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Tiggy was halfway back down the corridor, stopped dead and sight-seeing. I turned back.
    "Ain’t time to sightsee, ‘flower. Grab sky!" I took him by his wrist and pulled. It was like trying to shift a neutronium statue.
    "My arthame, chaudatu. I must have it."
    Just what I needed. More hellflower gibberish.
    "My Knife," Tiggy expanded. "I cannot leave without my Knife. They have taken it from me; do you know where it is?"
    There wasn’t anybody around to see or hear but there would be soon. "Look; I’ll buy you a new one; c’mon!" I gave one last yank, which meant I was still holding on when Tiggy took off in the opposite direction. Ever been dragged down a empty hall by a hellflower oblivious to threats, comments, and reasonable objections? I don’t recommend it.
    Paladin picked up on what was going on from listening to me and started doing a nice counterpoint; telling me to ditch the glitterborn and kyte.
    "Hold it, hold it-hold it!" I yelled, stopping one and shutting up the other. "Look-goddammit, ‘flower, will you slow down? Just hold it a minute, forbye."
    Tiggy Stardust stopped and glared glacially down at me from severalmany centimeters up.
    "I will listen."
    "You telling me you gonna throw it all away and go charging back inside to get yourself totally dusted and iced at least twice-for a knife?"
    "I will not leave without it. I cannot. It is not a ‘knife.’ It is my—" "Don’t start. Won’t make any more sense’n anything else you ever said. Whatever it is, you’re going the wrong way. Your knife’s in Property with the rest of your kit. I’ll help you get it. Then we leave, je, che-bai?"
    "Dzain’domere."
    Right.
    And they say hellflowers are crazy.
    We dogged it back the other way and all of a sudden instead of empty the place was full of enough securitronics to reassure me that Wanderweb PortSec still had the good numbers. We had to blow them away before they could use gas, or ticklers, or anything else, and Paladin was so disgusted he didn’t say damn-all. Real Soon Now I figured City Central Computer’d change the securitronics’ programming from "Contain" to "Destroy." I’d sort of intended to be gone before that happened, but you know how it gets. It’d been a while since I’d had this much homegrown fun, and only the fact that it was me and a hellflower doing the utterly unreasonable against a bunch of tronics saved our bones.
    ###
    Tiggy’s knife was in Dead Storage, which was somewhere between Receiving and Records (being public-access for financial reasons) and I wanted to get there before we ran out of grenades, blaster-paks, and luck. I’d of liked Paladin’s input on which door to choose, but he was still on strike and they all looked alike to me.
    The high numbers was on City Central evacing organics from this section, sealing it, and calling up a shift of coked wartoys from the Det levels to finish us. Fine. I always did want to live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse.
    On the other hand, if I could just find Dead Storage, I’d lay credit I wouldn’t have to die at all. I said so.
    "You should be in a corridor where the doors have colors. The colors will be red and blue. Attempt all doors which have the same color as the corridor walls," said Paladin in my ear. He sounded resigned.
    There was a door like that just ahead. I blew the lock, it opened, we went in. I dogged it shut with the emergency manual controls. Tiggy looked around. I looked around.
    "Here you go, ‘flower. Knife is somewheres in here."
    The room was too-damn big-although even a phone booth would of been too big right now-too-damn dark, and too-damn full with too-damn many things. It looked like every hock shop in the universe.
    "What you should be seeing, Butterfly, is a large room. All walls except the one behind you are lined with cabinets. There are rows of display cases containing weaponry along the floor. There is no other access to the room except the one you entered through. From what