“Leave him alone, Nik. He’s wearing Eishundo custom, which he found, he tells me, whilst wandering around New Hokkaido killing mimints for a living. You do know what a mimint is, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Natsume was still looking at me. “We’ve heard the news about Mecsek in here.”

“It’s not exactly news these days, Nik.” Brasil told him, with evident glee.

“You’re really wearing Eishundo?”

I nodded.

“You know what that’s worth?”

“I’ve had it demonstrated to me a couple of times, yeah.”

Brasil shifted impatiently on the stonework of the quadrangle. “Look, Nik, are you going to give us this route or not? Or are you just worried we’re going to beat your record?”

“You’re going to get yourselves killed, stacks irretrievable, both of you. Why should I help you to do that?”

“Hey, Nik—you’ve renounced the world and the flesh, remember. Why should how we end up in the real world bother you in here?”

“It bothers me that you’re both fucking insane, Jack.”

Brasil grinned, maybe at the obscenity he’d finally managed to elicit from his former hero. “Yeah, but at least we’re still in the game. And you know we’re going to do this anyway, with or without your help. So—”

“Alright.” Natsume held up his hands. “Yes, you can have it. Right now. I’ll even talk you through it. For all the good it’ll do you. Yeah, go on. Go and die on Rila Crags. Maybe that’ll be real enough for you.”

Brasil just shrugged and grinned again.

“What’s the matter, Nik? You jealous or something?”

Natsume led us up through the monastery to a sparsely furnished suite of wood-floored rooms on the third floor, where he drew images in the air with his hands and conjured the Rila climb for us. Partly it was drawn direct from his memory as it now existed in the virtuality’s coding, but the data functions of the monastery allowed him to check the mapping against an objective real-time construct of Rila. His predictions turned out to be on the nail—the ripwing colonies had spread and the battlement flange had been modified, though the monastery’s datastack could offer no more than visual confirmation of this last. There was no way to tell what else was up there waiting for us.

“But the bad news cuts both ways,” he said, an animation in his voice that hadn’t been there before he started sketching the route. “That flange gets in their way as well. They can’t see down clearly, and the sensors get confused with the ripwing movement.”

I glanced at Brasil. No point in telling Natsume what he didn’t need to know—that the Crags’ sensor net was the least of our worries.