I gave Koi the last of my stare and made for the door. I saw Vidaura and Brasil exchange a look, and then she followed me out. Neither of us said anything as we rode the transparent elevator down through a light-filled central space to the ground. Halfway down, in a large, glass-walled office, I spotted Tudjman shouting inaudibly at an impassive Sierra Tres. Clearly the demand for a higher ratio virtual environment wasn’t being well received.

The elevator let us out into an open-fronted atrium and the sound of the street outside. I crossed the lobby floor, stepped out into the throng of tourists on the promenade, then hooked an autocab with a wave of my arm. Virginia Vidaura grabbed my other arm as the cab settled to the ground.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“You know where I’m going.”

“No.” She tightened up on me. “No, you’re not. Koi’s right, we don’t have time for this.”

“It isn’t going to take long enough to worry about.”

I tried to move towards the autocab’s opening hatch, but short of hand-to-hand combat there was no way. And even that, against Vidaura, was a far from reliable option. I swung back towards her, exasperated.

“Virginia, let me go.”

“What happens if it goes wrong, Tak. What happens if this priest—”

“It isn’t going to go wrong. I’ve been killing these sick fucks for over a year now and—”

I stopped. Vidaura’s surfer sleeve was almost as tall as my own and our eyes were only about a handsbreadth apart. I could feel her breath on my mouth, and the tension in her body. Her fingers dug into my arm.

“That’s it,” she said. “Stand down. You talk to me, Tak. You stand down and you fucking talk to me about this.”

“What is there to talk about?”

She smiles at me across the mirrorwood table. It isn’t a face much like the one I remember—it’s a good few years younger, for one thing—but there are echoes in the new sleeve of the body that died in a hail of Kalashnikov fire before my eyes, a lifetime ago. The same length of limb, the same sideways fall of raven hair.

Something about the way she tips her head so that hair slides away from her right eye. The way she smokes. The way she still smokes.

Sarah Sachilowska. Out of storage, living her life.

“Well, nothing I guess. If you’re happy.”

“I am happy.” She plumes smoke away from the table, momentarily irritated.