“Hey, Micky.”

I peered downward. She was standing inside the crane’s base, staring up at me. Her hands were cupped around her mouth. I unfastened one hand carefully and waved.

“Yeah?”

“Just remembered. Grigori Ishii. We learned about him in school.”

“Learned what about him in school?”

She spread her arms.

“No idea, sorry. Who remembers shit like that?”

“Right.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Good question. Envoy caution seemed like the obvious answer. But stubborn mistrust came in a close second. A refusal. I wasn’t buying the glorious return of Quell at the cut rates Koi and the Bugs seemed prepared to accept.

“Maybe I will.”

“Well.” An arm lifted in farewell. “Scan up, Micky. Keep climbing, don’t look down.”

“Yeah,” I yelled it down. “You too, Sylvie.”

I climbed. The sweeper station shrank to the proportions of a child’s toy. The sea took on the texture of hammered grey metal welded to a tilting horizon. Sylvie was a dot facing north, then too small to make out at all. Maybe she wasn’t there any more. The girders around me lost any resemblance to the crane they had once been. The cold dawn light darkened to a flickery silver that danced in patterns on the metal that seemed maddeningly familiar. I didn’t seem to be tiring at all.

I stopped looking down.

FORTY

“So?” she asked finally.

I stared out of the window at Vchira Beach and the glitter of sunlight on the waves beyond. Both beach and water were beginning to fill up with tiny human figures intent on enjoying the weather. The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep were eminently environment-proofed, but you could almost feel the building heat, almost hear the rising chatter and squall of tourism that accompanied it. I hadn’t spoken to anyone since I came out of the construct.

“So you were right.” I spared a sideways glance for the woman wearing Sylvie Oshima’s body, then went back to looking at the sea. The hangover was back in place, worse it seemed. “She’s not coming out. She’s fallen back on childhood Renouncer crabshit to cope with the grief, and she’s staying in there.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah.” I left the window alone, turned back to Tres and Vidaura. “We’re finished here.”

Nobody talked on the way back to the skimmer. We shouldered our way through brightly-garbed crowds, working against the flow in silence. A lot of the time, our faces opened passage for us—you could see it in the expressions of people stepping hurriedly aside. But in the sunny warmth and enthusiasm to get to the water, not everyone was running even a surface level of attention. Sierra Tres scowled as her leg took clouts from garishly-coloured plastic beach implements, badly carried, but either drugs or focus kept her mouth clamped shut over any pain she suffered. No one wanted to create a memorable scene. Only once she turned to look at a particularly clumsy offender, and he practically ran away.

Hey guys. The thought ran sourly through me. Don’t you recognise your political heroes when you see them? We’re coming to liberate you all.

At Sunshine Fun Jetties, the pilot was lying on the sloping flank of the skimmer, soaking up the sun like everybody else. He sat up blinking as we came aboard.

“That was quick. You want to get back already?”

Sierra Tres glanced ostentatiously around at the bright plastic everywhere in view.

“You see any reason to hang about?”

“Hey, it’s not so bad. I get down here with the kids sometimes, they have a great time, ‘s a good mix of people, not so fucking snooty like they are at the south end. Oh yeah, you, man. Rad’s pal.”

I looked up, surprised. “Yeah.”

“Someone asking after you.”

I paused on my way across the skimmer’s flank. Cool drenching of Envoy preparedness, inked with a tiny, joyous splinter of anticipation.

The hangover receded to the back of my awareness.

“What did they want?”

“Didn’t say. Didn’t even have your name. Described you pretty solidly, though. It was a priest, one of those northern weirdos. You know, beard and shit.”

I nodded, anticipation fanning into warm, shivery little flames.

“So what’d you tell him?”

“Told him to fuck off. My woman’s from Saffron, she’s told me some of the shit they’re getting into up there. I’d string those fuckers to a weed rack with livewire, soon as look at them.”

“This guy young or old?”

“Oh, young. Carried himself too, know what I mean?”

Virginia Vidaura’s words drifted back through my mind. Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels.

Well, not like you weren’t looking for this.

Vidaura came up to me and put a hand on my arm.

“Tak—”

“You go back with the others now,” I said quietly. “I’ll take care of this.”

“Tak, we need you to—”

I smiled at her. “Nice try. But you guys don’t need me for anything any more. And I just discharged my last remaining obligation back there in virtual. I’ve got nothing better to do any more.”

She looked steadily back at me.

“It’ll be okay,” I told her. “Rip out his throat and be right back.”

She shook her head.

“Is this really all you want?”

The words chimed, real-time echo of my own question to Sylvie in the depths of the virtuality. I made an impatient gesture.

“What else is there? Fight for the glorious Quellist cause? Yeah right. Fight for the stability and prosperity of the Protectorate? I’ve done both, Virginia, you’ve done both, and you know the truth as well as I do. It’s all so much shit on a prick. Innocent bystanders blown apart, blood and screaming and all for some final greasy political compromise. Other people’s causes, Virginia, I’m fucking sick of it.”

“So what instead? This? More pointless slaughter?”

I shrugged. “Pointless slaughter is what I know how to do. It’s what I’m good at. You made me good at it, Virginia.”

That took her like a slap across the face. She flinched. Sierra Tres and the pilot looked on, curious. The woman who called herself Quell, I noticed, had gone below to the cabin.

“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”

I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”

“But it doesn’t solve anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”

“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.

“I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?”

Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.

“Only when I’m killing them.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”

“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”

She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.

She turned away without a word.

The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face, I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.