I nodded. “Two years ago. I went to find her when I got back from Latimer. I found Josef instead, snivelling by her grave. I got the story out of him.” My face twitched with the memory. “Eventually. He gave up the names of the helmsman and the officiator, so I tracked them down next. Like I said, they couldn’t tell me anything useful.”

“And then?”

“And then I went back to the village and I killed the rest of them.”

She shook her head slightly. “The rest of who?”

“The rest of the village. Every motherfucker I could find who was an adult there the day she died. I got a datarat in Millsport to run population files for me, names and faces. Everyone who could have lifted a finger to help her and didn’t. I took the list and I went back up there and I slaughtered them.” I looked at my hands. “And a few others who got in my way.”

She was staring at me as if she didn’t know me. I made an irritable gesture.

“Oh, come on, Virginia. We’ve both done worse than that on more worlds than I can remember right now.”

“You’ve got Envoy recall,” she said numbly.

I gestured again. “Figure of speech. On seventeen worlds and five moons. And that habitat in the Nevsky Scatter. And—”

“You took their stacks?”

“Josef and the priests’, yes.”

“You destroyed them?”

“Why would I do that? It’s exactly what they’d want. Oblivion after death. Not to come back.” I hesitated. But it seemed pointless to stop now.

And if I couldn’t trust Vidaura, then there was no one else left. I cleared my throat and jabbed a thumb northward. “Back that way, out on the Weed Expanse, I’ve got a friend in the haiduci. Among other business ventures, he breeds swamp panthers for the fight pits. Sometimes, if they’re good, he fits them with cortical stacks. That way, he can download injured winners into fresh sleeves and tip the odds.”

“I think I see where this is going.”

“Yeah. For a fee, he takes the stacks I give him, and loads their owners into some of his more over-the-hill panthers. We give them time to get used to the idea, then put them into the low-grade pits and see what happens. This friend can make good money running matches where it’s known humans have been downloaded into the panthers; there’s some kind of sick subculture built around it in fight circles apparently.” I tipped my coffee canister and examined the dregs in the bottom. “I imagine they’re pretty much insane by now. Can’t be much fun being locked inside the mind of something that alien in the first place, let alone when you’re fighting tooth and nail for your life in a mud pit. I doubt there’s much conscious human mind left.”