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She climbed the stairs in the dark, hearing their familiar creak underfoot, and stopped on the third floor, just under the steep roof. A final half flight of stairs ended in a roof door marked EXIT. Its viruflex panel shed a little light onto the landing, enough for her to see the crate of empty milk and beer bottles that had always stood by the door of the apartment. And there, propped up against the far wall, a bicycle that she could swear she remembered riding.

Cohen asked, popping into her head suddenly and shockingly.

She grimaced. She hadn’t wanted him to know about this. she told him.

A suspiciously long pause. Then,

Someone walked overhead with heavy, flat-footed steps, and Li spun around to face the roof door. It opened, letting in a gust of wet, fecund air. A man in street clothes and bedroom slippers shuffled past Li and down the next flight of stairs, staring at her all the while with a flat, suspicious look on his face. He had a freshly strangled capon tucked under one arm and a small splash of blood on his sleeve where he’d cut himself, or the bird, in the plucking. Li watched him until she heard a door close behind him a few flights below. Then she turned, stared at the door for a minute, and knocked.

A latch opened, and a chain clinked on the other side of the door. A finger’s breadth of lamplight spilled onto the landing. A thin, Irish-pale face pressed itself to the crack in the door.

Relief and disappointment battled in Li’s heart. Not her. Too young. “I’m looking for Mirce Perkins,” she said.

The girl shifted, and Li caught a glimpse of a baby riding her hip. “What are you selling, then? Oh, never mind, we don’t want it.”

“I’m not selling anything.”

The girl opened the door another few centimeters and looked Li over. “Oh,” she said, and her voice sounded like a door shutting. “Cops.”

“Is she here?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

The girl hesitated. Li could see her weighing the risk of personal trouble against the certainty that Li would find Mirce even if she didn’t help her. “Try the Molly.”

Li heard herself laugh nervously. The Molly Maguire. Of course. Where else would half the Irish-Catholic population of Shantytown be a few hours before midnight mass on a rainy Saturday night?

Her feet knew the way to the Molly almost as well as they knew the way to her house. Five minutes later she was stepping into the front room of the rusty Quonset hut and shouldering her way past the laughing, jostling crowd that always seemed to mill around the Molly’s threshold.

Every table she could see was taken. Even at the bar there were only a few empty stools left. She found one and settled onto it.

“Triple,” she said to the barkeep. He started slightly, but only at the unfamiliar face; half the Molly’s regulars were at least part construct, and even the most Irish of the Irish bore the marks of Migration-era genesplicing. The triple stout was good when it came, thick and peaty and so rich you could drink it instead of a meal in a pinch. Whatever else might go on at the Molly, or in the dark alleys behind it, the beer was on the up and up.

She drank thirstily and looked around the long, narrow space under the curving roof. Nothing had changed here except her. There were the same hard-muscled, hard-faced miners that still stalked her dreams. There were the pictures of famous local sons and the cups and ribbons of twenty years’ soccer championships gathering dust above the bar. There were the same cheap wall holos, opening onto the stone walls and heartbreakingly green fields of Ireland.

Li let the talk flow around her, listening to the hard-edged flat-voweled voices, relishing the same Saturday night arguments that had always bored her to tears. Wives trying to get their