Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.

“Kovacs,” Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. “What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’d have thought that was my line.”

Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.

“You were told,” snapped Yukio, “to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?”

“These your high-powered friends, Micky?” It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.

I nodded. “You might say that.”

Yukio’s eyes flickered to the woman’s voice and he frowned. Maybe the reference to Micky had thrown him, maybe it was just the five to three disadvantage he’d just walked into.

“You know who I am,” he began. “So let’s not complicate matters any—”

“I don’t know who the fuck you are,” said Sylvie evenly. “But I know you’re in our place without an invitation. So I think you’d better just leave.”

The yakuza’s face flared disbelief.

“Yeah, get the fuck out of here.” Jadwiga threw up both hands in something midway between a combat guard and a gesture of obscene dismissal.

“Jad—” I started, but by then it had all already tipped too far.

Jad was already swinging forward, chin jutting, clearly bent on shoving the yak muscleman tit-for-tat back to the door. The muscle reached, still grinning. Jad dummied him, very fast, left him reaching and took him down with a judo trick. Someone yelled, behind me. Then, without fuss, Yukio produced a tiny black particle blaster and shot Jad with it.

She dropped, freeze-lit by the pale flash of the blast. The odour of roasted meat rolled out across the room. Everything stopped.

I must have been moving forward, because the second yak enforcer blocked me, face gone shocked, hands filled with a pair of Szeged slug guns. I froze, lifted empty warding hands in front of me. On the floor, the other thug tried to get up and stumbled over the remains of Jad.

“Right.” Yukio looked around the rest of the room, wagging the blaster mainly in Sylvie’s direction. “That’s enough. I don’t know what the fuck’s going on here, but you—”

Sylvie spat out a single word.

“Orr.”

Thunder detonated in the confined space again. This time, it was blinding.