She wasn't real, curled there on her side in the firelight. He watched her mouth, the lips parted slightly. She was the girl he remembered from their trip across the Bay, and that was cruel.
`Mean, motherfucker,' he whispered to the wind. `Don't take a chance, do you? Wouldn't give me any junkie, huh? I know what this is...' He tried to keep the desperation from his voice. `I know, see? I know who you are. You're the other one. 3Jane told Molly. Burning bush. That wasn't Wintermute, it was you. He tried to warn me off with the Braun. Now you got me flatlined, you got me here. Nowhere. With a ghost. Like I remember her before...'
She stirred in her sleep, called something out, drawing a scrap of blanket across her shoulder and cheek.
`You aren't anything,' he said to the sleeping girl. `You're dead and you meant fuck-all to me anyway. Hear that, buddy? I know what you're doing. I'm flatlined. This has all taken about twenty seconds, right? I'm out on my ass in that library and my brain's dead. And pretty soon it'll bedead, if you got any sense. You don't want Wintermute to pull his scam off, is all, so you can just hang me up here. Dixie'll run Kuang, but his ass is dead and you can second guess his moves, sure. This Linda shit, yeah, that's all been you, hasn't it? Wintermute tried to use her when he sucked me into the Chiba construct, but he couldn't. Said it was too tricky. That was you moved the stars around in Freeside, wasn't it? That was you put her face on the dead puppet in Ashpool's room. Molly never saw that. You just edited her simstim signal. 'Cause you think you can hurt me. 'Cause you think I gave a shit. Well, fuck you, whatever you're called. You won. You win. But none of it means anything to me now, right? Think I care? So why'd you do it to me this way?' He was shaking again, his voice shrill.
`Honey,' she said, twisting up from the rags of blankets, `you come here and sleep. I'll sit up, you want. You gotta sleep, okay?' Her soft accent was exaggerated with sleep. `You just sleep, okay?'
When he woke, she was gone. The fire was dead, but it was warm in the bunker, sunlight slanting through the doorway to throw a crooked rectangle of gold on the ripped side of a fat fiber canister. The thing was a shipping container, he remembered them from the Chiba docks. Through the rent in its side, he could see half a dozen bright yellow packets. In the sunlight, they looked like giant pats of butter. His stomach tightened with hunger. Rolling out of the nest, he went to the canister and fished one of the things out, blinking at small print in a dozen languages. The English was on the bottom. EMERG.~ RATION, HI-PRO, `BEEF', TYPE AG-8. A listing of nutritive content. He fumbled a second one out. `EGGS'. `If you're making this shit up,' he said, `you could lay on some real food, okay?' With a packet in either hand, he made his way through the structure's four rooms. Two were empty, aside from drifts of sand, and the fourth held three more of the ration canisters. `Sure,' he said touching the seals. `Stay here a long time. I get the idea. Sure...'
He searched the room with the fireplace, finding a plastic canister filled with what he assumed was rainwater. Beside the nest of blankets, against the wall, lay a cheap red lighter, a seaman's knife with a cracked green handle, and her scarf. It was still knotted, and stiff with sweat and dirt. He used the knife to open the yellow packets, dumping their contents into a rusted can that he found beside the stove. He dipped water from the canister, mixed the resulting mush with his fingers, and ate. It tasted vaguely like beef. When it was gone, he tossed the can into the fireplace and went out.
Late afternoon, by the feel of the sun, its angle. He kicked off his damp nylon shoes and was startled by the warmth of the sand. In daylight, the beach was silver-gray. The sky was cloudless, blue. He rounded the corner of the bunker and walked toward the surf, dropping his jacket on the sand. `Dunno whose memories you're using for this one,' he said when he reached the water. He peeled off his jeans and kicked them into the shallow surf, following them with t-shirt and underwear.
`What you doin'~, Case?'
He turned and found her ten meters down the beach, the white foam sliding past her ankles.
`I pissed myself last night,' he said.
`Well, you don't wanna wear those. Saltwater. Give you sores. I'll show you this pool back in the rocks.' She gestured vaguely behind her. `It's fresh.' The faded French fatigues had been hacked away above the knee; the skin below was smooth and brown. A breeze caught at her hair.
`Listen,' he said, scooping his clothes up and walking toward her, `I got a question for you. I won't ask you what you'redoing here. But what exactly do you think I'mdoing here?' He stopped, a wet black jeans-leg slapping against his bare thigh.
`You came last night,' she said. She smiled at him.
`And that's enough for you? I just came?'
`He saidyou would,' she said, wrinkling her nose. She shrugged. `He knows stuff like that, I guess.' She lifted her left foot and rubbed salt from the other ankle, awkward, childlike. She smiled at him again, more tentatively. `Now you answer me one, okay?'
He nodded.
`How come you're painted brown like that, all except your foot.'
`And that's the last thing you remember?' He watched her scrape the last of the freeze-dried hash from the rectangular steel box cover that was their only plate.
She nodded, her eyes huge in the firelight. `I'm sorry, Case, honest to God. It was just the shit, I guess, an'~ it was...' She hunched forward, forearms across her knees, her face twisted for a few seconds with pain or its memory. `I just needed the money. To get home, I guess, or... hell,' she said, `you wouldn't hardly talk to me.'
`There's no cigarettes?'
`God dam,Case, you asked me that ten times today! What's wrong with you?' She twisted a strand of hair into her mouth and chewed at it.
`But the food was here? It was already here?'
`I toldyou, man, it was washed up on the damn beach.'
`Okay. Sure. It's seamless.'
She started to cry again, a dry sobbing. `Well, damn you anyway, Case,' she managed, finally, `I was doin'~ just fine here by myself.'
He got up, taking his jacket, and ducked through the doorway, scraping his wrist on rough concrete. There was no moon, no wind, sea sound all around him in the darkness. His jeans were tight and clammy. `Okay,' he said to the night, `I buy it. I guess I buy it. But tomorrow some cigarettes better wash up.' His own laughter startled him. `A case of beer wouldn't hurt, while you're at it.' He turned and re-entered the bunker.
She was stirring the embers with a length of silvered wood. `Who was that, Case, up in your coffin in Cheap Hotel? Flash samurai with those silver shades, black leather. Scared me, and after, I figured maybe she was your new girl, 'cept she looked like more money than you had...' She glanced back at him. `I'm real sorry I stole your RAM.'
`Never mind,' he said. `Doesn't mean anything. So you just took it over to this guy and had him access it for you?'
`Tony,' she said. `I'd been seein'~ him, kinda. He had a habit an'~ we... anyway, yeah, I remember him running it by on this monitor, and it was this real amazing graphics stuff, and I remember wonderin'~ how you --'
`There wasn't any graphics in there,' he interrupted.
`Sure was. I just couldn't figure how you'd have all those pictures of when I was little,Case. How my daddy looked, before he left. Gimme this duck one time, painted wood, and you had a picture of that...'
`Tony see it?'
`I don't remember. Next thing, I was on the beach, real early, sunrise, those birds all yellin'~ so lonely. Scared 'cause I didn't have a shot on me, nothin'~, an'~ I knew I'd be gettin'~ sick... An'~ I walked an'~ walked, 'til it was dark, an'~ found this place, an'~ next day the food washed in, all tangled in the green sea stuff like leaves of hard jelly.' She slid her stick into the embers and left it there. `Never did get sick,' she said, as embers crawled. `Missed cigarettes more. How 'bout you, Case? You still wired?' Firelight dancing under her cheekbones, remembered flash of Wizard's Castle and Tank War Europa.