“Been away, huh?” He didn’t push the point the way Plex had. Old-style Harlan’s World courtesy—if I wanted to tell him I’d been doing time in storage, he probably figured I’d get round to it. And if I didn’t, well then, what business was it of his anyway.

“Yeah, about thirty, forty years. Lot of changes.”

Another shrug. “Been coming for longer than that. Everything the Quellists squeezed out of the original Harlan regime, those guys have been chipping away at ever since it happened. Mecsek’s just the late stage bad news.”

“This enemy you cannot kill,” I murmured.

He nodded and finished the quote for me. “You can only drive it back damaged into the depths and teach your children to watch the waves for its return.”

“So I guess someone’s not been watching the waves very carefully.”

“That isn’t it, Micky.” He was looking away towards the failing light in the west, arms folded. “Times have changed since she was around, that’s all. What’s the point of toppling a First Families regime, here or anywhere else, if the Protectorate are just going to come in and unload the Envoys on you for your trouble?”

“You got a point there.”

He grinned again, more real humour in it this time. “Sam, it’s not a point. It’s the point. It’s the single big difference between then and now. If the Envoy Corps had existed back in the Unsettlement, Quellism would have lasted about six months. You can’t fight those fuckers.”

“They lost at Innenin.”

“Yeah, and how often have they lost since? Innenin was a minor glitch, a blip on the scope, strictly.”

Memory roared briefly down on me. Jimmy de Soto screaming and clawing at the ruins of his face with fingers that have already scooped out one eye and look like getting the other if I don’t …

I locked it down.

Minor glitch. Blip on the scope.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said.

“Maybe I am,” he agreed quietly.

We stood for a while in silence after that, watching the dark arrive. The sky had cleared enough to show a waning Daikoku spiked on mountains to the north and a full but distant Marikanon like a copper coin thrown high over our heads. Swollen Hotei still lay below the horizon to the west.

Behind us, the fire settled in. Our shadows shaded into solidity amidst flickering red glow.