We worked for thirty-eight hours solid, ironing out the bugs in the assault plan, running what-if scenarios and bickering. Every now and then one of us would vent an exasperated grunt, fall backwards into the knee deep water of the mapping construct and backstroke off out of the archipelago, towards the horizon. Provided you chose your angle of escape carefully and didn’t collide with an unremembered islet or scrape your back on a reef, it was an ideal way to get away and unwind. Floating out there with the voices of the others grown faint with distance, you could feel your consciousness loosen off again, like a cramped muscle relaxing.

At other times, you could get a similar effect by blinking out completely and returning to the hotel-suite level. There was food and drink there in abundance and though neither ever actually reached your stomach, the subroutines for taste and alcoholic inebriation had been carefully included.

You didn’t need to eat in the construct any more than you needed to sleep, but the acts of consuming food and drink themselves still had a pleasantly soothing effect. So sometime past the thirty-hour mark, I was sitting alone, working my way through a platter of bottleback sashimi and knocking back Saffron sake, when Virginia Vidaura blinked into existence in front of me.

“There you are,” she said, with an odd lightness of tone.

“Here I am,” I agreed.

She cleared her throat. “How’s your head?”

“Cooling off.” I raised the sake cup in one hand. “Want some? Saffron Archipelago’s finest nigori. Apparently.”

“You’ve got to stop believing what you read on labels, Tak.”

But she took the flask, summoned a cup directly into her other hand and poured.

“Kampai,” she said.

“Por nosotros.”

We drank. She settled onto the automould opposite me. “Trying to make me feel homesick?”

“Don’t know. You trying to blend in with the locals?”

“I haven’t been on Adoracion in better than a hundred and fifty years, Tak. This is my home now. I belong here.”

“Yeah, you’ve certainly integrated into the local political scene well enough.”

“And the beach life.” She reclined a little on the automould and raised one leg sideways. It was sleekly muscled and tanned from life on Vchira, and the spray-on swimsuit she was wearing showed it off full-length. I felt my pulse pick up slightly.

“Very beautiful,” I admitted. “Yaros said you’d spent everything you had on that sleeve.”

She seemed to realise the overtly sexual nature of the pose then, and lowered her leg. She cupped her sake in both hands and leaned forward over it.

“What else did he tell you?”

“Well, it wasn’t a long conversation. I was just trying to find out where you were.”

“You were looking for me.”

“Yeah.” Something stopped me at that simple admission. “I was.”

“And now that you’ve found me, what?”