“Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?”

I nodded greyly. “So she still thinks she’s—”

“At the moment, yes.”

I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.

“Kovacs.”

I looked back at Tres impatiently. “Yeah, what?”

“Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.”

“No. It isn’t.”

Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.

“Hello there Micky Serendipity.”

“Hello.”

“I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.” She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“I’m fine here.”

She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.

“I understand we may have to move soon,” she said quietly. “On foot.”

“Maybe. I’d say we’ve got a few more days yet, but in the end it comes down to luck. There was an aerial patrol yesterday evening. We heard them but they didn’t come close enough to spot us, and they can’t fly with anything sophisticated enough to scan for body heat or electronic activity.”

“Ah—so that much remains the same.”

“The orbitals?” I nodded. “Yeah, they still run at the same parameters as when you—”

I stopped. Gestured. “As they always did.”

Again, the long, evaluative stare. I looked back blandly

“Tell me,” she said finally. “How long has it been. Since the Unsettlement, I mean.”

I hesitated. It felt like taking a step over a threshold.

“Please. I need to know.”

“About three hundred years, local.” I gestured again. “Three hundred and twenty, near enough.”

I didn’t need Envoy training to read what was behind her eyes.

“So long,” she murmured.