“But you don’t buy it?”

“It doesn’t seem very likely. I can’t see why a personality store would be set up to leak virally in the first place. Doesn’t make any sense, even for a bunch of fuckwit Quellists. Where’s the value? And least of all a backup of their precious fucking revolutionary wet-dream icon.”

“So,” I said tonelessly. “Not a big fan of the Quellists, then?”

For the first time I could remember, Plex seemed to shed his shield of apologetic diffidence. A choked snort came out of him—someone with less breeding would have spat, I guess.

“Look around you, Kovacs. You think I’d be living like this if the Unsettlement hadn’t hit the New Hok ‘weed trade the way it did? Who do you think I’ve got to thank for that?”

“That’s a complex historical question—”

“Like fuck it is.”

“—that I’m not really qualified to answer. But I can see why you’d be pissed off. It must be tough having to trawl your playmates out of second rate dancehalls like this one. Not being able to afford the dress code on the First Families party circuit. I feel for you.”

“Ha fucking ha.”

I felt the way my own expression chilled over. Evidently he saw it too, and the sudden rage leaked back out of him almost visibly. I talked to stop myself hitting and hurting him.

“I grew up in a Newpest slum, Plex. My mother and father worked the belaweed mills, everybody did. Temp contracts, day rate, no benefits. There were times we were lucky if we ate twice a day. And this wasn’t any fucking trade slump either, it was business as usual. Motherfuckers like you and your family got rich off it.” I drew a breath and cranked myself back down to a dead irony. “So you’re going to have to forgive my lack of sympathy for your tragically decayed aristo circumstances, because I’m a little short right now. ‘kay?”

He wet his lips and nodded.

“Okay. Okay, man, it’s cool.”

“Yeah.” I nodded back. “Now. No reason for a stored copy of Quell to be set on viral deploy, you said. ”

“Yeah. Right, that’s right.” He was stumbling over himself to get back to safe ground. “And, anyway, look, she’s, Oshima’s loaded to the eyes with all sorts of baffles to stop viral stuff soaking through the coupling. That deCom command shit is state of the art.”

“Yeah, so that brings us back to where we started. If she isn’t really Quell, why are you so scared of her?”

He blinked at me. “Why am I—? Fuck, man, because whether she is Quell or whether she isn’t, she thinks she is. That’s a major psychosis. Would you put a psychotic in charge of that software?”

I shrugged. “From what I saw in New Hok, half of deCom would qualify for the same ticket. They’re not overly balanced as a profession.”

“Yeah, but I doubt many of them think they’re the reincarnation of a revolutionary leader three centuries dead. I doubt they can quote—”

He stopped. I looked at him.

“Quote what?”

“Stuff. You know.” He looked away, twitchily. “Old stuff from the war, the Unsettlement. You must have heard the way she talks sometimes, that period-flic Japanese she comes out with.”

“Yeah, I have. But that’s not what you were going to say, Plex. Is it.”

He tried to get up from the automould. I stepped closer and he froze. I looked down at him with the same expression I’d had when I talked about my family. Didn’t even lift the shard gun.

“Quote what?”

“Man, Tanaseda would—”

“Tanaseda isn’t here. I am. Quote. What?”

He broke. Gestured weakly. “I don’t even know if you’d understand what I’m talking about, man.”

“Try me.”

“Well, it’s complicated.”

“No, it’s simple. Let me help you get started. The night I came to collect my sleeve, you and Yukio were talking about her. At a guess, you’d been doing some business with her, at a second guess you’d met her in that sweeper dock dive you took me to for breakfast, right?”

He nodded reluctantly.

“Okay. So the only thing I can’t work out is why you were so surprised to see her there.”

“I didn’t think she’d come back,” he muttered.

I remembered my first view of her that night, the entranced expression on her face as she stared at herself in the mirrorwood bar. Envoy recall dug out a fragment of conversation from the Kompcho apartment, later. Orr, talking up Lazlo’s antics:

… still chasing that weapons chick with the cleavage, right?

And Sylvie: What’s that?

You know. Tamsin, Tamita, whatever her name was. The one from that bar on Muko. Just before you pissed off on your own. Christ, you were there, Sylvie. I wouldn’t have thought anyone could forget that rack.

And Jad: She’s not equipped to register that kind of armament.

I shivered. No, not equipped. Not equipped to remember anything much, wandering around in the Tekitomura night torn between Sylvie Oshima and Nadia Makita, aka Quellcrist fucking Falconer. Not equipped to do anything except maybe navigate by dredged-up fragments of recall and dream, and fetch up in some vaguely remembered bar where, just as you were trying to put yourself back together, some hard-faced gang of bearded scum with a licence to kill from God came to grind your face in the assumed inferiority of your gender.

I remembered Yukio when he burst into the Kompcho apartment the next morning. The fury in his face.

Kovacs, what exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?

And his words to Sylvie when he saw her.

You know who I am.

Not a passing reference to his evident membership of the yakuza. He thought she knew him.

And Sylvie’s even response. I don’t know who the fuck you are. Because at that moment, she didn’t. Envoy recall froze frame for me on the disbelief in Yukio’s face. Not offended vanity after all. He was genuinely shocked.

In the scant seconds of the confrontation, in the seared flesh and blood of the aftermath, it hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why he was so angry.

Anger was a constant. The constant companion of the last two years and longer, rage in myself and the rage reflecting from those around me. I no longer questioned it, it was a state of being. Yukio was angry because he was. Because he was an asshole male with delusions of status just like Dad, just like the rest of them, and I’d humiliated him in front of Plex and Tanaseda. Because he was an asshole male just like the rest of them, in fact, and rage was the default setting.

Or: Because you just wandered into the midst of a complicated deal with a dangerously unstable woman with a head full of state-of-the-art battletech software and a direct line back to—

What?

“What was she selling, Plex?”

The breath came out of him. He seemed to crumple with it.

“I don’t know, Tak. Really, I don’t. It was some kind of weapon, something from the Unsettlement. She called it the Qualgrist Protocol. Something biological. They took it away from me as soon as I hooked her up with them. Soon as I told them the preliminary data checked out.” He looked away again, this time with no trace of nerves. His voice took on a slurred bitterness. “Said it was too important for me. Couldn’t trust me to keep my mouth shut. They brought in specialists from Millsport. Fucking Yukio came with them. They cut me out.”

“But you were there. You’d seen her that night.”

“Yeah, she was giving them stuff on blanked deCom chips. Pieces at a time, you know, ‘cause she didn’t trust us.” He coughed out a laugh. ”No more than we trusted her. I was supposed to go along each time and check the prelim scrollup codes. Make sure they were genuine antiques. Everything I okayed, Yukio took and handed on to his pet fucking EmPee team. I never saw any of it. And you know who fucking found her in the first place. I did. She came to me first. And all I get is flushed out with a finder’s fee.”

“How’d she find you?”

A dejected shrug. “Usual channels. She’d been asking around Tekitomura for weeks, apparently. Looking for someone to move this stuff for her.”