“And you? Have you seen a forest fire? Offworld perhaps?”

“Seen a couple, yeah. On Loyko, I helped start one.” I went on looking into the maelstrom. “During the Pilots’ Revolt. A lot of their damaged vessels came down in the Ekaterina Tract and they ran a guerrilla war from the cover for months. We had to burn them out. I was an Envoy then.”

“I see.” His voice showed no reaction. “Did it work?”

“Yeah, for a while. We certainly killed a lot of them. But like you said, that kind of resistance lives for generations.”

“Yes. And the fire?”

I looked back at him again and smiled bleakly. “Took a long time to put out. Listen, Brasil’s wrong about this gap. There’s clear line of sight to the New Kanagawa security sweeps as soon as we round the headland here. Look at it. And the other side is reefed. We can’t come in from that side, we’ll get cut to pieces.”

He waded across and looked.

“Assuming they’re waiting for us, yes.”

“They’re waiting for something. They know me, they know I’ll be coming for her. Fuck it, they’ve got me on tap. All they’ve got to do is fucking ask me, ask him, and he’ll tell them what to expect, the little shit.”

The sense of betrayal was raw and immense, like something ripped out of my chest. Like Sarah.

“Then will he not know to come here?” Koi asked softly. “To Vchira?”

“I don’t think so.” I reran my own second-guessing rationale as I boarded the Haiduci’s Daughter in Tekitomura, hoping it sounded as convincing out loud. “He’s too young to know anything about my time with the Bugs, and there’s no official record they can feed him. Vidaura he knows, but for him she’s still a trainer back in the Corps. He’ll have no feel for what she might be doing now, or any post-service connection we might have. This Aiura bitch will give him what they’ve got on me, maybe on Virginia too. But they don’t have much and what they do have is misleading. We’re Envoys, we both covered our tracks and sewed the dataflows with tinsel every move we made.”

“Very thorough of you.”

I searched the lined face for irony, and found none apparent. I shrugged.

“It’s the conditioning. We’re trained to disappear without trace on worlds we hardly know. Doing it somewhere you grew up is child’s play. All these motherfuckers have got to work with is underworld rumour and a series of sentences in storage. That’s not much to go on with a whole globe to cover and no aerial capacity. And the one thing he probably thinks he knows about me is that I’ll avoid Newpest like the plague.”