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In rising Boston, light licking her bamboo slats, pillow beaten into an undignified jumble of hand-plucked feathers, Molly rolled and felt for a knife. Someone was burning clams. She had learned, quick as the mists smothered the sleeping rubble, that the antique hawks were as accurate as neon winking in her eyes. She brushed her teeth, tried something futile with her hair and strapped her things on her limbs.
The thousandth mile of shops. In a weap detector recessed in teak she lit up like a loaded Christmas tree and had to hide in her closet, traced kanji with her razors for half a day.
Psychodocs could squeeze papers from her furnishings. Molly Millions, though, she owned her name in little embedded plates and freedom in the flechette gun perpetually recurving her hip. Enough to silence the strivers or to laugh, to carve her way across the Sprawl whatever anyone had to say about yer. She listened to biz emerging from deals gone sour, to the pulse of Cape T and Geneva as her people danced hard about each other. The rhythm of Seba bullets' mosaic across a Tokyo alley rocked her ears. She had little left for exposition of her desires when she was busy pursuing them. City by break she clawed the underworlds. On the flats of Iowa, expanses empty as a derelict church deluged in spirits and yearning, she coated the ceiling with curliqued socks from Cairo. Little curls of symbols she couldn't read, but the language of the street: she spoke that, she sold things she didn't need.
In 'Francisco, when she had nothing but the fried cut-out chips and the blades and the craving to ache anywhere else, she had slept if the room was locked. She was procuring opportunities, not a sense of place, never accumulating the tender feel of possessing a place her own.
"I want something on here real bad, Case, I dunno why," she said. The Old Haven model house sloped up around them like a cathedral in paisley paint.
He traded a few hours on his deck for a chiffonier. The dealer, muffled in rayon, the tattoos sagging off his face, had the poly-coated monstrosity delivered that night. Case turned in its direction, blind eyes quizzical. "Jesus, where that come from?"
He had lost his sight a month or three ventures ago- traded them for better, he offered with a shrug- but could glide into her rigs easy as before. Glided into her life, more than work, less than love. The stars sailed over the horizon as he mouthed somewhere under her jeans. She hauled up when the sun did in the search for a new vacancy, vaguely satisfied.
In the morning, having scalded her tonsils with coffee, she slip-slid down the streets to the nuke plants. Case appeared in the distance first, then the shadows, their arms big silver holes in her vision. She clamped the fear down in a crab's claw, thought: I'm going under fire. I'm easy. Her palms stayed dry. She shot until the men were but perspective tricks in her insets and walked away with the sirens squealing the wrong direction. The house she had reintroduced herself to Case in stood where she had left it. They went in.
Above the fireplace, the antique old money fireplace that Molly kept for the ring of having it, there was a crack. She convulsively traced its corners until she found her New Gatling fit snug in it, and then it was mundane and useful.
They resettled under a puppet warren. "It's behind me," she said of the puppet warren, but scraped at the wall so lime crescents tingled under burgundy nails. Heat found them through the insulation. When they ran, she liberated the metal carapace that held the brothel's records and installed it as a coffee table in Paris, where its chrome flashed purple under the ad blimps and the espressos she drank decorated it in concentric brown rings.
Case heaped pink hexagons in the fluted vase instead of decorative stones. Molly wrinkled her nose, so out they were flung like Tally Isham undressing for the stims. Their inauguration of the sofa was heady and wet without a drug rainbow shimmying up any arms. The next night, they sat in a bar together. Lacquered hair blanketed Case's shoulder until he threw his beer in the boy's face. He disappeared for an hour and returned with a girl- startle lines, bandanna of unpetalling roses tying hair back from a plain face made exotic by disco light- and there she watched Case and the kind of girl he had met and briefly become vulnerable for a million times shake, like actors in a childhood drama. Michael, the girl whispered, her hand between Molly's knees. That's what I want to go by tonight.
Molly never repeated it when they sweated out the drinks on the sofa.
And the next week, maybe, black hemorrhaging out of the evening through the rectangular gashes of neon marquees. She added to her collection a table varnished in nightclub haze, oiled in the memory of skin against breast, their morning an impression of the city. In Cleveland the rain dusted it with the condensation of a martini glass. More cocktails down her throat than anyone else's, in the bars where their old businesses bloomed, because the Chiba surgeons did something powerful with her liver.
Now that they had stopped traipsing about the country and shut themselves in an all-American town, Case took more carefully chosen jobs. The kind that paid money disproportionate to the risk, which she couldn't fault when she was doing some for inverses. Without the awareness of him in her muscles, his frustration like an imploding argument at being unable to change her moves, though, watching him jack made her restless.
She left for Harajuku again. On the bathroom mirror, she scrawled in lipstick. ITS BEEN GOOD, CALL ME IF YOU NEED SOMETHING XO MOLLY
Case, refashioned transfigured adapted, became mementos in her closets. The old roses in Michael's hair resurfaced five cities later; she bought curtains. They kept her from waking earlier than she had to in the mornings. The curtains were beautiful, and the smell of krill sieved through them like a wakeup call in her nose, dribbling over the room all slow-like, until she couldn't catch it anymore for the enamel of it over her china. You're not real, she said to the plates and curtains. Twin insets bored into them; they yawned back, shrimp still everywhere, throwbacks to a youth spent stripping their flesh out of their cottages.
You're only not going out that window because you aren't real, Molly muttered, and went back to the paperwork necessary to kill someone.
In Stockholm, last of the stately cities, on a job to rob someone boringly rich of his life, her mark had a smile more artificial than the cobblestone streets. Something about the way it plastered across his face reminded her of Riviera. She splattered his veins against marble two days early, then, and rifled his pockets. Silver, sheathed knives, ornaments, an unexpected handful of condoms. The wooden bird ended up on her mantelpiece.
The mantelpiece nestled under curtains harem sheer. She wanted to show off something on her own terms to the bright primary colors outside. Her skin tones smeared against the glass of expatriate Shanghai, the tessellation of insect eyes, the ghost of Case laughing behind her, where no one had cared and if they had she would have done her job to make them look and shut up. Let them see a corridor of Mollys in the interchange of mirrorshades and ceiling-to-steel glass. She sat, visible, until the night snaked its way through the labyrinth. Her whole class of people came awake far beneath her penthouse. At least those of them that weren't dead, and the life in her that was alive demanded she join them.
In the city lights approaching Molly put her jeans back on. The flechette between thigh and fabric weighed nothing, familiar as her own mouth and invisible eyes and herself striding into the sunset.