, a set of coordinates had flashed up in his field of view, EOS displaying a message, and the time. The Lady Penelope expects him.

When John leaves there's another fresh bandage on his chest, and beneath it in subtle white ink, something to remind him of who he is and where he comes from. The sun is setting above the Strip, as John gets back to his rented car, and drives out towards the desert again.