“You want to bellow my name a couple more times,” I asked him evenly. “In case someone didn’t get it first time round.”

“Oops.” He cocked his head at an angle and raised his arms wide in a gesture of apology that wasn’t fooling anybody. He was still angry with me. “Just my naturally open nature, I guess. So what are we calling you these days?”

“Forget it. You going to stand down there all day?”

“I don’t know, you going to give me a hand up?”

I reached down. Segesvar grasped the offered hand and levered himself up onto the wharf. Twinges ran down my arm as I lifted him, subsiding to a fiery ache. Still paying for my arrested fall back under the eyrie. The haiduci straightened his immaculately tailored jacket and ran a fastidious hand through shoulder-length black hair. Radul Segesvar had made it far enough early enough to finance clone copies of the body he’d been born in and the face he wore beneath the sunlenses was his own—pale despite the climate, narrow and hard-boned, no visible trace of Japanese ancestry.

It topped an equally slim body that I guessed was in its late twenties.

Segesvar generally lived each clone through from early adulthood until, in his own words, it couldn’t fuck or fight like it ought to. I didn’t know how many times he’d re-sleeved because in the years since our shared youth in Newpest, I’d lost track of how long he’d actually lived. Like most haiduci and like me—he’d had his share of time in storage.

“Nice sleeve,” he said, pacing a circle around me. “Very nice. What happened to the other one?”

“Long story.”

“Which you’re not going to tell me.” He completed his circuit and took off the sunlenses. Stared into my eyes. “Right?”

“Right.”

He sighed theatrically. “This is disappointing, Tak. Very disappointing. You’re getting as close-mouthed as all those slit-eyed fucking northerners you spend your time with.”

I shrugged. “I’m half slit-eyed fucking northerner myself, Rad.”

“Ah yes, so you are. I forgot.”

He hadn’t. He was just pushing. In some ways nothing much had changed since our days hanging out at Watanabe’s. He was always the one that got us into fights back then. Even the meth dealer had been his idea originally.

“There’s a coffee machine inside. Want to get some?”

“If we must. You know, if you’d come out to the farm, you could have had real coffee and a seahemp spliff, hand-rolled on the thighs of the best holoporn actresses money can buy.”

“Some other time.”