He sank back into the automould, clutching at his arm where I’d kicked it. He was lucky, I thought with a brutality that almost instantly seemed too much effort, that I hadn’t broken it for him.

Fucking set fire to it or something.

“Who.” His mouth worked. “Who are you? You’re not Hirayasu.”

I put a splayed hand to my face and mimed taking off a Noh mask with a flourish. Bowed slightly.

“Well done. I am not Yukio. Though I do have him in my pocket.”

His face creased. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

I reached into my jacket and pulled out one of the cortical stacks at random. In fact it wasn’t Hirayasu’s yellow-striped designer special, but from the look on Plex’s face I judged the point made.

“Fuck. Kovacs?”

“Good guess.” I put the stack away again. “The original. Accept no imitations. Now, unless you want to be sharing a pocket with your boyhood pal here, I suggest you go on answering my questions the way you were when you thought I was him.”

“But, you’re.” He shook his head. “You’re never going to get away with this, Kovacs. They’ve got. They’ve got you looking for you, man.”

“I know. They must be desperate, right?”

“It isn’t funny, man. He’s fucking psychotic. They’re still counting the bodies he left in Drava. They’re really dead. Stacks gone, the works.”

I felt a brief spike of shock, but it was almost distant. Behind it there was the grim chill that had come with my sight of Anton and the Skull Gang in Dig 301’s recorded footage. Kovacs had gone to New Hok and he’d done the groundwork with Envoy intensity. He’d brought back what he needed. Corollary. What he couldn’t use he’d left in smoking ruin behind him.

“So who’d he kill, Plex?”

“I. I don’t know, man.” He licked his lips. “A lot of people. All her team, all the people she—”

He stopped. I nodded, mouth tight. Detached regret for Jad, Kiyoka and the others clamped and tamped down where it wouldn’t get in the way.

“Yes. Her. Next question.”

“Look, man, I can’t help you. You shouldn’t even—”

I shifted towards him, impatiently. Raging at the edges like lit paper. He flinched again, worse than he had when he thought I was Yukio.

“Alright, alright. I’ll tell you. Just leave me alone. What do you want to know?”

Go to work. Soak it up.

“First of all I want to know what you know, or think you know, about Sylvie Oshima.”

He sighed. “Man, I told you not to get involved. Back in that sweeper bar. I warned you.”

“Yeah, me and Yukio both, it seems. Very public-spirited of you, running round warning everybody. Why’d she scare you so much, Plex?”

“You don’t know?”