But in retrospect they always are.

Got to say, Mick, I like you. Her voice blurred with the early hours and the drugs. Morning creeping up on us somewhere beyond the apartment windows. Can’t. Put my finger on it. But I do. I like you.

That’s nice.

But it’s not enough.

My palms and fingers itched lightly, gene-programmed longing for a rough surface to grasp and climb. I’d noticed it a while ago on this sleeve, it came and went but manifested itself mostly around moments of stress and inactivity. Minor irritation, part of the download dues. Even a clone new sleeve comes with a history. I clenched my fists a couple of times, put a hand in my pocket and found the cortical stacks. They clicked through my fingers slickly, gathered together in my palm with the smooth weight of high-value machined components. Yukio Hirayasu and his henchman’s added to the collection now.

Along the slightly manic search-and-destroy path we’d carved across the Uncleared in the last month, I’d found time to clean up my trophies with chemicals and a circuitboard scrubber. As I opened my hand in the illuminum lamplight, they gleamed, all trace of bone and spinal tissue gone. A half dozen shiny metallic cylinders like laser-sliced sections of a slimline writing implement, their perfection marred only by the tiny spiking of filament microjacks at one end. Yukio’s stack stood out among the others—precise yellow stripe wrapped around it at the midpoint, etched with the manufacturer’s hardware coding. Designer merchandise. Typical.

The others, the yakuza henchman’s included, were standard, state installed product. No visible markings, so I’d carefully wrapped the yak’s in black insulating tape to distinguish it from those I’d taken in the citadel.

I wanted to be able to tell the difference. The man had no bargaining value the way Yukio might, but I saw no reason to consign a common gangster to the place I was taking the priests. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him instead, but at the last moment something in me had rebelled at my previous suggestion to Sylvie to toss him into the Andrassy Sea.

I put him and Yukio back in my pocket, looked down at the other four gathered in my palm and wondered.

Is this enough? Once, on another world around a star you couldn’t see from Harlan’s World, I’d met a man who made his living from trading cortical stacks. He bought and sold by weight, measuring the contained lives out like heaps of spice or semi-precious gems, something that local political conditions had conspired to make very profitable. To frighten the competition, he’d styled himself as a local version of Death personified and, overblown though the act was, it had stayed with me.

I wondered what he’d think if he could see me now.

Is this—

A hand closed on my arm.

The shock leapt up through me like current. My fist snapped closed around the stacks. I stared at the woman in front of me, now propped up in the sleeping bag on one elbow, desperation struggling with the muscles of her face. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. Her grip on my arm was like a machine’s.

“You,” she said in Japanese, and coughed. “Help me. Help me.”

It was not her voice.

ELEVEN

There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” muttered one of Oishii’s crew.

Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.

We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.

Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.

It wasn’t over. Not nearly.

Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been—none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.

The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.

Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full checkup.

She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?

A detached deCom shrug. Or you’ll blank out again. At a minimum, you’ve got to go back to Tekitomura and get checked out for viral trace. You can’t stay out to play in this state.

The rest of the Slipins concurred. Sylvie’s sudden return to consciousness notwithstanding, we were going back.

Burn some of that stored credit, grinned Jadwiga. Party on down. Tek’to nightlife, here we come.

The beachhead gate juddered up for us and we passed through into the compound. In comparison to the last time I’d seen it, the place seemed almost deserted. A few figures wandered about between the bubblefabs, carting equipment. Too cold to be out for anything else. A couple of surveillance kites fluttered madly from the coms mast, knocked about by wind and snow. It looked as if the rest had been taken down in anticipation of the blizzards. Visible over the tops of the ‘fabs, the superstructure of a big hoverloader showed snow-coated at the dock, but the cranes that served it were stilled. There was a desolate sense of battening down across the encampment.

“Better go talk to Kurumaya right away,” Oishii said, dismounting from his own use-battered solo bug as the gate came back down. He glanced around at his crew and ours. “See about some bunks. My guess is there won’t be a lot of space. I can’t see any of today’s arrivals deploying until this weather clears. Sylvie?”

Sylvie drew her coat tighter around her. Her face was haggard. She didn’t want to talk to Kurumaya.

“I’ll go, skipper,” offered Lazlo. He leaned on my shoulder awkwardly with his undamaged arm and jumped down from the bug we were sharing.

Frosted snow crunched under his feet. “Rest of you go get some coffee or something.”