I found Segesvar’s blaster in a pool of his blood near the feeding pen rail, checked it for charge and started to pick my way back across the fight-pit gantries. It dawned slowly on me as I went, that Segesvar’s death had left me with no more than a vague sense of relief. I couldn’t make myself care much any more about the way he’d sold me out, and the revelation of his bitterness at my transgression with Eva—

Yvonna.

—Yvonna, right, the revelation just reinforced an obvious truth. Despite everything, the only thing that had held the two of us together for nearly two hundred years was that single, involuntarily incurred back-alley debt.

We’d never really liked each other after all, and that made me think that my younger self had probably been playing Segesvar like an Ide gypsy violin solo.

Back down in the tunnel, I stopped again every few paces and listened for gunfire. The wet-bunker complex seemed eerily quiet and my own footfalls echoed more than I liked. I backtracked up the tunnel to the hatch where I’d left Murakami and found Aiura Harlan’s remains there with a surgically neat hole where the top of her spine used to be. No sign of anyone else. I scanned the corridor in both directions, listened again, and picked up only a regular metallic clanging that I reckoned had to be the confined swamp panthers, smashing themselves against the cell hatches in fury at the disturbances outside. I grimaced and started to work my way down the line of faintly clanging doors, nerves cranked taut, blaster cautiously levelled.

I found the others a half dozen doors along. The hatch was down, the cell space within unmercifully lit. Tumbled bodies lay sprawled across the floor, the wall behind was painted with long slops of blood, as if it had been thrown there in buckets.

Koi.

Tres.

Brasil.

Four or five others that I recognised but didn’t know by name. They’d all been killed with a solid-load weapon, and then they’d all been turned face to the floor. The same hole had been hacked in each spine, the stacks were gone.

No sign of Vidaura, no sign of Sylvie Oshima.

I stood amidst the carnage, gaze slipping from corpse to tumbled corpse as if searching for something I’d dropped. I stood until the quiet in the brightly lit cell became a steady whining hum in my ears, drowning out the world.

Footsteps in the corridor.

I snapped round, levelled the blaster and nearly shot Vlad Tepes as he poked his head round the edge of the hatch. He jolted back, swinging the plasmafrag rifle in his hands, then stopped. A reluctant grin surfaced on his face, and one hand crept up to rub at his cheek.

“Kovacs. Fuck, man, I nearly killed you there.”

“What the fuck is going on here, Vlad?”

He peered past me at the corpses. Shrugged.