The idea of decking into the local Shadowland system frightened her, she had to admit, but she didn’t know why. It wasn’t as if she’d be going up against any ice. (There was ice associated with Shadowland, of course, to protect it from corp and government deckers who’d like to close it down. But as long as she didn’t try anything drek-headed like commandeering the system or erasing important files, she wouldn’t even know the intrusion countermeasures were there.) It was just that Shadowland was symbolic. It represented her old life, the life of the shadow decker. The life that had almost killed her, that had slotted up her mind for more than a year, and that still caused her occasional nightmares.