I hit the ground on the other side and flattened myself to the dock, arms wrapped over my head.

The grenade blew with a curiously muffled crump, and something in my head screamed with the sound. A muted Shockwave slapped me, dented my hearing. I was on my feet in the blurred humming it left, no time to check for shrapnel injuries, snarling, spinning to face him as he climbed out of the water at the edge of the dock. I had no weapons, but I came round the end of the grav sled as if my hands were filled with them.

“That was fast,” he called. “Thought I’d get you both there.”

His clothes were drenched from his swim, and there was a long gash across his forehead that the water had leached pink and bloodless, but the poise in the amber-skinned sleeve hadn’t gone anywhere. The black hair was still long, tangled messily to his shoulders. He didn’t appear to be armed, but he grinned at me just the same.

Sylvie lay crumpled, halfway between the water and the sled. I couldn’t see her face.

“I’m going to fucking kill you now,” I said coldly.

“Yeah, you’re going to try, old man.”

“Do you know what you’ve done? Do you have any fucking idea who you just killed?”

He shook his head, mock-sorrowful. “You really are getting past your sell-by date, aren’t you? You think I’m going to go back to the Harlan family with a corpse when I can take a live sleeve. That’s not what I’m getting paid for. That was a stun grenade, my last one unfortunately. Didn’t you hear it crack? Kind of hard to mistake if you’ve been anywhere near a battlefield recently. Ah, but then maybe you haven’t. Shockwave knock-out and inhaled molecular shrapnel to keep everyone that way. She’ll be out all day.”

“Don’t lecture me on battlefield weaponry, Kovacs. I fucking was you, and I gave it up to do something more interesting.”

“Really?” The anger sparked in the startling blue eyes. “What was that, then? Low grade criminality or failed revolutionary politics? They tell me you’ve had a crack at both.”

I stalked forward a step, and watched him draw into a combat guard.

“Whatever they tell you, I have seen a century more sunrises than you. And now I’m going to take them all away from you.”

“Yeah?” He made a disgusted sound in his throat. “Well if they’re all leading up to what you are now, you’d be doing me a favour. Because whatever else happens to me, the one thing I never want to be is you. I’d rather blow my own stack out the back of my head than end up standing where you are now.”

“Then why don’t you do that. It’ll save me the trouble.”