How It All Goes Down
- Molly bursts into a room with a pool like she owns the place. Her heightened senses give the whole scene a type of bullet time, and she lets a grenade fly from her hand.
- She shoots at Ashpool, but he turns out to be one of Riviera's holograms. The grenade explodes in the water, Molly's leg collapses beneath her.
- Case is still connected to Molly via the simstim, and the pain is fierce. Molly's in a real fix. Her hands are bound by a sex toy 3Jane bought. The toy tightens around Molly's hands every time she moves them, and should she move them too much, it'll crush her fingers. Odd as that sounds, you've got to admire a purchase that multitasks so well.
- Riviera gloats over Molly, but a woman's voice asks Hideo to give her first aid. Molly loses consciousness right as Case jacks out.
- Wintermute is already on the line with Case. Since Molly's leg is now literally falling off, Case needs to waltz into Straylight and finish the job himself. Yep, the place with the sociopathic druggy and ninja assassin in it. Enjoy.
- A quick check on the Dixie Flatline, and Case returns to Molly's simstim. Molly is being nursed by 3Jane, who takes to Molly like a girl nursing an injured kitten.
- 3Jane asks if Molly really would have killed them. Molly answers that she wouldn't have killed 3Jane, but she would have tried to kill Hideo. Her reason is that she needs to know if she could. Remember that Johnny was killed by a similar ninja assassin, and Molly could do nothing about it.
- Riviera stands beside 3Jane. He explains that he betrayed the team out of a sense of pure perversity and that he's going to help 3Jane with her family empire. Then he smashes his wine class upside Molly's head. Sheesh, can't this girl catch a break?
- In the real world, Maelcum is preparing to storm Straylight, and he's got a big old shotgun to do it with.
- In Molly's simstim, Case can still hear what's going on even though Molly's knocked out. 3Jane is unhappy with Peter having bludgeoned Molly. She says it's no longer fun although she is interested in whether or not she'll see Molly's eye now that one of the mirror lenses is broken.
- We switch back to the real world again. Maelcum breaks the Marcus Garvey away from the Haniwa and docks the ship to Straylight.