I went for Hirayasu’s yelp. “No, I’m a fucking ledgedust dealer. What do you think? We’ve got some serious business to transact, Plex. Do you know how close I am to having your security taken on a little dawn ride here? You don’t fucking keep me waiting at the gate.”

“Okay, Yukio, okay. It’s cool. It’s just. Man, we all thought you were gone.”

“Yeah, well. Fucking streetflash. I’m back. But then Tanaseda probably didn’t tell you that, did he?”

“Tana—” Plex swallowed audibly. “Is Tanaseda here?”

“Never mind Tanaseda. My guess is we’ve got about four or five hours before the TPD are all over this.”

“All over what?”

“All over what?”

I cranked the yelp again. “What do you fucking think?”

I heard his breathing for a moment. A female voice in the background, muffled. Something surged in my blood for a moment, then slumped. It wasn’t Sylvie, or Nadia. Plex snapped something irritable at her, whoever she was, then came back to the phone.

“I thought they—”

“Are you going to fucking let me in or what?”

The bluff took. Plex asked to talk to the doorkeep and three monosyllables later the man keyed open a narrow hatch cut into the metal shutter. He stepped through and gestured me to follow.

Inside, Plex’s club looked pretty much the way I’d expected. Cheap echoes of the Millsport take scene—translucent alloy partitions for walls, mushroom-trip holos scribbled into the air over a mob of dancers clad in little more than bodypaint and shadow. The fusion sound drowned the whole space with its volume, stuffed its way into ears and made the translucent wall panels thrum visibly on the beat. I could feel it vibrate in my body cavities like bombing. Over the crowd, a couple of Total Body wannabes flexed their perfectly toned flesh in the air, choreographed orgasm in the way they dragged splayed hands across themselves. But when you looked carefully, you saw they were held up by cabling, not antigrav. And the trip holos were obvious recordings, not the direct cortical sampling you got in the Millsport take clubs. Isa, I guess, would not have been impressed.

A bodysweep team of two propped themselves unwillingly upright from battered plastic chairs set against the containing wall. With the place packed to capacity, they’d obviously thought they were done for the night. They eyed me grumpily and brandished their detectors. Behind them, through the translucence, some of the dancers saw and mimicked the gestures with wide, tripped-out grins. My escort got both men seated again with a curt nod and we pushed past, round the end of the wall panel and into the thick of the dancing. The temperature climbed to blood warm. The music got even louder.