I caught the exasperated rolling of Oumou Prescott’s eyes on the periphery of my vision and a grin twitched at the corner of my mouth.

“Who has access to this chamber?”

“Myself, authorised staff under a day code. And the owners, of course.”

I wandered down the line of cylinders, bending to examine the data displays at the foot of each one. There was a Miriam clone in the sixth, and two of Naomi’s at seven and eight.

“You’ve got the daughter on ice twice?”

“Yes.” Nyman looked puzzled, and then slightly superior. This was his chance to get back the initiative he’d lost on the fractal patterning. “Have you not been informed of her current condition?”

“Yeah, she’s in psychosurgery,” I growled. “That doesn’t explain why there’s two of her here.”

“Well.” Nyman darted a glance back at Prescott, as if to say that the divulging of further information involved some legal dimension. The lawyer cleared her throat.

“PsychaSec have instructions from Mr. Bancroft to always hold a spare clone of himself and his immediate family ready for decanting. While Ms. Bancroft is committed to the Vancouver psychiatric stack, both sleeves are stored here.”

“The Bancrofts like to alternate their sleeves,” said Nyman knowledgeably. “Many of our clients do, it saves on wear and tear. The human body is capable of quite remarkable regeneration if stored correctly, and of course we offer a complete package of clinical repair for more major damage. Very reasonably priced.”

“I’m sure it is.” I turned back from the end cylinder and grinned at him. “Still, not much you can do for a vaporised head, is there?”

There was a brief silence, during which Prescott looked fixedly at a corner of the ceiling and Nyman’s lips tightened to almost anal proportions.

“I consider that remark in very poor taste,” the director said finally. “Do you have any more important questions, Mr. Kovacs?”

I paused next to Miriam Bancroft’s cylinder and looked into it. Even through the fogging effect of the observation plate and the gel, there was a sensual abundance to the blurred form within.

“Just one question. Who decides when to alternate the sleeves?”

Nyman glanced across at Prescott as if to enlist legal support for his words. “I am directly authorised by Mr. Bancroft to effect the transfer on every occasion that he is digitised, unless specifically required not to. He made no such request on this occasion.”

There was something here, scratching at the Envoy antennae; something somewhere fitted. It was too early to give it concrete form. I looked around the room.

“This place is entry-monitored, right?”

“Naturally.” Nyman’s tone was still chilly.

“Was there much activity the day Bancroft went to Osaka?”

“No more than usual. Mr. Kovacs, the police have already been through these records. I really don’t see what value—”

“Indulge me,” I suggested, not looking at him, and the Envoy cadences in my voice shut him down like a circuit breaker.

Two hours later I was staring out of the window of another autocab as it kicked off from the Alcatraz landing quay and climbed over the Bay.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I glanced at Oumou Prescott, wondering if she could sense the frustration coming off me. I thought I’d got most of the external giveaways on this sleeve locked down, but I’d heard of lawyers who got empath conditioning to pick up more subliminal clues to their witnesses’ states of mind when on the stand. And here, on Earth, it wouldn’t surprise me if Oumou Prescott had a full infrared subsonic body and voice scan package racked into her beautiful ebony head.

The entry data for the Bancroft vault, Thursday 16th August, was as free of suspicious comings and goings as the Mishima Mall on a Tuesday afternoon. Eight a.m., Bancroft came in with two assistants, stripped off and climbed into the waiting tank. The assistants left with his clothes. Fourteen hours later his alternate clone climbed dripping out of the neighbouring tank, collected a towel from another assistant and went to get a shower. No words exchanged beyond pleasantries. Nothing.

I shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what I’m looking for yet.”

Prescott yawned. “Total Absorb, huh?”

“Yeah, that’s right.” I looked at her more closely. “You know much about the Corps?”

“Bit. I did my articles in UN litigation. You pick up the terminology. So what have you absorbed so far?”

“Only that there’s a lot of smoke building up around something the authorities say isn’t burning. You ever meet the lieutenant that ran the case?”

“Kristin Ortega. Of course. I’m not likely to forget her. We were yelling at each other across a desk for the best part of a week.”

“Impressions?”

“Of Ortega?” Prescott looked surprised. “Good cop, as far as I know. Got a reputation for being very tough. The Organic Damage Division are the police department’s hard men, so earning a reputation like that wouldn’t have been easy. She ran the case efficiently enough—”

“Not for Bancroft’s liking.”

Pause. Prescott looked at me warily. “I said efficiently. I didn’t say persistently. Ortega did her job, but—”

“But she doesn’t like Meths, right?”

Another pause. “You have quite an ear for the street, Mr. Kovacs.”

“You pick up the terminology,” I said modestly. “Do you think Ortega would have kept the case open if Bancroft hadn’t been a Meth?”

Prescott thought about it for a while. “It’s a common enough prejudice,” she said slowly, “But I don’t get the impression Ortega shut us down because of it. I think she just saw a limited return on her investment. The police department has a promotion system based at least partly on the number of cases solved. No one saw a quick solution to this one, and Mr. Bancroft was alive, so…”

“Better things to do, huh?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

I stared out the window some more. The cab was flitting across the tops of slender multi-storey stacks and the traffic-crammed crevices between. I could feel an old fury building in me that had nothing to do with my current problems. Something that had accrued through the years in the Corps and the emotional rubble you got used to seeing, like silt on the surface of your soul. Virginia Vidaura, Jimmy de Soto, dying in my arms at Innenin, Sarah … A loser’s catalogue, any way you looked at it.

I locked it down.

The scar under my eye was itching, and there was the curl of the nicotine craving in my fingertips. I rubbed at the scar. Left the cigarettes in my pocket. At some indeterminate point this morning I’d determined to quit. A thought struck me at random.

“Prescott, you chose this sleeve for me, right?”

“Sorry?” She was scanning through a subretinal projection, and it took her a moment to refocus on me. “What did you say?”

“This sleeve. You chose it, right?”

She frowned. “No. As far as I know that selection was made by Mr. Bancroft. We just provided the shortlist according to specifications.”

“No, he told me his lawyers had handled it. Definitely.”

“Oh.” The frown cleared away, and she smiled faintly. “Mr. Bancroft has a great many lawyers. Probably he routed it through another office. Why?”

I grunted. “Nothing. Whoever owned this body before was a smoker, and I’m not. It’s a real pain in the balls.”

Prescott’s smile gained ground. “Are you going to give up?”

“If I can find the time. Bancroft’s deal is, I crack the case, I can be re-sleeved no expense spared, so it doesn’t really matter long term. I just hate waking up with a throatful of shit every morning.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Give up smoking?”

“No. Crack this case.”

I looked at her, deadpan. “I don’t really have any other option, counsellor. Have you read the terms of my employment?”