however, beyond the always present need to keep an eye on the shadows, too angry still even to admit her anger, except as a white-cold intensity that she honed like a weapon, focusing her thoughts on the meeting. She would not think of Konstenten, of the co-op, not yet. She turned off Main Street at last, striding through the orange glow of a streetlight, and saw the familiar sign ahead of her.
Jesse’s was a small place, a clapboard storefront with a dirty display window filled with faded posters and a few old-fashioned pocketbooks and travel decks. The door was open, however, just a screen separating the main room from the street, and she could hear the music two doors away. It was old music, familiar rhythms, and she found herself falling into step as she came up to the door.
The main room was just the same as it had always been, bare wood floors badly in need of polishing, shelves filling the side walls and the wall behind the bare metal counter with its row of open outlets. Just inside the door, an overfilled notice board advertised everything from used chips and bioware to a secondhand tricycle. A quartet, all young, all nondescript in jeans and military surplus, none of them familiar to her, sat at the center table, a notebook’s internal works spread out among them like a card game or the entrails of some sacrificial animal. They all looked up at the sound of the door, and she felt their eyes on her as she walked past them to the counter. None of them would be of significance—if they were at all important, they would be in one of the back rooms—and she ignored them, fixing her eyes on the woman behind the counter. She would be one of Jesse’s innumerable girls, one of the harem who cooked and cleaned and did the tech work and kept the store running while Jesse played on the nets, and Trouble approached her with the same wary respect she used to all of Jesse’s women. The woman, tall, stringy, very black, her hair fastened in a club of braids at the base of her neck, looked back at her with a weary, deliberately unnerving stare.
“What you need, honey?”
“I’ve got some shopping to do,” Trouble answered. “And I want to talk to Jesse.”
“We got stock out here,” the woman answered, with a vague wave of her hand at the crowded shelves, “but Jesse’s on-line. You’ll have to make do with me.”
Behind her, Trouble could hear a soft sound from the group at the table, a rustle that might have been a stifled laugh. She ignored it, still looking at the stringy woman. “I need custom work. And I still want to talk to Jesse.”
There was a little silence, and the woman said, “Will Jesse want to talk to you?”
“Tell him Trouble’s here.”
The woman’s head came up, her mobile face drawing down into an angry scowl. “I don’t take kindly to pretenders, sweetheart, and we don’t deal with hot merchandise—”
“The real Trouble,” Trouble interjected. “The original. You can tell Jesse that I’m back, and I’m pissed. Nobody takes my name in vain.”
The woman stared at her, her anger replaced by speculation, and Trouble heard one of the quartet whistle softly. She could see their reflection in one of the shiny metal boxes that held sterile components, a distorted image, but clear enough to see them all four staring, the notebook forgotten on the tabletop. She waited, willing to let the woman take her own time in deciding how to handle this apparition from Jesse’s past, and the curtain that covered the door into the back rooms was swept back abruptly.
“Problems?” a familiar voice asked, and the woman turned toward her with ill-concealed relief.
“This woman wants to talk to Jesse—”
“Trouble?” Annie Elhibri sounded less than enthusiastic in her recognition, and Trouble allowed herself a slight, unpleasant smile.
“Good to see you again, Annie.”
“Jesus.”
“Not yet,” Trouble murmured, and Elhibri rolled her eyes.
“What the hell are you doing here? We heard you’d left the shadows.”
“Someone’s taking my name in vain,” Trouble said again. “I’m—not best pleased.”
“Right,” Elhibri said. “I guess you better talk to Jesse.”
She held the curtain aside, and Trouble ducked under the faded fabric. The inner rooms had changed even less than the outer, the walls still painted with bold sweeps of color and stylized suns-and-moons from the last psychedelic revival. In one side room, a couple of crackers sprawled on mattresses laid out beside a strip of datanodes, cords snaking across the floorboards from their dollie-slots to disappear into the nodes. In the next room, a man and a woman leaned close over a viewlens, the woman pointing out features in its circle. Trouble looked, but couldn’t see what lay in the lens’s magnifying field. The surgery was empty, not usual in the old days, not on a Thursday night when most people had just gotten paid on their real jobs, and she glanced sharply at Elhibri.
“Where’s Carlie?”
Elhibri looked back at her, thin eyebrows rising. “Dead. Didn’t you hear? He died last winter.”
“AIDS?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit.” Trouble closed her mouth over anything else she would have said, any apology for not having known. Carlie Held had installed her first dollie-slots and BOSRAM, had implanted her brainworm and rigged most of the later upgrades and improvements to the mixed system. It was hard to believe he could be dead—and someone might have told me, out of all the old gang. But she had walked away, not they.
“We got a new girl doing installations,” Elhibri went on, “name of Karakhan. Carlie trained her—it was his idea to have her take over.”
Trouble nodded, swallowing her grief and the regret that she hadn’t known sooner, and Elhibri stopped in front of the final door.
“Wait here,” she said, and pushed through the beaded curtain before Trouble could say anything. There was a murmur of voices, and Elhibri reappeared, holding the curtain aside. “Jesse says come on in.”
“Thanks,” Trouble said, and stepped under the draped beads.
Nothing much had changed here, either, except for Jesse himself. He still sat behind the massive desklike shape of a salvaged miniframe, extra processing towers sprouting from its corners like buttresses, but his hair was grey, and the lines of his face had deepened. The eyes, however, were the same, brown and deceptively warm, and so was his expression, smiling and closed all at once.
“So the prodigal returns,” he said, with the same heavy joviality that he had always used when he wanted to buy time. It was a familiar pose, and Trouble took a savage pleasure in the old routines.
“Not exactly,” she said. “I just need to pick up a few items for my toolkit. You’re still the best, Jesse, or so they say.”
Jesse lifted an eyebrow. “Still, Trouble?”
“It’s been a while.”
“So it has,” Jesse agreed. “What is it precisely that you’re looking for?”
“Just a couple of routines,” Trouble answered. “I need a set of icepicks and some tracers. And I want to buy a muzzle for a watchdog.”
“You do realize,” Jesse said, “that all of this is illegal now?”
Trouble smiled. “And I want an upgrade for my worm.”
Jesse sighed. “All right, I can get you the icepicks, no problem, deliver as soon as you pay and I download. Tracers, hell, take your pick, I’ve got a pretty good selection. Now, for the muzzle—what kind of a watchdog is it, anyway?”
“Treasury,” Trouble answered, and was pleased when Jesse winced.
“You don’t ask for much, do you? Come back into my life, without even so much as a hello, darling, and tell me you want sixteen varieties of naughtyware, including a new chip for the worm. What the hell are you up to—or, no, don’t tell me. Icepicks, tracers, muzzles, implants—Christ, you don’t want much from me.”
Trouble waited until the spate of talk had run out, smiled again. “Hello, darling. It’s good to see you again.”
There was a little silence, and then, reluctantly, Jesse smiled back at her. It was a real smile, acknowledging her attitude and skill, and it transformed the blank roundness of his face. “I didn’t think it could be you making all that trouble. Just not your style.”
“It’s not,” Trouble said. “Which, of course, is why I’ve come shopping.”
