“Ah. So you’re not convinced either.”

“I don’t.” Vidaura threw up one hand in exasperation. She twisted about in the bed to face me. “How can she be, right?”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one caught in that particular net. Welcome to the rational-thinking minority.”

“Koi says she checks out. All the way down.”

“Yeah. Koi wants this so badly he’d believe a fucking ripwing in a headscarf was Quellcrist Falconer. I was there for the Ascertainment, and they went easy on anything it looked like she was uncomfortable answering. Did anybody tell you about this genetic weapon she’s triggered?”

She looked away. “Yeah, I heard. Pretty extreme.”

“Pretty much in complete defiance of every fucking thing Quellcrist Falconer ever believed, I think you mean.”

“We none of us get to stay clean, Tak.” A thin smile. “You know that. Under the circumstances—”

“Virginia, you’re about to prove yourself a fully paid-up, lost-in-belief member of the old-style human race if you’re not careful. And you needn’t think I’ll still talk to you if you cross over to that shit.”

The smile powered up, became a laugh of sorts. She touched her upper lip with her tongue and glanced slantwise at me. It gave me an odd, electric sensation to watch.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s be inhumanly rational about this. But Jack says she remembers the assault on Millsport. Going for the copter at Alabardos.”

“Yeah, which kind of sinks the copy stored in the heat of battle outside Drava theory, don’t you think? Since both those events postdate any presence she might have had in New Hok.”

Vidaura spread her hands. “It also sinks the idea she’s some kind of personality casing for a datamine. Same logic applies.”

“Well. Yeah.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“You mean where does it leave Brasil and the Vchira gang?” I asked nastily. “Easy. It leaves them scratching around desperately for some other crabshit theory that’ll hold enough water to let them go on believing. Which, for fully paid-up neoQuellists is a pretty fucking sad state of affairs.”

“No, I mean us.” Her eyes drilled me with the pronoun. “Where does it leave us?”

I covered for the tiny jolt in my stomach by rubbing at my eyes in an echo of the gesture she’d used earlier.

“I’ve got an idea of sorts,” I started. “Maybe an explanation.”

The door chimed.

Vidaura raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, and a guest list, looks like.”

I shot another glance at my watch, and shook my head. Outside the window, the snarling of the panthers seemed to have settled down to a low grumble and an occasional cracking sound as they ripped the cartilage in their food apart. I pulled on trousers, picked up the Rapsodia from the bedside table on an impulse and went through to open up.

The door flexed aside and gave me a view onto the quiet, dimly lit corridor outside. The woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve stood there, fully dressed, arms folded.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” she said.

THIRTY-NINE

It was still early morning when we hit Vchira. The haiduci pilot Sierra Tres had got out of bed—her bed, in fact—was young and cocky, and the skimmer we lifted was the same contraband runner we’d come in on. No longer bound by the need to appear a standard, forgettable item of Expanse traffic and no doubt wanting to impress Tres as much as he impressed himself, the pilot opened his vessel up to the limit and we tore across to a mooring point called Sunshine Fun Jetties in less than two hours. Tres sat in the cockpit with him and made encouraging noises, while Vidaura and the woman who called herself Quell stayed below together. I sat alone on the forward deck for most of the trip, nursing my hangover in the cool flow of air from the slipstream.

As befitted the name, Sunshine Fun Jetties was a place frequented mostly by tour-bus skimmers from Newpest, and the odd rich kid’s garishly finned Expansemobile. At this time of day, there was a lot of mooring space to choose from. More importantly, it put us less than fifteen minutes’ walk from the offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep at a pace that allowed for Sierra Tres and her limp. They were just opening when we arrived at the door.

“I’m not sure,” said the underling whose job it evidently was to get up earlier than any of the partners and man the offices until they arrived. “I’m not sure that—”

“Yeah, well I am,” Sierra Tres told him impatiently.

She’d belted on an ankle-length skirt to cover her rapidly healing leg, and there was no way of knowing from her voice and stance that she was still damaged. We’d left the pilot back at Sunshine Fun Jetties with the skimmer, but Tres didn’t need him. She played the haiduci arrogance card to perfection. The underling flinched.

“Look,” he began.

“No, you look. We were in here less than two weeks ago. You know that. Now you want to call Tudjman, you can. But I doubt he’ll thank you for getting him out of bed at this time of the morning just to confirm we can have access to the same stuff we used last time we were here.”

In the end it took the call to Tudjman and some shouting to clear it, but we got what we wanted. They powered up the virtual systems and showed us to the couches. Sierra Tres and Virginia Vidaura stood by while the woman in Oshima’s sleeve attached the electrodes to herself. She held up the hypnophones to me.

“What’s this meant to be?”

“High-powered modern technology.” I put on a grin I didn’t much feel.

On top of my hangover, anticipation was building a queasy, not-quite-real sensation that I could have done without. “Only been around a couple of centuries. They activate like this. Makes the ride in easier.”

When Oshima was settled, I lay down in the couch next to her and fitted myself with phones and trodes. I glanced up at Tres.

“So we’re all clear on what you do to pull me out if it starts to come apart?”

She nodded, expressionless. I still wasn’t entirely sure why she’d agreed to help us without running it by Koi or Brasil first. It seemed a little early in the scheme of things to be taking unqualified orders from the ghost of Quellcrist Falconer.

“Alright then. Let’s get in the pipe.”

The sonocodes had a harder time than usual dragging me under, but finally I felt the couch chamber blur out and the walls of the off-the-rack hotel suite scribbled into painfully sharp focus in its place. Memory of Vidaura in the suite down the corridor pricked at me unexpectedly.

Get a grip, Tak.

At least the hangover was gone.

The construct had decanted me on my feet, over by a window that looked out onto unlikely vistas of rolling green pasture. At the other side of the room by the door, a sketch of a long-haired woman similarly upright sharpened into Oshima’s sleeve.

We stood looking at each other for a moment, then I nodded. Something about it must have rung false, because she frowned.

“You’re sure about this? You don’t have to go through with it, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“I don’t expect—”

“Nadia, it’s okay. I’m trained to arrive on alien planets in new sleeves and start slaughtering the natives immediately. How hard can this be?”

She shrugged. “Alright.”

“Alright then.”

She crossed the room towards me and halted less than a metre away.

Her head tipped so that the mane of silver grey slipped slowly forward and covered her face. The central cord skidded sideways down one side of her skull and hung like a stunted scorpion tail, cobwebbed with finer filaments.

She looked in that moment like every archetype of haunting my ancestors had brought with them across the gulfs from Earth. She looked like a ghost.

Her posture locked up.

I drew a deep breath and reached out. My fingers parted the hair across her face like curtains.