A handful of caresses and a hundred alarmingly wide smiles later, we made the foot of a metal ramp and tramped upward to where a pair of dockyard containers had been set up on scaffolding and fronted in mirror wood panelling. Reflected light from the holos smashed off their chipped and dented surfaces. My escort led me to the left-hand container, pressed a hand to a chime pad and opened a previously invisible mirrored door panel. Really opened, like the hatch that opened onto the street. No flexportals here, it seemed. He stood aside to let me pass.

I stepped in and surveyed the scene. Foreground, a flushed Plex, dressed to the waist and struggling into a violently psychedelic silk blouse. Behind him, two women and a man lolled on a massive automould bed. They were all physically very young and beautiful, wore uniformly blank-eyed smiles, badly smeared bodypaint and not much else. It wasn’t hard to work out where Plex had got them from. Monitors for sweep-and-swoop microcams in the club outside were lined along the back wall of the container space. A constant shift of dancespace image marched through them. The fusion beat came through the walls, muffled but recognisable enough to dance to.

Or whatever.

“Hey Yukio, man. Let me get a look at you.” Plex came forward, raised his arms. He grinned uncertainly. “That’s a nice sleeve, man. Where’d you get that? Custom grown?”

I nodded at his playmates. “Get rid of them.”

“Uh, sure.” He turned back to the automould and clapped his hands.

“Come on, boys and girls. Fun’s over. Got to talk some business with the sam here.”

They went, grudgingly, like small children denied a late night. One of the women tried to touch my face as she passed. I twitched irritably away, and she pouted at me. The doorman watched them out, then cast a querying glance at Plex. Plex echoed the look to me.

“Yeah, him too.”

The doorman left, shutting out some of the music blast. I looked back at

Plex, who was moving towards a low interior-lit hospitality module set against the side wall. His movements were a curious mix of languid and nervous, take and situational jitters fighting it out in his blood. He reached into the glow of the module’s upper shelf, hands clumsy among ornate crystal vials and delicate paper parcels.

“Uh, you want a pipe, man?”

“Plex.” I played the last twist of the bluff for all it was worth. “Just what the fuck is going on?”

He flinched. Stuttered.

“I, uh, I thought Tanaseda would have—”

“Fuck that, Plex. Talk to me.”

“Look, man, it’s not my fault.” His tone worked towards aggrieved. “Didn’t I tell you guys right from the beginning she was fucked in the head? All that kaikyo shit she was spouting. Did any of you fucking listen? I know bio tech, man, and I know when it’s fucked up. And that cable-headed bitch was fucked up.”

My mind whipped back two months to the first night outside the warehouse, sleeved synthetic, hands stained with priests’ blood and a blaster bolt across the ribs, eavesdropping idly on Plex and Yukio. Kaikyo—a strait, a stolen goods manager, a financial consultant, a sewage outlet. And a holy man possessed by spirits. Or a woman maybe, possessed by the ghost of a revolution three centuries past. Sylvie, carrying Nadia. Carrying Quell.

“Where’d they take her?” I asked quietly.

It wasn’t Yukio’s tone any more but I wasn’t going to get much further as Yukio anyway. I didn’t know enough to sustain the lie in the face of Plex’s lifelong acquaintance.

“Took her to Millsport, I guess.” He was building himself a pipe, maybe to balance out the take blur. “I mean, Yukio, has Tanaseda really not—”

“Where in Millsport?”

Then he got it. I saw the knowledge soak through him, and he reached suddenly under the module’s upper shelf. Maybe he had some neurachem wiring somewhere in that pale, aristocratic body he wore, but for him it would have been little more than an accessory. And the chemicals slowed him down so much it was laughable.

I let him get a hand on the gun, let him get it halfway clear of the shelf it was webbed under. Then I kicked his hand away, knocked him back onto the automould with a backfist and stamped down on the shelf. Ornate glassware splintered, the paper parcels flew and the shelf cracked across.

The gun fell out on the floor. Looked like a compact shard blaster, big brother to the GS Rapsodia under my coat. I scooped it up and turned in time to catch Plex scrambling for some kind of wall alarm.

“Don’t.”

He froze, staring hypnotised at the gun.

“Sit down. Over there.”

He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.

Fucking set fire to it or something.

“Who.” His mouth worked. “Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.”

I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.

“Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.”

His face creased. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.

“Fuck. Kovacs?”

“Good guess.” I put the stack away again. “The original. Accept no imitations. Now, unless you want to be sharing a pocket with your boyhood pal here, I suggest you go on answering my questions the way you were when you thought I was him.”

“But, you’re.” He shook his head. “You’re never going to get away with this, Kovacs. They’ve got. They’ve got you looking for you, man.”

“I know. They must be desperate, right?”

“It isn’t funny, man. He’s fucking psychotic. They’re still counting the bodies he left in Drava. They’re really dead. Stacks gone, the works.”

I felt a brief spike of shock, but it was almost distant. Behind it there was the grim chill that had come with my sight of Anton and the Skull Gang in Dig 301’s recorded footage. Kovacs had gone to New Hok and he’d done the groundwork with Envoy intensity. He’d brought back what he needed. Corollary. What he couldn’t use he’d left in smoking ruin behind him.

“So who’d he kill, Plex?”

“I. I don’t know, man.” He licked his lips. “A lot of people. All her team, all the people she—”

He stopped. I nodded, mouth tight. Detached regret for Jad, Kiyoka and the others clamped and tamped down where it wouldn’t get in the way.

“Yes. Her. Next question.”

“Look, man, I can’t help you. You shouldn’t even—”

I shifted towards him, impatiently. Raging at the edges like lit paper. He flinched again, worse than he had when he thought I was Yukio.

“Alright, alright. I’ll tell you. Just leave me alone. What do you want to know?”

Go to work. Soak it up.

“First of all I want to know what you know, or think you know, about Sylvie Oshima.”

He sighed. “Man, I told you not to get involved. Back in that sweeper bar. I warned you.”

“Yeah, me and Yukio both, it seems. Very public-spirited of you, running round warning everybody. Why’d she scare you so much, Plex?”

“You don’t know?”

“Let’s pretend I don’t.” I raised a hand, displacement gesture as the anger threatened to get out. “And let’s also pretend that if you try to lie to me, I’ll torch your fucking head off.”

He swallowed. “She’s, she says she’s Quellcrist Falconer.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “So is she?”

“Fuck, man, how would I know?”

“In your professional opinion, could she be?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded almost plaintive. “What do you want from me? You went with her to New Hok, you know what it’s like up there. I suppose, yeah, I suppose she could be. She might have stumbled on a cache of backed-up personalities. Got contaminated somehow.”