“Yeah, yeah, I know. You half are, already. Thing is, Tak, when you were younger you tried not to let it show so much.” He moved his right hand up to cup the outer swell of an ample breast. The owner giggled and nibbled at his ear. “Come on, girls. Let’s leave Kovacs-san to his brooding.”

I watched them rejoin the main throng of the party, Segesvar steering.

The pheromone-rich air stitched a vague regret into my guts and groin. I finished the take cookie, barely tasting it.

“Well, you look like you’re having fun.”

“Envoy camouflage,” I said reflexively. “We’re trained to blend in.”

“Yeah? Doesn’t sound like your trainer was up to much.”

I turned and there was a crooked grin across Virginia Vidaura’s face as she stood there with a tumbler in each hand, I glanced around for signs of Brasil, couldn’t see him in the vicinity.

“Is one of those for me?”

“If you like.”

I took the tumbler and sipped at it. Millsport single malt, probably one of the pricier western rim distilleries. Segesvar wasn’t a man to let his prejudices get in the way of taste. I swallowed some more and looked for Vidaura’s eyes. She was staring away across the Expanse.

“I’m sorry about Ado,” I said.

She reeled in her gaze and raised a finger to her lips.

“Not now, Tak.”

Not now, not later. We barely talked as we slipped away from the party, down into the corridors of the wet-bunker complex. Envoy functionality came online like an emergency autopilot, a coding of glances and understanding that stung the underside of my eyes with its intensity.

This, I remembered suddenly. This is what it was like. This is what we lived like, this is what we lived for.

And, in my room, as we found and fastened on each other’s bodies beneath hastily disarrayed clothing, sensing what we each wanted from the other with Envoy clarity, I wondered for the first time in better than a century of objective lifetime, why I had ever walked away.

It wasn’t a feeling that lasted in the comedown panther snarl of morning.

Nostalgia leached out with the fade of the take and the groggy edge of a hangover whose mildness I wasn’t sure I deserved. In its wake, I was left with not much more than a smug possessiveness as I looked at Vidaura’s tanned body sprawled in the white sheets and a vague sense of misgiving that I couldn’t pin to any single source.

Vidaura was still staring a hole in the ceiling.

“You know,” she said finally. “I never really liked Mari. She was always trying so hard to prove something to the rest of us. Like it just wasn’t enough just to be one of the Bugs.”

“Maybe for her it wasn’t.”