We made our way up the hill and found the gate wedged open sufficiently to permit entry. Inside, a hall of polished Earthwood floors and beamed ceilings led through to a central garden and what looked like cherry trees in blossom. The walls on either side were hung with intricately coloured tapestries, and as we moved into the centre of the hall, a figure from one of them unwove itself into a mass of threads that hung in the air, drifted downward and became a man. He was dressed in the same monk’s coveralls we’d seen on the Renouncers back in the real world, but the body beneath wasn’t a synth.

“May I help you?” he asked gently.

Brasil nodded. “We’re looking for Nik Natsume. I’m an old friend.”

“Natsume.” The monk bowed his head a moment, then looked up again.

“He’s currently working in the gardens. I’ve advised him of your presence. I imagine he will be here in a moment.”

The last word was still leaving his mouth when a slim, middle-aged man with a grey ponytail walked in at the far end of the hall. As far as I could see it was a natural appearance, but unless the gardens were hidden just around the corner, the speed of his arrival alone was a sign that this was still all subtly deployed systems magic in action. And there were no marks of water or soil on his coveralls.

“Nik?” Brasil moved forward to meet him. “Is that you?”

“Certainly, I would argue that it is, yes.” Natsume glided closer across the wooden floor. Up close, there was something about him that reminded me painfully of Lazlo. The ponytail and the wiry competence in the way he stood, a hint of the same manic charm in his face. Couple of bypass jolts and a seven-metre crawl up a polished steel chimney. But where Lazlo’s eyes had always shown the white-knuckled leash he had himself on, Natsume appeared to have beaten his inner ramping to an agreed peace. His gaze was intent and serious, but it demanded nothing of the world it saw.

“Though I prefer to call myself Norikae these days.”

He exchanged a brief series of honorific gestures with the other monk, who promptly drifted up from the floor, shredded into a mass of coloured threads and rewove himself into the tapestry. Natsume watched him go, then turned and scrutinised both of us. “I’m afraid I don’t know either of you in those bodies.”

“You don’t know me at all,” I reassured him.

“Nik, it’s me, Jack. From Vchira.”

Natsume looked at his hands for a moment, then up at Brasil again.

“Jack Soul Brasil?”

“Yeah. What are you doing in here, man?”

A brief smile. “Learning.”

“What, you’ve got an ocean in here? Surf like at Four Finger Reef? Crags like the ones at Pascani? Come on, man.”