“I see.” His voice showed no reaction. “Did it work?”

“Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.”

“Yes. And the fire?”

I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. “Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.”

He waded across and looked.

“Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.”

“They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.”

The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.

“Then will he not know to come here?” Koi asked softly. “To Vchira?”

“I don’t think so.” I reran my own second-guessing rationale as I boarded the Haiduci’s Daughter in Tekitomura, hoping it sounded as convincing out loud. “He’s too young to know anything about my time with the Bugs, and there’s no official record they can feed him. Vidaura he knows, but for him she’s still a trainer back in the Corps. He’ll have no feel for what she might be doing now, or any post-service connection we might have. This Aiura bitch will give him what they’ve got on me, maybe on Virginia too. But they don’t have much and what they do have is misleading. We’re Envoys, we both covered our tracks and sewed the dataflows with tinsel every move we made.”

“Very thorough of you.”

I searched the lined face for irony, and found none apparent. I shrugged.

“It’s the conditioning. We’re trained to disappear without trace on worlds we hardly know. Doing it somewhere you grew up is child’s play. All these motherfuckers have got to work with is underworld rumour and a series of sentences in storage. That’s not much to go on with a whole globe to cover and no aerial capacity. And the one thing he probably thinks he knows about me is that I’ll avoid Newpest like the plague.”

I shut down the updraft of family feeling that had stabbed through me on the Haiduci’s Daughter. Let go a compressed breath.

“So where will he look for you?”

I nodded at the model of Millsport in front of us, brooding on the densely settled islands and platforms. “I think he’s probably looking for me right there. It’s where I always came when I wasn’t offworld. It’s the biggest urban environment on the planet, the easiest place to disappear if you know it well, and it’s right across the bay from Rila. If I were an Envoy, that’s where I’d be. Hidden, and in easy striking distance.”

For a moment, my unaccustomed aerial viewpoint grew dizzying as I looked down on the wharflines and streets, unfocused memory down the disjointed centuries blurring the old and new into a smudged familiarity.

And he’s down there somewhere.

Come on, there’s no way you can be sure of—

He’s down there somewhere like an antibody, perfectly shaped to match the intruder he’s looking for, asking soft questions in the flow of city life, bribing, threatening, levering, breaking, all the things that they taught us both so well.

He’s breathing deep as he does it, living it for its own dark and joyous sake like some inverted version of Jack Soul Brasil’s philosophy of life.

Plex’s words came trickling back to me.

He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—

I thought back along my train of associations in the last year, the people I might have endangered.

Todor Murakami, if he was still hanging around undeployed. Would my younger self know him? Murakami had joined the Corps almost the same time as I had, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the early days, hadn’t deployed together until Nkrumah’s Land and Innenin. Would Aiura’s pet Kovacs make the connection? Would he be able to play Murakami successfully? Come to that, would Aiura let her newly double-sleeved creation anywhere near a serving Envoy? Would she dare?

Probably not. And Murakami, with the full weight of the Corps behind him, could look after himself.

Isa.

Oh, shit.

Fifteen-year-old Isa, wearing tough-as-titanium woman-of-the-world like a pantherskin jacket over a soft and privileged upbringing among what was left of Millsport’s middle class. Razor-sharp smart, and just as brittle. Like a pretend edition of little Mito, just before I left for the Envoys. If he found Isa then—

Relax, you’re covered. Only place she can put you is in Tekitomura. They get Isa, they’ve got nothing.

But—

It took me that long, that heartbeat, to care. The knowledge of the gap was a cold revulsion welling up through me.

But he’ll break her in half if she gets in his way. He’ll go through her like angelfire.

Will he? If she reminds you of Mho, isn’t she going to remind him too? It’s the same sister for both of you. Isn’t that going to stop him?

Isn’t it?

I cast my mind back into the murk of operational days with the Corps, and didn’t know.

“Kovacs!”

It was a voice out of the sky. I blinked and looked up from the modelled streets of Millsport. Over our heads, Brasil hung in the air of the virtuality clad in garish orange surf shorts and tatters of low-level cloud. With his physique and long fair hair blown back by stratospheric winds, he looked like a disreputable minor god. I raised a hand in greeting.

“Jack, you’ve got to come and look at this northern approach. It isn’t going to—”

“Got no time for that, Tak. You need to bail out. Right now.”

I felt a tightening around my chest. “What is it?”

“Company,” he said cryptically, and vanished in a twist of white light.

The offices of Dzurinda Tudjman Sklep, marine architects and fluid dynamic engineers by appointment, were in north Sourcetown, where the Strip started to morph into resort complexes and beaches with safe surf. It wasn’t a part of town any of Brasil’s crew would have been seen dead in under normal circumstances, but they merged competently enough with the tourist hordes. Only someone who was looking for hardcore surfer poise would have spotted it beneath the violently mismatched high-colour branded beachwear they’d adopted like camouflage. In the sober surroundings of a nilvibe conference chamber ten floors up from the promenade, they looked like an outbreak of some exotic anti-corporate fungal infection.

“A priest, a fucking priest?”

“I’m afraid so.” Sierra Tres told me. “Apparently alone, which I understand is unusual for the New Revelation.”

“Unless they’re borrowing tricks from the Sharyan martyr brigades,” said Virginia Vidaura sombrely. “Sanctified solo assassins against targeted infidels. What have you been up to, Tak?”

“It’s personal,” I muttered.

“Isn’t it always.” Vidaura grimaced and looked around at the assembled company. Brasil shrugged, and Tres showed no more emotion than usual.

But Ado and Koi both looked angrily intent. “Tak, I think we have a right to know what’s going on. This could jeopardise everything we’re working for.”

“It’s got nothing to do with what we’re working for, Virginia. It’s irrelevant. These bearded fucks are too stupid incompetent to touch us. They’re strictly the bottom of the food chain.”

“Stupid or not,” Koi pointed out, “One of them has succeeded in following you here. And is now asking after you in Kem Point.”

“Fine. I’ll go and kill him.”

Mari Ado shook her head. “Not alone, you won’t.”

“Hey, this is my nicking problem, Mari.”