“Or remarkable focus. Killing him wouldn’t have helped, would it. By the time they walked that sleeve onto the ferry in Tek’to, it would have already infected enough neutral carriers to make it unstoppable. By the time it got off the other end in Millsport.” She shrugged. “You’ve got an invisible pandemic on your hands.”

“Yeah.”

Maybe she heard something in my voice. She looked round at me again and her face was miserable with contained anger.

“Alright, Kovacs. You fucking tell me. What would you have done?”

I looked back at her, saw the pain and terror there. I looked away, suddenly ashamed.

“I don’t know,” I said quietly. “You’re right, I wasn’t there.”

And as if, finally, I’d given her something she needed, she did leave me then.

Left me standing alone on the gantry, watching the ocean come at me with pitiless speed.

THIRTY-SEVEN

In the Gulf of Kossuth, the weather systems had calmed while we were away. After battering the eastern seaboard for well over a week, the big storm had clipped the northern end of Vchira around the ear and then wandered off into the southern Nurimono Ocean, where everyone assumed it would eventually die in the chilly waters towards the pole. In the calm that followed, there was a sudden explosion of marine traffic as everybody tried to catch up. Angelfire Flirt descended into the middle of it all like a street dealer chased into a crowded mall. She hooked about, curled in alongside the crawling bulk of the urbraft Pictures of the Floating World and moored demurely at the cheap end of the starboard dock just as the sun started to smear out across the western horizon.

Soseki Koi met us under the cranes.

I spotted his sunset-barred silhouette from the rayhunter’s rail and raised an arm in greeting. He didn’t return the wave. When Brasil and I got down to the dock and close up, I saw how he’d changed. There was a bright-eyed intensity to his lined face now, a gleam that might have been tears or a tempered fury, it was hard to tell which.

“Tres?” he asked us quietly.

Brasil jerked a thumb back at the rayhunter. “Still mending. We left her with. With Her.”

“Right. Good.”

The monosyllables fell into a general quiet. The sea wind fussed about us, tugging at hair, stinging my nasal cavities with its salts. At my side, I felt rather than saw Brasil’s face tighten, like a man about to probe a wound.

“We heard the newscasts, Soseki. Who made it back from your end?”

Koi shook his head. “Not many. Vidaura. Aoto. Sobieski.”

“Mari Ado?”

He closed his eyes. “I’m sorry, Jack.”