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Wage wore a suit of gunmetal silk and a simple bracelet of platinum on either wrist.

Ratz's mouth narrowed, compressed into a single line.

"Iffy," he said, "it's all looking very iffy tonight."

Glint of silver across the eyes.

His tail was back. He was sure of it. He felt a stab of elation, the octagons and adrenaline mingling with something else. You're enjoying this, he thought; you're crazy.

The thing felt like it might clatter to the pavement with his next step, but it made him feel better.

Beyond the neon shudder of Ninsei, the sky was that mean shade of gray.

The trick lay in not letting it get out of control. But that could be quite a trick, behind a stack of octagons.

"Be seeing you, Julie. I'll say hello to Wage."

"If it proves to be an unfounded rumor, old son, you come back in a week or so and I'll let you in on a little something out of Singapore."

"Ah. Well then. And where did you hear this, if I may?"
<…>
He say anything to you?"
"Haven't been in touch, of late."Then he sighed. "If I did know, of course, I might not be in a position to tell you. Things being what they are, you understand."

"What brings you around, boyo?" Deane asked, offering Case a narrow bonbon wrapped in blue-and-white checked paper. "Try one. Ting Ting Djahe, the very best."

bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor. Its hands were holograms that altered to match the convolutions of the face as they rotated, but it never told the correct time.

His primary hedge against aging was a yearly pilgrimage to Tokyo, where genetic surgeons re-set the code of his DNA,

Now, sensing that its walls were starting to crumble, he felt the edge of a strange euphoria.

There was something in the gray eyes now that he couldn't read,

By day, the bars down Ninsei were shuttered and featureless, the neon dead, the holograms inert, waiting, under the poisoned silver sky.

"You're breaking my heart, Ratz."