The Bridge Trilogy Part 57

Laney saw a folding plastic table set up against the rear wall. It was bright pink. There was a gray computer there, a pair of eye-phones. Unfamiliar cables ran to the nearest console: flat ribbons candy-striped in different colors. The wall behind was plastered with an overlay of old advertising; a woman's eye was directly behind the pink table, a yard wide, her laser-printed pupil the size of Laneys head.

Laney moved toward the table, through the Styrofoam, sliding his feet, a motion not unlike cross- country skiing.

"Let's do it," he said. "Let's see what you've got."

108 William Gibson Zona Rosa kept a secret place, a country carved from what once had been a corporate website.

It was a valley lined with ruined swimming pools, overgrown with cactus and red Christmas flowers.

Lizards posed like hieroglyphs on mosaics of shattered tile.

No houses stood in that valley, though sections of broken wall gave shade, or rusting rectangles of corrugated metal set aslanr on weathered wooden uprights. Sometimes there were ashes of a cooking fire.

She kept it early evening there.

"Zona?"

"Someone is trying to find you." Zona in her ragged leather jacket over a white t-shirt. In that place she presented as a quick collage, fragments torn from films, magazines, Mexican newspapers:

dark eyes, Aztec cheekbones, a dusting of acne scars, her black hair tangled like smoke. She kept the resolution down, never let herself come entirely into focus.

"My mother?"

"No. Someone with resources. Someone who knows that you are in Tokyo." The narrow toes of her black boots were pale with the dust of the valley. There were copper zips down the outer seams of her faded black jeans, waist to ankle. "Why are you dressed that way?"

Chia remembered that she was still presenting in the Silke-Marie

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16. Zona KoIb outfit. "There was a meeting. Very formal. Major b.u.t.t-pain. I got this with Kelsey's cashcard."

"Where were you ported, when you paid for it?"

"Where I'm ported now. Mitsuko's place."

Zona frowned. "What other purchases have you made?"

"None."

"Nothing?"

"A subway ticket."

Zona snapped her fingers and a lizard scurried from beneath a rock. It ran up her leg and into her

waiting hand. As she stroked it with the fingers of the other hand, the patterns of its coloration changed. She tapped its head and the lizard ran down her leg, vanishing behind a crumpled sheet of rusted roofing. "Kelsey is frightened, frightened enough to come to me."

"Frightened of what?"

"Someone contacted her about your ticket. They were trying to reach her father, because the points

used to purchase it were his. But he is traveling. They spoke with Kelsey instead. I think they threatened her."

"With what?'

"I don't know. But she gave them your name and the number of the cashcard."

Chia thought about Maryalice and Eddie.

Zona Rosa took a knife from her jacket pocket and squatted on a shelf of pinkish rock. Golden

dragons swirled in the shallow depths of the knife's pink plastic handles. She thumbed a b.u.t.ton of plated tin and the dragon-etched blade snapped out, its spine sawtoothed and merciless. "She has no b.a.l.l.s, your Kelsey."

"She's not my Kelsey, Zona."

Zona picked up a length of green-barked branch and began to shave thin curls from it with the edge of the switchblade. "She would not last an hour, in my world." On a previous visit, she'd told Kelsey stories of the war with the Rats, pitched battles fought through the garbage-strewn playgrounds and collapsing parking garages of vast

110 William Gibson housing projects. How had that war begun? Over what? Zona never said.

"Neither would I."

"So who is looking for you?"

"My mother would be, if she knew I was here "That was not your mother, the one who put the fear into Kelsey."

"If someone knew my seat number on the flight over, they could get a ticket number and trace it

back, right?"

"If they had certain resources, yes. It would be illegal."

"From there, they could go to Kelsey-"

"From there they are in the frequent-flyer files of Air Magellan, which implies very serious

resources."

"There was a woman, on the plane... She had the seat beside me. Then I had to carry her suitcase, and she and her boyfriend gave me a ride into Tokyo.

"You carried her suitcase?"

"Yes."

"Tell me this story. All of it. When did you first see this woman?"

"In the airport, SeaTac. They were doing noninvasive DNA samples and I saw her do this weird thing

Chia began the story of Maryalice and the rest of it, while Zona Rosa sat and peeled and sharpened her stick, frowning.

"f.u.c.k your mother," Zona Rosa said, when Chia had finished her story. The translation rendered her tone as either amazement or disgust, Chia couldn't tell.

"What?" Chia's confusion was absolute.

Zona looked at her along the length of the peeled stick. "An idiom. Idioma. Very rich and complicated. It has nothing to do with your mother." She lowered the stick and did something to her knife, folding the blade away with a triple click. The lizard she'd adjusted 0.

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earlier came scurrying low across a narrow ledge of rock, clinging so close as to appear two- dimensional. Zona picked it up and stroked it into yet another color-configuration.

"What are you doing?"

"Harder encryption," Zona said, and put the lizard on the lapel of her jacket, where it clung like a brooch, its eyes tiny spheres of onyx. "Someone is looking for you. Probably they've already found you. We must try to insure that our conversation is secure."

"Can you do that, with him?" The lizards head moved.

"Maybe. He's new. But those are better." She pointed up with the stick. Chia squinted into the evening sky, dark cloud tinted with streaks of sunset pink. She thought she saw a sweep of wings, so high. Two things flying. Big. Not planes. But then they were gone. "Illegal, in your country.

Colombian. From the data-havens." Zona put the pointed end of her stick on the ground and began to twirl it one way, then the other, between her palms. Chia had seen a rabbit make -fire that way,