Ortega stood before me, a stirring implement in one hand, hair gathered back in a loose knot. Her T-shirt blazoned at me.

RESOLUTION 653. Yes or No, depending.

Oumou Prescott

Mr. Bancroft has an undeclared influence in the UN Court.

Jerry Sedaka

Old Anenome’s Catholic … We take on a lot like that. Real convenient sometimes.

My thoughts ran like a combustion fuse, flaming up the line of association.

Tennis court

Nalan Ertekin, Chief Justice of the UN Supreme Court

Joseph Phiri, the Commission of Human Rights

My own words

You’re here to discuss Resolution 653, I imagine.

An undeclared influence …

Miriam Bancroft

I’ll need some help keeping Marco off Nalan’s back. He’s fuming, by the way.

And Bancroft

The way he played today, I’m not surprised.

Resolution 653. Catholics.

My mind spewed the data back at me like a demented file search, scrolling down.

Sedaka, gloating

Sworn affidavit on disc, full Vow of Abstention filed with the Vatican.

Real convenient sometimes.

Ortega

Barred by Reasons of Conscience decals.

Mary Lou Hinchley.

Last year the Coastals fished some kid out of the ocean.

Not much left of the body, but they got the stack.

Barred by Reasons of Conscience.

Out of the ocean.

Coastals.

Mobile aerial site outside coastal limit …

Head in the Clouds.

It was a process that could not be braked, a kind of mental avalanche. Chunks of reality splintering away and tumbling downward, except that instead of chaos they were falling into something that had form, a kind of restructured whole whose final shape I still couldn’t make out.

Beaconing system locked to Bay City —

— and Seattle

Bautista.

See, it all went down in a black clinic up in Seattle.

The intacts ditched in the Pacific.

Ortega’s theory was that Ryker was set up.

“What’re you looking at?”

The words hung in the air for a moment like a hinge in time, and suddenly time hinged back and in the doorway behind, Sarah was just waking up in the Millsport hotel bed, with the rolling thunder of an orbital discharge rattling the loose windows in their frames and behind that, rotorblades against the night, and our own deaths waiting just up around the bend.

“What’re you looking at?”

I blinked and I was still staring at Ortega’s T-shirt, at the soft mounds she made in it and the legend printed across the chest. There was a slight smile on her face, but it was beginning to bleach out with concern.

“Kovacs?”

I blinked again and tried to reel in the metres of mental spillage that the T-shirt had set off. The looming truth of Head in the Clouds.

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to eat?”

“Ortega, what if—” I found I had to clear my throat, swallow and start again. I didn’t want to say this, my body didn’t want me to say it. “What if I can get Ryker off the stack? Permanently, I mean. Clear him of the charges, prove Seattle was a set-up. What’s that worth to you?”

For a moment, she looked at me as if I was speaking a language she didn’t understand. Then she moved to the window shelf and seated herself carefully on the edge, facing me. She was silent for a while, but I had already seen the answer in her eyes.

“Are you feeling guilty?” she asked me finally.

“About?”

“About us.”

I nearly laughed out loud, but there was just enough underlying pain to stop the reflex in my throat. The urge to touch her had not stopped. Over the last day it had ebbed and flowed in waves, but it had never wholly gone. When I looked at the curve of her hips and thighs on the window shelf, I could feel the way she had writhed back against me so clearly it was almost virtual. My palm recalled the weight and shape of her breast as if holding it had been this sleeve’s life’s work. As I looked at her, my fingers wanted to trace the geometry of her face. There was no room in me for guilt, no room for anything but this feeling.

“Envoys don’t feel guilt,” I said shortly. “I’m serious. It’s likely, no it’s almost certain in fact that Kawahara had Ryker set up because he was heating up the Mary Lou Hinchley case too much. Do you remember anything about her employment records?”

Ortega thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “She ran away from home to be with the boyfriend. Mostly unregistered stuff, anything to bring the rent in. Boyfriend was a piece of shit, got a record goes back to age fifteen. He dealt a little Stiff, crashed a few easy datastacks, mostly lived off his women.”

“Would he have let her work the Meat Rack? Or the cabins?”

“Oh, yeah.” Ortega nodded, face stony. “Soon as spit.”

“If someone was recruiting for a snuff house, Catholics would be the ideal candidates, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to tell any tales after the event, after all. By reasons of conscience.”

“Snuff.” If Ortega’s face had been stony before, it was weathered granite now. “Most of the snuff victims around here just get a bolt through the stack when it’s over. They don’t tell any tales.”

“Right. But what if something went wrong. Specifically, what if Mary Lou Hinchley was going to be used as a snuff whore, so she tried to escape and fell out of an aerial whorehouse called Head in the Clouds. That would make her Catholicism very convenient, wouldn’t it?”

“Head in the Clouds? Are you serious?”

“And it’d make the owners of Head in the Clouds very anxious to stop Resolution 653 dead in its tracks, wouldn’t it?”

“Kovacs.” Ortega was making slow-down gestures with both palms. “Kovacs, Head in the Clouds is one of the Houses. Class prostitution. I don’t like those places, they make me want to vomit just as bad as the cabins, but they’re clean. They cater for elevated society and they don’t run scams like snuff—”

“You don’t think the upper echelons go in for sadism and necrophilia, then. That’s strictly a lower-class thing, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” said Ortega evenly. “But if anyone with money wants to play at torturer, they can afford to do it in virtual. Some of the Houses run virtual snuff, but they run it because it’s legal, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And that’s the way they like it.”

I drew a deep breath. “Kristin, someone was taking me to see Kawahara on board Head in the Clouds. Someone from the Wei Clinic. And if Kawahara is involved in the West Coast Houses, then they will do anything that turns a profit, because she will do anything, anything at all. You wanted a big bad Meth to believe in? Forget Bancroft, he’s practically a priest in comparison. Kawahara grew up in Fission City, dealing anti-radiation drugs to the families of fuel rod workers. Do you know what a water carrier is?”

She shook her head.

“In Fission City it’s what they used to call the gang enforcers. See, if someone refused to pay protection, or informed to the police, or just didn’t jump fast enough when the local yakuza boss said frog, the standard punishment was to drink contaminated water. The enforcers used to carry it around in shielded flasks, siphoned off low-grade reactor cooling systems. They’d turn up at the offender’s house one night and tell him how much he had to drink. His family would be made to watch. If he didn’t drink, they’d start cutting his family one by one until he did. You want to know how I know that delightful piece of Earth history trivia?”

Ortega said nothing, but her mouth was tight with disgust.

“I know because Kawahara told me. That’s what she used to do when she was a kid. She was a water carrier. And she’s proud of it.”

The phone chimed.

I waved back Ortega out of range and went to answer it.