A tense minute and a half after that and I was lying on the floor of the eyrie, cackling quietly to myself and listening to the trickle of echoes in the alien architecture that had saved my life.

Nothing to it.

Eventually, I got up and made my way out.

In the cabin they’d kicked open every internal door that might hide a threat and in the bedroom Sylvie and I had shared, there were some signs of a struggle. I looked around the cabin, massaging my arm at the shoulder.

The lightweight bedside unit overturned, the sheets twisted and trailing from the bed to the floor. Elsewhere, they’d touched nothing.

There was no blood. No pervasive scent of weapons discharge.

On the floor in the bedroom, I found my knife and the GS Rapsodia.

Smashed from the surface of the bedside unit as it went over, skittering off into separate corners. They hadn’t bothered with them.

In too much of a hurry.

Too much of a hurry for what? To get down the mountain and pick up a dead Takeshi Kovacs?

I frowned slightly as I gathered up the weapons. Strange they hadn’t turned the place inside out. According to Dig 301, someone had been detailed to go down and recover my broken body, but that didn’t take the whole squad. It would have made sense to conduct at least a cursory search of the premises up here.

I wondered what kind of search they were conducting now, at the base of the mountain. I wondered what they’d do when they couldn’t find my body, how long they’d keep looking.

I wondered what he would do.

I went back into the main living space of the cabin and sat at the table. I stared into the depths of the datacoil. I thought the pain in my left elbow might be loosening a little.

“Dig?”

She fizzled into being on the other side of the table. Machine-perfect as ever, untouched by the events of the last couple of hours.

“Professor Serendipity?”

“You said you had footage of what happened here? Does that cover the whole site?”

“Yes, input and output run off the same imaging system. There are microcams for every eight cubic metres of the site. Within the eyrie complexes, recording is sometimes of poor—”

“Never mind that. I want you to show me Kovacs. Footage of everything he did and said here. Run it in the coil.”

“Commencing.”

I laid the Rapsodia and the Tebbit knife carefully on the table by my right hand.

“And Dig? Anyone else comes up that path, you tell me immediately they get in range.”

He had a good body.