Under the Angier lamps, the night was pleasantly cool and there were knots of surfers clowning about in the parking area, bottles and pipes in hand. Laughter that seemed to bounce off the darkened distance around the lampglow, someone telling a broken-board story in a high, excited voice. One or two more serious groups gathered around the opened innards of vehicles undergoing repair. Laser cutters flickered on and off, showering weird green or purple sparks off exotic alloys.

I got a surprisingly good coffee at the counter and took it outside to watch the surfers. It wasn’t a culture I’d ever accessed during my youth in Newpest—gang protocols wouldn’t permit a serious commitment to both scuba and wave-riding, and the diving found me first. I never switched allegiances. Something about the silent world beneath the surface drew me. There was a vast, slow-breathing calm down there, a respite from all the street craziness and my own even more jagged home life.

You could bury yourself down there.

I finished the coffee and went back inside the diner. Ramen soup smells wreathed the air and tugged at my guts. It hit me suddenly that I hadn’t eaten since a late ship’s breakfast on the bridge of the Haiduci’s Daughter with Japaridze. I climbed onto a counter stool and nodded at the same meth-eyed kid I’d bought my coffee from.

“Smells good. What have you got?”

He picked up a battered remote and thumbed it in the general direction of the autochef. Holodisplays sprang up over the various pans. I scanned them and chose a hard-to-spoil favourite.

“Give me the chillied ray. That’s frozen ray, right?”

He rolled his eyes. “You expecting fresh, maybe? Place like this? At that price?”

“I’ve been away.”

But it elicited no response in his meth-stunned face. He just set the autochef in motion and wandered away to the windows, staring out at the surfers as if they were some form of rare and beautiful sealife caught in an aquarium.

I was halfway through my bowl of ramen, when the door opened behind me. No one said anything, but I knew already. I set down the bowl and turned slowly on the stool.

He was on his own.

It wasn’t the face I remembered, not even close. He’d sleeved to fairer and broader features than the last time around, a tangled mane of blonde traced with grey, and cheekbones that owed at least as much to Slavic genes as they did to his predilection for Adoracion custom. But the body wasn’t much different—inside the loose coveralls he wore, he still had the height and slim breadth in chest and shoulders, the tapered waist and legs, the big hands. And his moves still radiated the same casual poise when he made them.

I knew him as certainly as if he’d torn open the coverall to show me the scars on his chest.

“I hear you’re looking for me,” he said mildly. “Do I know you?”

I grinned.

“Hello Jack. How’s Virginia these days?”

TWENTY-FOUR

“I still can’t believe it’s you, kid.”

She sat on the slope of the dune at my side and traced triangles in the sand between her feet with a bottleback prod. She was still wet from the swim, water pearling on sun-darkened skin all over the surfer sleeve, razored black hair spiked damp and uneven on top of her head. The elfin face beneath was taking some getting used to. She was at least ten years younger than when I’d last seen her. Then again, she was probably having the same problem with me. She stared down at the sand as she spoke, features unreadable. She talked hesitantly, the same way she’d woken me in the spare room at dawn, asking if I wanted to go down to the beach with her. She’d had all night to get over the surprise, but she still looked at me in snatched glances, as if it wasn’t allowed.

I shrugged.

“I’m the believable part, Virginia. I’m not the one back from the dead. And don’t call me ‘kid’.”

She smiled a little. “We’re all back from the dead at some point, Tak. Hazards of the profession, remember?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah.” She stared away down the beach for a while, where the sunrise was still a blurred blood rumour through early morning mist. “So do you believe her?”

“That she’s Quell?” I sighed and scooped up a handful of sand. Watched it trickle away through my fingers and off the sides of my palm. “I believe she believes she is.”

Virginia Vidaura made an impatient gesture. “I’ve met wireheads that believe they’re Konrad Harlan. That isn’t what I asked you.”

“I know what you asked me, Virginia.”

“Then deal with the fucking question,” she said without heat. “Didn’t I teach you anything in the Corps?”

“Is she Quell?” Trace moisture from the swim had left tiny lines of sand still clinging to my palms. I brushed my hands together brusquely. “How can she be, right? Quell’s dead. Vaporised. Whatever your pals back at the house might like to wish for in their political wet dreams.”

She looked over her shoulder, as if she thought they might hear us. Alight have woken and come stretching and yawning down to the beach after us, rested and ready to take violent offence at my lack of respect.

“I can remember a time you might have wished for it too, Tak. A time you might have wanted her back. What happened to you?”

“Sanction IV happened to me.”

“Ah, yes. Sanction IV. Revolution called for a bit more commitment than you’d expected, did it?”

“You weren’t there.”

A small quiet opened up behind the words. She looked away. Brasil’s little band were all nominally Quellists—or neoQuellists at least—but Virginia Vidaura was the only one among them with Envoy conditioning.

She’d had the capacity for willful self-deception gouged out of her in a way that would permit no easy emotional attachment to legend or dogma. She’d have, I reasoned, an opinion worth listening to. She’d have perspective.

I waited. Down the beach, wavecrash kept up a slow, expectant back beat.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

“Skip it. We all get our dreams stamped on from time to time, right? And if it didn’t hurt, what kind of second-rate dreams would they be?”

Her mouth quirked. “Still quoting her though, I see.”

“Paraphrasing. Look, Virginia, you correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s no record of any backup up of Nadia Makita ever made. Right?”

“There’s no record of any backup of Takeshi Kovacs either. Seems to be one out there though.”

“Yeah, don’t remind me. But that’s the fucking Harlan family, and you can see a rationale for why they’d do it. You can see the value.”

She looked sidelong at me. “Well, it’s good to see your time on Sanction IV didn’t damage your ego.”

“Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have uses. It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.”

“Hardly plankton-standard.” She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. “Takeshi, you know Yaros and I …”

“Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.”

“Really?”

“Well, what he really said was ah fuck it, but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?”

She sighed. “No. It didn’t.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There’s no point, it was all so long ago.” A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. “I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.”

I shrugged. “We must be prepared to live on timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realise our own dreams.”

This rime the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.

“You trying to be fucking funny?”