“No. It wasn’t her, it was the daughter. She was in a fishing accident. I don’t have the details. She was killed. I mean, stack-retrievable.” The fury was flaring up again, freezing the inside of my head in icy splashes. “Except of course it’s not fucking permitted.”

The final irony. The Martians, once the scourge of the old Earthbound faiths as knowledge of their million-year-old, prehuman, interstellar civilisation cracked apart the human race’s understanding of its place in the scheme of things. And now usurped by the New Revelation as angels; God’s first, winged creations, and no sign of anything resembling a cortical stack ever discovered in the few mummified corpses they left us. To a mind sunk in the psychosis of faith, the corollary was inescapable. Re-sleeving was an evil spawned in the black heart of human science, a derailing of the path to the afterlife and the presence of the godhead. An abomination.

I stared at the sea. The words fell out of my mouth like ashes. “She tried to run. Alone. Josef was already fucked in the head with the faith, he wouldn’t help her. So she took her daughter’s body, alone, and stole a skimmer. Went east along the coast, looking for a channel she could cut through to get her south to Millsport. They hunted her down and brought her back. Josef helped them. They took her to a punishment chair the priests had built in the centre of the village and they made her watch while they cut the stack from her daughter’s spine and took it away. Then they did the same thing to her. While she was conscious. So she could appreciate her own salvation.”

I swallowed. It hurt to do it. Around us, the tourist crowd ebbed and flowed like the multicoloured idiot tide it was.

“Afterwards, the whole village celebrated the freeing of their souls. New Revelation doctrine says a cortical stack must be melted to slag, to cast out the demon it contains. But they’ve got some superstitions of their own up on the North arm. They take the stacks out in a two-man boat, sealed in sonar reflective plastic. They sail fifty kilometres out to sea and somewhere along the way, the officiating priest drops the stacks overboard. He has no knowledge of the ship’s course, and the helmsman’s forbidden to know when the stacks have been dropped.”

“That sounds like a pretty easily corrupted system.”

“Maybe. But not in this case. I tortured both of them until they died, and they couldn’t tell me. I’d have a better chance of finding Sarah’s stack if Hirata’s Reef had fucking tipped over on top of it.”

I felt her gaze on me and, finally, turned to face it.

“So you’ve been there,” she murmured.