“So, this is where you get off, is it?” She opened her eyes at the sky and glanced slantwise at me without lowering her head. “Give up, let scum like the First Families have it all, let the rest of humanity slip into a coma. Cancel the fight.”

“No, I suspect it’s already too late for that, Nadia.” I found there was none of the grim satisfaction in saying it that I’d expected. All I felt was tired. “Men like Koi are hard to stop once they’re set in motion. I’ve seen a few. And for better or worse, we are in motion now. You’re going to get your new Unsettlement, I think. Whatever I say or do.”

The stare still pinned me. “And you think it’s all a waste of time.”

I sighed. “I think I’ve seen it go wrong too many times on too many different worlds to believe this is going to be very different. You’re going to get a lot of people slaughtered for at best not very much in the way of local concessions. At worst, you’ll bring the Envoys down on Harlan’s World, and believe me, that you do not want in your worst nightmares.”

“Yes, Brasil told me. You used to be one of these stormtroopers.”

“That’s right.”

We watched the sun dying for a while.

“You know,” she said. “I don’t pretend to know anything about what they did to you in this Envoy Corps, but I have met men like you before. Self hatred works for you, because you can channel it out into rage at whatever targets for destruction come to hand. But it’s a static model, Kovacs. It’s a sculpture of despair.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. At base, you don’t really want things to get any better because then you’d be out of targets. And if the external focus for your hate ran out, you’d have to face up to what’s inside you.”

I snorted. “And what is that?”

“Exactly? I don’t know. But I can hazard a few guesses. An abusive parent. A life on the streets. A loss of some sort early in childhood. Betrayal of some kind. And sooner or later, Kovacs, you need to face the fact that you can never go back and do anything about that. Life has to be lived forward.”

“Yeah,” I said tonelessly. “In the service of the glorious Quellist revolution no doubt.”

She shrugged. “That’d have to be your choice.”

“I’ve already made my choices.”

“And yet you came to prise me free of the Harlan family. You mobilised Koi and the others.”

“I came for Sylvie Oshima.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Is that so?”

“Yes, that is so.”