There was a sense of slow accumulation, an assembly of tiny increments in the balance pan that sat opposite the colossal tonnage of Sarah Sachilowska’s extinction. For two years I’d needed no purpose other than that pocket and its handful of stolen souls. I’d needed no future, no outlook that didn’t revolve around feeding the pocket and the swamp panther pens at Segesvar’s place out on the Expanse.

Really? So what happened at Tekitomura?

Movement on the rail. The cables thrummed and bounced gently. I looked up and saw Sierra Tres maneuvering herself forward, braced on the rail with both arms and hopping on her uninjured leg. Her usually inexpressive face was taut with frustration. Under different circumstances, it might have been comical, but from the hacked-off trousers at mid-thigh, her other leg was encased in transparent plaster that laid bare the wounds beneath.

We’d been skulking in Eltevedtem for nearly three days now, and Brasil had used the time as well as the limited battlefield medical gear we had would allow. The flesh beneath Tres’s plaster was a black and purple swollen mess, punched through and torn by the swoopcopter’s machine gun fire, but the wounds had been cleaned and dusted. Blue and red tags marched down the damaged portions, marking the points at which Brasil had inserted rapid regrowth bios. A flex-alloy boot cushioned the bottom end of the cast against outside impact, but walking on it would have required more painkillers than Tres seemed prepared to take.

“You should be lying down,” I said as she joined me.

“Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.”

“Alright.” I went back to staring into the water. “Any word yet?”

She shook her head. “Oshima’s awake, though. Asking for you.”

I lost focus on the fish below me for a moment. Got it back. Made no move to leave the rail or look up again.

“Oshima or Makita?”

“Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?”

I nodded greyly. “So she still thinks she’s—”

“At the moment, yes.”

I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.

“Kovacs.”

I looked back at Tres impatiently. “Yeah, what?”

“Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.”

“No. It isn’t.”

Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.

“Hello there Micky Serendipity.”

“Hello.”

“I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.” She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine here.”

She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.

“I understand we may have to move soon,” she said quietly. “On foot.”

“Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.”

“Ah—so that much remains the same.”

“The orbitals?” I nodded. “Yeah, they still run at the same parameters as when you—”

I stopped. Gestured. “As they always did.”

Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly

“Tell me,” she said finally. “How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.”

I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.

“Please. I need to know.”

“About three hundred years, local.” I gestured again. “Three hundred and twenty, near enough.”

I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.

“So long,” she murmured.

This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.

Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight.

Some things leave the same teethmarks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.

Or not, I reminded myself.

Go easy on her.

“You didn’t know?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.”

“Who told you?”

“I—” She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.

“Three hundred and twenty years,” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.

“I called you,” she said suddenly.

“Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?”

The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.

“I don’t know. I knew.” She cleared her throat. “No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.”

I leaned forward in the seat. “Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?”

“In here, somewhere. In here.”

The woman in the bunk closed her eyes. For a minute or so I thought she’d gone to sleep. I would have left the cabin, gone back up on deck, but there was nothing up there I wanted. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open again and she nodded as if something had just been confirmed in her ear.

“There’s a.” She swallowed. “A space down there. Like a pre-millennial prison. Rows of cells. Walkways and corridors. There are things down there she says she caught, like catching bottleback from a charter yacht. Or maybe caught like a disease? It’s, it shades together. Does that make any sense?”

I thought about the command software. I remembered Sylvie Oshima’s words on the crossing to Drava.

—mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. There’s stuffbedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.

I nodded. Wondered what it might take to break out of that kind of prison. What kind of person—or thing—you might have to be.

Ghosts of things.

“Yeah, it makes sense.” And then, before I could stop myself. “So is that where you come in, Nadia? You something she caught?”

A brief look of horror flitted across the gaunt features.

“Grigori,” she whispered. “There’s something that sounds like Grigori down there.”