It was my fault as much as anyone’s. My mother and sisters were unfamiliar semi-strangers already, memories of the bonds we’d once had blurred indistinct alongside the sharp shining functions of my Envoy recall. I’d lost track, didn’t know where they were in their lives. The salient novelty was my mother’s marriage to a Protectorate recruiting executive. I met him once, and wanted to kill him. The feeling was probably mutual. In my family’s eyes, I’d crossed a line somewhere. Worse still, they were right—all we disagreed on was where that line had been. For them it was neatly epoxied to the boundary between my military service to the Protectorate and my step into unsanctioned for-personal-profit criminality. For me, it had come less specifically at some unnoticed moment during my time in the Corps.

But try explaining that to someone who hasn’t been there.

I did try, briefly. The immediate and obvious pain it caused my mother was enough to make me stop. It was shit she didn’t need.

On the horizon, the sun was gone to molten leavings. I looked south east where the dark was gathering, approximately towards Newpest.

I wouldn’t be dropping in to see anyone on my way through.

Leathery flap of wings past my shoulder. I glanced up and spotted a ripwing banking about over the freight pod, black turning iridescent shades of green in the last rays of the sun. It circled me a couple of times, then came in to land on the walkway an insolent half dozen metres away. I edged round to watch it. Down around Kossuth they flock less and grow bigger than the ones I’d seen in Drava, and this specimen was a good metre from webbed talons to beak. Big enough to make me glad I was armed. It folded its wings with a rasp, lifted one shoulder in my direction and regarded me unblinkingly from a single eye. It seemed to be waiting for something.

“Fuck are you looking at?”

For a long moment the ripwing was silent. Then it arched its neck, flexed its wings and screeched at me a couple of times. When I didn’t move, it settled down and cocked its head at a quizzical angle.

“I’m not going to see them,” I told it after a while. “So don’t try talking me into it. It’s been too long.”

But still, in the fast growing gloom around me, that itch of family I’d felt in the pod. Like warmth from the past.

Like not being alone.

The ripwing and I sat hunched six metres apart, watching each other in silence while darkness fell.

TWENTY-ONE