I looked over the side at the blue water.

“What is it this time?” I said with forced lightness. “Feed me to the sharks?”

She laughed, showing perfect teeth. “No, that won’t be necessary at this stage. All I want to do is talk.”

I stood loose limbed, staring at her. “So talk.”

“Very well.” The woman folded herself gracefully back onto the seat at the stern. “You have involved yourself in matters that are clearly not your affair, and you have suffered as a result. My interest is, I think, identical to yours. That is, to avoid further unpleasantness.”

“My interest is in seeing you die.”

A small smile. “Yes, I’m sure it is. Even a virtual death would probably be very satisfying. So, at this point, let me point out that the specifics for this construct include fifth dan shotokan proficiency.”

She extended a hand to show me the calluses on her knuckles. I shrugged.

“Moreover, we can always return to the way things were earlier.” She pointed out over the water and, following her arm, I saw the city she had been sketching on the horizon. Squinting into the reflected sunlight, I could make out the minarets. I almost managed to smile at the cheap psychology of it. A boat. The sea. Escape. These boys had bought their programming off the rack.

“I don’t want to go back there,” I said truthfully.

“Good. Then tell us who you are.”

I tried not to let the surprise show on my face. The deep-cover training awoke, spinning lies. “I thought I had.”

“What you have said is somewhat confused, and you curtailed the interrogation by stopping your own heart. You are not Irene Elliott, that much is certain. You do not appear to be Elias Ryker, unless he has undergone substantial retraining. You claim a connection with Laurens Bancroft, and also to be an offworlder, a member of the Envoy Corps. This is not what we expected.”

“I bet it isn’t,” I muttered.

“We do not wish to be involved in matters which do not concern us.”

“You already are involved. You’ve abducted and tortured an Envoy. You got any idea what the Corps will do to you for that. They’ll hunt you down and feed your stacks to the EMP. All of you. Then your families, then your business associates, then their families and then anyone else who gets in the way. By the time they’ve finished you won’t even be a memory. You don’t fuck with the Corps and live to write songs about it. They’ll eradicate you.”

It was a colossal bluff. The Corps and I had not been on speaking terms for at least a decade of my subjective lifeline, and the best part of a century of objective time. But throughout the Protectorate the Envoys were a threat that could be dealt across the table to anyone up to and including a planetary President with the same assurance that small children in Newpest are threatened with the Patchwork Man.

“It was my understanding,” said the woman quietly, “that the Envoy Corps were banned from operations on Earth unless UN mandated. Perhaps you have as much to lose by revelation as anyone else?”

Mr. Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court, which is more or less common knowledge. Oumou Prescott’s words came back to me, and I leapt to parry.

“Perhaps you would like to take that up with Laurens Bancroft and the UN Court,” I suggested, folding my arms.

The woman looked at me for a while. The wind ruffled my hair, bringing with it the faint rumble of the city. Finally, she said, “You are aware we could erase your stack, and break down your sleeve into pieces so small there would be no trace. There would, effectively, be nothing to find.”

“They’d find you,” I said, with the confidence that a strand of truth in the lie provides. ”You can’t hide from the Corps. They’ll find you whatever you do. About the only thing you can hope for now is to try to cut a deal.”

“What deal?” she asked woodenly.

In the fractions of a second before I spoke, my mind went into overdrive, measuring the tilt and power of every syllable chosen before it was launched. This was the escape window. There wouldn’t be another chance.

“There’s a biopirate operation moving stolen military custom through the West Coast,” I said carefully. “They’re being fronted by places like Jerry’s.”

“And they called the Envoys?” The woman’s tone was scornful. “For biopirates? Come on, Ryker. Is that the best you can do?”

“I’m not Ryker,” I snapped. “This sleeve’s a cover. Look, you’re right. Nine times out often, this stuff doesn’t touch us. The Corps wasn’t designed to take on criminality at that level. But these people have taken some items they should never have touched. Rapid response diplomatic bioware. Stuff they should never even have seen. Someone’s pissed off about it—and I mean at UN Praesidium level—so they call us in.”

The woman frowned. “And the deal?”

“Well, first of all you cut me loose, and no one talks about this to anybody. Let’s call it a professional misunderstanding. And then you open some channels for me. Name some names. Black clinic like this, the information circulates. That might be worth something to me.”

“As I said before, we do not wish to involve ourselves—”

I came off the rail, letting just enough anger bleed through. “Don’t fuck with me, pal. You are involved. Like it or not, you took a big bite of something that didn’t concern you, and now you’re going to either chew it or spit it out. Which is it going to be?”

Silence. Only the sea breeze between us, the faint rocking of the boat.

“We will consider this,” said the woman.

Something happened to the glinting light on the water. I shifted my gaze out past the woman’s shoulder and saw how the brightness unstitched itself from the waves and scribbled into the sky, magnifying. The city whited out as if from a nuclear flash, the edges of the boat faded, as if into a sea mist. The woman opposite went with it. It became very quiet.

I raised a hand to touch the mist where the parameters of the world ended and my arm seemed to move in slow motion. There was a static hiss like rain building under the silence. The ends of my fingers turned transparent, then white like the minarets of the city under the flash. I lost the power of motion and the white crept up my arm. The breath stopped in my throat, my heart paused in mid-beat. I was.

Not.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I woke once more, this time to a rough numbness in the surface of my skin, like the feeling your hands get just after you’ve rinsed them clean of detergent or white spirit, but spread throughout the body. Re-entry into a male sleeve. It subsided rapidly as my mind adjusted to the new nervous system. The faint chill of air conditioning on exposed flesh. I was naked. I reached up with my left hand and touched the scar under my eye.

They’d put me back.

Above me the ceiling was white and set with powerful spotlights. I propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. Another faint chill, this one internal, coasted through me as I saw that I was in an operating theatre. Across the room from where I lay stood a polished steel surgical platform complete with runnels for the blood and the folded arms of the autosurgeon suspended spiderlike above. None of the systems were active, but there were small screens blinking the word STANDBY on the wall and on a monitor unit beside me. I leaned closer to the display and saw a function checklist scrolling down repeatedly. They had been programming the autosurgeon to take me apart.

I was swinging myself off the waiting tray when the door cracked open and the synthetic woman came in with a pair of medics in tow. The particle blaster was stowed at her hip and she was carrying a recognisable bundle.

“Clothes.” She flung them at me with a scowl. “Get dressed.”

One of the medics laid a hand on her arm. “Procedure calls for—”