He led us across the encampment to a long silver trailer backed up against one of the perimeter fences. Cheap moulded tables and chairs sprouted in the space around the serving hatch. There was a scattering of clientele, sleepy-faced and quiet over coffees and foil-plated breakfast. In the hatch, three attendants moved back and forth as if on rails. Steam and the smell of food boiled out towards us, pungent enough to trigger even the meagre taste/scent sense on the synthetic sleeve.

“Misos and rice all round?” asked Lazlo.

Grunts of assent from the deComs as they took a couple of tables. I shook my head. To synthetic taste buds, even good miso soup tastes like dishwater. I went up to the hatch with Lazlo to check what else was on offer. Settled for coffee and a couple of carbohydrate-heavy pastries. I was reaching for a credit chip when Lazlo put out his hand.

“Hey. On me, this.”

“Thanks.”

“No big deal. Welcome to Sylvie’s Slipins. Guess I forgot to say that yesterday. Sorry.”

“Well, there was a lot going on.”

“Yeah. You want anything else?”

There was a dispenser on the counter selling painkiller dermals. I pulled a couple of strips out and waved them at the attendant. Lazlo nodded, dug out a credit chip of his own and tossed it onto the counter.

“So you got tagged.”

“Yeah. Ribs.”

“Thought so, from the way you were moving. Our friends yesterday?”

“No. Before that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Busy man.”

“Like you wouldn’t believe.” I tore dosage off one of the strips, pushed up a sleeve and thumbed the dermal into place. Warm wash of chemical well-being up my arm. We gathered up the food on trays and carried it back to the tables.

The deComs ate in a focused silence at odds with their earlier bickering.

Around us, the other tables started to fill up. A couple of people nodded at Sylvie’s crew in passing, but mostly the deCom norm was standoffish. Crews kept to their own little knots and gatherings. Shreds of conversation wisped past, rich in specs and the same sawn-off cool I’d picked up in my companions over the last day and a half. The attendants yelled order numbers and someone got a receiver tuned to a channel playing Settlement-Years jazz.

Loose and painless from the dermal wash, I caught the sound and felt it kick me straight back to my Newpest youth. Friday nights at Watanabe’s place—old Watanabe had been a big fan of the Settlement-Years jazz giants, and played their stuff incessantly, to groans from his younger patrons that swiftly became ritualised. Spend enough time at Watanabe’s and whatever your own musical preferences, it wore you down. You ended up with an engraved liking for the tipped-out-of-kilter rhythms.

“This is old,” I said, nodding at the trailer-mounted speakers.

Lazlo grunted. “Welcome to New Hok.”

Grins and a trading of finger-touch gestures.