I glanced around at the billowing curves and hollows, felt the gentle but insistent way their lines sucked focus upward until your eyes started to ache. Hard morning light fell in from unseen vents overhead, but somehow on the way down it softened and changed. The clouded bluish alloy surfaces seemed to suck it in and the reflected light that came back was oddly muted. Below the mezzanine level I’d climbed to, patches of gloom alternated with gashes and holes in flooring where no sane human architect would have put them. A long way below that, the mountainside showed grey rock and sparse vegetation.

Only a ruin. Right.

He was younger than I’d expected.

For the first time, I started to wonder constructively exactly how young.

At an absolute minimum, he was certainly short a couple of formative experiences I’d had around Martian artefacts.

“Look, he’s not even fucking armed.”

I pitched my voice to carry outside.

“Boy, Kovacs! You’re so fucking confident, why don’t you come in and get me yourself?”

Sudden silence. Some muttering. I thought I caught a muffled guffaw from one of the locals. Then his voice, raised to match mine.

“That’s good eavesdropping gear they fitted you with.”

“Isn’t it.”

“You planning to give us a fight, or just listen in and shout cheap abuse?”

I grinned. “Just trying to be helpful. But you can have a fight if you want it—just come on in. Bring the hired help too, if you must.”

“I’ve got a better idea. How about I let my hired help run an open-all orifices train on your travelling companion, as long as it takes you to come out? You could use your neurachem to listen in on that as well if you like. Although, to be honest, the sound’ll probably carry enough without. They’re enthusiastic, these boys.”

The fury spiked up through me, too fast for rational thought. Muscles in my face skipped and juddered, and the frame of the Eishundo sleeve cabled rigid. For two sluggish heartbeats, he had me. Then the Envoy systems came soaking coldly through the emotion, bleaching it back out for assessment.

He isn’t going to do that. If Tanaseda traced you through Oshima and the Slipins, it’s because he knows she’s implicated in Yukio Hirayasu’s death. And if he knows that, he’ll want her intact. Tanaseda is old school and he’s promised an old-school execution. He isn’t going to want damaged goods.

And besides, this is you we’re talking about. You know what you’re capable of and it isn’t this.

I was younger then. Now. I am. I wrestled the concept in my head. Out there. I’m younger out there. There’s no telling—

Yes there is. This is Envoy bluff and you know it, you’ve used it enough yourself.

“Nothing to say about that?”