She’d come here herself, almost six months ago, seeking funds. Lo Prang’s illegal muay Thai fights paid well. He paid extra for an attractive Western woman willing to fight. And she, with the bookies setting the odds steeply against her, borrowed heavily from a loan shark to bet on herself. Three fights later she’d been able to afford the new identity, the melanin therapy, the facial bone structure changes that allowed her to push on to Mae Dong.

Now she needed something else. Something that would cost her more.

There was a line outside the door an hour long. Deliberate scarcity created to enforce the twin illusions of exclusivity and popularity. She went around it, towering over the women and most of the men in the line with her spiked heels. The tiny LEDs her heels were crusted with pulsed with every step, flashing as she brought them down, sending patterns of light rippling up their length. Sam headed to the front of the line, where the bouncers with their oversized muscle-grafted bodies waited, scowling, in their dark suits.

She saw a look of recognition pass across one of their faces as she approached. The huge Asian man raised a finger to his ear and his lips parted as he spoke something, pitched low for a throat mic to hear. Their eyes locked, and she read those lips. Jade Tiger, they said, in Thai. Jade Tiger.

His eyes stayed locked on hers, and then he nodded to the voice in his earpiece, and pulled back the velvet rope for Sam to pass.

The club was built on a cliff, with views of the beach below and the Andaman Sea beyond that from every level. The entrance was on the uphill side of the club, on the top level. From there one could work their way down and down, to realms that were darker, where the services offered were less constrained by laws or moral norms.

Sam made her way into the club, then through the top floor, past the dance floor where the bar girls in their skimpy skintight dresses danced with Chinese and American men twice their age, tempting them to pay for the even greater pleasures that could be had in private. Past the bars where the tourists ordered rounds of shots and glowing or bubbling or smoking drinks. Past the hookah couches where the younger set reclined, and sucked on water pipes loaded with genetically potentiated hashish, or engineered blissweed with its enzymatically produced ecstasy, or perhaps just a tiny bit of discreetly sprinkled opium. Her heels tapped the floor, sending little pulses of light up them on every step.