“How the fuck would I know that? Believe what you want.” Plex’s companion was moving about, handling things. His voice faded back in the echoes of the loading bay. I caught the words kaikyo, matter, a chopped laugh. Then again, coming closer to the shutter “—matters is what the family believes, and they’ll believe what the technology tells them. Technology leaves a trail, my friend.” A sharp coughing and indrawn breath that sounded like recreational chemicals going down. “This guy is fucking late.”

I frowned. Kaikyo has a lot of meanings, but they all depend on how old you are. Geographically, it’s a strait or a channel. That’s early Settlement Years use, or just hyper-educated, kanji-scribbling, First Families pretension.

This guy didn’t sound First Family, but there was no reason he couldn’t have been around back when Konrad Harlan and his well connected pals were turning Glimmer VI into their own personal backyard.

Plenty of old personalities still on stack from that far back, just waiting to be downloaded into a working sleeve. Come to that, you wouldn’t need to re-sleeve more than a half dozen times, end to end, to live through the whole of Harlan’s World’s human history anyway. It’s still not much over four centuries, earth standard, since the colony barges made planetfall.

Envoy intuition twisted about in my head. It felt wrong. I’d met men and women with centuries of continuous life behind them and they didn’t talk like this guy. This wasn’t the wisdom of ages, drawling out into the Tekitomura night over pipe fumes.

On the street, scavenged into the argot of Stripjap a couple of hundred years later, kaikyo means a contact who can shift stolen goods. A covert flow manager. In some parts of the Millsport Archipelago, it’s still common usage. Elsewhere, the meaning is shifting to describe aboveboard financial consultants.

Yeah, and further south it means a holy man possessed by spirits, or a sewage outlet. Enough of this detective shit. You heard the man—you’re late.

I got the heel of one hand under the edge of the shutter and hauled upward, locking up the tidal rip of pain from my wound as well as the synthetic sleeve’s nervous system would let me. The shutter ratcheted noisily to the roof. Light fell out into the street and all over me.

“Evening.”

“Jesus!” The Millsport accent jerked back a full step. He’d only been a couple of metres away from the shutter when it went up.

“Tak.”

“Hello Plex.” My eyes stayed on the newcomer. “Who’s the tan?”

By then I already knew. Pale, tailored good looks straight out of some low-end experia flic, somewhere between Micky Nozawa and Ryu Bartok.