“And the ones we lost?”

His gaze still hadn’t reeled in from the other side of the baling dock. It was as if he could see Ado and the others standing there in the flickering torchlight, grim spectres at the feast that no amount of alcohol or take would erase.

“Ado vaporised her own stack before she died. I saw her do it. The rest.”

He seemed to shiver slightly, but that might have been the evening breeze across the Expanse, or maybe just a shrug. “I don’t know. Probably they got them.”

Neither of us needed to follow that to its logical conclusion. If Aiura had recovered the stacks, their owners were now locked in virtual interrogation.

Tortured, to death if necessary, then reloaded into the same construct so the process could begin again. Repeated until they gave up what they knew, maybe still repeated after that in vengeance for what they had dared to do to a member of the First Families.

I swallowed the rest of my drink and the bite of it released a shudder across my shoulders and down my spine. I raised the empty glass towards Koi.

“Well, here’s hoping it was worth it.”

“Yes.”

I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.

“Enjoying the party?”

“Not yet.” I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. “I’ll get there.”

He smiled faintly. “You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?”

“Not right now.”

Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wetmaned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more.

Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.

One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soaplike in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.

I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.

Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.

“Okay, then. Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?”

I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar was working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.

“Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.”

He shrugged. “Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact.

You really are turning northern, Tak.”

“Like I said—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are, already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.” He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. “Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.”

I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering.

The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the take cookie, barely tasting it.

“Well, you look like you’re having fun.”

“Envoy camouflage,” I said reflexively. “We’re trained to blend in.”

“Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.”

I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand, I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.

“Is one of those for me?”

“If you like.”

I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier western rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.

“I’m sorry about Ado,” I said.

She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.

“Not now, Tak.”

Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.

This, I remembered suddenly. This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived for.

And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime, why I had ever walked away.

It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning.

Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the take and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.

Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.

“You know,” she said finally. “I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to be one of the Bugs.”

“Maybe for her it wasn’t.”

I thought about Koi’s description of Mari Ado’s death, and I wondered if at the end she’d pulled the trigger to escape interrogation or simply a return to the family ties she’d spent her whole life trying to sever. I wondered if her aristo blood would have been enough to save her from Aiura’s wrath and what she would have had to do to walk away from the interrogation constructs in a fresh sleeve, what she would have had to buy back into to get out intact. I wondered if in the last few moments of dimming vision, she looked at the aristo blood from her own wounds, and hated it just enough.

“Jack’s talking some shit about heroic sacrifice.”

“Oh, I see.”

She swivelled her gaze down to my face. “That’s not why I’m here.”

I said nothing. She went back to looking at the ceiling.

“Oh shit, yes it is.”

We listened to the snarling and the shouts outside. Vidaura sighed and sat up. She jammed the heels of both hands against her eyes and shook her head.

“Do you ever wonder,” she asked me. “If we’re really human any more?”

“As Envoys?” I shrugged. “I try not to buy into the standard tremble-tremble-the-posthumans-are-coming crabshit, if that’s what you mean. Why?”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head irritably. “Yeah, it’s fucking stupid, I know. But sometimes I talk to Jack and the others, and it’s like they’re a different fucking species to me. The things they believe. The level of belief they can bring to bear, with next to nothing to justify it.”