It was called out, over the sound of wind and keel-slashed waves. I looked right, towards the centre deck and saw her bracing herself at the entrance to the gantry, dressed in coveralls and a jacket she’d borrowed from Sierra Tres. The gripped pose made her look ill and unsteady on her feet. The silver grey hair blew back from her face in the wind, but weighted by the heavier strands it stayed low, like a drenched flag. Her eyes were dark hollows in the pale of her face.

Another fucking ghost.

“Sure. Why not?”

She made her way out onto the gantry, showing more strength in motion than she had standing. By the time she reached me, there was an ironic twist to her lips and her voice when she spoke was solid in the rushing slipstream.

Brasil’s medication had shrunk the wound on her cheek to a fading line.

“You don’t mind talking to a fragment, then?”

Once, in a porn construct in Newpest, I’d got wrecked on take with a virtual whore in a—failed—attempt to break the system’s desire fulfillment programming. I was very young then. Once, not so young, in the aftermath of the Adoracion campaign, I’d sat and talked drunken forbidden politics with a military AI. Once, on Earth, I’d got equally drunk with a copy of myself. Which, in the end, was probably what all those conversations had been about.

“Don’t read anything into it,” I told her. “I’ll talk to pretty much anybody.”

She hesitated. “I’m remembering a lot of detail.”

I watched the sea. Said nothing.

“We fucked, didn’t we?”

The ocean, pouring past beneath me. “Yeah. A couple of times.”

“I remember—” Another hovering pause. She looked away from me.

“You held me. While I was sleeping.”

“Yes.” I made an impatient gesture. “This is all recent, Nadia. Is that as far back as you can go?”

“It’s. Difficult.” She shivered. “There are patches, places I can’t reach. It feels like locked doors. Like wings in my head.”

Yes, that’s the limit system on the personality casing, I felt like saying. It’s there to stop you going into psychosis.

“Do you remember someone called Plex?” I asked her instead.

“Plex, yes. From Tekitomura.”

“What do you remember about him?”

The look on her face sharpened suddenly, as if it were a mask someone had just pressed themselves up behind.

“That he was a cheap yakuza plug-in. Fake fucking aristo manners and a soul sold to gangsters.”

“Very poetic. Actually, the aristo thing is real. His family were court level merchants once upon a time. They went broke while you were having your revolutionary war up there.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

I shrugged. “Just putting you straight on the facts.”