“Tak, calm down.”

“I am fucking calm!”

My shout sank into the nilvibe muffling like pain drowned in IV endorphin. No one said anything for a while. Mari Ado looked pointedly away, out of the window. Sierra Tres raised an eyebrow. Brasil examined the floor with elaborate care. I grimaced and tried again. Quietly.

“Guys, this is my problem, and I would like to deal with it myself.”

“No.” It was Koi. “There is no time for this. We have already spent two days that we can ill afford in preparation. We cannot delay further. Your private vendettas will have to wait.”

“It isn’t going to take—”

“I said no. By tomorrow morning your bearded friend will in any case be looking in entirely the wrong place for you.” The ex-Black Brigade commando turned away, dismissing me the way Virginia Vidaura would sometimes do when we’d performed badly in Envoy training sessions. “Sierra, we’ll need to up the realtime ratio on the construct. Though I don’t imagine it ramps that high anyway, does it?”

Tres shrugged. “Architectural specs, you know how they are. Time’s not usually the issue. Maybe get forty, fifty times real out of a system like that at full flog.”

“That’s fine.” Koi was building an almost visible internal momentum as he talked. I imagined the Unsettlement, clandestine meetings in hidden back rooms. Scant light on scrawled plans. “It’ll do. But we’re going to need that running at two separate levels—the mapping construct and a virtual hotel suite with conference facilities. We need to be able to shuttle between the two easily, at will. Some kind of basic triggering gesture like a double blink. I don’t want to have to come back to the real world while we’re planning this.”

Tres nodded, already moving. “I’ll go tell Tudjman to get on it.”

She ducked out of the nilvibe chamber. The door clumped gently shut behind her. Koi turned back to the rest of us.

“Now I suggest we take a few minutes to clear our heads because once this is up and running, we’re going to live in virtual until we’re done. With luck we can complete before tonight, real time, and be on our way. And Kovacs. This is only my personal opinion, but I think you owe at least some of us here an explanation.”

I met his gaze, a sudden flood of dislike for his crabshit march-of-history politics giving me a handy frozen stare to do it with.

“You’re so right, Soseki. That is your personal opinion. So how about you keep it to yourself?”

Virginia Vidaura cleared her throat.

“Tak, I think we should go down and get a coffee or something.”

“Yeah, I think we should.”

I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.

The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“You know where I’m going.”

“No.” She tightened up on me. “No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.”

“It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.”

I tried to move towards the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far from reliable option. I swung back towards her, exasperated.

“Virginia, let me go.”

“What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—”

“It isn’t going to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—”

I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own and our eyes were only about a handsbreadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.

“That’s it,” she said. “Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.”

“What is there to talk about?”

She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember—it’s a good few years younger, for one thing—but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair.

Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.

Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.

“Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.”

“I am happy.” She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated.

It’s a tiny spark of the woman I used to know. “I mean, wouldn’t you be? Sentence commuted for cash equivalence. And the money’s still flooding in, there’ll be biocoding work for the next decade. Until the ocean settles down again, we’ve got whole new levels of flow to domesticate, and that’s just locally. Someone’s still got to model the impact where the Mikuni current hits the warm water coming up from Kossuth, and then do something about it. We’ll be tendering as soon as the government funding clears. Josef says the rate we’re going, I’ll have paid off the whole sentence in another ten years.”

“Josef?”

“Oh, yeah, I should have said.” The smile comes out again, wider this time.

More open. “He’s really great, Tak. You should meet him. He’s running the project up there, he’s one of the reasons I got out in the first wave. He was doing the virtual hearings, he was my project liaison when I got out and then we just, ah, you know.”

She looked down at her lap, still smiling.

“You’re blushing, Sarah.”

“I am not.”

“Yeah, you are.” I know I’m supposed to feel happy for her, but I can’t. Too many memories of her long, pale flanks moving against me in hotel-suite beds and seedy hideout apartments. “So he’s playing for keeps, this Josef?”

She looks up quickly, pins me with a look. We’re both playing for keeps, Tak.

“He makes me happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, I think.”

So why the fuck did you come and look me up, you stupid bitch?

“That’s great,” I say.

“And what about you?” she asks with arch concern. “Are you happy?”

I raise an eyebrow to gain some time. Slant my gaze to the side in a way that used to make her laugh. All I get this time is a maternal smile.

“Well, happy.” I pull another face. “That’s, ah, never been a trick I was very good at. I mean, yeah, I got out ahead of time like you. Full UN amnesty.”

“Yeah, I heard about that. And you were on Earth, right?”

“For a while.”

“And what about now?”

I gesture vaguely. “Oh, I’m working. Not anything as prestigious as you guys up there on the North arm, but it pays off the sleeve.”

“Is it legal?”

“Are you kidding?”

Her face falls. “You know if that’s true, Tak, I can’t spend time with you. It’s part of the re-sleeve deal. I’m still in parole time, I can’t associate with …”

She shakes her head.

“Criminals?” I ask.

“Don’t laugh at me, Tak.”

I sigh. “I’m not, Sarah. I think it’s great how things have worked out for you. It’s just, I don’t know, thinking of you writing biocode. Instead of stealing it.” She smiled again, her default expression for the whole conversation, but this time it was edged with pain.

“People can change,” she says. “You should try it.”

There’s an awkward pause.

“Maybe I will.”

And another.

“Look, I should really be getting back. Josef probably didn’t—”