“Met a lot like me, have you?”

He filled our glasses. “Man, I was one like you. I grew up in Newpest just like you and I was a pirate, just like you. Used to work route robberies with the Seven Per Cent Angels. Crabshit stuff, skimmer cargo coming in over the Expanse.” He paused and looked me in the eyes. “I got caught.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, it was too bad. They took the flesh off me and they dumped me in the store for three decades, near enough. When I got out, all they had to sleeve me in was some wired-for-shit methhead’s body. My family had all grown up, or moved away, or, you know, died or something. I had a daughter, seven years old when I went in, she was ten years older than the sleeve I was wearing by the time I got out. She had a life and a family of her own. Even if I had known how to relate to her, she didn’t want to know me. I was just a thirty-year gap in her eyes. Likewise her mother, who’d found some other guy, had kids, well, you know how it goes.” He sank his drink, shivered and stared at me through suddenly teared eyes. He poured himself another. “My brother died in a bug crash a couple of years after I went away, no insurance, no way to get a re-sleeve. My sister was in the store, she’d gone in ten years after me, wasn’t getting out for another twenty. There’d been another brother, born a couple of years after I went away, I didn’t know what to say to him. My father and mother were separated—he died first, got his re-sleeve policy through and went off somewhere to be young, free and single again. Wouldn’t wait for her. I went to see her but all she did was stare out of the window with this smile on her face, kept saying soon, soon, it’ll be my turn soon. Gave me the fucking creeps.”

“So you went back to the Angels.”

“Good guess.”

I nodded. It wasn’t a guess, it was a riff on the lives of a dozen acquaintances from my own Newpest youth.

“Yeah, the Angels. They had me back, they’d gone up a notch or two in the scheme of things. Couple of the same guys I used to run with. They were knocking over hoverloaders on the Millsport runs from the inside. Good money, and with a meth habit to support I needed that. Ran with them for about two, three years. Got caught again.”

“Yeah?” I made an effort, tried to look mildly surprised. “How long this time?”

He grinned, like a man in front of a fire. “Eighty-five.”

We sat in silence for a while. Finally, Japaridze poured more whisky and sipped at his drink as if he didn’t really want it.