I sighed.

“Got anything to drink?”

“You tell me. You’re the one broke into my room.”

Somewhere inside me something shifted, and I suddenly understood how happy I was to see her. I couldn’t work out if it was the biological tie of the Eishundo sleeves, remembrance of the month’s snappish-ironic camaraderie in New Hok, or just the change from Brasil’s suddenly serious born-again revolutionaries. I looked at her standing there and it was like the gust of an Andrassy Sea breeze through the room.

“Good to see you again, Jad.”

“Yeah, you too,” she admitted.

When I’d laid it all out for her, it was dark outside. Jad got up and squeezed past me in the narrow space, stood by the variable transparency window staring out. Street lighting frosted dimly in the gloomed glass.

Raised voices floated up, some kind of drunken argument.

“You sure it was her you talked to?”

“Pretty sure. I don’t think this Nadia, whoever she is, whatever she is, I don’t think she could run the command software. Certainly not well enough to generate an illusion that coherent.”

Jad nodded to herself.

“Yeah, that Renouncer shit was always going to catch up with Sylvie some day. Fuckers get you that young, you never really shake it off. So what about this Nadia thing? You really think she’s a personality mine? ‘cause I got to say, Micky, in nearly three years of tracking around New Hok, I never saw or heard of a datamine that carried that much detail, that much depth.”

I hesitated, feeling around the edges of Envoy-intuited awareness for a gist that could be stamped into something as crude as words.

“I don’t know. I think she’s, I don’t know, some kind of spec designation weapon. Everything points to Sylvie getting infected in the Uncleared. You were there for Iyamon Canyon, right?”

“Yeah. She flaked in an engagement. She was sick for weeks after. Orr tried to pretend it was just post-op blues, but anyone could see different.”

“And before that, she was fine?”

“Well, she was a deCom head, that’s not a job that leans towards fine. But all this gibbering shit, the blackouts, turning up to sites someone else had already worked, that’s all post-Iyamon, yeah.”

“Sites someone else had worked?”

“Yeah, you know.” In the reflection of the window, the irritation flared on her face like matchglow, then guttered out as suddenly. “No, come to think of it, you don’t, you weren’t around for any of those.”

“Any of what?”

“Ah, handful of times we zeroed in on mimint activity, by the time we got there, it was all over. Looked like they’d been fighting each other.”

Something from my first meeting with Kurumaya snapped into focus.

Sylvie wheedling, the camp commander’s impassive responses.