The door wittered to itself and began to open.

Thought vanished like shreds in the slipstream of enabled force. I came out of the capsule, round the edge of its door and stood braced with the knife, ready to reach and stab.

He wasn’t what I’d imagined. The skimmer pilot and the girl downstairs had both remarked on his poise, and it showed in the way he spun at the tiny sounds of my clothing, the shift of air in the narrow room. But he was slim and slight, shaven skull delicate, beard an out-of-place idiocy on the fine features.

“You looking for me, holy man?”

For a moment we locked gazes and the knife in my hand seemed to tremble of its own accord.

Then he reached up and tugged at his beard, and it came away with a short static crackle.

“Of course I’m looking for you, Micky,” said Jadwiga tiredly. “Been chasing you for nearly a month.”

FORTY-ONE

“You’re supposed to be dead.”

“Yeah, twice at least.” Jad picked morosely at the beard prosthesis in her hands. We sat together at the cheap plastic table, not looking at each other. “Only reason I’m here, I guess. They weren’t looking for me when they came for the others.”

I saw Drava again as she told it, a mind’s-eye view of swirling snow on night-time black, the frosted constellations of camp lights and infrequent figures moving between buildings, hunched up against the weather.

They’d come the following evening, unannounced. It wasn’t clear if Kurumaya had been bought off, threatened with higher authority or simply murdered. Behind the funnelled force of Anton’s command software on max override, Kovacs and his team located Sylvie’s team by net signature. They kicked in doors, demanded submission.

Apparently didn’t get it.

“I saw Orr take someone down,” Jad went on, talking mechanically as she stared into her own memories. “Just the flash. He was yelling for everyone to get out. I was bringing carry-out back from the bar. I didn’t even …”

She stopped.

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“No, it’s not fucking okay, Micky. I ran away.”

“You’d be dead if you hadn’t. Really dead.”

“I heard Kiyoka screaming.” She swallowed. “I knew it was too late, but I …”

I hurried her past it. “Did anyone see you?”

A jerky nod. “Traded shots with a couple of them on the way across to the vehicle sheds. Fuckers were everywhere, seemed like. But they didn’t come after me. I think they thought I was just a stroppy bystander.” She gestured at the Eishundo sleeve she wore. “No trace on the net search, see. Far as that fucker Anton’s concerned, I was invisible.”

She’d lifted one of the Dracul bugs, powered it up and driven right off the side of the dock.

“Had a squabble with the autosub systems getting up the estuary,” she said, and laughed mirthlessly. “You’re not supposed to do that, put vehicles in the water without authorisation. But the clear tags worked in the end.”

And out onto the Andrassy Sea.

I nodded mechanically, exact inverse of my near disbelief. She’d ridden the bug without resting, nearly a thousand kilometres back to Tekitomura and a quiet night-time landing in a cove out of town to the east.

She shrugged it off.

“I had food and water in the panniers. Meth to stay awake. The Dracul’s got Nuhanovic guidance. Main thing I worried about was keeping low enough to the water to look like a boat not a flying machine, trying not to upset the angelfire.”

“And you found me how?”

“Yeah, that’s some weird shit.” For the first time, something bloomed in her voice that wasn’t weariness and rancid rage. “I sold the bug for quick cash at Soroban wharf, I was walking back up towards Kompcho. Coming down from the meth. And it’s like I could smell you or something. Like the smell of this old family hammock we had when I was a kid. I just followed it, like I said I was coming down, running on autopilot. I saw you on the wharf, going aboard this piece-of-shit freighter. Haiduci’s Daughter.”

I nodded again, this time in sudden comprehension as large chunks of the puzzle fell into place. The dizzying, unaccustomed sense of family longing swam back over me. We were twins, after all. Close scions from the long-dead house of Eishundo.

“You stowed away, then. It was you trying to get inside that pod when the storm hit.”

She grimaced. “Yeah, creeping around on deck’s fine when the sun’s shining. Not something you want to try when there’s heavy weather coming in. I should have guessed they’d have it alarmed up the arse. Fucking webjelly oil, you’d think it was Khumalo wetware the price they get for it.”

“You stole the food out of communal storage too, second day out.”

“Hey, your ride was flying departure lights when I saw you go aboard. Left inside an hour. Didn’t exactly leave me much time to go stock up on provisions. I went a day without food before I figured you weren’t getting off at Erkezes, you were in for the long haul. I was fucking hungry.”

“You know there was a nearly a fight over that. One of your deCom colleagues wanted to brain someone for stealing it.”

“Yeah, heard them talking. Fucking burnouts.” Her voice took on a kind of automated distaste, a macro of opinion over old ground. “Kind of sad case losers get the trade a bad name.”

“So you tracked me across Newpest and the Expanse as well.”

Another humourless smile. “My home turf, Micky. And besides, that skimmer you took left a soup wake I could have followed blindfolded. Guy I hired got your ride on the radar pulling into Kem Point. I was there by nightfall, but you’d gone.”

“Yeah. So why the fuck didn’t you come knock on my cabin door while you had the chance, aboard Haiduci’s Daughter?”

She scowled. “How about because I didn’t trust you?”

“Alright.”

“Yeah, and while we’re on the subject how about I still don’t? How about you explain what the fuck you’ve done with Sylvie?”

I sighed.

“Got anything to drink?”

“You tell me. You’re the one broke into my room.”

Somewhere inside me something shifted, and I suddenly understood how happy I was to see her. I couldn’t work out if it was the biological tie of the Eishundo sleeves, remembrance of the month’s snappish-ironic camaraderie in New Hok, or just the change from Brasil’s suddenly serious born-again revolutionaries. I looked at her standing there and it was like the gust of an Andrassy Sea breeze through the room.

“Good to see you again, Jad.”

“Yeah, you too,” she admitted.

When I’d laid it all out for her, it was dark outside. Jad got up and squeezed past me in the narrow space, stood by the variable transparency window staring out. Street lighting frosted dimly in the gloomed glass.

Raised voices floated up, some kind of drunken argument.

“You sure it was her you talked to?”

“Pretty sure. I don’t think this Nadia, whoever she is, whatever she is, I don’t think she could run the command software. Certainly not well enough to generate an illusion that coherent.”

Jad nodded to herself.

“Yeah, that Renouncer shit was always going to catch up with Sylvie some day. Fuckers get you that young, you never really shake it off. So what about this Nadia thing? You really think she’s a personality mine? ‘cause I got to say, Micky, in nearly three years of tracking around New Hok, I never saw or heard of a datamine that carried that much detail, that much depth.”

I hesitated, feeling around the edges of Envoy-intuited awareness for a gist that could be stamped into something as crude as words.

“I don’t know. I think she’s, I don’t know, some kind of spec designation weapon. Everything points to Sylvie getting infected in the Uncleared. You were there for Iyamon Canyon, right?”

“Yeah. She flaked in an engagement. She was sick for weeks after. Orr tried to pretend it was just post-op blues, but anyone could see different.”