“Virginia, come on. I’m an ex-Envoy, I’m a killer. I have uses. It’s kind of hard to see the Harlan family backing up the woman who nearly tore their whole oligarchy apart. And anyway, how the hell does something like that, a copy of someone that historically vital, get dumped in the skull of a plankton-standard deCom artist.”

“Hardly plankton-standard.” She poked at the sand some more. The lull in the conversation stretched. “Takeshi, you know Yaros and I …”

“Yeah, spoke to him. He’s the one told me you were down here. He said to say hello if I saw you. He hopes you’re okay.”

“Really?”

“Well, what he really said was ah fuck it, but I’m reading between the lines here. So it didn’t work out?”

She sighed. “No. It didn’t.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“There’s no point, it was all so long ago.” A vicious jab at the sand with the bottleback prod. “I can’t believe he’s still hung up on it.”

I shrugged. “We must be prepared to live on timescales of life our ancestors could only dream of, if we are to realise our own dreams.”

This rime the look she gave me was smeared with an ugly anger that didn’t suit her fine new features.

“You trying to be fucking funny?”

“No, I’m just observing that Quellist thought has a wide range of—”

“Shut up, Tak.”

The Envoy Corps was never big on traditional authority models, at least not as most humans would recognise them. But the habit, the assumption that my trainers were worth listening to was hard to break. And when you’ve had feelings that amount to—

Well, never mind.

I shut up. Listened to the waves.

A little while later, rusty saxophone notes started to float down to us from the house. Virginia Vidaura got up and looked back, expression softened somewhat, shading her eyes. Unlike a lot of the surfer crash pads I’d seen as I cruised this portion of the Strip the night before, Brasil’s house was a built structure, not blown. Mirrorwood uprights caught the rapidly strengthening sunlight and glinted like huge edged weapons. The wind-worn surfaces between offered restful shades of washed-out lime and grey, but all the way up four storeys of seaward facing rooms, the windows winked broadly at us.

An off-note from the sax dented the halting melody out of shape.

“Ouch.” I winced, perhaps exaggeratedly. The sudden softness in her face had caught me at an odd angle.

“At least he’s trying,” she said obscurely.

“Yeah. Well, I guess everyone’s awake now, anyway.”

She looked sideways at me, the same not-allowed glance. Her mouth quirked unwillingly.

“You’re a real bastard, Tak. You know that?”

“I’ve been told once or twice. So what’s breakfast like round here?”

Surfers.