On one corner, a listing illuminum sign said weapons in kanjified Amanglic lettering. We pushed through curtaining strung with thousands of minute shells and into the air-conditioned warmth of the emporium.

Heavy-duty slug throwers and power blasters were mounted on walls alongside blown-up holo schematics and looping footage of battle joined with mimints in the bleak landscapes of New Hok. Reefdive ambient music bumped softly from hidden speakers.

Behind a high counter near the entrance, a gaunt-faced woman with command head hair nodded briefly at us and went back to stripping down an ageing plasmafrag carbine for the sprog who seemed to want to buy it.

“Look, you yank this back as far as it’ll go and the reserve load drops. Right? Then you’ve got about a dozen shots before you have to reload. Very handy in a firefight. You go up against those New Hok karakuri swarms, you’re going to be grateful you’ve got that to fall back on.”

The sprog muttered something inaudible. I wandered about, looking for weapons you could conceal easily while Sylvie stood and scratched irritably at her headscarf. Finally the sprog paid up and left with his purchase slung under one arm. The woman turned her attention to us.

“See anything you like?”

“Not really, no.” I went up to the counter. “I’m not shipping out. Looking for something that’ll do organic damage. Something I can wear to parties, you know.”

“Oho. Fleshkiller, huh.” The woman winked. “Well, that’s not as unusual as you’d think round here. Let’s see now.”

She swung out a terminal from the wall behind the counter and punched up the datacoil. Now that I looked closely, I saw that her hair was lacking the central cord and some of the thicker associated tresses. The rest hung lank and motionless against her pallid skin, not quite hiding a long, looping scar across one corner of her forehead. The scar tissue gleamed in the light from the terminal display. Her movements were stiff and stripped of the deCom grace I’d seen in Sylvie and the others.

She felt me looking and chuckled without turning from the screen.

“Don’t see many like me, eh? Like the song says—see the deCom stepping lightly. Or not stepping at all, right? Thing is, the ones like me, I guess we don’t generally like to hang around Tek’to and be reminded what it was like to be whole. Got family, you go back to them, got a hometown you go back to it. And if I could remember if I had either or where it was, then I’d go.” She laughed again, quietly, like water burbling in a pipe. Her fingers worked the datacoil. “Fleshkillers. Here we go. How about a shredder? Ronin MM86. Snub-barrelled shard blaster, turn a man to porridge at twenty metres.”

“I said something I could wear.”