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pleasures now available to him. Easiest nuyen he’d ever made. What a day this was! What! A! Day!
    * * *
    Maneuvering through the piles of garbage and duraplas crates filling the alleyway, Adam Two Bears left the troll behind and darted between the towering norm drunks and scraggly elf chippers vibrating to the secret rhythm of the wires in their brains. All ignored him. Not one tried to stop him or ask for a handout. Gunfire followed by a running person always meant real trouble and the only way you stayed breathing on the streets was to avoid it.
    Gods and demons, what had he gotten himself into? All this could happen while he was watching on a public telecom? Somebody had fragging wiped Sister Wizard while she was jacked into the fragging Matrix. And while he was fragging watching as he waited for her to jack out. With his own eyes he’d seen the IC fry first her deck and then her brain. Right there, big as life. The only good thing about it was that he’d been at a public telecom on the other side of town and not there in the doss with her.
    Frag and drek! Where had she been, in whose files? Somebody who didn’t like to be bothered. And it had to be somebody big. Atlantic Security? Gunderson? But the only person who could answer that question was a stiff still jacked into the smoking ruins of her Fuchi 9 with her brains dripping out of her ear. Gunderson was one of the most powerful multinationals in Miami. And being a corp like any other, they could easily have their fingers in just about anything.
    Congratulations, Two Bears admonished himself sourly. One hour on the job and his best decker was toasted. A new personal record. Gotta find someplace to twig this mess and get major backup ASAP.
    Stopping at the other end of the alleyway, Two Bears looked beyond the honking traffic at the telecom sitting there in plain sight. It was covered with graffiti and probably smelled like a lavatory, but the access light was bright on top, so it was still in operational condition. Help was only a call away. He could have a hundred runners here in minutes.
    Yet he hesitated to make a dash for the unit. Did he dare call any of his regulars? Rattlesnake, ChrisCross, Omni, Jimmy 2 Cool. Oh man ... if they could do that to Sister so quickly, then they had to know her telecom was on and where it was connected.
    Face facts, chumley, you panicked, he told himself. Maybe if god loves dwarfs, that big troll had destroyed the telecom before a trace could be done. But what if a decker someplace was able to follow the connection to the call box before Sister’s brain was fried? What if who-ever-the-frag they were—this so-called IronHell—were even now tracking him down, encircling, this neighborhood, ghosting his crib and known chummers? Going to any of his usual haunts could mean getting geeked big time. And anybody Two Bears knew might already be compromised by IronHell. Pros moved fast. Show up at Dogboy’s doss and his knock on the door could be answered by a shotgun blast in the throat.
    Forcing himself to stroll casually instead of run, Two Bears felt eyes watching him as he moved along through the tall bustling crowds. Desperately he searched for another dwarf, almost ready to call on a total stranger as long as it was one of his own kind, so great was his need. But only norms and trolls and orks filled the street. Great. Just great. Tugging on his ear, Two Bears wondered what to do, where to go?
    He couldn’t keep himself from looking back over his shoulder, which caught the eye of a slotmachine girl in Amerind buckskin and feathers. She called out something suggestive to him, but he never heard the words, only the tone. “Necker,” he answered, to get rid of her fast. It was a trick that rarely failed. As expected, she recoiled in disgust. Few were the flesh peddlers who would hire out to somebody who liked doing the dead.
    Alone on the crowded sidewalk, Two Bears watched the second-floor windows for the silenced barrels of