I felt a light tautening across my nerves. “Makes you say that?”

“Ah, see.” He grinned again. “If you were from around here, you wouldn’t have to ask me that. You’d know me. I know everyone here in Kuraminato.”

“Good for you.”

“Not off that rayhunter though, are you?”

I put down my chopsticks. Bleakly, I wondered if I would have to kill this man later. “What are you, a detective?”

“No!” He laughed delightedly. “What I am, I’m a qualified fluid dynamics specialist. Qualified, and unemployed. Well, underemployed, let’s say. These days I mostly crew for that trawler out there, the green painted one. But my folks put me through college back when the Mikuni thing was going on. Real time, they couldn’t afford virtual. Seven years. They figured anything to do with the flow had to be a safe living, but of course by the time I qualified, it wasn’t any more.”

“So why’d you stay?”

“Oh, this isn’t my hometown. I’m from a place about a dozen klicks up the coast, Albamisaki.”

The name dropped through me like a depth charge. I sat frozen, waiting for it to detonate. Wondering what I might do when it did.

I made my voice work. “Really?”

“Yeah, came here with a girl I met at college. Her family’s here. I thought we’d start a keel-building business, you know make a living off trawler repair until I could maybe get some designs in to the Millsport yacht co-ops.” He pulled a wry face. “Well. Started a family instead, you know. Now I’m too busy just staying one step ahead with food and clothes and schooling.”

“What about your parents? See much of them?”

“No, they’re dead.” His voice caught on the last word. He looked away, mouth suddenly pressed tight.

I sat and watched him carefully.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

He cleared his throat. Looked back at me.

“Nah. Not your fault, is it. You couldn’t know. It’s just it.” He drew breath as if it hurt him. “It only happened a year or so ago. Out of the fucking sky. Some fucking maniac went crazy with a blaster. Killed dozens of people. All old people, in their fifties and older. It was sick. Didn’t make any sense.”

“Did they get the guy?”

“No.” Another painfully hitched breath. “No, he’s still out there somewhere. They say he’s still killing, they can’t seem to stop him. If I knew a way to find him, I’d fucking stop him.”

I thought briefly of an alley I’d noticed between storage sheds at the far end of the harbour complex. I thought about giving him his chance.

“No money for re-sleeving, then? For your parents, I mean?”

He gave me a hard look. “You know we don’t do that.”

“Hey, you said it. I’m not from around here.”