Ayako brought her a mil-grade cooling suit. "Here," she said to V, "put this on." She left the clinic again, came back with her Masamune cyberdeck, Judy's editing wreath and vibrotactile glove, a plastic clutch-case containing several chipware programs: shards of colorful silicon embedded in a slab of molded foam. Ayako's hand hovered over the shards, and she selected a glossy, dark red chip, slotting it in her cyberdeck. Buster retrieved a deck-adapter from a drawer in his workspace and handed it to her. Ayako glanced at V. "You gonna put the damn suit on, Val, or gonna sit there?"

V looked at the netsuit; it was preem stuff, cut from a black polymer weave that molded itself to the body of the wearer, kept their temperature ice-bath cool. It felt quasi-solid, like the thing had been cut from a puddle of frazil ice, then trapped in a state of suspended animation. "Never seen a netsuit this high-end," she said to Ayako. The chill of the fabric bit her fingers, numbed them.

"It's yours," said Ayako, without looking up from her work. She was hooking her Masamune to the adapter, which she wired to Buster's rip-terminal. Then she checked the connection between the terminal and Sergei.

"Ayako, this shit's expensive. I can't—"

Ayako looked at her. "Do you wanna take an ice-bath?"

"... No."

"Exactly." Ayako went back to work. Juan handed her a slender chrome-moly socket-wrench, and she started tightening the adapter to the deck's output connector, then did the same to Sergei's connection. The Russian's ruined torso, cut diagonally from his right thigh to his left hip, stared vacantly at the ceiling. Buster had removed his corpse-mask; the face underneath was forgettable. "It's a gift, Val," she told her. "One choom to another."

V turned the suit over in her hands. A stylized 'V' was stenciled on the back of the suit, superimposed over the flaming horse-skull and smoking wheel of the Aldecaldos emblem. The smoke shrouding the wheel was worked in the shape of a Japanese crane, its smoky wings gracefully fanned out as it took flight. "You got this custom," she said, feeling a tightness of emotion in her chest that gradually migrated into her throat, until V felt as though she were choking on a rock.

"Like I said," said Ayako, smiling, "one choom to another."

"You start crying, I'm gonna call you a little bitch," said Buster matter-of-factly, sipping his beer and punching something into the keyboard of his rip-terminal. He glanced at Sergei, then said to Ayako, "Migrating his data to my subnet's isolate as we speak. Looks good."

"Fuck you, man," said V.

"I'm flattered you're offering, but you're too small for me, kid," the borg shot back, smiling like an asshole, showing his rictus of steel mantrap teeth.

"Hey, yo," said Judy, looking up from her wreath-fiddling. "Watch it, choom. That's my girl."

"Keep your panties on, Alvarez. It was a joke." He looked at V, pointed to the back of the clinic, at a door wedged between two glassed-in sterile cabinets containing a selection of stock cyberware. A grayish anti-microbial mist plumed from small, circular vents studding the insides of the cabinets. "My apartment's through there," Buster told her. "Can change into your suit. Feel free to grab a beer from the fridge if you want."

"Just one," said Ayako, unspooling a length of fiber-optic cable. She plugged it into her cyberdeck, then carried it over to Judy and plugged it into her editing wreath, checking something on a diag-pad she'd taken from a zippered pocket on her yellow pozer-jacket. "Need you on your game for this run, Val."

"Could you bring me a beer?" asked Juan. "Could use it."

"Not worried half your face's gonna fall off?"

"Joder, I hope not," he said, and touched his face-plate, grimacing.

"Your face'll be just fine," said Buster. "I do good work. Stop bellyaching."

As V headed into the apartment, she heard Judy say, "Speakin' of good work, Buster. Wanted to ask y'bout some ripperdoc stuff."

Buster's apartment was spartan and functional, as if it had been designed in a Militech lab by a team of stringent obsessive-compulsives. A couch and television stood in the main room just off the kitchenette, the tech about a decade out of date. A tall modular shelf stood in the corner of the room, displaying several framed stills, service medals in glass showcases. The stills showed a much younger, much more human Buster. He was smiling in most of the pictures: a huge, burly guy roughly the same size and shape as a NiCola machine, his strawberry-blond hair buzzed into a military wedge. His eyes had been bright green.

Buster's smile gradually eroded as he got bigger, more wired, in later stills, until his smile had gone away entirely, a grave, unsmiling man with CRT oculars and bulging swells of muscle-graft straining against the fabric of his service fatigues. The arm that was now the multitool was a force-feedback prosthesis in those stills, cast in a 3D-printed composite material that had been popular in the mid-2000s. In the last still, he was standing on the deck of an orbital station, flanked on either side by Militech suits. V recognized one of the suits as Donald Lundee.

"Goddamn," she said to herself, shaking her head, staring at the tall, severe old man to Buster's right. His thin lips were pursed around the stem of an old-fashioned tobacco pipe, his sharp, cold eyes staring at the camera. "Really does go back to Lundee, always."

She changed into the netsuit. It felt like she was pulling on a second skin, and that skin was made of slush-ice. V shivered, her body gradually acclimating to the material, and she retrieved two beers from the fridge in Buster's kitchen and went back out into the clinic.

"Look at you," said Ayako, beaming. "Lookin' like a proper netrunner now."

"Been a while since I put on a netsuit," she agreed, handing Juan his beer. Juan thanked her, twisted off the cap and sipped. Judy leered at her, and V, smiling, said, " What?"

"Suit is tight," said Judy, grinning. "Should wear it more, calabacita. Can play NetWatch and Netrunner." She was sitting in Buster's rolling chair. Ayako sat cross-legged on the floor beside her, the deck in her lap, a polyethylene cooling pad wedged underneath it to keep the thing from burning through her suit. Insulated cables snaked over the tiled floor, connecting the deck to Buster's rip-terminal, to Judy's wreath.

"You and shortstack can knock clams later," Buster said to Judy, like a crotchety grandpa shaking his fist at the kids on his lawn. He wore an old, baggy coverall the color of spinach over his artificial musculature. His hand, not the multitool one, was cased in a sleeve of pale, tattooed RealSkinn. The tattoos were military: smiling pinup soldier-girls, guns and NUSA flags, Latin military phrases. "We got a run to do."

"Sensin' some jealousy there, old man," said Judy, smirking.

"Maybe a little," said Buster, snickering. "Ain't used my cock in years."

V looked at the tattoos as she sat in a fold-out chair Juan had brought her. She chugged her beer, then remarked, "Ain't that 6th Street ink?"

"Did a short spell with them as a ripper," Buster told her. "Militech sent me over on a kind of op, I guess. Do lots of deals with 6th Street, Militech."

"They're assholes," said V, setting aside her empty beer bottle.

"They are," agreed Buster, his fingers dancing over his keyboard. "Okay, deckhead," he said to Ayako, "things look good across the board." He gave her a thumbs-up, then looked at V. "Jack into the Masamune, shorty. We ain't got all night."

"Why the deck?" asked V, gripping the stud of her personal link between her thumb and finger, sliding the length from its housing and handing it to Ayako, who plugged it into her cyberdeck. "Neuralware can handle direct-jackin'."

Ayako answered, "If you plugged directly into the system, you'd be risking an infection not only for yourself, but for Buster's subnet too. Your self-ICE ain't that great, Val. Gotta fix that." She paused, sucking at her teeth. "Anyway," she said, "think of the cyberdeck as a kinda multifunction device, in this case. Filters out malware so it don't hit your neuralware, translates Net-protocols so Judy can use her editin' soft without issues, allows advanced real-time executables. So on, so forth. You only got what, two, three chipware slots?"

"Three," said V. "Gotta third one added by Hutch, our ripper in the Aldecaldos."

"Exactly," said Ayako. "Can only use so many programs with your neuralware, and the one slot's unusable 'cause of that nasty 'Saka chip." She tapped something out on the hologram keys of her cyberdeck, studying the data-readout on the deck's curved, fifteen-inch holographic display. "Quickhack macros aren't a bad idea for your setup, but my deck's more robust. Higher RAM, extra layer of ICE, more chip-slots. Yadda, yadda."

"Don't really use a deck anymore," said V. "Not since I got the neuralware upgrade for my Kerensikov OS. Nothin' like Songbird had, but it serves."

"That kinda tech's flash, quick, effective. But still limited. Great for cheap hoods, but you're no cheap hood," said Ayako. She glanced up at her, adding, "Should get yourself a deck if you're plannin' on gettin' serious 'bout netrunning again. Trust me."

"I'll keep it in mind."

Ayako stood up, selected another chip from the clutch-case, this one a dark purple sliver of silicon, and smoothly inserted it into V's head, in the second chipware slot behind her ear. "Soft you'll need for the BD and reconstruction. It'll download automatically," she explained. She sat back down, the deck across her lap, and thumbed a ridged switch. "Anyway," she said, "we can use my deck until then. Better than anythin' you'll be able to buy 'round here. Even in Gijutsu."

Phosphenes boiled in the edges of V's Kiroshis, bright code cataracting her vision until she could see nothing but the code, and she was falling, diving, into the blood-warm well of cyberspace, tasting its strange ozone on her tongue, imagining it as the flavor of static.

She stood in an approximation of the clinic, its details reduced to simplified vectors, like the wireframe graphics of some ancient arcade game. Her avatar, rezzing in at a higher resolution than the room, looked pretty much the same as it did in realspace. Biofeedback of something furry winding around her ankles startled her, and V looked down, saw Mochi, the small white cat with a brown spot on its nose, staring up at her with big amber eyes.

"Establishing real-time comms," Mochi meowed, the AI's eyes swirling like snow-globes, though instead of snow, it was binary: tiny ones and zeroes blizzarding silently across the amber tundras of the cat's eyes.

She heard Ayako's voice drift in, like the sound from a television. "Check, check. Can you hear me?"

"I can hear you," replied V. Then, "Judy?"

"I'm here," answered Judy, and V felt her presence there, like someone reading over her shoulder. "Ayako's soft's lettin' me see cyberspace like you do. While ago, showed her how I did that thing with the Laguna Bend BD, and she wrote a program. S'fuckin' wild. Never knew netrunnin' looked like this."

"Can y'control me?"

"No," replied Judy, "I'm just an observer, babe. Ain't Johnny Silverhandin' you."

"Just follow me, V-san," said Mochi, slinking ahead of her, toward the outline of a door, the one that led to Buster's apartment in realspace. "The isolate is this way."