Sarah—

“It’s him!”

Another voice. Vision cleared, and I saw the one with the wounded hand holding his injury out like some obscure proof of faith. The palm was gouting crimson, blood vessels closest to the cut already rupturing.

“It’s him! The Envoy! The transgressor!”

With a soft thud behind me, the hallucinogen grenade blew.

Most cultures don’t take kindly to you slaughtering their holy men. I couldn’t tell which way the roomful of hard-bitten sweeper crew might lean—Harlan’s World never used to have much of a reputation for religious fanaticism, but a lot had changed while I was away, most of it for the worse. The citadel looming above the streets of Tekitomura was one of several I’d run up against in the last two years, and wherever I went north of Millsport, it was the poor and work-crushed that swelled the ranks of the faithful.

Best to play it safe.

The grenade blast shunted aside a table like a bad-tempered poltergeist, but alongside the scene of blood and fury at the bar, it went pretty much unnoticed. It was a half dozen seconds before the vented molecular shrapnel got into lungs, decayed and started to take effect.

Screams to drown the agony of the priests dying around me. Confused yelling, threaded with iridescent laughter. It’s an intensely individual experience, being on the receiving end of an H-grenade. I saw men jerk and swat at invisible things apparently circling them at head height. Others stared bemused at their own hands or into corners, shuddering. Somewhere