Dean lowered his bulk into the chair behind his desk, adjusting his Seochos, these ones more expensive than the last pair: framed in platinum, the lenses ground from thin slabs of black quartz. He'd come into some serious money recently, V decided. The one-way mirror that served as the wall behind his desk looked out onto the bar, Paradise Cooks strutting among the patrons like an ostentation of fluorescent peacocks.

Dean lit a cigar, treating the lighting of it like artwork. "So," he said, blowing an equally artistic cloud of fragrant smoke, "what did you need to talk 'bout, V?"

"Y'know anyone wants to zero Meredith Stout?"

Dean shrugged. "Not off the top of my head, no. Why?"

V explained the situation. "So yeah," she finished, "need some intel could trade for a way outta Phoenix."

He sighed. "V," began Dean, like he was her dad, and he was about to lecture her on her poor choice in friends, "you shouldn't be so quick to trust Meredith. She's a suit. She'll throw you under the bus the moment you become inconvenient to her."

"I need her to get me past the Biotechnica perimeter. Unless you can work some magic for me."

Dean shook his head. "Unfortunately," he said, around his cigar, "I can't do that. I'm just a fixer these days, V."

"Then I need information, man. C'mon."

He said nothing, and for a moment, V wasn't sure he'd even heard her. Then, "I might've heard a rumor about someone in the company wanting her gone." He plucked the cigar out of his mouth, tapping ash into a crystal dish. "But I don't know who. Someone who wants her job, undoubtedly. I'd tell her to look at her underlings."

"Not much t'go on, Dean."

"I don't have much to give, V."

V sighed. She was just about to get up when Judy shook her shoulder and pointed at the one-way mirror-wall. V looked. People were scattering from the bar, and Hersh had his shotgun out. Oiwa didn't give him the chance to pull the trigger; a flash of steel, and the barman's head rolled off his shoulders and dropped to the floor, his body shuddering once, then toppling sideways in an arc of arterial blood.

And Oiwa was walking, striding purposefully toward Dean's office, her katana sliding against fleeing patrons, separating their limbs, torsos, heads. V kicked Dean's ergonomic chair to the side, and it rolled away with him still in it, screaming and white-knuckling the armrests, and careened into the wall, knocking a portrait of himself in half-naked repose off its mountings. Then the mirror-wall shattered, shards of glass catching the neon like stained glass, Oiwa leaping through the jagged breach, blade raised above her head. V slewed to the side just as the katana came down, carving a deep gash into the lacquered steel of Dean's desk.

Dean scrambled out of the chair and sprinted for the door like someone had lit his ass on fire, and was gone. Oiwa hadn't even tried to stop Dean. Hadn't even tried to kill him. The cyberninja's dark eyes were on her, only her. V couldn't remember the last time someone had looked at her like that, like she was the thing that they hated most in the world.

"You go rogue, Oiwa?" asked V, leveling the Malorian at her. "That why y'aint got any soldier-boys with you? Why you're killin' people on Biotechnica's turf despite your bosses bein' in hot fuckin' water?"

"My orders," said Oiwa, "were not to kill you. I was never told I could not maim you. And we can still use you, V-san, even if the only thing left of you is your neuralware."

"She ain't the one shot you back at Fabrika," said Judy, pulling The Chaos, pointing the hot pink electromagnetic gun at the cyberninja. She flipped the hair out of her eyes with a toss of her head. "That was me. Made some modifications to my gun, too. Microsonic flechettes." She smiled, thumbed a switch on the gun, and the thing started vibrating, coil-whining like an electric motor. "Y'wanna 'nother nap, puta? 'Cause you touch my girl, you're gonna be sleepin' a real long time."

Oiwa's fingers tightened around the hilt of her sword. "You are right, Judy-san. I am focusing on the wrong person." Then she spun and vanished, blinking back into existence in front of Judy, the blade brushing across her midriff. Judy jumped back, a neat, scarlet incision across her belly. She stumbled, clutching the wound, blood dripping between her tattooed fingers.

V fired the Malorian, and Oiwa whipped around, deflected the bullets as though she'd already calculated their trajectories and knew exactly where and when to strike, and lunged at her. V swayed to the side, the blade flashing in her periphery before it cut into the wall, then sprinted over to Judy, steadying her on her feet. They'd look at the wound once they were safe; it didn't look life-threatening, and right now, that was all V cared about.

She and Judy ran through the smashed frame of the window-wall, pieces of glass catching their clothes and hair, stumbling over the bodies littering the parquet floor. V twisted around and tried to launch a quickhack at Oiwa, but the moment her neuralware connected with the cyberninja, V found herself hurtling into a wall of Black ICE, reeling back as though she'd been struck, her head screaming with pain, Kiroshis glitching into visual artifacts, warm blood gushing from her nostrils.

Now it was Judy's turn to steady her, and they ran together, skidding and slipping on blood, the cyberninja closing on their asses. "Yorinobu-sama will understand when I just bring him your head," said Oiwa behind them, her Japanese coming over V's schizzing auto-translator like garbled demon-static. "As long as your neuralware is intact, Arasaka can make you into an engram, V-san. Then your cooperation will be assured. We will make you tell us what Militech's plans are. We know you are in league with Meredith Stout—"

Oiwa abruptly stopped talking, and when V turned to see why, she saw the cyberninja flailing, tweaking out like a junk-fiend. Ayako appeared in her Kiroshi's ocular display. "I've managed to cut through her Black ICE with Mochi's help," she said to V. "But I won't be able to disable her for long. She's got some serious fuckin' soft, Val. Lot more advanced than I initially thought."

"The fuck's that mean?"

"Exactly as it sounds," said Ayako. "Oiwa ain't your run-of-the-mill onryō—not that they were ever run-of-the-mill to begin with." She sounded concerned, even scared. V had never heard Ayako sound scared before, and that scared her. "She's different," she continued, frowning in the call-window. "Somethin' tells there ain't any engrams left in Yomi, you catch my drift. Alt Cunninghamed them, bet your fuckin' ass. Forked their code."

"You suggestin' she went AI?" asked V.

"Alt did," Ayako said. "Who's to say Oiwa didn't do the same. With ICE like this…. But if that's the case? Unlike Alt, Oiwa doesn't remember who she was before becomin' Oiwa. And AIs, if they spend too long in cyberspace without any kinda tether in their programming? They go insane. Become unpredictable. And if that's so, 'Saka ain't got control over her anymore." She paused. "But if it's any consolation, don't think Oiwa's got anythin' to do with Uncle Sam."

V looked at Judy. She seemed to be hanging in there, stable. "Listen, I gotta get to Buster," she told Ayako. "Judy's hurt. I'll contact Meredith, see if we can get out to the Trash Pan."

"All right, get outta there before Phoenix PD and Biotechnica show up. Can't keep Oiwa disabled much longer." Ayako cut the call.

V hauled ass out of there.

Buster didn't look surprised to see them when they entered his clinic. He glanced at Judy's wound, snorting. "You're such a goddamn baby," he grunted, peeling away his RealSkinn and wiping his hardware down with an oily rag. He jerked his chin toward the op-chair. "Go on, Alvarez. Haul your wimpy ass into the seat."

"Fuck off, y'talkin' Swiss Army knife," she said, grimacing. V helped her into the padded seat.

The borg dropped his considerable bulk into his reinforced work-chair and rolled over to the rip-terminal, his articulated fingers picking at the keyboard, servos whirring softly. Buster swung down the jib-arm of tools and thumbed a ridged switch; the jib-arm started to hum, lights beaming out from a row of tiny lenses inset in it, crosshatching Judy's stomach. He watched the display on his terminal, then said, "Nothing serious. No perforated guts. You got lucky, Alvarez."

"How deep is it?"

"You didn't look?"

"Why the fuck would I wanna look at somethin' like that?"

"Curiosity. Humans, we're curious."

"How deep is it? The cut."

"Deep enough that I can see your intestines without a scan. But lucky for you, they weren't damaged." Buster thumbed the switch on the jib-arm, then swung it back into place. "Crybaby."

"My fuckin'—are you serious? My fuckin' guts ?"

"Oh yeah," said Buster. "One bad move, your intestines would've hit the floor. But it's not as bad as it sounds. This was back in Vietnam, but had this guy we called Scooter in our regiment. Anyway, Scooter got knifed by some tiny Vietcong guy. Killed him, but Scooter had to walk the whole way back to our camp holding his intestines in his hands. Tough bastard."

"That ain't helpin' me, Buster."

"At least you survived." Buster carefully cleaned the wound, then applied bioglue to close it, smoothing a large anodyne patch of micropore over the skin. "Don't fiddle with this," he instructed. "It's waterproof, so you can shower with it. Leave it on. It'll dissolve in a week."

"So what happened to Scooter?

Buster shrugged and stood up. "Got blown up by a grenade."

While the two talked, V reached out to Meredith and left a voicemail when she didn't pick up. V was pretty sure Meredith wasn't dead or hurt; she was probably avoiding calls in the same way people avoided telemarketers and collections agents. She looked at Buster and said, "Buster, been meanin' to ask you. 'Bout those 'Saka netrunners crashed the Uncle Sam subnet. Before they moved it to that isolate, I mean."

"Nothing to really tell," he said, and looked at her. "Experiments like I was, those netrunners. Nuked the subnet with a nasty virus."

"That subnet still exist?"

"Yeah, sure. Like machu picchu still exists. Just a ruin these days, kid. Sealed off. Covered in fucking Black ICE, I hear." He shrugged, adding, "Don't really know much beyond that. I'm no netrunner."

V hesitated. Then, "When y'mentioned bein' an experiment, a prototype?"

"I'm a biointerface. Or was supposed to be," explained Buster, pulling the pale sleeve of RealSkinn over the articulated framework of his prosthesis. "But when they tried downloading the Uncle Sam AI to my hardware, I nearly flatlined. Heard the eggheads talking about shunting the AI. Something about partitioning and streamlining the data—keeping the bulk of it on a neural matrix and downloading a compressed copy to a biointerface. Parts could still interact wirelessly, but Militech never really perfected the methodology."

"So a proxy?"

"Something like that," said Buster. "But not exactly. Biointerfaces were, theoretically, supposed to be the human half of the AI-human hybrid."

"Transcendentals," she said, without thinking.

Buster looked at her as though seeing her for the first time. "Now where'd you hear that term, kiddo?" V told him, then Buster said, "Surprised Meredith mentioned it. Militech doesn't like talking about how Donald Lundee was batshit crazy."

"Y'know Meredith?"

"Much as I know any Militech suit," said Buster. "Met her a few times through work. I was the ripper who installed her cyberware, back when she first joined Militech."

"Y'know if she's in any kinda trouble, Buster?"

"Not that I know of," he said. "If she was, probably would've heard about it by now. Militech rumors have a way of trickling down to me. It's like Chinese water-torture." He looked over at Judy. "Feeling better now, Alvarez?"

"Yeah," she said, "feelin' fine as someone nearly had her guts on the floor can."

"Good, because I have an appointment coming up. Get your ass out of my chair."

Judy laughed. "You're such a fuckin' asshole," she said, and stood up with a wince.

"It's part of my charm," he said, and smiled his steel smile.