“I didn’t have to help you,” Isa said in a small voice. “I could have sold you out a week back, Tak. Probably would have made more from that than you’re paying me for this shit. Don’t forget that.”

“We won’t,” I assured her, with a warning glance at Ado. “Now, aside from the fact that no one thinks we’re here, what else have you got?”

What Isa had, all loaded onto innocuous, matt-black datachips, was the backbone of the raid. Schematics of the security systems at Rila Crags, including the modified procedures for the Harlan’s Day festivities. Up-to date dynamic forecast maps of the currents in the Reach for the next week.

Millsport PD street deployment and water traffic protocols for the duration of the celebrations. Most of all, she’d brought herself and her bizarre shadow identity at the fringes of the Millsport datacrime elite. She’d agreed to help, and now she was in deep with a role in the proceedings that I suspected was the main source of her current edginess and lost cool.

Taking part in an assault on Harlan family property certainly constituted rather more cause for stress than her standard forays into illicit data brokerage. If I hadn’t more or less dared her into it, I doubted she would have had anything to do with us.

But what fifteen-year-old knows how to refuse a dare?

I certainly didn’t at her age.

If I had, maybe I’d never have ended up in that back alley with the meth dealer and his hook. Maybe—

Yeah, well. Who ever gets a second shot at these things? Sooner or later, we all get in up to our necks. Then it s just a question of keeping your face out of the swamp, one stumbling step at a time.

Isa covered it well enough to deserve applause. Whatever misgivings she had, by the time we’d finished the handover, her ruffled feathers had smoothed and she had her laconic Millsport drawl back in place.

“Did you find Natsume?” I asked her.

“Yeah, as it happens I did. But I’m not convinced you’ll want to talk to him.”

“Why not?”

She grinned. “Because he got religion, Kovacs. Lives in a monastery now, over on Whaleback and Ninth.”

“Whaleback? That the Renouncer place?”

“Sure is.” She struck an absurdly solemn, prayerful pose that didn’t match her hair and face. “Brotherhood of the Awoken and Aware. Renounce henceforth all flesh, and the world.”

I felt my mouth twitch. Beside me, Mari Ado sat humourless as a ripwing.

“I got no problem with those guys, Isa. They’re harmless. Way I see it, they’re stupid enough to shun female company, that’s their loss. But I’m surprised someone like Natsume’d buy into something like that.”

“Ah, but you’ve been away. They take women too, these days.”

“Really?”