As I turned about, looking for a way out, the air beside me thickened and rippled into a sketched doll of light that became Jack Soul Brasil.

The pitch of the waterfall jolted as he solidified, then settled down again.

The oscillating spectrum raced through the air again, departed again. The puddles shimmered and reappeared. Brasil blinked and looked around him.

“It’s this way, I think.” I said, pointing to a set of shallow stone steps at one side of the waterfall.

We followed the steps round a rock bluff and emerged into bright sunlight above the waterfall. The steps became a paved path across a moss-grown hillside and at the same moment I spotted the monastery.

It rose among gentry rolling hills against a backdrop of jagged mountains that vaguely recalled parts of the Saffron Archipelago, seven levels and five towers of ornately worked wood and granite in classic pagoda style. The path up from the waterfall crossed the hillside and ended at a huge mirrorwood gate that shone in the sun. Other similar paths radiated out from the monastery in no particular pattern, leading away across the hills. One or two figures were visible walking them.

“Well you can see why they went virtual,” I said, mostly to myself. “It beats Whaleback and Ninth.”

Brasil grunted. He’d been similarly uncommunicative all the way over from Akan. He still didn’t seem to have got over the shock of Nikolai Natsume’s renunciation of the world and the flesh.

We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.

“May I help you?” he asked gently.

Brasil nodded. “We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.”

“Natsume.” The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again.

“He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.”

The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.

“Nik?” Brasil moved forward to meet him. “Is that you?”

“Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.” Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw.

“Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.”

He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I reassured him.

“Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.”

Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.

“Jack Soul Brasil?”

“Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?”

A brief smile. “Learning.”

“What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.”

“Actually, I’m learning at the moment to grow filigree poppies. Remarkably difficult. Perhaps you’d care to see my efforts so far?”

Brasil shifted awkwardly. “Look, Nik, I’m not sure we’ve got time for—”

“Oh, time here is.” The smile again. “Flexible. I’ll make time for you. Please, this way.”

We left the hall and tracked left around the cherry-blossom quadrangle, then under an arch and across a pebbled courtyard. In one corner, two monks were knelt in meditation, and did not look up. It was impossible to tell if they were human inhabitants of the monastery or functions of the construct like the doorkeeper. Natsume at least ignored them. Brasil and I caught each other’s eye and the surfer’s face was troubled. I could read his thoughts as if they were printing out for me. This wasn’t the man he’d known, and he didn’t know if he could trust him any more.

Finally, Natsume led us through an arched tunnel to another quadrangle and down a short set of Earthwood steps into a shallow pit of marshy grasses and weed bordered by a circular stone path. There, buoyed up amidst the cobwebby grey scaffolding of their root systems, a dozen filigree poppies offered their tattered, iridescent purple and green petals to the virtual sky. The tallest wasn’t much more than fifty centimetres high. Maybe it was impressive from a horticultural point of view, I wouldn’t know. But it certainly didn’t look like much of an achievement for a man who’d once fought off a full-grown bottleback with no weapon outside of fists and feet and a short-burn chemical flare. For a man who’d once scaled Rila Crags without antigrav or ropes.

“Very nice,” said Brasil.

I nodded. “Yes. You must be very pleased with those.”

“Only moderately.” Natsume circled his shred-petalled charges with a critical eye. “In the end I’ve succumbed to the obvious failing, as apparently most new practitioners do.”

He looked expectantly up at us.

I glanced back at Brasil but got no help there..

“Are they a bit short?” I asked finally.

Natsume shook his head and chuckled. “No, in fact they’re a good height for a base this moist. And—I’m so sorry—I see I’ve committed yet another common gardener’s misdemeanour. I’ve assumed a general fascination with the subject of my personal obsessions.”

He shrugged and joined us again on the steps, where he seated himself.

He gestured out at the plants.

“They’re too bright. An ideal filigree poppy is matt. It shouldn’t glint like that, it’s vulgar. At least, that’s what the Abbot tells me.”

“Nik …”

He looked at Brasil. “Yes.”

“Nik, we need to. To talk to you about. Some stuff.”

I waited. This had to be Brasil’s call. If he didn’t trust the ground, I wasn’t going to walk ahead of him on it.

“Some stuff?” Natsume nodded. “What stuff would that be, then?”

“We.” I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. “I need your help, Nik.”

“Yes, clearly. But in what?”

“It’s.”

Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.

“Jack,” he said. “This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?”

Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.

“You’ve changed, Nik.”

“Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?” For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. “That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.”