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great,’ he said, voice rasping through the box’s speaker grille. ‘Where can I get hold of whatever perks you up?’
    ‘It’s coffee, Case. Too much of the damned stuff.’
    ‘I was joking,’ Ng said. ‘You look like shit warmed over.’
    She drew her palm across her mouth, removing the foam. ‘I’ve only just woken up, you bastard.’
    ‘Excuses.’ Ng managed to sound as if the act of waking up was an outmoded physical affectation he had long since discarded, like owning an appendix. Which was entirely possible: Khouri had never got a good look at the man inside the box. Hermetics were one of the more peculiar post-plague castes to emerge in the last few years. Reluctant to discard the implants which the plague might have corrupted, and convinced that traces of it still lingered even in the relative cleanliness of the Canopy, they never left their boxes unless the environment itself was hermetically sealed; limiting their mobility to a few orbital carousels.
    The voice rasped again, ‘Pardon me, but we do have a kill scheduled for this morning, if I’m not very much mistaken. You remember this fellow Taraschi we’ve been trying to take out for the last two months? Ring any bells in there? It’s rather crucial that you do, because you happen to be the individual assigned to put him out of misery.’
    ‘Off my back, Case.’
    ‘Anatomically problematic even if I desired to locate myself thus, dear Khouri. But seriously, we have a probable kill location pegged, and an estimated time of demise. Are you sharpness personified?’
    Khouri poured herself a final few sips of coffee and then left the rest of it on the stove for when she got back. Coffee was her only vice, one acquired in her soldiering days on the Edge. The trick was to reach a knife-edge of alertness, but not be so buzzing that she could not point the weapon without shaking.
    ‘I think I’ve reduced the amount of blood in my caffeine system to an acceptable level, if that’s what you mean.’
    ‘Then let us discuss matters of a terminal nature, at least where Taraschi is concerned.’
    Ng began to hit her with the final details for the kill. Most of it was already in the plan, or stuff that she had guessed for herself, based on her experience of previous kills. Taraschi was to be her fifth consecutive assassination, so she was beginning to grasp the wider scope of the game. Though they were not always obvious, the game had its own rules, subtly reiterated in the grand movements of each kill. The media attention was even picking up, her name being bandied around Shadowplay circles with increasing frequency, and Case was apparently setting up some juicy, high-profile targets for her next few hunts. She was, she felt, on the way to becoming one of the top hundred or so assassins on the planet; élite company indeed.
    ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Under the Monument, plaza level eight, west annexe, one hour. Couldn’t be easier.’
    ‘Aren’t you forgetting one thing?’
    ‘Right. Where’s the kill weapon, Case?’
    Ng’s form nodded behind her. ‘Where the tooth fairy left it, dear girl.’
    And then he turned his box and retreated from the room, leaving only a faint whiff of lubricant. Khouri, frowning, reached a hand slowly beneath the pillow on her bed. There was something, just as Case had said. There had been nothing there when she went to sleep, but this sort of thing hardly bothered her these days. The company always had moved in mysterious ways.
    Soon, she was ready.
    She called a cable-car from the roof, the kill weapon snuggling under her coat. The car detected the weapon and the presence of implants in her head, and would have refused to carry her had she not shown it her Omega Point ident, grafted beneath the nail of her right index finger, making a tiny holographic target symbol seem to dance beneath the keratin. ‘Monument to the Eighty,’ Khouri said.
     
    Sylveste stepped off the ladder and walked across the stepped base of