“Some stuff?” Natsume nodded. “What stuff would that be, then?”

“We.” I’d never seen the surfer so locked up. “I need your help, Nik.”

“Yes, clearly. But in what?”

“It’s.”

Suddenly, Natsume laughed. It was a gentle sound, light on mockery.

“Jack,” he said. “This is me. Just because I grow flowers now, do you think it means you can’t trust me? You think Renouncing means selling out your humanity?”

Brasil looked away at the corner of the shallow garden.

“You’ve changed, Nik.”

“Of course I have. It’s over a century, what did you expect?” For the first time, a faint rash of irritation marred Natsume’s monkish serenity. He got up to better face Brasil. “That I’d spend my whole life on the same beach, riding waves? Climbing up suicidal hundred-metre pitches for thrills? Cracking locks on corporate bioware, stealing the stuff for quick cash on the black market and calling it neoQuellism? The creeping bloody revolution.”

“That’s not—”

“Of course I’ve changed, Jack. What kind of emotional cripple would I be if I hadn’t?”

Brasil came down a step towards him, abruptly. “Oh, you think this is better?”

He slung an arm at the filigree poppies. Their latticed roots seemed to quiver with the violence of the gesture.

“You crawl off into this fucking dream world, grow flowers instead of living, and you’re going to accuse me of being emotionally crippled. Get fucked, Nik. You’re the cripple, not me.”

“What are you achieving out there, Jack? What are you doing that’s worth so much more than this?”

“I was standing on a ten-metre wall four days ago.” Brasil made an effort to calm himself. His shout sank to a mutter. “That’s worth all of this virtual shit twice over.”

“Is it?” Natsume shrugged. “If you die under one of those waves out at Vchira, you got it written down somewhere that you don’t want to come back?”

“That isn’t the point, Nik. I’ll come back, but I’ll still have died. It’ll cost me the new sleeve, and I’ll have been through the gate. Out there in the real world you hate so much—”

“I don’t hate—”

“Out there, actions have consequences. If I break something, I’ll know about it because it’ll fucking hurt.”

“Yes, until your sleeve’s enhanced endorphin system kicks in, or until you take something for the pain. I don’t see your point.”

“My point?” Brasil gestured at the poppies again, helplessly. “None of this is fucking real, Nik.”

I caught a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye. Turned and spotted a pair of monks, drawn by the raised voices and hovering at the arched entrance to the quadrangle. One of them, quite literally hovering.

His feet were a clear thirty centimetres off the uneven paving.

“Norikae-san?” asked the other.