Behind, there was nothing. No features, no structure, only a gap of dark warmth that seemed to expand out towards me like negative torchglow. I leaned closer and the darkness opened at her throat, peeling gently back along the vertical axis of her frozen figure. It split her to the crotch and then beyond, opening the same rent in the air between her legs. I could feel balance tipping away from me in tiny increments as it happened. The floor of the hotel room followed, then the room itself, shrivelling like a used wipe in a beach bonfire. The warmth came up around me, smelling faintly of static. Below was unrelieved black. The iron tresses in my left hand plaited about and thickened to a restless snakelike cable. I hung from it over the void.

Don’t open your eyes, don’t open your left hand, don’t move at all.

I blinked, possibly in defiance, and stowed the recollection.

Grimaced and let go.

If it was falling, it didn’t feel like it.

There was no rush of air, and nothing lit to judge movement by. Even my own body was invisible. The cable seemed to have vanished as soon as

I took my hand off it. I could have been floating motionless in a grav chamber no bigger than the spread of my arms, except that all around me, somehow, my senses signalled the existence of vast, unused space. It was like being a spindrizzle bug, drifting about in the air of one of the emptied warehouses on Belacotton Kohei Nine.

I cleared my throat.

Lightning flickered jaggedly above me, and stayed there. Reflexively, I reached up and my fingers brushed delicate filaments. Perspective slammed into place—the light wasn’t fire in a sky unfathomably high up, it was a tiny branching of twigs a handful of centimetres over my head. I took it gently in my hand and turned it over. The light smudged from it where my fingers pressed. I let go and it hung there, at chest height in front of me.

“Sylvie? You there?”

That got me a surface under my feet and a bedroom steeped in late afternoon light. From the fittings, the place looked as if it might have belonged to a child of about ten. There were holos on the walls of Micky Nozawa, Rili Tsuchiya and a host of other pin-ups I didn’t recognise, a desk and datacoil under a window and a narrow bed. A mirrorwood panel on one wall made the limited space seem larger, a walk-in cupboard opposite opened onto a badly-hung mass of clothing that included court style dressing-up gowns. There was a Renouncer creed tacked to the back of the door, but it was coming away at one corner.

I peered out of the window and saw a classic temperate latitudes small town sloping down to a harbour and the outlying arm of a bay. Tinge of belaweed in the water, crescent slices of Hotei and Daikoku thinly visible in a hard blue sky. Could have been anywhere. Boats and human figures moved about in dispersal patterns close to real.

I moved to the door with the poorly-attached creed and tried the handle. It wasn’t locked, but when I tried to step out into the corridor beyond, a teenage boy appeared in front of me and shoved me back.

“Mum says you’ve to stay in your room,” he said obnoxiously. “Mum says.”

The door slammed in my face.

I stared at it for a long moment, then opened it again.

“Mum says you’ve—”

The punch broke his nose and knocked him back into the opposite wall. I held my fist loosely curled, waiting to see if he’d come back at me but he just slid down the wall, gaping and bleeding. His eyes glazed over with shock. I stepped carefully over his body and set off along the corridor.

Less than ten paces, and I felt her behind me.

It was minute and fundamental, a rustling in the texture of the construct, the scratch of crepe-edged shadows reaching along the walls at my back. I stopped dead and waited. Something curled like fingers over my head and around my neck.

“Hello, Sylvie.”

Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whisky I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colours washed out to grey, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.

“Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,” Sylvie Oshima said evenly, “it seems to have fallen apart.”

“It didn’t start here, Sylvie.”

She looked sideways at me. “Oh, I know. I said seems. But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.”

“Not this me.”

“No, so I understand.” She lifted the whisky to her lips. “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.

Change the subject.

“So what she hears up there filters down here?”

“To an extent.” The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct.

First the reflected image, from top to bottom and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it sombrely. “But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.”

“How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?”

“I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.”

“Is she real?”

A harsh laugh. “You’re asking me that? In here?”

“Alright, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?”

“She escaped.” Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. “That’s what she kept saying, escaped. Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.”

Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.

“That was a holding cell?”

“Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.”

“It wasn’t very hard to get out of.”

“Well, what language were you using?”

“Uh—Amanglic.”

“Yeah—in machine terms that’s not very complex. In fact, it’s infantile in its simplicity. You got the jail your levels of complexity merited.”

“But did you really expect me to stay put?”

“Not me, Micky. The software. This stuff is autonomic‘

“Alright, did the autonomic software expect me to stay put?”

“If you were a nine-year-old girl with a teenage brother,” she said, rather bitterly, “You would have stayed put, believe me. The systems aren’t designed to understand human behaviour, they just recognise and evaluate language. Everything else is machine logic. They draw on my subconscious for some of the fabric, the tone of things, they alert me directly if there’s an excessively violent breakout, but none of it has any real human context. DeCom doesn’t handle humans.”

“So if this Nadia, or whoever she is. If she came in speaking, say, old time Japanese, the system would have put her in a box like mine?”

“Yes. Japanese is quite a bit more complex than Amanglic, but in machine terms the difference is close to irrelevant.”

“And she’d have got out easily, like me. Without alerting you, if she was subtle about it.”

“More subtle than you, yes. Out of the containment system anyway. Finding her way through the sensory interfaces and the baffles into my head would have been a lot harder. But given time, and if she was determined enough…”