She hit the panel and the door folded itself up and away.

“You got some kind of fucking motor dysfunction?” she enquired acidly of whoever was outside. “We heard you the first ninety-seven ti—Hey!”

There was a brief scuffle, and then Jadwiga bounced back into the room, struggling not to fall. Following her in, the figure who’d dealt the blow scanned the room with a single trained sweep, acknowledged my presence with a barely perceptible nod and wagged an admonishing finger at Jad.

He wore an ugly grin full of fashionably jagged teeth, a pair of smoked-yellow enhanced-vision lenses barely a centimetre from top to bottom and spreading wings of tattoowork across both cheekbones.

It didn’t take much imagination to guess what was coming next.

Yukio Hirayasu stepped through the door. A second thug followed him in, clone identical to the one who’d shoved Jad aside except he wasn’t smiling.

“Kovacs,” Yukio had just spotted me. His face was a tight mask of throttled-back anger. “What exactly the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

“I’d have thought that was my line.”

Peripheral vision gave me a tiny flinch across Jadwiga’s face that looked like internal transmission.

“You were told,” snapped Yukio, “to stay out of the way until we were ready for you. To stay out of trouble. Is that so fucking difficult to do?”

“These your high-powered friends, Micky?” It was Sylvie’s voice, drawling from the door to my left. She stood wrapped in a bathrobe and gazed curiously at the new arrivals. Proximity sense told me that Orr and someone else had made appearances elsewhere, behind me. I saw the movement reflected in the EV lenses of Yukio’s muscle clones, saw it registered with minute tautening of their faces beneath the smoked glass.