“Pretty handy with that knife.”
I shrugged. “Practice.”
She looked me over. “Synth sleeve, biocode steel. You deCom?”
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Well, you sure—” Her speculative gaze stopped, riveted on the portion of my coat that covered the wound. “Shit, they got you.”
I shook my head. “Different party. Happened a while back.”
“Yeah? Looks to me like you could use a medic. I’ve got some friends could—”
“It isn’t worth it. I’m getting out of this in a couple of hours.”
Brows cranked. “Re-sleeve? Well, okay, you got better friends than mine. Making it pretty hard for me to pay off my giri here.”
“Skip it. On the house.”
“On the house?” She did something with her eyes that I liked. “What are you, living some kind of experia thing? Micky Nozawa stars in? Robot samurai with the human heart?”
“I don’t think I’ve seen that one.”
“No? Comeback flic, ‘bout ten years back.”
“Missed it. I’ve been away.”
Commotion back across the wharf. I jerked round and saw the bar door propped open, heavily clothed figures silhouetted against the interior lighting. New clientele from the sweeper, crashing the grenade party.
Shouts, and high-pitched wailing boiled out past them. Beside me, the woman went quietly tense, head tilted at an angle that mingled sensual and lupine in some indefinable, pulse-kicking fashion.
“They’re putting out a call,” she said and her posture unlocked again, as rapidly and with as little fuss as it had tautened. She seemed to flow backwards into the shadows. “I’m out of here. Look, uh, thanks. Thank you. Sorry if I spoilt your evening.”
“It wasn’t shaping up for much anyway.”
She took a couple more steps away, then stopped. Under the vague caterwauling from the bar and the noise of the hosing station, I thought I could hear something massive powering up, tiny insistent whine behind the fabric of the night, sense of shifting potential, like carnival monsters getting into place behind a stage curtain. Light and shadow through the stanchions overhead made a splintered white mask of her face. One eye gleamed silver.