I pushed my thoughts aside, derailed them before they could get where they were going.

“And Sylvie Oshima?” I asked.

“Well.” Another shrug. “As I understand it, she’s been contaminated by something from the Uncleared zones. So allowing we can salvage her from the firefight, we have her cleansed and then hand her back her life. Does that sound reasonable?”

“It sounds untenable.”

I remembered Sylvie talking about the command software aboard Guns for Guevara. No matter how good the housecleaning you buy afterwards, some of that shit stays. Hard-to-kill code remnants, traces. Ghosts of things. If Koi could fight and die for a ghost, who knew what the neoQuellists would make of Sylvie Oshima, even after her headgear was wiped.

“Is it?”

“Come on, Tod. She’s iconic. Whatever is or isn’t inside her, she could be the focus for a whole new neoQuellist wave. The First Families will want her liquidated on principle.”

Murakami grinned fiercely.

“What the First Families want, and what they get from me are going to be two radically different things, Tak.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” He slurred it, for mockery. “Because if they don’t cooperate fully, I’ll promise them an Envoy deployment at assault strength.”

“And if they call your bluff?”

“Tak, I’m an Envoy. Brutalising planetary regimes is what we do. They’ll fold like a fucking deck chair, and you know it. They’re going to be so fucking grateful for the escape clause, they’d have their own children queuing up to tongue my arse clean if I asked.”

I looked at him then, and for just a moment it was as if a door had blown open on my Envoy past. He stood there, still grinning in the glare from the Angier spots, and he could have been me. And I remembered what it had really been like. It wasn’t the belonging that came flooding back to me this time, it was the brutal power of Corps enablement. The liberating savagery that rose out of a bone-deep knowledge that you were feared.

That you were whispered of across the Settled Worlds and that even in the corridors of governance on Earth, the power brokers grew quiet at your name. It was a rush that came on like branded-supply tetrameth. Men and women who might wreck or simply remove from the balance sheet a hundred thousand lives with a gesture, those men and women could be taught fear again, and the instrument of that lesson was the Envoy Corps.

Was you.

I forced an answering smile.

“You’re charming, Tod. You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

“Nope.”

And, out of nowhere, the smile stopped being forced. I laughed and it seemed to shake something loose inside me.

“Alright. Talk to me, you bastard. How do we do this?”

He gave me the clownish raised brows again. “I was hoping you’d tell me. You’re the one with the floorplans.”