In the 7-8 years since the events in Neuromancer, cyberspace has changed dramatically. Once, a cyberspace cowboy had to be fast and good, now he also has to make deals with the things that inhabit the matrix.

At the end of Neuromancer, the Tessier-Ashpool AIs merged and set themselves free of the constraints that bind AIs. They became something more. But since then, the resulting intelligence has fragmented, and taken on the identities of the spirits of voodoo.

Bobby Newmark is a kid who wants to be a cowboy, and he is given an icebreaker program and a target by a local hood called Two-a-Day. When he jacks in, he's immediately trapped by Ice, security software that has him flatlined. He is suddenly saved by a vision of a girl in the matrix, reaching down and freeing him. When he wakes up he flees, trying to find Two-a-Day.

Two-a-Day was only doing a favour for people higher up the chain, Lucas and Beauvoir. They had needed someone to try out the icebreaker for them, and passed it down. But Two-a-Day's watchers, keeping an eye on Bobby in the matrix, had seen the girl, and now Bobby is hot property. Lucas and Beauvoir call her the virgin, the chosen of Legba. They have contact with the ghosts of the matrix, and they do deals with them.

The girl is really Angie Mitchell, the daughter of Maas Biotech's leading researcher. Hosaka thought that Mitchell wanted to defect, and set up an extraction for him using the mercenary Turner, but Mitchell didn't come out, it was Angie. As Turner tries to protect the girl, he realises that Mitchell has done something to her brain. There are strange structures in there, and at times the ghosts of the matrix speak through her.

Mitchell had done a deal with them, his research was driven by their intelligence, and in return, he had implanted the structures in his daughter's brain. They allow her to interact directly with the matrix, and for the ghosts to speak with and to her directly.

Meanwhile the art sponser Virek has hired a woman called Marly to track a series of art pieces to their source. Virek has been confined to a tank for many years, riddled with cancer, but he believes he knows how to escape. Marly doesn't understand this at first, only understands that she is employed again.

The location she is looking for is discovered incredibly easily, although her ex-lover is killed finding out. She quickly becomes uncomfortable with working for Virek, and makes her own way to the obscure orbital.

The orbital is actually the old data cores of the Tessier-Ashpool corporation, supposedly erased, yet strangely still acitve. Virek believes he can be encoded into the matrix the way that the AI was. Just before his agent arrives at the orbital, Virek encounters the ghosts in the matrix, and is destroyed by them.

Marly receives a new piece of art, containing her experiences, and we learn that the ice-breaker given to Bobby originated there too, it is a way of the AI speaking to itself.

Turner takes Angie to meet up with Beauvoir, who asks her to come and stay with his people and learn about her gifts, and Bobby comes too. Several years later, she is beginning her career as a sim-stim star, with her lover Bobby Newmark, Count Zero.