“Grigori who?”

“Grigori Ishii.” It was still a whisper. Then the inward-looking horror was gone, wiped away, and she was staring hard at me. “You don’t think I’m real, do you, Micky Serendipity?”

A flicker of unease in the back of my head. The name Grigori Ishii chimed somewhere in the pre-Envoy depths of my memory. I stared back at the woman in the bed.

Go easy on her.

Fuck that.

I stood up. “I don’t know what you are. But I’ll tell you this for nothing, you’re not Nadia Makita. Nadia Makita is dead.”

“Yes,” she said thinly. “I’d rather gathered that. But evidently she was backed up and stored before she died, because here I am.”

I shook my head.

“No, you’re not. You’re not here at all in any guaranteed sense. Nadia Makita is gone, vaporised. And there’s no evidence that a copy was made. No technical explanation for how a copy could have got into Sylvie Oshima’s command software, even if it did exist. In fact, no evidence that you’re anything other than a faked personality casing.”

“I think that’s enough, Tak.” Brasil stepped suddenly into the cabin. His face wasn’t friendly. “We can leave it here.”

I swung on him, skinning teeth in a tight grin. “That’s your considered medical opinion is it, Jack? Or just a Quellist revolutionary tenet? Truth in small and controlled doses. Nothing the patient won’t be able to handle.”

“No, Tak,” he said quietly. “It’s a warning. Time for you to come out of the water.”

My hands flexed gently.

“Don’t try me, Jack.”

“You’re not the only one with neurachem, Tak.”

The moment hung, then pivoted and died as the ridiculous dynamics of it caught up with me. Sierra Tres was right. It wasn’t this fractured woman’s fault Isa was dead, and nor was it Brasil’s. And besides, any damage I’d wanted to do to the ghost of Nadia Makita was now done. I nodded and dropped the combat tension like a coat. I brushed past Brasil and reached the door behind him. Turned briefly back to the woman in the bunk.

“Whatever you are, I want Sylvie Oshima back unharmed.” I jerked my head at Brasil. “I brought you these new friends you’ve got, but I’m not one of them. If I think you’ve done anything to damage Oshima, I’ll go through them all like angelfire just to get to you. You keep that in mind.”

She looked steadily back at me.

“Thank you,” she said without apparent irony. “I will.”

On deck, I found Sierra Tres propped in a steel frame chair, scanning the sky with a pair of binoculars. I came and stood behind her, cranking up the neurachem as I peered out in the same direction. It was a limited view—Boubin Islander was tucked away in the shade of a massive, jagged fragment of toppled Martian architecture that had hit the shoal below us, bedded there and fossilised into the reef over time. Above water, airborne spores had seeded a thick covering of creeper and lichen analogues, and now the view out from under the ruin was obscured by ropes of hanging foliage.

“See anything?”

“I think they’ve put up microlights.” Tres put aside the binoculars. “It’s too far away to get more than glints, but there’s something moving out there near the break in the reef. Something very small, though.”

“Still twitchy, then.”

“Wouldn’t you be? It’s got to be a hundred years since the First Families lost an aircraft to angelfire.”

“Well.” I shrugged with an ease I didn’t really feel. “Got to be a hundred years since anyone was stupid enough to start an aerial assault during an orbital storm, right?”

“You don’t think he made four hundred metres either then?”

“I don’t know.” I played back the swoopcopter’s final seconds of existence with Envoy recall. “He was going up pretty fast. Even if he didn’t make it, maybe it was the vector that tripped the defences. That and the active weaponry. Fuck, who knows how an orbital thinks? What it’d perceive as a threat. They’ve been known to break the rules before. Look at what happened to the ledgefruit autos back in the Settlement. And those racing skiffs at Ohrid, remember that? They say most of them weren’t much more than a hundred metres off the water when it took them all out.”

She shot me an amused look. “I wasn’t born when that happened, Kovacs.”

“Oh. Sorry. You seem older.”

“Thank you.”

“In any case, they didn’t seem keen to put much in the sky while we were running. Suggests the prediction AIs were erring on the side of caution, making some gloomy forecasts.”

“Or we got lucky.”

“Or we got lucky,” I echoed.

Brasil came up the companionway and stalked towards us. There was an uncharacteristic anger flickering around in the way he moved and he looked at me with open dislike. I spared him a return glance, then went back to staring at the water.

“I won’t have you talking to her like that again,” he told me.

“Oh, shut up.”

“I’m serious, Kovacs. We all know you’ve got a problem with political commitment, but I’m not going to let you vomit up whatever fucked-in-the-head rage you’re carrying all over this woman.”

I swung on him.

“This woman? This woman? You’re calling me fucked in the head. This woman you’re talking about is not a human being. She’s a fragment, a ghost at best.”

“We don’t know that yet,” said Tres quietly.

“Oh please. Can neither of you see what’s happening here? You’re projecting your desires onto a fucking digitised human sketch. Already. Is this what’s going to happen if we get her back to Kossuth? Are we going to build a whole fucking revolutionary movement on a mythological scrap?”

Brasil shook his head. “The movement’s already there. It doesn’t need to be built, it’s ready to happen.”

“Yeah, all it needs is a figurehead.” I turned away as the old weariness rose in me, stronger even than the anger. “Which is handy, because all you’ve got is a fucking figurehead.”

“You do not know that.”

“No, you’re right.” I began to walk away. There isn’t far you can go on a thirty-metre boat, but I was going to open up as much space as I could between myself and these sudden idiots. Then something made me swing about to face them both across the deck. My voice rose in abrupt fury. “I don’t know that. I don’t know that Nadia Makita’s whole personality wasn’t stored and then left lying around in New Hok like some unexploded shell nobody wanted. I don’t know that it didn’t somehow find a way to get uploaded into a passing deCom. But what are the fucking chances?”

“We can’t make that judgment yet,” Brasil said, coming after me. “We need to get her to Koi.”

“Koi?” I laughed savagely. “Oh, that’s good. Fucking Koi. Jack, do you really think you’re ever going to see Koi again? Koi is more than likely blasted meat scraped up off some back street in Millsport. Or better yet, he’s an interrogation guest of Aiura Harlan. Don’t you get it, Jack? It is over. Your neoQuellist resurgence is rucked. Koi is gone, probably the others are too. Just more rucking casualties on the glorious road to revolutionary change.”

“Kovacs, you think I don’t feel for what happened to Isa?”

“I think, jack, that provided we rescued that shell of a myth we’ve got down there, you don’t much care who died or how.”

Sierra Tres moved awkwardly on the rail. “Isa chose to get involved. She knew the risks. She took the pay. She was a free agent.”

“She was fifteen fucking years old!”

Neither of them said anything. They just watched me. The slap of water on the hull grew audible. I closed my eyes, drew a deep breath and looked at them again. I nodded.

“It’s okay,” I said tiredly. “I see where this is going. I’ve seen it before, I saw it on Sanction IV. Fucking Joshua Kemp said it at Indigo City. What we crave is the revolutionary momentum. How I’ve get it is almost irrelevant, and certainly not admitting of ethical debate—historical outcome will be the final moral arbiter. If that isn’t Quellcrist Falconer down there, you’re going to turn it into her anyway. Aren’t you.”