There was snow in the sky by the time we got into the hills overlooking Drava. Visible flurries at intervals, and the everpresent bite of it in the air between. The streets and the tops of buildings in the city below were dusted as if with insect poison and thick cloud was piling up from the east with the promise of more. On one of the general channels, a pro government dissemination drone was issuing microblizzard warnings and blaming the bad weather on the Quellists. When we went down into the city and the blast-torn streets, we found frost on everything and puddles of rainwater already frozen. In amongst the snowflakes, there was an eerie silence drifting to the ground.

“Merry fucking Christmas,” muttered one of Oishii’s crew.

Laughter, but not much of it. The quiet was too overpowering, Drava’s gaunt snow-shrouded bones too grim.

We passed newly-installed sentry systems on the way in. Kurumaya’s response to the co-op incursion six weeks ago, they were single-minded robot weapons well below the threshold of machine intelligence permitted under the deCom charter. Still, Sylvie flinched as Orr guided the bug past each crouched form, and when one of them flexed upright slightly, running the make on our clear tags a second time with a slight chittering, she turned her hollow-eyed gaze away and hid her face against the giant’s shoulder.

Her fever hadn’t broken when she woke. It just receded like a tide, leaving her exposed and damp with sweat. And at the distant edge of the ground it had given up, tiny and almost soundless, you could see how the waves still pounded at her. You could guess at the minuscule roar it must still be making in the veins at her temples.

It wasn’t over. Not nearly.

Through the tangled, abandoned streets of the city. As we drew closer to the beachhead, my new sleeve’s refined senses picked up the faint scent of the sea under the cold. Mingling of salts and various organic traces, the everpresent tang of belaweed and the sharp plastic stink of the chemicals spilled across the surface of the estuary. I realised for the first time how stripped down the synthetic’s olfactory system had been—none of this had made it through to me on the inward journey from Tekitomura.

The beachhead defences flexed awake as we arrived. Spider blocks heaved themselves sideways, livewire swayed back. Sylvie hunched her shoulders as we passed between, lowered her head and shivered. Even her hair seemed to have shrunk closer to her skull.

Overexposure, Oishii’s crew medic opined, squinting into his imaging set while Sylvie lay impatiently still under the scanner. You’re not out of the breakers yet. I’d recommend a couple of months laid-back living somewhere warmer and more civilised. Millsport maybe. Get to a wiring clinic, get a full checkup.

She seethed. A couple of months? Fucking Millsport?