“Because a couple of days ago you were telling me I’m not Nadia Makita. Now suddenly you want to blame me for something she did three hundred years ago. You need to sort out what you believe, Kovacs.”

I looked sideways at her. “You been talking to the others?”

“They told me your real name, if that’s what you mean. Told me a little about why you’re so angry with the Quellists. About this clown Joshua Kemp you went up against.”

I turned away to the onrushing seascape again. “I didn’t go up against Kemp. I was sent to help him. To build the glorious fucking revolution on a mudball called Sanction IV.”

“Yes, they said. ”

“Yeah, that’s what I was sent to do. Until, like every other fucking revolutionary I ever saw, Joshua Kemp turned into a sick-fuck demagogue as bad as the people he was trying to replace. And let’s get something else straight here, before you hear any more neoQuellist rationalisation. This clown Kemp, as you call him, committed every one of his atrocities including nuclear bombardment in the name of Quellcrist fucking Falconer.”

“I see. So you also want to blame me for the actions of a psychopath who borrowed my name and a few of my epigrams centuries after I died. Does that seem fair to you?”

“Hey, you want to be Quell. Get used to it.”

“You talk as if I had a choice.”

I sighed. Looked down at my hands on the gantry rail. “You really have been talking to the others, haven’t you. What did they sell you? Revolutionary Necessity? Subordination to the March of History? What? What’s so fucking funny?”

The smile vanished, twisted away into a grimace. “Nothing. You’ve missed the point, Kovacs. Don’t you see it doesn’t matter if I am really who I think I am? What if I am just a fragment, a bad sketch of Quellcrist Falconer? What real difference does that make? As far down as I can reach, I think I’m Nadia Makita. What else is there for me to do except live her life?”

“Maybe what you should do is give Sylvie Oshima her body back.”

“Yes, well right now that’s not possible,” she snapped. “Is it?”

I stared back at her. “I don’t know. Is it?”

“You think I’m holding her under down there? Don’t you understand? It doesn’t work like that.” She grabbed a handful of the silvery hair and tugged at it. “I don’t know how to run this shit. Oshima knows the systems far better than I do. She retreated down there when the Harlanites took us, left the body running on autonomic. She’s the one who sent me back up when you came for us.”

“Yeah? So what’s she doing in the meantime, catching up on her beauty sleep? Tidying her dataware? Come on!”

“No. She is grieving.”