“We both walked away from the Corps,” Vidaura said finally. “Intact. Wiser. Now you’re just going to turn the rest of your life off like some fucking torch? Just bury yourself in a retribution subroutine?”

I summoned a grin. “I’ve had well over a hundred years of life, Virginia. I won’t miss it.”

“But it doesn’t solve anything.” Suddenly she was shouting. “It won’t bring Sarah back. When you’ve done this, she’ll still be gone. You’ve already killed and tortured everyone who was there. Does it make you feel any better?”

“People are starting to stare,” I said mildly.

“I don’t fucking care. You answer me. Does it make you feel any better?”

Envoys are superlative liars. But not to themselves or each other.

“Only when I’m killing them.”

She nodded grimly. “Yeah, that’s right. And you know what that is, Tak. We both do. It’s not like we haven’t seen it before. Remember Cheb Oliveira? Nils Wright? It’s pathological, Tak. Out of control. It’s an addiction and in the end, it’s going to eat you.”

“Maybe so.” I leaned in closer, fighting to keep a lid on my own sudden anger. “But in the meantime it isn’t going to kill any fifteen-year-old girls. It isn’t going to get any cities bombed or populations decimated. It isn’t going to turn into the Unsettlement, or the Adoracion campaign. Unlike your surf buddies, unlike your new best friend down there in the cabin, I’m not asking sacrifices of anybody else.”

She looked at me levelly for a couple of seconds. Then she nodded, as if abruptly convinced of something she’d hoped wasn’t true.

She turned away without a word.

The skimmer drifted sideways off the mooring point, spun about in a wash of muddy water and took off westward at speed. No one stayed on deck to wave. Droplets from the fantail blew back and sprinkled my face, I watched it recede to a faint growl and a dot on the horizon, then I went looking for the priest.

Sanctified solo assassins.

I’d been up against them a couple of times on Sharya. Psychotically stoked religious maniacs in Right Hand of God martyr sleeves, peeled from the main body of fighters, given a virtual glimpse of the paradise that awaited them beyond death and then sent to infiltrate the Protectorate power bases. Like the Sharyan resistance in general, they weren’t overly imaginative—which in the end proved their downfall when faced with the Envoys—but they weren’t any kind of pushover either. We’d all developed a healthy respect for their courage and combat endurance by the time we slaughtered the last of them.

The Knights of the New Revelation, by contrast, were an easy mark.