She took a feline kind of offence at it, rolled a shrug of her own off one shoulder and turned her back on me as she went to the coffee machine beside the window. It looked as if she’d opted for a clone of her last sleeve, but there was a down-to-the-bone restlessness about her that I didn’t remember from forty years ago. She looked thinner too, a little hollow around the eyes, and she’d drawn her hair back in a sawn-off ponytail that seemed to be pulling her features too tight. Her custom-grown Adoracion face had the bone structure to carry that, it just made the bent nose more hawkish, the dark liquid eyes darker and the jaw more determined. But still, it didn’t look good on her.

“Well, I think you’ve got some fucking nerve actually, Kovacs. Coming back here like this after Sanction IV.”

Opposite me at the table, Virginia twitched. I shook my head minutely.

Ado glanced sideways. “Don’t you think, Sierra?”

Sierra Tres, as was her tendency, said nothing. Her face was also a younger version of the one I remembered, features carved elegantly in the space between Millsport Japanese and the gene salons’ idea of Inca beauty.

The expression it wore gave nothing away. She leaned against the blue colourwashed wall beside the coffeemaker, arms folded across a minimal polalloy top. Like most of the recently woken household, she wore little more than the spray-on swimwear and some cheap jewellery. A drained café-au-lait demitasse hung from one silver-ringed finger as if forgotten.

But the look she danced between Mari and me was a requirement to answer.

Around the breakfast table, the others stirred in sympathy. With whom, it was hard to tell. I soaked up the responses with Envoy-conditioned blankness, filing it away for assessment later. We’d been through Ascertainment the night before; the stylised grilling disguised as conversational reminiscence was done and I was confirmed in my new sleeve as who I claimed to be. That wasn’t the problem here.

I cleared my throat.

“You know, Mari, you could always have come along. But then Sanction IV’s a whole different planet, it has no tides and the ocean’s as flat as your chest, so it’s hard to see what fucking use you’d have been to me.”