Fucking blood tie junkies.

War with the yakuza.

Why you going up north again? I looked at the excised spinal segment and the blood on my hands. It wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I caught the hoverloader up to Tekitomura three days ago.

“Micky?” For a moment, the name meant nothing to me. “Hey, Mick, you okay?”

I looked up. She was watching me with narrow concern. I forced a nod.

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

“Well, do you think you could pick it up a bit? Orr’ll be back and he’ll want to get started.”

“Sure.” I turned to the other corpse. The knife burred back into life. “I’m still curious what you plan to do about Jadwiga.”

“You’ll see.”

“Party trick, huh?”

She said nothing, just walked to the window and stared out into the light and clamour of the new day. Then, as I was starting the second spinal incision, she looked back into the room.

“Why don’t you come with us, Micky?”

I slipped and buried the knife blade up to its hilt. “What?”

“Come with us.”

“To Drava?

“Oh, you’re going to tell me you’ve got a better chance running against the yak here in Tekitomura?”

I freed the blade and finished the incision. “I need a new body, Sylvie. This one’s in no state for meeting the mimints.”

“What if I could set that up for you?”

“Sylvie.” I grunted with effort as the bone segment levered upward.

“Where the fuck are you going to find me a body on New Hokkaido? Place barely permits human life as it is. Where are you going to find the facilities?”

She hesitated. I stopped what I was doing, Envoy intuition wakening to the realisation that there was something here.

“Last time we were out,” she said slowly, “we turned up a government command bunker in the hills east of Sopron. The smart locks were too complex to crack in the time we had, we were way too far north anyway and it’s bad mimint territory, but I got in deep enough to run a basic inventory. There’s a full medlab facility, complete re-sleeving unit and cryocap clone banks. About two dozen sleeves, combat biotech by the signature traces.”