“Nah. Asshole got away with it. I ever find out who did it … they won’t make it to prison.” He works his jaw, hesitating, as if deciding whether or not to tell me what’s on his mind. “I’m pretty sure it was the Ratel.”

Was that why he went undercover? “If they hurt your partner, wouldn’t they then know who you were?”

“You’re not the only one wearing a false face and using a false name,” he says.

I wonder what he used to look like. What his real name is. I’m not sure he’d tell me, so instead I ask: “What was her name?”

He closes his eyes. “Juliane. Juliane Amello.”

“Pretty name.” I raise my coffee cup, and he taps his with mine. “In memory of Juliane.”

He smiles at my sentimentality, and drinks. “We’re toasting with the wrong stuff.”

“Can you stand the thought of more SynthGin or SynthTequila?”

He grimaces, and I laugh. I sober when he glances down at the tablet again. I don’t want to see a hollow re-creation of Mia. I don’t want to remember the way she was in the Vervescape. I don’t want to think about how she might have screwed Tila and me over. I want to preserve her in my mind as the woman she was when we were sixteen and scared, and she protected us.

“Did you find out anything about Mirage?” I ask, stalling further.

“Yeah. I think we’re OK. Another Knight told me Mirage was a bust for recording dreams, too, and that the King and Queen were annoyed. They’ve only managed to do it in small batches, with one or two people, and they want to do it with more people at once.”

“How many more?”

Nazarin sighs. “As many as possible. Get them hooked, get them buying straight from them. Money and information flows toward the Ratel. The Ratel becomes the true power in San Francisco.”

Hence why the government and Sudice have to squash them before they can’t any longer. What would San Francisco be like, if we were all under Ratel control? Even less privacy than now, if not even our dreams were our own.

“Still terrifying that the Ratel are using Zealots as experimental subjects. Have any died from Verve?”

“Plenty.”

“Why isn’t the government doing more? Surely they could do something to protect them?”

Nazarin’s face is impassive. “In this case, it means the government can watch what they’re doing. If the Ratel realizes the government knows, then they’ll do something more underground. Maybe take people to experiment on. Zealots are expendable.” His mouth tightens.

Expendable. Like Mia.

“They’re both as bad as each other in some ways, aren’t they?” I say, my stomach roiling. Am I really on the right side? Is there a right side in all of this?