My hands were itching again. Gene-twitch of the desire to grab a rock surface and scale it the fuck out of here.

Face it, Micky. It’s time to cut loose from this. Your deCom days are over. Fun while it lasted, and it got you a new face and these gekko hands, but enough’s enough. It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

I turned on my side and stared at the wall. On the other side, Sylvie would be lying in the same quiet, the same automould isolation. Maybe the same harbour chop of distressed sleep as well.

What am I supposed to do? Leave her?

You’ve done worse.

I saw Orr’s accusatory stare. You don’t flicking touch her.

Heard Lazlo’s voice. I’m trusting you, Micky.

Yeah, my own voice jeered through me. He’s trusting Micky. Takeshi Kovacs, he hasn’t met yet.

And if she is who she says she is?

Oh, come on. Quellcrist Falconer? You heard the machine. Quellcrist Falconer got turned into airborne ash at seven hundred metres above Alabardos.

Then who is she? The ghost, the one in the stack. Maybe she’s not Nadia Makita, but she sure as hell thinks she is. And she sure as fuck isn’t Sylvie Oshima. So who is she?

No idea. Is that supposed to be your problem?

I don’t know, is it?

Your problem is that the yakuza have hired your own sweet self out of some archive stack to take you down. Very fucking poetic and you know what, he’ll probably do not a bad job for them. He’ll certainly have the resources—a global writ, remember. And you can bet the incentive scheme has a real fucking edge on it. You know the rules on double sleeving.

And at the moment the only thing linking all this to that sleeve you’re wearing is the woman next door and her low-grade mercenary pals. So the sooner you cut loose from them, head south and get on with the job in hand, the better for all concerned.

The job in hand. Yeah, that’ll solve all your problems, Micky.

And stop fucking calling me that.

Impatiently, I threw off the cover and got out of bed. I cracked the door and saw an empty room beyond. The table and the weaving datacoil, bright in the darkness, the bulk of our two packs leaning together in a corner. Hotei light painted the shapes of the windows in pale orange on the floor. I trod naked through the moonsplash and crouched by the packs, rooting around for a can of amphetamine cola.

Fuck sleep.

I heard her behind me, and turned with a cold, unfamiliar unease feathering my bones. Not knowing who I’d be face to face with.

“You too, huh?”

It was Sylvie Oshima’s voice, Sylvie Oshima’s slightly quizzical lupine look as she stood facing me with arms wrapped around herself. She was naked as well, breasts gathered up and pressed in the V of her arms like a gift she planned to give me. Hips tilted in mid-step, one curved thigh slightly behind the other. Hair in tangled disarray around her sleep smudged face. In the light from Hotei, her pale skin took on tones of warm copper and fireglow. She smiled uncertainly.

“I keep waking up. Feels like my head’s running on overdrive.” She nodded at the cola can in my hand. “That isn’t going to help, you know.”

“I don’t feel like sleeping.” My voice came out a little hoarse.

“No.” The smile inked out to sudden seriousness. “I don’t feel like sleeping either. I feel like doing what you wanted before.”

She unfolded her arms and her breasts hung free. A little self-consciously, she raised her arms and pushed back the mass of her hair, pressing her hands to the back of her head. She shifted her legs so that her thighs brushed together. Between the angles of her lifted elbows, she was watching me carefully.

“Do you like me like this?”

“I.” The posture raised and modelled her breasts higher on her chest. I could feel the blood rushing into my cock. I cleared my throat. “I like you like that very much.”

“Good.”

And she stood without moving, watching me. I dropped the cola can on top of the pack it had come from and took a step towards her. Her arms unlinked and draped themselves around my shoulders, tightening across my back. I filled one hand with the soft weight of her breast, reached down with the other to the juncture of her thighs and the remembered dampness that—”

“No, wait.” She pushed the lower hand away. “Not there, not yet.”

It was a tiny jarring moment, a jolt to expectations mapped out in the bubblefab two days earlier. I shrugged it off and gathered both hands to the breast I held, squeezing the nipple forward and sucking it into my mouth. She reached down and took my erection in her hand, stroking it back and forth with a touch that seemed forever on the point of letting go.

I frowned, remembering a harder, more confident grip from before, and closed her hand tighter with my own. She chuckled.

“Oh, sorry.”

Stumbling a little, I pushed her to the edge of the table, pulled loose of her grip and knelt on the floor in front of her. She murmured something deep in her throat and spread her legs a little, leaning back and bracing herself on the table top with both hands.

“I want your mouth on me,” she said thickly.

I ran spread hands up her thighs and pressed the ball of each thumb either side of her cunt. A shiver ran through her and her lips parted. I bent my head and slid my tongue inside her. She made a tight, caught-up sound and I grinned. She felt the smile somehow and one hand slapped me across the shoulder.

“Bastard. Don’t you fucking stop, you bastard.”

I pushed her legs wider and went to work in earnest. Her hand came back to knead at my shoulder and neck and she shifted restlessly on the edge of table, hips tilting back and forth with the motion of my tongue.

The hand moved to tangle in my hair. I managed another split grin against the pressure she was exerting but this time she was too far gone to say anything coherent. She started to murmur, whether to me or herself

I couldn’t tell. At first it was simply the repeated syllables of assent, but as she tightened towards climax, something else began to emerge. Lost in what I was doing, it took me time to recognise it for what it was. In the throes of orgasm, Sylvie Oshima was chanting a skein of machine code.

She finished with a hard judder and two hands crushing my head into the juncture of her thighs. I reached back and gently prised her grip away, rose to my feet against her, grinning.

And found myself face to face with another woman.

It was impossible to define what had changed, but Envoy sense read it out for me and the absolute knowledge behind was like an elevator dropping through my stomach.

Nadia Makita was back.

She was there in the narrowing of the eyes and the deep quirk in one corner of her mouth that didn’t belong to any expression Sylvie Oshima owned. In a kind of hunger that licked around her face like flames, and in breath that came in short, harsh bursts as if the orgasm, once spent, was now creeping back in some mirror-image replay.

“Hello there, Micky Serendipity,” she husked.

Her breathing slowed and her mouth twisted into a grin to replace the one that had just melted off my own face. She slipped off the table, reached down and touched me between the legs. It was the old, confident grasp I remembered, but I’d lost a lot of my erection with the shock.

“Something wrong?” she murmured.

“I—” She was using both hands on me like someone gently gathering in rope. I felt myself swelling again. She watched my face.

“Something wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said quickly.

“Good.”

She slid elegantly down on one knee, eyes still locked on mine, and took the head of my cock into her mouth. One hand stayed on the shaft, stroking while the other found its way to my right thigh and curled around the muscle there, gripping hard.

This is flecking insane, a cold, mission-time shard of Envoy selfhood told me. You need to stop this right now.