“Put down your gun.”

“Put down yours.”

“Yobany stos, one of you give in. I’m struggling to stay conscious.”

Hijo started to pull Petrovitch backward, then decided that he could win after all. He aimed at Madeleine and fired in one fluid movement, and she ducked, rolled and came up on her feet; closer, meaner, and unscathed.

The gun flicked back to Petrovitch’s head.

“No further.”

“You’re just going to try and shoot me again.” Madeleine started to move in a wide circle, forcing Hijo to spin with her.

Then she stopped and sighed, and held up her gun hand. “Okay. We’re done here.” She stooped and placed the special on the ground between her feet.

Petrovitch felt the muscles constricting his throat to relax and heard a grunt of satisfaction. He was pushed away and, as he turned to look back at Hijo, he saw Sonja lope silently up behind him. She danced lightly on the balls of her feet and swung her father’s katana at Hijo’s exposed neck.

The blade cut deep, coming to rest part way through his Adam’s apple. She twisted away, a spray of blood leaping from the tip of the sword, droplets spinning darkly in the air.

Hijo, with a look of immense surprise on his face, folded up onto the path. His half-severed head hung loosely from his body, and a lake of deep red formed under him, soaking away into the pale gravel.

“So ends the life of Hijo Masazumi,” said Sonja. The bright edge of the sword dripped as she hung it downward. “Always looking for threats, and never seeing the one that would kill him.”

Madeleine picked Petrovitch up, and held him to her like a rag doll. “Are you all right?”

“I thought you weren’t coming.”

“Chain. I had a mind to kick him all the way down the stairs to the cesspit that’s ground level. He used the wound on his head to appeal to my better nature.”

“Yeah, Okay. Sonja? Thanks.”

“I did it for me. I did it for my father. I did it because a world without Hijo is a better place.”

“Nice as this is,” said Petrovitch, untangling himself from Madeleine’s arms, “we still have something to do, and only a limited time to do it.”

“Follow me,” said Sonja, and didn’t look back once.

“I’ll get Chain,” said Madeleine, crouching to collect his gun. “It sounds like he’s finished coughing his guts up.”

Sonja led them over the wooden bridge and eventually to the temple. She hesitated at the steps. “Sam, what will you do?”

Petrovitch rested against one of the stone lions that guarded the entrance. “I don’t know,” he answered. “It depends on what’s possible.”

“You said you’d save the Jihad.”

“Funny,” said Chain, wiping red-flecked phlegm from his mouth, “he told us it had to go.”

There was a moment where it was equally likely that Sonja would raise her sword and Madeleine raise her gun. Petrovitch stood in the middle and bowed his head, wondering at the stupidity of people and realizing why he avoided them so much.

“I can do both,” he said.

“That makes no sense,” said Chain.

“This,” said Petrovitch, “coming from a man who had an armored car and Sonja, and still managed to screw up.”

Chain put his hand to his matted hair and showed Petrovitch the blood. “You didn’t have Godzilla chasing you half the night.”

He wasn’t impressed. “We’ve more important things to deal with than your lame excuses. Mainly, a nuclear missile is going to hit this building at dawn. It will vaporize it, and excavate a hole deep enough to destroy the quantum computer below. That will be the end of the New Machine Jihad.”

Chain wasn’t the only one to gape. “How? How do you know this?”

“I have every confidence that my university colleagues will get the message through to the EDF. They might decide not to wait that long, of course, and order an immediate strike. In which case, it’s a race between a bunch of electronics students with soldering irons and me. We can stand here and talk about how I’m a bad person for what I’ve done, or we can get on with trying to prevent disaster. What do you want to do?”

Sonja flexed her fingers around the katana’s hilt. “Can you save it?”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“Have I ever let you down?”

She looked puzzled. “No. No, you haven’t.”

Chain looked up at Madeleine, who asked. “Can you stop it?”

“Yeah.”

“And I have to trust you, don’t I?”

“Not if you don’t want to. If you think I’m going to betray you—now or at any point in the future—it’s probably best that you kill me now. It’ll save a lot of heartbreak.”

“Faith is a decision,” she said. “Not a feeling. Go and do it. Go and do the impossible.”

“There’s something you can do for me, too.” He reached into his inside pocket for the envelope Pif had given him. “Chain, have you still got my rat?”

“I… I lost it when Hijo jumped me.”

“You balvan. Really.” Petrovitch pressed the papers on Madeleine. “Look after this for me.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“The secrets of the universe laid bare. That’s all.” He watched her hold the envelope open and peer curiously inside, then went with Sonja onto the temple platform.

There was the table, and the screen, and the keyboard.

“This isn’t what you’re looking for,” said Sonja, and she walked through the temple to the other side. She laid her hand on one of the lions heads, and part of the wooden platform in front of Petrovitch popped up. “But this is.”

The square of wood rose into the air, and underneath it grew a tight spiral staircase. Petrovitch leaned over the gap and looked down. It was dark inside, and cool air rose from it, making his skin prickle.

Sonja pointed her sword to the floor and started down the metal steps. “Hijo never came down here. If he had, he’d have known.”

“Known what?”

She was already below the temple. Lights tripped on, and Petrovitch descended, clinging on to the narrow handrail. When his head dipped beneath the level of the ceiling, the meaning of Sonja’s words became clear.

The room was Oshicora’s shrine to everything he’d lost, and to everything he hoped to regain. Books, scrolls, statuary, a hand-painted silk screen. Lacquerware, sandals, a kimono, a flag. A skin drum. A full set of samurai armor displayed on a mannequin. A black stone bowl containing faded pink blossom. A hanger on the wall, displaying a short sword and an empty scabbard.

“So,” she said, “Hijo didn’t know. He thought I was doing what he wanted. Instead, I’d tricked him into doing what I wanted.”

Petrovitch ran his hand over the cold stone, bright metal, smooth wood. He touched the thin pages and the soft silk. He caught fibers in the rough skin at the ends of his fingers.

“Where’s the interface?” he asked.

Sonja wiped Hijo’s blood off on her sleeve and resheathed the katana. “Through here.”

There was another, smaller room, shielded by the folding screen. Petrovitch saw a clinically white room with cupboards all around. In the center was a dentist’s chair and a coil of cable that ended in something like a modified network connector.

His eyes narrowed, then went wide. “Oh. You’re joking. So that’s what your father needed Sorenson for.”

“I know what to do,” said Sonja, “if that helps.”

“Not much.”

She busied herself with the stainless steel cylinder that was the length of a shock-stick and had the bore of drainpipe. She plugged it into the wall to let it charge, and opened a drawer. It was full of sealed plastic bags, each containing a T-shaped device, a disc with a spike like a giant drawing pin.

Petrovitch picked up one of the bags and turned it in his hand: he knew where that spike was going.

“Do you have…?” he asked.

“No. My father would not allow me one until he’d tested it thoroughly.”

“And did he?”

“You’ll have to ask him when you get there.” She washed her hands up to her elbows, then tore a bag open and slotted its contents into the steel dispenser. She closed the access slot, and a light winked from red to green.