“Oh, she’s determined enough. You know who she says she is, don’t you?”

A brief nod. “She told me. When we were both hiding down here from the Harlan interrogators. But I think I knew already. I was starting to dream about her.”

“Do you think she is Nadia Makita? Really?”

Sylvie picked up her drink and sipped it. “It’s hard to see how she could be.”

“But you’re still going to let her run things on deck for the foreseeable future? Without knowing who or what she is?”

Another shrug. “I tend to judge on performance. She seems to be managing.”

“For fuck’s sake, Sylvie, she could be a virus for all you know.”

“Yeah, well from what I read in school, so was the original Quellcrist Falconer. Isn’t that what they called Quellism back in the Unsettlement? A viral poison in the body of society?”

“I’m not talking political metaphors here, Sylvie.”

“Nor am I.” She tipped back her glass, emptied it again and set it down.

“Look, Micky, I’m not an activist and I’m not a soldier. I’m strictly a datarat. Mimints and code, that’s me. Put me in New Hok with a crew and there’s no one to touch me. But that’s not where we are right now, and you and I both know I’m not going back to Drava any time soon. So given the current climate, I think I’m going to bow out to this Nadia. Because whoever or whatever she really is, she stands a far better chance of navigating the waters than I do.”

She sat staring into her glass as it filled. I shook my head.

“This isn’t you, Sylvie.”

“Yes it is.” Suddenly her tone was savage. “My friends are fucking dead or worse, Micky. I’ve got a whole planet of cops plus the Millsport yakuza looking to make me the same way. So don’t tell me this isn’t me. You don’t know what happens to me under those circumstances because you haven’t fucking seen it before, alright. Even I don’t fucking know what happens to me under those circumstances.”

“Yeah, and instead of finding out, you’re going to stay in here like some fucking Renouncer dream of a good little girl your parents once had. Going to sit in here playing with your plug-in world, and hope someone on the outside takes care of business for you.”

She said nothing, just raised the newly-filled glass in my direction. I felt a sudden, constricting wave of shame pulse through me.

“I’m sorry.”

“You should be. Would you like to live through what they did to Orr and the others? Because I’ve got it all on tap down here.”

“Sylvie, you can’t—”

“They died hard, Micky. Peeled back, all of them. At the end, Kiyoka was screaming like a baby for me to come and get her. You want to plug into that, carry that around with you for a while like I have to?”

I shivered, and it seemed to transmit itself to the whole construct. A small, cold thrum hung in the air around us.

“No.”

We sat for a long time in silence after that. Tokyo Crow’s clientele came and went around us, wraithlike.

After a while, she gestured vaguely upwards.

“You know, the aspirants believe this is the only true existence. That everything outside is an illusion, a shadow play created by the ancestor gods to cradle us until we can build our own tailored reality and Upload into it. That’s comforting, isn’t it.”

“If you let it be.”

“You called her a virus,” she said pensively. “As a virus, she was very successful in here. She infiltrated my systems as if she was designed for it. Maybe she’ll be as successful out there in the shadow play.”

I closed my eyes. Pressed a hand to my face.

“Something wrong, Micky?”

“Please tell me you’re being metaphorical now. I don’t think I can cope with another hardwired believer at the moment.”

“Hey, you don’t like the conversation, you can fuck off out of here, can’t you.”

The sudden edge on her voice kicked me back to New Hok and the seemingly endless deCom bickering. An unlooked-for smile tugged at my mouth with the memory. I opened my eyes and looked at her again. Placed both hands flat on the bar, sighed and let the smile come up.

“I came to get you out, Sylvie.”

“I know.” She put her hand over one of mine. “But I’m fine here.”

“I told Las I’d look after you.”

“So look after her. That keeps me safe too.”

I hesitated, trying to frame it right. “I think she might be some kind of weapon, Sylvie.”

“So? Aren’t we all?”

I looked around at the bar and its grey speed ghosts. The low murmur of amalgamated sound. “Is this really all you want?”

“Right now, Micky, it’s all I can cope with.”

My drink stood untouched on the bar in front of me. I stood up. Picked it up.

“Then I’d better be getting back.”

“Sure. I’ll see you out.”

The whisky went down burning, cheap and rough, not what I’d been expecting.

She walked with me out onto the wharf. Here the dawn was already up, cold and pale grey, and there were no people, speeded pastiche or otherwise, anywhere in the unforgiving light. The sweeper station stood closed and deserted, the mooring points and the ocean beyond were both empty of traffic. There was a naked, stripped look to everything and the Andrassy Sea came in and slapped at the pilings with sullen force. Looking north, you could sense Drava crouched below the horizon in similar, abandoned quiet.

We stood under the crane where we’d first met, and it hit me then with palpable force that this was the last time I’d see her.

“One question?”

She was staring out to sea. “Sure.”

“Your preferred active agent up there says she recognised someone in the holding constructs. Grigori Ishii. That chime with you at all?”

A slight frown. “It sounds familiar, yes. I couldn’t tell you from where though. But I can’t see how a personality would have got down here.”

“Well, quite.”

“Did she say it was this Grigori?”

“No. She said there was something down here that sounded like him. But when you flaked taking down the scorpion gun, afterwards when you were coming out of it in Drava you said it knew you, something knew you. Like an old friend.”

Sylvie shrugged. Most of her was still watching the northern horizon.

“Then it could be something the mimints have evolved. A virus to trigger recognition routines in a human brain, makes you think you’re seeing or hearing something you already know. Each individual it hits would assign an appropriate fragment to fit.”

“That doesn’t sound very likely. It’s not like the mimints have had much human interaction to work off recently. Mecsek’s only been in place what, three years?”

“Four.” A faint smile. “Micky, the mimints were designed to kill humans. That’s what they were for originally, three hundred years ago. There’s no telling if some piece of viral weaponry built along those lines has survived this long, maybe even sharpened itself a bit.”

“Have you ever come across anything like that?”

“No. But that doesn’t mean it’s not out there.”

“Or in here.”

“Or in here,” she agreed shortly. She wanted me gone.

“Or it could just be another personality-casing bomb.”

“It could be.”

“Yeah.” I looked around one more time. “Well. How do I get out of here?”

“The crane.” For a moment she came back to me. Her eyes switched in from the north and met mine. She nodded upward to where a steel ladder disappeared into the laced girderwork of the machine. “You just keep climbing up.”

Great.

“You take care of yourself, Sylvie.”

“I will.”

She kissed me briefly on the mouth. I nodded, clapped her on the shoulder and backed away a couple of steps. Then I turned for the ladder, laid hands on the cold metal of the rungs and started climbing.

It seemed solid enough. It beat ripwing infested seacliff and the underside of Martian architecture, anyway.

I was a couple of dozen metres into the girders when her voice floated up to join me.