It wasn’t a new attitude. Forty years ago, before I went away, you could get the same phlegmatic responses to economic hardship from the Suzi Petkovskis of this world. The same clamped, chain-smoking capacity for endurance, the same grim shrug, as if politics was some kind of massive, capricious weather system you couldn’t do anything about.

I went back to watching the skyline.

After a while, the phone in my left pocket rang. I hesitated for a moment, then twitched irritably, fished it out still buzzing and pressed it to my ear.

“Yeah, what?”

The murmuring ghosted up out of close-pressed electronic silence, a stirring of the quiet like a pair of dark wings beating in the stillness overhead. The hint of a voice, words riding a whisper into my ear there isn’t much time left

“Yeah, you said that. I’m going as fast as I can.” can’t hold them back much longer …

“Yeah, I’m working on it.” working now … It sounded like a question.

“Yeah, I said—” there are wings out there … a thousand wings beating and a whole world cracked …

It was fading out now, like a badly tuned channel, wavering, fluttering down into silence again cracked open from edge to edge … it’s beautiful, Micky …

And gone.

I waited, lowered the phone and weighed it in my palm. Grimaced and shoved it back into my pocket.

Suzi Petkovski glanced my way.

“Bad news?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Can we go any faster?”

She was already back to watching the water ahead. Kindling a new cigarette one handed.

“Not safely, no.”

I nodded and thought back through the communiqué I’d just had.

“And what’s it going to cost me to be unsafe then?”

“About double?”

“Fine. Do it.”

A grim little smile floated to her mouth. She shrugged, pinched out the cigarette and slid it behind one ear. She reached across the cockpit displays and jabbed a couple of screens. Radar images maximised. She yelled something to Mikhail in a Magyar street dialect that had slipped too much in the time I’d been away for me to catch more than skimmed gist. Get below and keep your hands off … something? He shot her a resentful look, then unslumped himself from the rail and made his way back into the cabin.

She turned back to me, barely looking away from the controls now.

“You too. Better get yourself a seat back there. I speed up and we’re liable to slosh about.”

“I can hang on.”

“Yeah, I’d rather you were back there with him. Give you someone to talk to, I’m going to be too busy.”

I thought back to the equipment I’d seen stashed in the cabin.

Navigational plug-ins, an entertainment deck, currentflow modifiers.

Cables and jacks. I thought back too, to the kid’s demeanour and his scratching at the plugs in his neck, the slumped lack of interest in the whole world. It made a sense I hadn’t really been paying attention to before.

“Sure,” I said. “Always good to have someone to talk to, right?”

She didn’t answer. Maybe she was already immersed in the darkly rain bowed radar images of our path through the Expanse, maybe just mired in something else. I left her to it and made my way aft.

Over my head, the turbines opened to a demented shriek.

TWENTY-THREE

Eventually, time stands still on the Weed Expanse.

You start by noticing detail—the arched root system of a tepes thicket, breaking the water like the half-decayed bones of some drowned giant humanoid, odd clear patches of water where the belaweed hasn’t deigned to grow and you can see down to a pale emerald bed of sand, the sly rise of a mudbank, maybe an abandoned harvester kayak from a couple of centuries back, still not fully overgrown with Sakate’s moss. But these sights are few and far between, and in time your gaze is drawn out to the great flat horizon, and after that, however many times you try to pull away to look at closer detail, it feels like there’s a tide dragging your vision back out there.

You sit and listen to the cadences of the engines because there’s nothing else to do. You watch the horizon and you sink into your own thoughts because there’s nowhere else to go … hurry …

I’m trusting you, Micky. You look after her, her, her, her …

Her. Sylvie, maned in silver grey. Her face—

Her face, subtly changed by the woman who had crept out and stolen it from her. Her voice, subtly modulated …

I’ve got no way of knowing if or when Sylvie Oshima’s coming back.

Nadia, I’m trying to fucking help.

She wonders who the fuck Micky Serendipity really is, and whether he’s safe to be around. Whether he’ll fuck her over at the soonest opportunity.

She wonders where the fuck you’re going with the souls of so many dead priests.

Todor Murakami’s lean, attentive features on the ferry. Pipe smoke, whipped away in the wind.

So what’s this scam about? Thought you were hanging out with Radul Segesvar these days. Hometown nostalgia and cheap organised crime. Why you going up north again?

It’s time to get back on track. Back to the job in hand.

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

Stop fucking calling me that.

And screams. And gaping holes cut in spines at neck height. And the weight of cortical stacks in my palm, still slick with clinging gore. And the hollow that would never be filled.

Sarah.

The job in hand.

I’m trying to fucking help.

… hurry …

I’m trusting you …

I’m trying to fucking …

… hurry …

I’m TRYING—

“Coastline.” Suzi Petkovski’s voice rinsed through the cabin speaker, laconic and firm enough to grab at. “Be hitting Sourcetown in fifteen.”

I dumped my brooding and looked left where the Kossuth coast was slicing back towards us. It raised as a dark bumpy line on the otherwise featureless horizon, then seemed to leap in and resolve as a procession of low hills and the occasional flash of white dunes beyond and between. The backside of Vchira, the drowned nubs of an ancient mountain range worn down geological ages past to a seven-hundred-kilometre curve of marsh fringed tidal barrier on one side and the same stretch of crystalline white sand on the other.

Some day, one of Sourcetown’s long-term inhabitants had informed me nearly half a century ago, the sea’s going to break through all along here. Break through and pour into the Weed Expanse like an invading army breaching a long disputed frontier. Wear down the last remaining bastions and wreck the beach. Some Day, man, the Sourcetowner repeated slowly, and capitalised the phrase and grinned at me with what I’d already come to recognise as typical surfer detachment, Some Day, but Not Yet. And until Yet, you just got to keep looking out to sea, man. Just keep looking out there, don’t look behind you, don’t worry what’s keeping it all in place.

Some Day, but Not Yet. Just look out to sea.

You could call it a philosophy, I suppose. On Vchira Beach, it often passed for one. Limited maybe, but then I’ve seen far worse ways of relating to the universe deployed elsewhere.

The sky had cleared up as we reached the southern fringes of the Expanse and I started to see signs of habitation in the sunlight. Source town isn’t really a place, it’s an approximation, a loose term for a hundred-and-seventy-kilometre coastal strip of surfer support services and their associated infrastructure. In its most tenuous form, it comes into being as scattered tents and bubblefabs along the beach, generational fire-circles and barbecue sites, roughly woven belaweed shacks and bars. Settlement permanence increases and then decreases as the Strip approaches and then passes the places where the surf is not merely good but phenomenal. And then, in the Big Surf zones, habitation thickens to an almost municipal density. Actual streets appear on the hills behind the dunes, rooted street lighting along them and clusters of evercrete platforms and jetties sprouting backwards off the spine of land and into the Weed Expanse. Last time I’d been here, there were five such accretions, each with its gang of enthusiasts who swore that the best surf on the continent was right fucking here, man. For all I knew, any one of them could have been correct. For all I knew, there’d be another five by now.