"Still dark," he said.

Liv Hula had to admit that was true.

"Hey," he said. "Here's Joe Leone."

Over the street from Black Cat White Cat it was the usual frontages, busted and askew, buildings which had lost confidence in their structural integrity and which now housed shoestring tailor operations specialising in cosmetics or one-shot cultivars. You couldn't call them "parlours." The work they did was too cheap for that. They got a trickle of stuff from the Uncle Zip and Nueva Cut franchises downtown; also they took work from the Shadow Boys, work like Joe Leone. Just now Joe was pulling himself down Straint using the fences and walls to hold himself up. His energy ebbed and flowed. He would fall down, wait for a minute, then struggle up again. It looked like hard work. You could see he was holding something in down there with one hand while he leaned on the fence with the other. The closer he got the more puzzled he looked.

Antoyne made a tube out of his two damp fists and said through it in the voice of a sports commentator at Radio Retro:

"… and will he make it this time?"

"Be sure to let us know when you join the human race, Antoyne," Liv Hula said. The fat man shrugged and turned away from the window. "It's no bet," he said in his normal voice. "He never failed yet."

Joe kept dragging himself down Straint. As he approached, you could see the tailors had done something to his face so it had a crude lion-like cast. It was white and sweated up, but it didn't move properly. They had given it a one-piece look as if it were sculpture, even the long hair swept back and out from his big forehead and cheekbones. Eventually he fell down outside one of the chopshops and stopped moving, and after a couple of minutes two men almost as big as him came out to drag him inside.

Joe started to fight when he was seven.

"Never strike out at the other, son," his father would explain in a patient way, "because the other is your self."