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garden flat in Sendai and never leave, just lie there listening to the birds, tripping out in the green light diffusing through the leaves.
    Shock rubs hard at his eyes. Goddamit but he’s so tired. If only no were as simple as a single syllable. Mim’s sure to send an IM flood if he doesn’t turn up. No thought required for that, just a preset on her drive, and it’ll drive him crazy on demand. Besides, she probably only wants to grab him for a face-to-face over his reluctance to sort this Olbax shit. Job’s probably important to whichever scumbag she’s doing it for. Either way, no is a sure-fire route to more mental pain, which means he’s got to go for his own peace of mind if nothing else. He checks the time. Five hours to kill.
    “I could sleep. But fuck that…”
    Chucking his insultingly empty cup into the nearest trash-comp, Shock makes a beeline for the park. If he goes home—if the shitty little cage he’s currently holed up in can be called anything so friendly—he’ll end up lying in bed, eyes pinned wide, listening to the oldsters he calls room-mates banging on about their dicky bladders and bunions, their boils and haemorrhoids, and likely end up face-planting the concrete. When he does that,
if
he does it, he wants it to be because he’s honestly finished, and he’s nowhere near finished. He’s still desperate to find a way out of the trap he’s built for himself, a way to make everything right—a way to get back to Sendai.
    He hangs out at the park till the sun is nothing but a memory and he’s shivering in his shoes. He’d stay on for the hypothermia, but makes his way to the party instead, before his lateness threatens to provoke Mim’s provocation. This party is located at some J-Hack’s safe house in the arse-end of Sakkura.
    The place is a real find, covered in black mould and so sparsely furnished it looks long since abandoned, though all five of its tiny rooms swell with bodies, slicked together close as sweat-soaked hair to a cheek. They spill in to the corridor, lining the walls in a tangle of limbs and noise.
    Shock squeezes through with his eyes closed, skin shrink-wrapped to cringing bones, and heads direct to booze central, a table in the kitchen so overloaded the plastic creaks in protest. Three bottles of cheap Chinese beer in swift succession give him the strength to turn and face the crush, in time to see Mim catch him in her headlights and fire herself at him like he’s a bullseye.
    She’s wearing a flimsy bodysuit, and those old red bladers. Warning lights. Seeing them arouses a potent mixture of unease and desire. Shock ran those red lights without thinking when they met, and despite the pain of the resulting crash, he still hasn’t the sense to stop.
    “Shocking boy. You showed.”
    “I had a choice?”
    She beams, all those tiny teeth too dangerous for words, and snags a beer, twisting off the top with one precise hand movement. He imagines it’s his dick, and goes lightheaded. Has to dig his nails into his palm to snap out of it, before meeting her eyes, wary as a cornered fox. In his drunken, unmedicated state Mim’s gaze is vivisection in a glance, excising the cool he had at Keen Machine and exposing his barely hidden continued attraction to her, soft and vulnerable as a torso full of viscera. He sneers at her—an old defence mechanism and quite useless. All but kicks the wall when he sees the gleam in her eye, that magpie-spotting-a-helpless-chick look.
    She takes a long, slow drink from her beer. He can’t take his eyes off her throat, he wants to bite it, throttle it, and she fucking knows it. Amazing how much you can hate a person and still want them so hard. He should have run from her, shouldn’t have left himself this wide open. But how the hell could he not?
    “Care to share your reluctance to open my IMs?” she asks softly.
    “I’m busy,” he says.
    First thing out of his mouth and it’s the sort of lie she doesn’t need evidence to