“We’re gaining on them.”

Petrovitch put his hand on his sternum, checking that his heart was still beating. That he hadn’t felt any erratic behavior from it for a while worried him, because he paced life by its various twinges and aches, and let his defibrillator punctuate him when it needed to.

He could be killing himself by climbing at such speed.

The doors below them peeled open and snapped shut. Hoarse coughing rattled the air, going on and on until it ended in a ghastly retch.

“There’s someone else coming,” mouthed Petrovitch.

“Really?” mimed Madeleine back. She pointed to him, then up the stairs. “You, go.”

He frowned.

She tapped herself and held up the pipe.

Petrovitch shook his head.

She pressed her mouth to his ear. “Now is not the time to argue. I’m here to make sure you get to where you’re going. I’ll see to whoever it is coming up the stairs, and then I’ll join you. It’s not like you’re going to make it to floor fifty before I catch up to you, is it?”

He tried to pull back, but she wrapped her arm around his neck and held him still.

“If you take some stupid stray shot meant for me, I won’t know what to do with the Jihad. You’re the one who’s going to stop it. Not me. So I have to protect you, and you have to accept that. Okay?” She kissed the side of his head and pushed him away, flapping her arms like she was chasing a pigeon.

He watched her descend, creeping along, back hard against the inside curve of the spiral stairs. Then she was gone. He couldn’t hear her at all, just the coughing and hawking of phlegm from five floors below.

He turned around and forced his legs to move. Thirty-four more floors.

35

He reached the top, with barely enough strength to fall through the door and lie on the gravel path. The door swung shut behind him; disguised by a bamboo screen, it blended into its surroundings so completely that when he next looked up, he couldn’t work out how he’d got there.

Stones stuck to his face, his hands, and he barely noticed apart from the rattle they made as they fell from him one by one.

Madeleine hadn’t reappeared, despite her assurance that she would. He’d almost turned back half a dozen times, only to imagine the tongue-lashing he’d get for not keeping his mind on the job.

So he’d kept on going and, now he was there, he was without her. Failure was written all over the venture. He couldn’t even stand.

He rolled over onto his back and let the light from the artificial sky shine down on him. The air was as warm as a bright spring day, yet he was cold, cold to the core.

Feet crunched down the path toward him. He heard a metallic snap, and a shadow covered him.

“Petrovitch?”

He squinted into the glare. “Konnichiwa, Hijo-san.”

“You… what are you doing here?” Hijo pointed his gun at Petrovitch’s heaving chest.

“I’ve come for Sonja. I just didn’t know it was you who had her. What did you do with Chain?”

“He will not be bothering us again.” Hijo took a couple of steadying breaths and sighted down his arm. “Neither will you, Petrovitch. You are still that loose thread.”

“Yeah, not so much anymore. I’m the thread that’s holding everything together. Pull it and the whole sorry garment falls apart, leaving you naked.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that come dawn, there’ll be two suns in the sky.” Petrovitch let the cultural resonance of that phrase sink in, then added. “You killed your boss because you wanted for free everything he’d built up the hard way. You wanted to be the big man, the—what is it?—taishou. And everything you’ve done since then has just made it worse. Now you have nothing and in the morning you’ll have even that taken away.”

“A filthy Russian street-dog does not have the authority to call down a nuclear strike.” Hijo ground his teeth and his hand shook. “You are bluffing.”

“But you don’t dismiss the idea completely, do you? You’re wondering what you’d trade if it meant you’d salvage something out of this, whether you can get to keep the tower, the company, the syndicate, the girl… ah. She was right.” Petrovitch smiled and snorted. He noticed for the first time that Hijo wasn’t his usual immaculate self: jacket torn, shirt dirty, trousers ragged. His polished shoes were encrusted with filth. “You thought that when Oshicora-san came to see me, he was giving me his blessing. And you couldn’t take losing her to an unworthy gaijin, so you killed him, but Sonja saw you, and so on and so on. Oshicora-san liked me, but he wanted her to marry some Japanese pureblood. He warned me off. I said I’d stay clear of her. We parted on good terms.”

Hijo had gone pale. Sweat trickled down his forehead. “So why are you here?”

“I’ve come to talk to Oshicora-san. What about you?”

“He is dead,” he hissed. “I killed him myself.”

“And yet, when Sonja told you he was still alive, you had to come and find out for yourself.”

“You put these thoughts in her head. You told her she would find him here. Why did you do that?”

Petrovitch cackled. “You ignorant govnosos. You’ve no idea, have you? Even though she’s tried to explain it to you, over and over again, you wouldn’t believe her. Why should I waste what little time I have left on you?”

Hijo reached down and filled his fist with Petrovitch’s collar, hauling him half off the ground. He pressed the barrel of his gun at Petrovitch’s throat. “He is not a machine!”

“Trust you to get it zhopu-backward. The machine thinks it’s Oshicora, not the other way around. It’s not a resurrection—it’s reincarnation. A bit Shinto, in its way, really.” Petrovitch taunted Hijo, even though he knew the man could pull the trigger at any moment.

Hijo’s face went through several grotesque contortions. “How can this be?”

“I could tell you, but that’s dependent on you not killing me. In fact, it seems rather a lot depends on you not killing me. You can’t stop the New Machine Jihad, because you killed its creator. Sonja won’t, because she sees it as the last link to her father. Only I can do this. Only I can make sure you have something left by tomorrow morning.”

Petrovitch was released, and he fell back down to the ground in a crumpled heap. Hijo walked around him, agitated, uncertain, raising and lowering his pistol as he debated with himself as to whether to finish his prisoner off.

“You,” he finally said. “Get up.”

“That might be a problem,” said Petrovitch.

“Get. Up.” He punctuated the order with jabs of his shoes.

“Since you asked nicely, I’ll have to see what I can do.” He rolled onto his side and dragged his leaden legs up. He levered himself onto his knees and used a nearby maple to get him the rest of the way.

“Walk.”

“Yeah. If I could see where you were pointing, that’d be good. I’m waiting for the blood to get back to my brain.” He held onto the smooth-skinned trunk and waited for the grayness to resolve itself.

“Now.”

Petrovitch pushed himself away and managed a couple of steps. A bamboo screen banged open and Harry Chain stumbled through as if thrown. Madeleine, with Chain’s police special in her hand, stood in the doorway.

Hijo moved fast. He wrapped his arm around Petrovitch’s throat and held a gun to his temple.

“I can take him,” said Madeleine, advancing over Chain’s shuddering and retching form. “Sorry I’m late, by the way. This lard-ass has a concussion as well as being even more unfit than you.”

“Stop. Stop where you are, woman. Or I kill Petrovitch.” Hijo tightened his grip, and there was nothing Petrovitch could do about it.

“Head shot. By the time your neurones decide to tell your finger to move, you’ll be dead. And I am that accurate.” But she stayed where she was, on the border between the path and a moss-covered rockery.