"Help me," Konstantin said. The voice came out little-girl-lost desperate. "He's gonna kill me."

"Then you better keep running, Chicken Little," said the Dragon Lady airily, waving one hand over her head dismissively.

The shirtless bodybuilder jerked a thumb to his right. "Hurry now."

More annoyed than ever, Konstantin ran down to the end of the hall, turned another corner, and jumped into a large empty elevator just before the doors came together. She wasn't actually afraid that Goku was going to kill her -- she had just wanted to see if she could get some help. Apparently not; from the disgusted sound of the Dragon Lady's voice, Konstantin thought the woman probably felt the same about kid-face in AR as she did. Just my luck.

The elevator gave a jerk and Konstantin felt it start to move backwards and down at a slight angle instead of straight up or down. As it began to pick up speed, the doors suddenly turned transparent, and she saw that she was moving through a long tunnel on oily-looking rails; she could see Goku in silhouette at the far end growing smaller and smaller, one hand pounding on what she figured must be the call b.u.t.ton. Then he raised the same hand and pointed it at her, holding his wrist steady with the other.

Konstantin saw his head drop slightly; she threw herself down on the floor just as something hit the back wall, crackled, and blew a hole in it about the size of her head. The doors hadn't gone transparent -- they'd disappeared.

What the h.e.l.l kind of a thing was that? Furious, she elbowed Taliaferro's connection.

"He used a demolecularizer." From his casual tone, he might have been talking about something she had in her kitchen drawer.

"A what?"

"Something he pulled out of his catalog. Nice bit of premium stuff. Reusable." Taliaferro sounded amused. "If he'd hit you, all of that expensive encrypted face would have gone kablooie, leaving you in your virtual underwear with your ident.i.ty hanging out."

Konstantin rolled over and sat up with some difficulty. The elevator dipped and swayed as it kept accelerating. "You think he knows who I am?"

"No, but he seems to know what kind of face you've got on and he wants to strip it off you."

"What do you mean?" The elevator hit a b.u.mp and dropped almost straight down for two seconds, giving her an all-too-realistic sensation of freefall.

"He recognizes the expensive get-up. He might even know You (Not You)'s work. He probably thinks you're the advance for a new kid gang out to take his turf." Pause. "Of course, I'm just guessing."

"OK. Next question: what is this thing and where am I going?"

"It's only a carnival ride," Taliaferro told her. "A little roller-coaster interlude to break up the monotony of everyone chasing around trying to kill each other."

"How long does it last?" Konstantin asked, starting to feel breathless. She closed her eyes and the feeling of acceleration vanished, although the elevator was still rocking from side to side and tilting up and down. The incipient vertigo vanished and she sighed with relief.

"About another minute. Then you get dumped outside in the alley. Look alive, because Goku's going to be waiting there for you."

"Is there any way to get out before that?"

"Only if you have a Lucky Escape coupon in your cat."

The coupon materialized in Konstantin's small hand, which at that moment actually looked oversized to her, but still like a child's. The elevator slid to a halt, and a trap door in the ceiling fell open.

"Wow," Konstantin said, staring up at it. "Talk about your deus ex machina. Doesn't it know the doors've already been shot off this thing?"

"The trap door comes with the Lucky Escape, not the elevator," Taliaferro told her serenely. "I suggest you not waste it, however."

Konstantin sighed and got to her feet. "I know. There's no putting the b.a.s.t.a.r.d back in the cat once it's out, and if you waste it, it taints anything else you use." She managed to catch the edge of the openingwith both hands on her first jump and hung there for a moment, swaying a little and gathering her will.

For this kind of physical maneuver in AR, it was more a matter of will than physical strength. If she let herself think of her body in a reclining chair, she'd find herself lying flat on her back on the floor of the elevator. What she had to do was sense-remember what the movement felt like for real, which would enable her nerves to provide just enough cues for the hotsuit to provide the proper sensation.

You might think this is the squish-headed part, Tonic had told her. It's more like learning to use a prosthetic limb, except the limb is actually an auxiliary body. Kind of.

She managed to get one elbow up on top of the elevator and then the other. After that, she was surprised to find that getting herself out onto the roof of the elevator car wasn't as hard as she had thought it would be.

Child's body, she thought. Child's body, but I'm willing it with adult strength. I guess. It was as good a theory as any. She went to the front of the elevator, clambered down so that she was dangling by her hands again, and then dropped. Tarzan was a girl. Take that.

She found a reusable flashlight in her cat and started to head back the way she had come before remembering the roller-coaster-style drops. "Taliaferro?"

"Walk straight ahead until you hit an incline. There's a door in it that should lead to one of the casino's many infamous secret pa.s.sages. Follow that in any direction for any period of time and use any exit you care to. You'll end up in the casino. And then look doubly alive, because Goku will have figured out why you didn't appear in the alley and he'll know where to look for you."

"G.o.d, this is all so calculated," she muttered, shining the light ahead of her as she went.

Taliaferro chuckled. "As opposed to real life."

Konstantin kept between the greasy metal rails, noting that the floor seemed to be unremarkable black parquet. No one had found a good reason yet to colonize the more horizontal parts of the elevator shaft, or tunnel, or whatever it was, something that she might well be able to use to her own advantage in some way. She took a moment to activate the bread-crumber in the cat before continuing.

The incline was a perfect forty-five degree angle; the door was set into it like an old storm-cellar. It was chained shut, but she found she could pry an opening just wide enough to slip through. No stairway, just a very steep ramp that she stumbled on, almost sending herself rolling all the way to the bottom, where the floor evened out and became a standard secret pa.s.sage, complete with peep-holes, so many that Konstantin turned off her flashlight. They were all on the left side of the pa.s.sage, which meant that the other side might be an outside wall.

The first half dozen peepholes were all set too high for her to look through, and she didn't want to spare anything from the cat. "Taliaferro?"

"All I can get it to tell me is 'secret pa.s.sage,'" he told her. "I'm not even sure what part of the building you're in, whether you're above- or below-ground. Probably below, but don't quote me. The casino develops uneven terrain when it needs it."

"Don't we all," Konstantin muttered, not even sure what she meant, except that it sounded right.

She came to a peephole low enough for her to put her eye to and did so.

She was looking at a woman lying on a bed in a room that was unmistakably someone's idea of what a high-cla.s.s brothel in the Orient must have looked like in the nineteenth century, except the man standing at the end of the bed was dressed in detail-perfect twentieth-century punk-rocker drag. The woman was slumped against satin pillows, one knee bent so that the split in her black silk dress showed plenty of thigh. The guy unbuckled a studded belt and tossed it on a velvet chair. His hair stuck out from his head in all directions in a myriad of lacquered spikes.

Konstantin shook her head. For some reason, people thought that anachronism equaled imagination and simultaneously cancelled out cliche. But at least in AR, you never had to worry about messing up your hair spikes. She moved on to the next peephole she could reach.

A seven-foot man dressed entirely in red except for the black hood over his head was holding an enormous sword in two hands while another man knelt down and put his head on a well-used chopping block. Behind the second man was a long line that went beyond the entrance, men, women, lizard people, bird people, and a few other creatures she couldn't identify, all waiting patiently to be executed. A moment later, she realized that the swordsman was actually nude. She flinched and moved on quickly. At the next peephole, she hesitated; did she really want to see any more of lowdown Hong Kong's non-gambling attractions? No, of course not, but it was her job. She stood on tiptoe and put her eye to the opening.

An eyeball stared back at her. She yelled and jumped back, hit the opposite wall and then just stuck there.

Sharp, thin lines of very bright light appeared slowly around the peephole. The lines held for a moment before exploding outward, blinding her. Konstantin struggled, trying to free herself. Two big hands took hold of her wrists and peeled her arms slowly away from the wall with a practiced motion before pulling her hands up over her head and stripping the rest of her body away from whatever she was stuck to. Her feet dangled as she was carried through the doorway and casually tossed down, the child body tumbling backwards easily in natural acrobatics. She was on her feet again almost before she knew it, with a vicious little serrated blade in her left hand. Only in AR, she thought, looking up at the muscular, shirtless man she'd seen gambling in the private room with the Dragon Lady and the others, would anyone think that a junior Swiss Army steak knife could stand up to a man nearly seven feet tall. From the look on his face, Konstantin surmised he was thinking something similar.

"What're you gonna do that with that little toad-sticker -- cut me?" He stood with his legs apart, hands on his wasp waist. "I don't think so, little girl." Contempt twisted up his mouth. "You've come around the wrong person, you pervert. Some of us know how to deal with your kind, we don't all fall for your little baby-wh.o.r.e routine. That surprise you?"

He took a step toward her and she jumped back. She tried brandishing the knife, but she felt as if she were threatening him with a nail file. Come any closer and I'll give you a manicure, you big bully.

"You filthy-minded creatures come in here thinking you're gonna exploit a lot of weak-minded degenerates that can't help themselves. But I got a little news for you, you pervert. I know some tricks, too. I know how to grab your arm just so that it makes your muscles knot up in such a bad cramp, you sprain it for real." He bent down and put his big hands on his knees. "Give you some bad muscle spasms, maybe you'll think twice about coming back in here lookin' like a kid, you unmitigated pervert."

"Why don't you just mind your own business, big fella?" Konstantin winced, not just at the childish, pouty sound of her voice but at her words. What she had actually tried to say was, Leave me alone, I'm an employee working undercover. "Taliaferro, doesn't this thing have an override?"

"How should I know?" came the reply faintly. "You're the one wearing it."

"Look at the schematic for me."

"Hey, f.u.c.khead, I'm talkin' to you."

"So what?" Konstantin's bratty voice said.

"I said, if you want a beatin', I can help you out."

"Gotta catch me first."

He lunged for her and she dived between his legs, the persona taking over again. Great reflexes, she thought as she rolled over once, sprang to her feet and kept going out the door to the secret pa.s.sage without missing a beat, while her would-be captor was still in the process of turning around. Still, she thought as her legs carried her along, a persona with preprogrammed responses was hard to get used to.

It was like being inside a hotsuit that had suddenly developed a mind and an agenda of its own.

She reached the end of the hallway and took a left. Or rather, the persona took a left -- she'd have gone the other way if she'd had any control, but she was just along for the ride now. New Blue Rose apparently knew plenty she didn't. She gasped as she felt herself leap forward suddenly in the dark hallway, her feet kicking nothing but air. She landed heavily on all fours at the bottom of a short flight of stairs, staggered sideways, and found a railing bolted to the wall. There was just enough room for her to plant her b.u.t.t on it and slide the rest of the way down before tumbling off and rolling over and over again, recovering her feet in front of a pair of swinging doors. Momentum carried her through them and then she was in the middle of a room full of bored-looking casino croupiers and dealers, some of them sitting at small round tables, others sprawled in easy chairs or on the one sofa, and one who looked like a werewolf standing at a table off to the side, demonstrating something with an oversized deck of cards.Next to the table was a door open just wide enough to show that it was an entrance to the casino.

Konstantin sprinted for it, managing to grab a card out of the werewolf's hand without stopping.

Then she was skidding into yet another overly mammalian reptile-woman, this one a gilded cobra.

"Brat," the cobra woman said mildly, and tapped Konstantin lightly on the top of her head with a fan. Konstantin grabbed for it but the woman held it high up out of her reach. "Now, now, don't let's get any ideas above ourselves, shall we?" She grabbed Konstantin by one skinny bicep.

Konstantin howled in surprise and pain. She could feel each of the woman's fingers digging into her arm.

"Oh, what a performance," said the cobra woman and bent her head as if to strike. Konstantin jumped to one side and the fingers dug in so hard she yelled. "Hold still, you little brat. Do you know what most people would pay for--"

There was a new hand gripping Konstantin's wrist; one by one, the cobra woman's fingers were pried off her arm. "I believe this one's for me."

"You believe?" The cobra woman batted her eyes at the man who had spoken; considering her eyelids rose up from below lizard-style, it was about the strangest thing Konstantin had ever seen in her life, if also the least important. "And what's made you into such a believer?"

"O ye of little faith." The hand gripping Konstantin's wrist lifted her up and she found herself nearly nose-to-nose with Hastings Dervish. An enormous smile spread slowly over his heavily-painted face.

"Yes, this does have my name on it. Or rather, it will when I get done with it."

Konstantin had time only to think about pushing her panic b.u.t.ton for a quick disconnect.

"I see you've never had the experience of being jammed before."

The voice seemed to be coming through water, something that gave it a kind of auditory shimmer.

Or maybe it was her brain shimmering and shaking in her head like jelly.

"You are conscious, by the way. It's just taking a little while for the words to make sense because of the jamming."

Must be jelly, 'cause jamming don't shake like that...

"It's a little surprising that you didn't think of this long ago. It tends to make a subject so tractable.

But then, this really isn't your medium, is it."

Konstantin could see nothing. I'm blind, she thought. Not what I imagined blindness would be, seeing nothing. It's not dark and it's not light... it's nothing. But she didn't panic until she realized she couldn't feel her body at all.

"There, there, child. Quiet now. You don't want to give yourself a heart attack, do you?"

Child? Images flashed through her mind, all out of order, elements misplaced -- an elevator leading to a fitting room, with a Dragon Lady -- no, a cobra -- and a big man, shirtless but wearing a suit.

"A shame you can't feel anything. This would calm you." Pause. "Maybe. Or it might, um, stimulate you." The nothing around Konstantin shook with laughter. "After all, that's what you kids come in here like this for, isn't it, all those thrills. You little perverts." More laughter. Konstantin tried to concentrate on being able to feel herself breathe. Breathe and the world breathes with you, stop, and you die alone-- Except you couldn't die in Artificial Reality. Not for real.

"Oh, but what if this is an alternative reality rather than something fake, the way so many people seem to think? What happens then? If you were to die for real, but you weren't in your home reality, so to speak, would you be just as dead?"

If she shut everything out, the voice, the nothingness, even the sensation of nothingness, she thought, maybe she would be able to feel her lungs inflating and deflating. If she could feel that, she should be able to feel her chest, rising and falling, even just very shallowly.

"Now, don't clam up on me, we were communicating so well. Some people would say it doesn'tcount if you don't know you're talking out loud, but I say communication justifies the means. Life isn't fair, so why should we be?"

The voice didn't fall silent so much as grey out; it was the only description Konstantin could think of for the gradually increasing onslaught of nothingness. This must be what it was like to be a ghost, she thought, to be disembodied. The old out-of-body experience reinvented by technology.

No. She thought the word as hard as she could, trying to will substance into it. No out-of-body. If you can think, then you have something to think with. I think; therefore-- "You are--"

in a small room in police headquarters, wearing a hotsuit with transcutaneous nerve "--stimulation. Do you find this stimulating?"

Someone was holding her hands and stroking them. She willed herself not to flinch or pull away, but to let the return of sensation spread to her wrists and up her arms. No hurry, just let it happen, she told herself. Let it-- Her eyes were closed, the lids very heavy, but she made herself open them.

Dervish's face filled her vision. His own; he was a barefaced liar. That figured, though. His ego would insist on his wearing his own face. At this angle, he was distorted, a grotesque, stylized clown-gargoyle.

"A child is an acquired taste." He let one of her hands fall and held the other up so she could see him lace his fingers through hers. "You'd be surprised at how many acquire it in here. People it would never have occurred to out there in meat world -- in here, their desires become more rarified. Because, you see, they've done everything they can do in here, and that's everything." He began to move his fingers up and down in the s.p.a.ces between hers. The sensation was too smooth, practically greasy.

"Intelligent, sentient creatures, when presented with the complete range of experience, graduate from testing what is possible to testing what they're capable of."

Konstantin could feel her body again but she still couldn't move anything. It was as if she were trying to flex a muscle that wasn't actually there.

"People -- humans -- are capable of... so much. There are things that are technically forbidden even here. But what if they happen and no one -- no human -- knows, outside of the one who indulged in it?"

Dervish bent her hand back and let his fingers dance on her palm, a sensation that was even more revolting.

"It's the feeling, isn't it. It's the feeling that makes the experience." He leaned over and blew on her open hand, his eyes watching her reaction. "Right, I'm not supposed to be able to do that. But in this world, there's no supposed to. There is only what is possible, and what I'm capable of. What I'm capable of."

He licked his lips. Konstantin would have thought he'd have indulged in something long and pointy and too red, but it was just a normal tongue, sliding around very human, very normal lips. "By now, you must realize I'm capable of things that they would call... outre... even in here. Outre, and very, very big.

And that ain't you, little girl. Never broke a sweat, even in the act of jamming you."

The heavy, paralyzed feeling lifted as he pulled back from her, dropping her hand. Konstantin looked around. She was sitting on the floor in what looked like a warehouse, full of shelving and boxes, none of which was quite distinct enough for her to see. But then, Dervish wouldn't have wanted her looking at anything but him anyway.

"Now, take this sad, ill-fitting rig back to the hack shack you got it from." Dervish stood over her, bent at the waist with his arms folded. "Tell them to give you a refund. Because it's pointless to try to put one over on me, Officer Konstantin. I'll know you no matter what you show up in. And I can do whatever I like with you." He reached down and put his hands on her shoulders. "And I will."

He pushed her over backwards. Instead of hitting the floor with her back, she found herself on her feet in the exit hall, among the usual crowd of ghosts. None of them were on her frequency.

"Don't take my word for it," Taliaferro said, gesturing at the monitor without looking at it. "I don't want to take your machine's word for it, either," Konstantin told him snappishly. "And I wouldn't, except Celestine's got the same data." She slid her fingers into her hair and ma.s.saged her scalp. "So does my 'suit log. For all I know, so does every TV channel in the hemisphere.."

"Only the dedicated p.o.r.n channels. They're the only ones who keep cams in the offline s.e.x clubs.

Look on the bright side." Taliaferro patted her shoulder with one big, gentle hand. "You've uncovered a potentially criminal piece of software detectable out here as well as in AR. If it gets into circulation, service providers could face losses in the skintillions from falsified records of billable time. When you clamp Hastings Dervish for this one, you'll be a hero."

"That'll be swell," Konstantin agreed. The wind on the roof picked up slightly, blowing a piece of grit into her eye. Sometimes, she reflected, holding her lower eyelid down while Taliaferro dabbed at her with the corner of a tissue, even the little things went against you. "All I have to do is prove that Dervish's jamming program was created with intent to defraud by fooling the AR interface into registering the user as being off line while actually still being on line. Maybe that will draw attention away from my new alleged hobby of frequenting s.e.x clubs in and out of AR. Ow," she added.