Orr snorted again. The woman looked at him and made a spiralling gesture. He compressed a sigh and went to his room.

“Let me worry about Jad.” Her face was clouded with distance, engaged at levels I couldn’t sense. “Just get cutting. And while you’re at it, you want to tell me who exactly we’ve killed here?”

“Sure.” I went to Yukio’s corpse and manhandled it onto what was left of its front. “This is Yukio Hirayasu—local yak, but he’s someone important’s son apparently.”

The knife burred into life in my hand, vibrations backing up unpleasantly as far as the wound in my side. I shook off a teeth-on-edge shiver, placed one cupped palm on the back of Yukio’s skull to steady it and started cutting into the spine. The mingled stink of scorched flesh and shit didn’t help.

“And the other one?” she asked.

“Disposable thug. Never seen him before.”

“Is he worth taking with us?”

I shrugged. “Better than leaving him here, I guess. You can toss him over the side halfway to New Hok. This one I’d keep for ransom, if I were you.”

She nodded. “What I thought.”

The knife bit down through the last millimetres of spinal column and sliced rapidly into the neck below. I switched off, changed grip and started a new cut, a couple of vertebrae lower down.

“These are heavyweight yakuza, Sylvie.” My guts were chilling over as I recalled my phone conversation with Tanaseda. The sempai had cut a deal with me purely on the strength of Yukio’s value in one piece. And he’d been pretty explicit about what would happen if things didn’t stay that way. “Millsport-connected, probably with First Family links. They’re going to come after you with everything they’ve got.”

Her eyes were unreadable. “They’re going to come after you too.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“That’s very generous of you. However,” she paused as Orr came back out of his room fully dressed and headed out the door with a curt nod, “I think we have this handled. Ki is off wiping our electronic traces now. Orr can torchblast every room in this place in about half an hour. That leaves them with nothing but—”

“Sylvie, this is the yakuza we’re talking about.”

“Nothing but eye witnesses, peripheral video data, and besides which we’ll be on our way to Drava in about two hours’ time. And no one’s going to follow us there.” There was a sudden, stiff pride in her voice. “Not the yakuza, not the First Families, not even the fucking Envoys. No one wants to fuck with the mimints.”