“Skip it. On the house.”

“On the house?” She did something with her eyes that I liked. “What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?”

“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”

“No? Comeback flic, ‘bout ten years back.”

“Missed it. I’ve been away.”

Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party.

Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.

“They’re putting out a call,” she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. “I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.”

“It wasn’t shaping up for much anyway.”

She took a couple more steps away, then stopped. Under the vague caterwauling from the bar and the noise of the hosing station, I thought I could hear something massive powering up, tiny insistent whine behind the fabric of the night, sense of shifting potential, like carnival monsters getting into place behind a stage curtain. Light and shadow through the stanchions overhead made a splintered white mask of her face. One eye gleamed silver.

“You got a place to crash, Micky-san? You said a couple of hours. What do you plan to do until then?”

I spread my hands. Became aware of the knife, and stowed it.

“No plans.”

“No plans, huh?” There was no breeze coming in off the sea, but I thought her hair stirred a little. She nodded. “No place either, right?”

I shrugged again, fighting the rolling unreality of the H-grenade comedown, maybe something else besides. “That’s about the size of it.”

“So. Your plans are play tag with the TPD and the Beards for the rest of the night, try to see the sun come out in one piece. That it?”

“Hey, you should be writing experia. You put it like that, it sounds almost attractive.”

“Yeah. Fucking romantics. Listen, you want a place to crash until your high-grade friends are ready for you, that I can do. You want to play Micky Nozawa in the streets of Tekitomura, well.” She tilted her head again. ”I’ll ‘trode the flic when they make it.”

I grinned.

“Is it far?”

Her eyes shuttled left. “This way.”

From the bar, the cries of the deranged, a single voice shouting murder and holy retribution.

We slipped away among the cranes and shadows.

THREE