It was minute and fundamental, a rustling in the texture of the construct, the scratch of crepe-edged shadows reaching along the walls at my back. I stopped dead and waited. Something curled like fingers over my head and around my neck.

“Hello, Sylvie.”

Without apparent transition, I was at the bar in Tokyo Crow. She leaned next to me, nursing a glass of whisky I didn’t remember her having when we were there for real. There was a similar drink in front of me. The clientele boiled around us at superamped speed, colours washed out to grey, no more substantial than the smoke from pipes at the tables or the distorted reflections in the mirrorwood under our drinks. There was noise, but it blurred and murmured at the lower edge of hearing, like the hum of high capacity machine systems on standby behind the walls.

“Ever since you came into my life, Micky Serendipity,” Sylvie Oshima said evenly, “it seems to have fallen apart.”

“It didn’t start here, Sylvie.”

She looked sideways at me. “Oh, I know. I said seems. But a pattern is a pattern, perceived or actual. My friends are all dead, Really Dead, and now I find it was you that killed them.”

“Not this me.”

“No, so I understand.” She lifted the whisky to her lips. “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel better.”

She knocked back the drink. Shivered as it went down.

Change the subject.

“So what she hears up there filters down here?”

“To an extent.” The glass went down on the bar again. Systems magic refilled it, slowly, like something soaking through the fabric of the construct.

First the reflected image, from top to bottom and then the actual glass from base to brim. Sylvie watched it sombrely. “But I’m still finding out how much we’re tangled through the sensory systems.”

“How long have you been carrying her, Sylvie?”

“I don’t know. The last year? Iyamon Canyon, maybe? That’s the first time I whited out. First time I woke up not knowing where I was, got this feeling like my whole existence was a room and someone’d been in, moving the furniture around without asking.”

“Is she real?”

A harsh laugh. “You’re asking me that? In here?”

“Alright, do you know where she came from? How you picked her up?”

“She escaped.” Oshima turned to look at me again. Shrugged. “That’s what she kept saying, escaped. Of course, I knew that anyway. She got out of one of the holding cells just like you did.”

Involuntarily, I glanced over my shoulder, looking for the corridor from the bedroom. No sign of it across the smoky crowding of the bar, no sign it had ever existed.

“That was a holding cell?”

“Yes. Woven complexity response, the command software builds them automatically around anything that gets into the capacity vault using language.”

“It wasn’t very hard to get out of.”