‘Isa?’ I got on my knees beside her in her blood. ‘Isa, talk to me.’
‘Kovacs?’ She tried to roll her head towards me, but it barely moved. I leaned closer, put my face close to hers.
‘I’m here, Isa.’
‘I’m sorry Kovacs,’ she moaned. Her voice was a little girl’s, barely above a high whisper. ‘I didn’t think.’
I swallowed. ‘Isa—’
‘I’m sorry—’
And, abruptly, she stopped breathing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
At the heart of the maze-like group of islets and reefs wryly named Eltevedtem, there was once a tower over two kilometres high. The Martians built it directly up from the seabed, for reasons best known to themselves, and just short of half a million years ago, equally inexplicably, it fell into the ocean. Most of the wreckage ended up littered across the local seabed, but in places you can still find massive, shattered remnants on land. Over time, the ruins became part of the landscape of whichever islet or reef they had smashed down onto, but even this subliminal presence was enough to ensure that Eltevedtem remained largely unpeopled. The fishing villages on the northern arm of the Millsport Archipelago, at a couple of dozen kilometres distant, were the closest human habitation. Millsport itself lay over a hundred kilometres further south. And Eltevedtem (I’m lost in one of the pre-Settlement Magyar dialects) could have swallowed a whole flotilla of shallow-draught vessels, if said flotilla didn’t want to be found. There were narrow, foliage-grown channels between upflung rock outcrops high enough to hide Boubin Islander to the mast tips, sea caves gnawed out between headlands that rendered the openings invisible except on close approach, chunks of overarching Martian tower wreckage, smothered in a riot of hanging vegetation.
It was a good place to hide.
From external pursuers, anyway.
I leaned on Boubin Islander’s rail and stared down into limpid waters. Five metres below the surface, a brightly-coloured mix of native and colonial fish nosed around the white spraycrete sarcophagus we’d buried Isa in. I had some vague idea about contacting her family once we got clear, to let them know where she was, but it seemed a pointless gesture. When a sleeve is dead, it’s dead. And Isa’s parents weren’t going to be any less sick with worry when a recovery team cracked open the spraycrete and found someone had carved the stack out of her spine.
It lay in my pocket now, Isa’s soul, for want of a better descriptor, and I could feel something changing in me with the solitary weight it made against my fingers. I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I didn’t dare leave it for anyone else to find either. Isa was solidly implicated in the Millsport raid, and that meant a virtual interrogation suite up at Rila Crags if she was ever retrieved. For now, I would have to carry her, the way I’d carried dead priests southward to punishment, the way I’d carried Yukio Hirayasu and his gangster colleague in case I needed them to bargain with.
I’d left the yakuza stacks buried in the sand under Brasil’s house on Vchira Beach, and I hadn’t expected the pocket to fill again so soon. Had even, on the voyage east to Millsport, caught myself taking occasional, momentary pleasure in the strange new lack of carriage, until the memories of Sarah and the habit of hatred came searing back.
Now the pocket was weighted again, like some fucked-up modern day variant on the Ebisu-cursed trawl net in the Tanaka legend, destined forever to bring up the bodies of drowned sailors and nothing much else.
There didn’t seem to be any way for it to stay empty, and I didn’t know what I felt any more.
For nearly two years, it hadn’t been that way. Certainty had coloured my existence a grained monochrome. I’d been able to reach into my pocket and weigh its varying contents in my palm with a dark, hardened satisfaction. There was a sense of slow accumulation, an assembly of tiny increments in the balance pan that sat opposite the colossal tonnage of Sarah Sachilowska’s extinction. For two years I’d needed no purpose other than that pocket and its handful of stolen souls. I’d needed no future, no outlook that didn’t revolve around feeding the pocket and the swamp-panther pens at Segesvar’s place out on the Expanse.
Really? So what happened at Tekitomura?
Movement on the rail. The cables thrummed and bounced gently. I looked up and saw Sierra Tres manoeuvring herself forward, braced on the rail with both arms and hopping on her uninjured leg. Her usually inexpressive face was taut with frustration. Under different circumstances, it might have been comical, but from the hacked-off trousers at mid-thigh, her other leg was encased in transparent plaster that laid bare the wounds beneath.
We’d been skulking in Eltevedtem for nearly three days now, and Brasil had used the time as well as the limited battlefield medical gear we had would allow. The flesh beneath Tres’s plaster was a black and purple swollen mess, punched through and torn by the swoopcopter’s machine gun fire, but the wounds had been cleaned and dusted. Blue and red tags marched down the damaged portions, marking the points at which Brasil had inserted rapid regrowth bios. A flex-alloy boot cushioned the bottom end of the cast against outside impact, but walking on it would have required more painkillers than Tres seemed prepared to take.
‘You should be lying down,’ I said as she joined me.
‘Yeah, but they missed. So I’m not. Don’t give me a hard time, Kovacs.’
‘Alright.’ I went back to staring into the water. ‘Any word yet?’
She shook her head. ‘Oshima’s awake, though. Asking for you.’
I lost focus on the fish below me for a moment. Got it back. Made no move to leave the rail or look up again.
‘Oshima? Or Makita?’
‘Well now, that really depends on what you want to believe, doesn’t it?’
I nodded greyly. ‘So she still thinks she’s—’
‘At the moment, yes.’
I watched the fish for a moment longer. Then, abruptly I straightened off the rail and stared back to the companionway. I felt an involuntary grimace twist my mouth. Started forward.
‘Kovacs.’
I looked back at Tres impatiently. ‘Yeah, what?’
‘Go easy on her. It isn’t her fault Isa got shot up.’
‘No. It isn’t.’
Below, in one of the forward cabins, Sylvie Oshima’s sleeve lay propped up on pillows in the double bunk, staring out of a porthole. Throughout the darting, twisting, coast-hugging sprint withdrawal up to Eltevedtem and the days of hiding that followed, she’d slept, woken only by two episodes of delirious thrashing and machine-code gibbering. When Brasil could spare time from steering and watching the radar, he fed her with dermal nutrient patches and hypospray cocktails. An intravenous drip did the rest. Now the input seemed to be helping. Some of the hectic colour had faded from the feverish cheeks, and her breathing had ceased to be audible as it normalised. The face was still sickly pale, but it had expression and the long thin scar on her cheek looked to be healing. The woman who believed she was Nadia Makita looked out of the sleeve’s eyes at me, and made a weak smile with its mouth.
‘Hello there Micky Serendipity.’
‘Hello.’
‘I would get up, but I’ve been advised against it.’ She nodded to an armchair moulded into one wall of the cabin. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’
‘I’m fine here.’
She seemed to look at me more intently for a moment then, evaluating maybe. There was a scrap of Sylvie Oshima in the way she did it, enough to twist something tiny inside me. Then, as she spoke and changed the planes of her face, it was gone.
‘I understand we may have to move soon,’ she said quietly. ‘On foot.’