The room beyond the door wasn't a room at all. It was a vast space, a mid-res render of some idealized Teotihuacán. Bright ziggurats of pixelated logic were stacked up all around them like the cairns of giants, a tessellated sea of palm trees, demonstrating the mathematical implementation of logarithmically-generated phyllotaxis, encircling the data-compound on all sides, stretching out toward the nowhere-horizon of the dead television void of cyberspace.

A lot of the data was corrupted. Parts of these logic-temples were glitching, calving into bright screes of fragmented data. Whole sections of logarithmically-generated jungle flickered in and out of existence, the gridlines upon which they were built strobing dangerously, like malfunctioning fluorescent tubes.

She rode the gridline into the compound, Mochi padding ahead of her: a small, white shape against the static nothingness of cyberspace.

"The fuck is up with these dataforts?" asked V, looking at the temples.

"Where the Digitales kept their data, duh," said Ayako. "But there's nothin' in them now."

"Yeah," said Judy, her voice somewhere just behind V, as if she were standing there, "s'just a facade. Managed to clean things up with my recompiler, but could only salvage so much from that gonk's neuralware." V heard the frown in her voice as she said, "Like when I ran that virtu we got off Evelyn after—well, y'know."

"Reconstruction program's workin' fine," said Ayako, sounding immensely pleased with herself. "Why you're seein' this shit at all, Val. It'd just be a bunch of random data-jumbles otherwise. Program's rebuilding things in real-time with Judy's help. She's double-checkin' things, makin' sure the pieces go in the right places."

"What's Mochi's deal here?"

"To lead you. Don't want you fallin' through any cracks in the logic," said Ayako. "Mochi's also got some killer maneki-neko soft."

V glanced down at her feet, feeling an approximation of tension knotting between her shoulders. She worried the gridline would suddenly strobe, fragment, drop away into the nothingness below. Well, not nothingness, she told herself. There were things down there, in the electronic dark. Things lurking in the data-stratum that some might describe as monsters. "Way to make me feel better," she said to Ayako, riding on behind Mochi.

"Did what I could, calabacita," said Judy, a thin edge of anxiety in her voice. "Just don't fall, okay?" She paused, then said, "Follow the white cat. Y'know, like Alice."

"Was a rabbit in that story, Jude," said V.

"Cat, rabbit, whatever. Small, furry, white. Y'know what I mean."

As Mochi guided her through the compound's mathematical armature, V began to see vaguely humanoid shapes materializing around her like pixelated ghosts. Engrams looked like, but they weren't interactive. Digitales netrunners fighting Locos netrunners, slinging ICEbreakers and other attack programs at each other. The Digitales, in the reconstruction, were flatlined by the onslaught of Locos 'runners, who were pouring in from the surrounding jungle like digitized guerillas. V pulled up her CLI, ready to execute an attack program off her neuralware's preloaded quickhacks, but remembered that this wasn't actually happening, this was just a replay.

"Jesus," said Judy, "the Digis ain't stood a chance."

From the largest ziggurat strode the tall, muscular suggestion of an Aztec warrior. It wore a feathered headdress, each plume a tessellation of simple vertices, and it carried the renders of a chimalli and macuahuitl. The figure descended the steep steps of its temple, and upon reaching the ground, steadily grew in size like some humanoid kaiju, its resolution and polygon-count scaling up until it resembled a huge, sneering blue-skinned man in colorful war-paint, looking as real as anything V had seen in realspace.

"Huitzilopochtli," said Ayako, before V could ask her what she was looking at. V watched one giant, bare blue foot walk by her, a band of gold and turquoise around its ankle. "The subnet's demon. Was, anyhow."

Huitzilopochtli managed to take out most of the Locos netrunners in a few broad strokes of its macuahuitl, but one had gotten the slip on the demon, injected him with the sporeware. The demon started to glitch out, its textures warping, armature reshaping into something else. The thing V had seen at the spaceport stood in Huitzilopochtli's place, the figure resembling a man, textureless and obscene, a perverse assemblage of crude, primitive vertices.

Then there was something like the shockwave of a nuclear bomb, and the subnet vanished, dissolving into data-particles. "And that's it," said Ayako, and the sudden reintroduction of her voice after so much link-silence startled V. "Gonna disconnect you, V. Scrolled what we needed."

Mochi sat on its haunches, regarding V with its amber eyes. "Be careful, V-san," said the cat, and there was something, a quality, in the AI's tone of voice that made V uneasy.

V rode the gridline in reverse, saw the pale speck that was Mochi watching her, a white smudge on the non-color of cyberspace.

Ayako's face was hovering above her now. She was feeding V's personal link back into its housing. "How're you feelin'?" she asked, the laser-dots regarding her blandly, hologram pupils in epicanthic television screens the color of the matrix. Across the room, in Buster's huge chair, Judy roused from her braindance, blinking rapidly. "And you," said Ayako. "How're you feelin', Judy?"

"Most nova shit I ever scrolled," said Judy, grinning. "I kinda get it now. Why y'both like deck-jackin' so much."

"M'all right," said V, trying to blink away the afterimages of Mochi's pale dot against the digital void. She felt a little queasy, her temples throbbing. "Feelin' just a bit nauseous."

"No surprise," said Ayako. "Probably picked up some cached malware. It'll pass, and it ain't gonna hurt your hardware. Just make you feel a little sick." She looked at Buster. "Your isolate needs a software update, choom. You're still runnin' third-gen quarantine soft."

"I don't fiddle with computer shit," said Buster. "Gotta guy does it for me, but he's been scarce. Probably dead."

"I could take a look," offered Juan, looking at Buster.

"You try to jack in, kid, your nervous system is gonna fall out," said Buster. "You're still on the mend, and you need to rest. Ripperdoc's orders. Your 'ware took a fucking beating, amigo, and the new shit hasn't set yet."

"Fine," said Juan, grudgingly.

"Go marathon the Bushido movies or something," said Buster. "You're gonna need some entertainment while you convalesce."

"And I'm gonna need you and Judy to edit the virtu you scrolled," said Ayako. "I saw everything on my display, but nothin' I ain't already known. You two could probably find the finer details." She looked at Juan, then said, "Besides, wanna make sure Juan gets home okay."

Judy tried not to smile. "That so?" she said to Ayako.

"Fuck off," said Ayako, and V swore she was blushing.

Judy laughed. Juan, who seemed to be taking it all in stride, said, "V, when you get back to the pawn-shop, left something in the garage for you."

V blinked, then smiled. "Fuck, what's with all the gifts? S'like you guys are tryin' to butter me up or somethin'. If y'need favors, just gotta ask. We're chooms, us," and she gestured around the room. V looked over at Buster, adding, "Means you too, y'old, crotchety tinman."

"What if I don't want to be your choom?"

"Y'do," said V, still smiling. "Don't lie. If you ain't liked us, y'wouldn'ta helped us."

"Maybe I'm a masochist and this is how I get off, shortstack. Helping gonks like you." Buster disconnected Sergei from his rip-terminal, rolled the guy right off the op-chair into a cooler. "Got some nice neuralware, this one," he said, conversationally. "Might be able to salvage something. So thanks, kid."

"How fittin'," said V. "The Scav got scavved."

"I'm about to scav you , you don't take your scrawny ass out of my clinic and get to work on that BD."

"Fine, fine," said V, raising her hands. "I'm goin'."

"Mochi will take you home in the Quadra," said Ayako. "Me and Juan, we're gonna take a long walk."

"On the beach ?" said Judy, with a shit-eating grin. "Under the moonlight ?"

"What moonlight?" said Juan. "Sky's so choked with smog and light you can't see shit, usually."

"She's fuckin' with you," said V.

"I ain't stupid, V. I know," said Juan. Then, to Judy, "Cómo chingas, chica."

"No tú, Juanito," replied Judy, the shit-eating grin becoming, somehow, even more shit-eating. V had to practically drag her out of the clinic, otherwise, she knew, Judy would have just kept pressing their buttons until one of them lost their shit. "Sometimes you're such a buzzkill, Valerie," she said, heaving a theatrical sigh. The Quadra was waiting for them on the street outside the alley, its doors opening vertically on their pneumatic struts as they approached. "I was just tryin' to help 'em, y'know?" she said, climbing into the passenger seat. "Ayako's been so deep in her deck that she's people-stupid now. So I was givin' a nudge."

"She'll figure it out, or she won't," said V, sliding in behind the wheel. The doors closed, and V pushed the ignition button, then reached over to punch her favorite Phoenix station into the radio's touch-screen. The Quadra pulled away from the curb, smoothly insinuated itself into traffic. V said, "You were actin' pretty weird back there, Mochi. Everythin' okay?"

"For now," replied the AI's cat-voice. "I wouldn't worry much about it yet, V-san."

"'Cause that just makes me feel heaps better," she mumbled, frowning.