“Hey, it was you who introduced me to her in the first place.”

Annie was silent at that. After a while she changed her tack.

“It’s a beautiful night out here. Let’s walk on the sand. At least you should have a rest from it sometimes. Let me take you to town, Ed! I’ll come home early one evening, run you over there. We could see a show!”

“I am a show,” Ed said.

Nevertheless, he saw the point. He started going into town. He went at night, and avoided both Pierpoint Street and Straint. He didn’t want to meet Tig or Neena again. He didn’t want Bella Cray back in his life. He spent his time in the quarter they called East Dub, where the narrow streets were choked with rickshaws and the tank farms called out to him from their animated shoot-up posters. Ed walked on by. He got into the Ship Game instead, squatting in the street in the smell of falafel and sweat with cultivars twice his size. These guys were always on the edge of violence when life brought them next to someone who had something real to lose. The dice fell and tumbled. Ed walked away whole but cleaned out, and thanked them for it. They viewed his receding back with monstrous tusky grins. “Any time, man.”

When she found out, Madam Shen regarded him curiously.

“Is this wise?” was all she said.

“Everyone,” he said, “deserves a break.”

“And yet, Ed, there’s Bella Cray.”

“What do you know about Bella?” he demanded. When she shrugged, he shrugged too.

“If you’re not scared of her, I’m not either.”

“Be careful, Ed.”

“I’m careful,” he said. But Bella Cray had already found him.

He was followed one night by two corporate-looking guys with loosely knotted apricot sweaters. He led them the mystery dance for half an hour, round the crooked alleys and arcades, then dodged into a falafel joint on Foreman Drive and out the back.

Had he lost them? He couldn’t be sure. He thought he saw the same two guys the next day, on the concrete at the noncorporate spaceport. It was wide noon, with white heat blazing up from the concrete, and they were pretending to look in one of the alien exhibits, goofing about round the viewing port, turning away and pretending to barf at what they saw inside. The giveaway was that one of them always kept the whole site in view while the other was bent to the glass. Ed still had twenty yards on them when he turned quietly off into the crowd. But they must have seen him, because the next night in East Dub a gun-kiddie mob calling themselves The Skeleton Keys of the Rain tried to kill him with a nova grenade.