This life is like the sea. There’s a three-moon tidal slop running out there and if you let it, it’ll tear you apart from everyone and everything you ever cared about.

Japaridze’s homespun wheelhouse wisdom, but it bit deep. You could be a Seven Per Cent Angel thug, you could be a Harlan family heavyweight.

Some things leave the same teethmarks on everyone. You could even be Quellcrist fucking Falconer.

Or not, I reminded myself.

Go easy on her.

“You didn’t know?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know, I dreamed it. I think I knew it was a long time. I think they told me.”

“Who told you?”

“I—” She stopped. Lifted her hands fractionally off the bed and let them fall. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”

She closed her hands up into loosely curled fists on the bed.

“Three hundred and twenty years,” she whispered.

“Yeah.”

She lay, looking down the barrel of it for a while. Waves tapped at the hull. I found that, despite myself, I’d taken a seat in the armchair.

“I called you,” she said suddenly.

“Yeah. Hurry, hurry. I got the message. Then you stopped calling. Why was that?”

The question seemed to floor her. Her eyes widened, then the gaze fell inward on itself again.

“I don’t know. I knew.” She cleared her throat. “No, she knew you’d come for me. For her. For us. She told me that.”

I leaned forward in the seat. “Sylvie Oshima told you? Where is she?”

“In here, somewhere. In here.”

The woman in the bunk closed her eyes. For a minute or so I thought she’d gone to sleep. I would have left the cabin, gone back up on deck, but there was nothing up there I wanted. Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open again and she nodded as if something had just been confirmed in her ear.

“There’s a.” She swallowed. “A space down there. Like a pre-millennial prison. Rows of cells. Walkways and corridors. There are things down there she says she caught, like catching bottleback from a charter yacht. Or maybe caught like a disease? It’s, it shades together. Does that make any sense?”

I thought about the command software. I remembered Sylvie Oshima’s words on the crossing to Drava.

—mimint interactive codes trying to replicate themselves, machine intrusion systems, construct personality fronts, transmission flotsam, you name it. I have to be able to contain all that, sort it, use it and not let anything leak through into the net. It’s what I do. Time and time again. And no matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. There’s stuffbedded down there, beyond the baffles, that I don’t want to even think about.