You couldn’t blame him. In his place, I wouldn’t have been any different.

You don’t go back to the yakuza with half a contract fulfilled. And you certainly don’t turn your back on an Envoy. He knew that better than anyone there.

He sounded younger than I’d expected.

“—believe you’re fucking scared of this place. For Christ’s sake, you all grew up just down the hill. It’s only a fucking ruin.”

I glanced around at the billowing curves and hollows, felt the gentle but insistent way their lines sucked focus upward until your eyes started to ache. Hard morning light fell in from unseen vents overhead, but somehow on the way down it softened and changed. The clouded bluish alloy surfaces seemed to suck it in and the reflected light that came back was oddly muted. Below the mezzanine level I’d climbed to, patches of gloom alternated with gashes and holes in flooring where no sane human architect would have put them. A long way below that, the mountainside showed grey rock and sparse vegetation.

Only a ruin. Right.

He was younger than I’d expected.

For the first time, I started to wonder constructively exactly how young.

At an absolute minimum, he was certainly short a couple of formative experiences I’d had around Martian artefacts.

“Look, he’s not even fucking armed.”

I pitched my voice to carry outside.

“Boy, Kovacs! You’re so fucking confident, why don’t you come in and get me yourself?”

Sudden silence. Some muttering. I thought I caught a muffled guffaw from one of the locals. Then his voice, raised to match mine.

“That’s good eavesdropping gear they fitted you with.”

“Isn’t it.”

“You planning to give us a fight, or just listen in and shout cheap abuse?”

I grinned. “Just trying to be helpful. But you can have a fight if you want it—just come on in. Bring the hired help too, if you must.”

“I’ve got a better idea. How about I let my hired help run an open-all orifices train on your travelling companion, as long as it takes you to come out? You could use your neurachem to listen in on that as well if you like. Although, to be honest, the sound’ll probably carry enough without. They’re enthusiastic, these boys.”

The fury spiked up through me, too fast for rational thought. Muscles in my face skipped and juddered, and the frame of the Eishundo sleeve cabled rigid. For two sluggish heartbeats, he had me. Then the Envoy systems came soaking coldly through the emotion, bleaching it back out for assessment.

He isn’t going to do that. If Tanaseda traced you through Oshima and the Slipins, it’s because he knows she’s implicated in Yukio Hirayasu’s death. And if he knows that, he’ll want her intact. Tanaseda is old school and he’s promised an old-school execution. He isn’t going to want damaged goods.

And besides, this is you we’re talking about. You know what you’re capable of and it isn’t this.

I was younger then. Now. I am. I wrestled the concept in my head. Out there. I’m younger out there. There’s no telling—

Yes there is. This is Envoy bluff and you know it, you’ve used it enough yourself.

“Nothing to say about that?”

“We both know you won’t do it, Kovacs. We both know who you’re working for.”

This time the pause before he called back was barely noticeable. Good recovery, very impressive.

“You seem remarkably well informed for a man on the run.”

“It’s my training.”

“Soak up the local colour, huh?”

Virginia Vidaura’s words at Envoy induction, a subjective century ago. I wondered how long ago she’d said it to him.

“Something like that.”

“Tell me something, man, ‘cause I’d genuinely like to know. With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living? As a career move, I got to say it puzzles me.”

A cold knowledge crept up through me as I listened. I grimaced and shifted my position slightly. Said nothing.

“Serendipity, right? It’s Serendipity?”

“Well, I have got another name,” I shouted back. “But some fuckhead stole it. Until I get it back, Serendipity’s fine.”

“Maybe you won’t get it back.”

“Nah, it’s good of you to worry, but I know the fuckhead in question. He isn’t going to be a problem for much longer.”

The twitch was tiny, barely a missed beat. Only the Envoy sense picked it up, the anger, shut down as rapidly as it flared.

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, like I said. Real fuckhead. Strictly a short-lived thing.”

“That sounds like overconfidence to me.” His voice had changed fractionally. Somewhere in there, I’d stung him. “Maybe you don’t know this guy as well as you like to think.”

I barked a laugh. “Are you kidding? I taught him every nicking thing he knows. Without me—”

And there. The figure I’d known was coming. The one I couldn’t listen for with neurachem while I traded veiled insults with the voice outside. A crouched, black-clad form sliding in through the opening five metres under me, some kind of spec-ops eye-mask-and-sensor gear turning the head insectile and inhuman. Thermographic imaging, sonic locater, motion alert, at a probable minimum—

I was already falling. Pushed off from the ledge, boot-heels aligned to hit the neck below the masked head and snap it.

Something in the headgear warned him. He jumped sideways, looking up, twisting the blaster towards me. Beneath the mask, his mouth jerked open to yell. The blast cut through air I’d just dropped out of. I hit the floor crouched, a handsbreadth off his right elbow. Blocked the swing of the blaster barrel as it came round. The yell came out of his mouth, shivery with the shock. I struck upward into his throat with the blade of one hand and the sound choked to retching. He staggered. I straightened, went after him and chopped again.

There were two more of them.

Framed in the opening, side by side. The only thing that saved me was their incompetence. As the lead commando dropped strangling to death at my feet, either one could have shot me—instead, they both tried at the same time and tangled. I sprinted directly at them.

There are worlds I’ve been where you can take down a man with a knife at ten metres and claim it as self defence. The legal argument is that it doesn’t take very long to close that gap.

That much is true.

If you really know what you’re doing, you don’t even need the knife.

This was five metres or less. I got in a flurry of blows, stamping down at shin and instep, blocked weapons however I could, hooking an elbow round hard into a face. A blaster came loose and I fielded it. Triggered it in a savage close-quarters arc.

Muffled shrieks and a short-lived explosion of blood as flesh seared open and then cauterised. Steam wisped, and their bodies tumbled away from me. I had time for a hard breath, a glance down at the weapon in my hands—piece of shit Szeged Incandess—and then another blaster beam flared off the alloy surface beside my head. They were coming in force.

With all that training, how come you end up a cut-rate sneak assassin for a living?

Just fucking incompetent, I guess.

I backed up. Someone poked a head into the oval opening and I chased them away with a barely aimed burst of fire.

And too fucking fascinated with yourself for your own good.

I grabbed a projection one handed and hauled myself up, hooking my legs onto the wide, spiralling ramp that led back to my initial hiding place on the mezzanine. The Eishundo sleeve’s gekko grip failed on the alloy.

I slipped, grabbed again in vain, and fell. Two new commandos burst through a gap to the left of the one I was covering. I fired randomly and low with the Szeged, trying to get back up. The beam chopped a foot off the commando on the right. She screamed and stumbled, clutched at her injured leg, toppled gracelessly and fell through a gash in the floor. Her second scream floated back up through the gap.