I shut down the updraft of family feeling that had stabbed through me on the Haiduci’s Daughter. Let go a compressed breath.

“So where will he look for you?”

I nodded at the model of Millsport in front of us, brooding on the densely settled islands and platforms. “I think he’s probably looking for me right there. It’s where I always came when I wasn’t offworld. It’s the biggest urban environment on the planet, the easiest place to disappear if you know it well, and it’s right across the bay from Rila. If I were an Envoy, that’s where I’d be. Hidden, and in easy striking distance.”

For a moment, my unaccustomed aerial viewpoint grew dizzying as I looked down on the wharflines and streets, unfocused memory down the disjointed centuries blurring the old and new into a smudged familiarity.

And he’s down there somewhere.

Come on, there’s no way you can be sure of—

He’s down there somewhere like an antibody, perfectly shaped to match the intruder he’s looking for, asking soft questions in the flow of city life, bribing, threatening, levering, breaking, all the things that they taught us both so well.

He’s breathing deep as he does it, living it for its own dark and joyous sake like some inverted version of Jack Soul Brasil’s philosophy of life.

Plex’s words came trickling back to me.

He’s got an energy to him as well, it feels as if he can’t wait to get things done, to get started on everything. He’s confident, he’s not scared of anything, nothing’s a problem. He laughs at everything—

I thought back along my train of associations in the last year, the people I might have endangered.

Todor Murakami, if he was still hanging around undeployed. Would my younger self know him? Murakami had joined the Corps almost the same time as I had, but we hadn’t seen much of each other in the early days, hadn’t deployed together until Nkrumah’s Land and Innenin. Would Aiura’s pet Kovacs make the connection? Would he be able to play Murakami successfully? Come to that, would Aiura let her newly double-sleeved creation anywhere near a serving Envoy? Would she dare?

Probably not. And Murakami, with the full weight of the Corps behind him, could look after himself.

Isa.

Oh, shit.

Fifteen-year-old Isa, wearing tough-as-titanium woman-of-the-world like a pantherskin jacket over a soft and privileged upbringing among what was left of Millsport’s middle class. Razor-sharp smart, and just as brittle. Like a pretend edition of little Mito, just before I left for the Envoys. If he found Isa then—

Relax, you’re covered. Only place she can put you is in Tekitomura. They get Isa, they’ve got nothing.

But—

It took me that long, that heartbeat, to care. The knowledge of the gap was a cold revulsion welling up through me.