There was a bitter edge on the words that made me glance up. Jad was still at the window, staring at her reflected face.

“There’s nothing you could have done,” I said gently.

She didn’t look at me, didn’t look away. “Maybe not. But I know what I felt, and it wasn’t enough. This fucking sleeve has changed me. It cut me out of the net loop—”

“Which saved your life.”

An impatient shake of her shaven head. “It stopped me feeling with the others, Micky. It locked me out. It even changed things with Ki, you know. We never felt the same about each other that last month.”

“That’s quite common with resleeving. People learn to—”

“Oh, yeah, I know.” Now she turned away from the image of herself and stared at me. “A relationship is not easy, a relationship is work. We both tried, tried harder than we ever had before. Harder than we ever had to before. That’s the problem. Before, we didn’t have to try. I was wet for her just looking at her sometimes. It was all either of us needed, a touch, a look. That fucking went, all of it.”

I said nothing. There are times when there is nothing you can usefully say. All you can do is listen, wait and watch as this stuff comes out. Hope that it’s a purge.

“When I heard her scream,” Jad said, with difficulty. “It was like, it didn’t matter. Didn’t matter enough. I didn’t feel it enough to stay and fight. In my own body, I would have stayed and fought.”

“Stayed and died, you mean.”

A careless shrug, a flinching away like tears.

“This is crabshit, Jad. It’s the guilt talking because you survived. You tell yourself this but there’s nothing you could have done, and you know it.”

She looked at me then, and she was crying, quiet ribbons of tears and a smeared grimace.

“What the fuck do you know about it, Micky? It’s just another fucking version of you that did this to us. You’re a fucking destroyer, an ex-Envoy burnout. You were never deCom. You never belonged, you don’t know what it was like to be a part of that. How close it was. You don’t know what it feels like to lose that.”

Briefly, my mind fled back to the Corps and Virginia Vidaura. The rage after Innenin. It was the last time I’d really belonged to anything, well over a century gone. I’d felt twinges of the same thing after, the fresh growth of comradeship and united purpose—and I’d ripped it up by the roots every time. That shit will get you killed. Get you used.

“So,” I said, brutally casual. “Now you’ve tracked me down. Now you know. What are you going to do about it?”