The vendor, a Turkish teenager with a luxurious mustache, nodded. "Every bead made from naturally occurring foetus-bones." He handed one to Perry. It was dry and fragile in his hand. The bones were warm and porous, and in tortured Elephant Man shapes that he recoiled from atavistically. "Good price," the Turkish kid said. He had practically no accent at all, and was wearing a Japanese baseball-team uniform and spray-on foot-coverings. Thoroughly Americanized. "Look here," he said, and gestured at a little corner of his table. It was covered in roses made from fabric -- small and crude, with pin-backs. Perry picked one up. It had a certain naive charm. The fabric was some kind of very delicate leather -- "It's skin," his date said. "Foetal skin." He dropped it. His fingers tingled with the echo of the feeling of the leather. *Jesus I hate biotech*. The rose fluttered past the table to the sandy boardwalk, and the Turkish kid picked it up and blew it clean. "Sorry," Perry said, sticking his hands in his pockets. His date bought a bracelet and a matching choker made of tiny bones and teeth, and the Turkish kid, leering, helped her fasten the necklace. When they returned to Lester and his date, Perry knew the evening was at a close. The girls played a couple rounds of eye-hockey, unreadable behind their lenses, and Perry shrugged apologetically at Lester. "Well then," Lester said, "it sure has been a nice night." Lester got smooched when they saw the girls off in a pedicab. In the buzz and hum of its flywheel, Perry got a damp and unenthusiastic handshake. "Win some, lose some," Lester said as the girls rolled away in a flash of muscular calves from the pair of beach-perfect cabbies pedaling the thing. "You're not angry?" Perry said. "Nah," Lester said. "I get laid too much as it is. Saps me of my precious bodily fluids. Gotta keep some chi inside, you know?" Perry raised up his funny eyebrow and made it dance. "Oh, OK," Lester said. "You got me. I'm meeting mine later, after she drops her friend off." "I'll get a cab home then, shall I?" "Take my car," Lester said. "I'll get a ride back in the morning. No way you'll get a taxi to take you to our neighborhood at this hour." Perry's car had been up on blocks for a month, awaiting his attention to its failing brakes and mushy steering. So it was nice to get behind the wheel of Lester's Big Daddy Roth trike and give it a little gas out on the interstate, the smell of the swamp and biodiesel from the big rigs streaming past the windscreen. The road was dark and treacherous with potholes, but Perry got into the rhythm of it and found he didn't want to go home, quite, so he kept driving, into the night. He told himself that he was scouting dead malls for future expansion, but he had kids who'd video-documented the status of all the likely candidates in the hood, and he kept tabs on his choicest morsels via daily sat photos that he subscribed to in his morning feed.