“Thanks.”

They gathered the rest of their equipment and left. Zeyneb looked back at me from the bubblefab flap and her mouth twisted. Her voice was too low for me to catch what she said. Martin raised his arm in a cuffing gesture, and they both ducked out. I watched them go, then looked down at the strip of dermals in my clenched fist.

“That’s your solution?” asked Wardani in a small, cold voice. “Take drugs and watch it all slide out of view?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

She turned away.

“Then get down off that fucking prayer tower and keep your self-righteousness to yourself.”

“We could—”

“We could what? We’re inhibited, we’re most of us a couple of days off death from catastrophic cell damage, and I don’t know about you, but my arm hurts. Oh, yeah, and this whole place is wired for sight and sound to the political officer’s cabin, which, I imagine, Carrera has ready access to when he wants it.” I felt a slight twinge from the thing on the nape of my neck, and realised my own anger was getting the better of my weariness. I locked it down. “I’ve done all the fighting I’m going to do, Tanya. Tomorrow we get to spend the day listening to Sutjiadi die. You deal with that any way you want. Me, I’m going to sleep through it.”

There was a searing satisfaction in throwing the words out at her, like twisting shrapnel out of a wound in your own flesh. But somewhere underneath it, I kept seeing the camp commandant, shut down in his chair, current running, the pupil of his remaining human eye bumping idly against the upper lid.

If I lay down, I’d probably never get up again. I heard the words again, whispering out of him like dying breath. So I stay in this. Chair. The discomfort wakes me. Periodically.

I wondered what kind of discomfort I’d need at this stage of the game. What kind of chair I’d need to be strapped into.

Somewhere there’s got to be a way off this fucking beach.

And I wondered why the hand at the end of my injured arm was not empty.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

Sutjiadi started screaming shortly after it got light.

Outraged fury for the first few seconds, almost reassuring in its humanity, but it didn’t last. In less than a minute, every human element boiled away to the white bone of animal agony. In that form it came searing up the beach from the butcher’s slab, shriek after peeling shriek filling the air like something solid, hunting listeners. We had been waiting for it since before the dawn but it still hit like a shockwave, a visible flinch through each of us where we sat hunched on beds no one had even tried to sleep in. It came for us all, and touched us with a sickening intimacy. It laid clammy hands over my face and a clamped grip on my ribcage, stopping breath, spiked the hairs on my neck and sent a single twitch through one eye. At my nape, the inhib unit tasted my nervous system and stirred interestedly.

Lock it down.

Behind the shrieking ran another sound I knew. The low growl of an aroused audience. The Wedge, seeing justice done.

Cross-legged on the bed, I opened my fists. The dermal strips fell to the quilt.

Something flickered.

I saw the dead visage of the Martian, printed across my vision so clear it might have been a retinal display.

this chair—

—wakes me.

—spinning motes of shadow and light—

—dirge of alien grief—

I could feel—

—a Martian visage, in amongst the swirl of brilliant pain, not dead—

—great unhuman eyes that met mine with something that—

I shuddered away from it.

The human scream ran on, ripping along nerves, digging into marrow. Wardani buried her face in her hands.

I shouldn’t be feeling this bad, a detached part of me argued. This isn’t the first time I’ve—

Unhuman eyes. Unhuman screams.

Vongsavath began to weep.

I felt it rising in me, gathering in spirals the way the Martians had done. The inhib unit tensed.

No, not yet.

Envoy control, cold and methodical unpicking of human response just when I needed it. I welcomed it like a lover on Wardani’s sunset beach—I think I was grinning as it came on.

Outside on the slab, Sutjiadi screamed pleading denial, the words wrenched out of him like something drawn with pliers.

I reached down to the grip-pad on my arm and tugged it slowly towards my wrist. Twinges ran through the bone beneath as the movement snagged the regrowth biotags.

Sutjiadi screamed, ragged glass over tendon and gristle in my head. The inhibitor—

Cold. Cold.

The grip-pad reached my wrist and dangled loose. I reached for the first of the biotags.

Someone might be watching this from Lamont’s cabin, but I doubted it. Too much else on the menu right now. And besides, who watches detainees with inhibitor systems crouched on their spines? What’s the point? Trust the machine and get on with something more rewarding.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I gripped the tag and applied evenly mounting pressure.

You’re not doing this, I reminded myself. You’re just sitting here listening to a man die, and you’ve done enough of that in the past couple of years for it not to bother you. No big deal. The Envoy systems, fooling every adrenal gland in my body and plastering me with a layer of cool detachment. I believed what I told myself at a level deeper than thought. On my neck, the inhibitor twitched and snugged itself down again.

A tiny tearing and the regrowth bio filament came out.

Too short.

Fu—

Cold.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I selected another tag and tugged it gently side to side. Beneath the surface of the skin, I felt the monofilament slice tissue down to the bone in a direct line and knew it was also too short.

I looked up and caught Deprez looking at me. His lips framed a question. I gave him a distracted little smile and tried another tag.

Sutjiadi screamed.

The fourth tag was the one—I felt it slicing flesh in a long curve through and around my elbow. The single endorphin dermal I’d shot earlier kept the pain to a minor inconvenience, but the tension still ran through me like wires. I took a fresh grip on the Envoy lie that absolutely nothing was happening here, and pulled hard.

The filament came up like a kelp cable out of damp beach sand, ripping a furrow through the flesh of my forearm. Blood spritzed my face.

Sutjiadi screamed. Searing, sawing up and down a scale of despair and disbelief at what the machine was doing to him, at what he could feel happening to the sinewed fibres of his body.

“Kovacs what the fuck are you—” Wardani shut up as I cut her a look and jabbed a finger at my neck. I wrapped the filament carefully around my left palm, knotted it behind the tag. Then, not giving myself time to think about it, I splayed my hand and drew the noose smoothly and rapidly tight.

Nothing is happening here.

The monofilament sliced into my palm, went down through the pad of tissue as if through water and came up against the interface bioplate. Vague pain. Blood welled from the invisible cut in a thin line, then blotched across the whole palm. I heard Wardani’s breath draw short, and then she yelped as her inhibitor bit.

Not here my nerves told the inhib unit on my own neck. Nothing happening here.

Sutjiadi screamed.

I unknotted the filament and drew it clear, then flexed my damaged palm. The lips of the wound across the palm split and gaped. I stuffed thumb into the split and—

NOTHING is happening here. Nothing at all.

—twisted until the flesh tore.

It hurt, endorphin or no fucking endorphin, but I had what I wanted. Below the mangled mass of meat and fatty tissue, the interface plate showed a clear white surface, beaded with blood and finely scarred with biotech circuitry. I worked the lips of the wound further apart until there was a clear patch of plate exposed. Then I reached back with no more conscious intent than you’d get from a back-cracking yawn, and jammed the gashed hand onto the inhibitor.