Carl just glares back at him through brimming eyes. The uncle sees it, sighs, and gets back to his feet.

“In time,” he says from what seems like a great height, “you will understand.”

And in the distance, the waxing, hurrying chunter of the helicopter transport, coming in across the autumn sky like a harvester scything down summer’s crop.

He drifted awake in a bed he didn’t know, among sheets that emanated the scent of a woman. A faint grin touched his mouth, something to offset the bitter aftertaste of the Osprey memories.

“Bad dream?” Rovayo asked him from across the room.

She sat a couple of meters off in a deep sofa under the window, curled up and naked apart from a pair of white briefs, reading from a projected display headset. Streetlight from outside lifting a soft sheen from the ebony curves of her body, the line of one raised thigh, the dome of a knee. Recollection slammed into him like a truck—the same body twined around him as he knelt upright on the bed and held her buttocks in his hands like fruit and she lifted herself up and down on his erection and made, again and again, a long, deep noise in her throat like someone tasting food cooked to perfection.

He sat up. Blinked and stared at the darkness outside the window. Sense of dislocation—it felt wrong.

“How long was I out?”

“Not long. An hour, maybe.” She tipped off the headset and laid it aside on the back of the sofa, still powered up. Tiny panels of blue light glowed in the eye frames, like the sober gaze of a robot chaperone. She shook back her hair and grinned at him. “I figured you earned the downtime.”

“Fucking jet lag.” He remembered vaguely the last thing, long after her hands and mouth could no longer get him to rise to the occasion, lying with his head pillowed on her thigh, breathing in the odor of her cunt as if it were the sea. “My time sense is shot to pieces. So looked like I was having a bad dream, huh?”

“Looked like you were wrestling Haystack Harrison for the California title, if you really want to know. You were thrashing all over the place.” She yawned, stretched, and stood up. “Would have woken you up myself, but they say it’s better to let something like that play out, let the trigger images discharge fully or something. You don’t remember what you were dreaming?”

He shook his head and lied. “Not this time.”

“Well then, maybe you were dreaming about me.” She put her hands on her hips. Another grin. “Going a fifth round, you know.”

He matched the grin. “Don’t know, I think I’m pretty fully beaten into submission right now.”

“Yeah, I guess you are,” she said reflectively. “You certainly seemed like a guy knew what he wanted.”

He couldn’t argue with that—self-ejected from the screening room, tight with anger at Ertekin, he’d stood in the center of the operations space and when he’d spotted Rovayo propped on the edge of her desk and watching him, he’d drifted toward her like a needle tugging north.

“Problems?” she asked neutrally.

“You could say that.”

She nodded. Leaned back across her desk space to the datasystem and punched in a quit code. Looked back at him, dark eyes querying.

“Want to get a drink?”

“That’s exactly what I want,” he said grimly.

They left, rode an elevator stack up through the levels of the Alcatraz station until they could see sky and water through the windows. It felt like pressure easing. On the upper balconies, Rovayo led him to a franchise outfit called Lima Alpha that had chairs and tables with views across the bay. She got heavily loaded pisco sours for them both, handed him his, and sank into the chair opposite with a fixed, speculative gaze. He sipped the cocktail, had to admit it was pretty good. His anger started to ebb. They talked about nothing much, drank, soaked in the late-afternoon sunlight. Slipped at some point from Amanglic into Spanish. Their postures eased, sank lower in their chairs. Neither of them made an obvious move.

Finally, Rovayo’s phone wittered for attention. She grimaced, hauled it out, and held it to her ear, audio only.

“Yeah, what?” She listened, grimaced again. “On my way home, why?”

A male voice rinsed tinnily out of the phone, distant and indistinct.

“Roy, I haven’t been home in thirty, no wait”—she checked her watch—“thirty-five hours. I haven’t slept in twelve, and that was ninety minutes on the couch in operations…”

Crackled dispute. Rovayo glowered.

“…No, it fucking wasn’t…”

Coyle crackled some more. She cut him off.

“Look, don’t try to tell me how much sleep I’ve had, Roy. You don’t…”

Spit, spit, crack.

“Yeah, you’re right, we are all tired, and when you’re this fucking tired, Roy, you know what you do? You get some sleep. I’m not going to pull another macho all-nighter just so you can play at old-school cop with Tsai. Outside of all those pre-mil period flicks you love so much, nobody cracks a case like that. You guys want to act like the New Math never fucking happened, be my guest. I’m going home.”

A more muted crackling. Rovayo glanced across at Carl and raised an eyebrow.

“No,” she said flatly. “Haven’t seen him. Doesn’t he have a phone? No? Well, try his hotel, maybe. See you in the morning.”

She killed the call.

“People are looking for you,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You want to be found?”

“Not particularly.”

“What I thought.” She drained what was left in her glass and gave him the speculative look again. “Well, I’d say your hotel is a bust right now. Want another drink at my place?”

He gave her back the look. “Is that a trick question?”

Alcatraz station ran smart-chopper shuttles for its staff, twenty-four seven to both sides of the bay. The Oakland service dropped off at a couple of points within an easy walk of Rovayo’s apartment. They walked, easily, pisco sours and the shared sense of truancy, laughing in the early-evening air. She asked him how come he spoke Spanish, he told her a little about Marisol, a little more about Mars and the Upland projects. As before, she seemed hungry for the detail. They touched, far more than her Hispanic background could write off as a cultural norm. Signals coming through clear and tight. They got up the stairs and in the door of her second-floor apartment a couple of grins short of the clinch.

The door swung shut behind them with a solid snap and the burble of electronic security engaging.

Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.

“So what do you want to do now?”

Still standing in front of him, hipshot, wide grin. Despite everything, he felt his sore and shrunken prick twitch at the sight.

“I thought you were tired.”

She shrugged. “So did I. Cyclical, I guess. Give me another couple of hours, I probably will be again.”

“You’re not Xtrasoming on me, are you?”

“No, I’m not fucking Xtrasoming on you.” Suddenly there was a real edge in her voice. “Do I look like I come from that kind of money? You think if my parents had the finance for built-in, I’d be working for RimSec?”

He blinked. Held up his hands, palms out. “Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Rim States have got a reputation for that stuff, you know.”

She wasn’t listening. She gestured at herself with one splayed hand, motion robbed of any sensuality by the look on her face. “What I’ve got, I was either born with or I fucking worked to build. I came up through the ranks, it’s taken me eight years to make detective, and I didn’t take any fucking genetic shortcuts along the way. I didn’t have—”

“I said okay, Detective.”

It stopped her. She sank back onto the sofa, sat hunched at the edge with her arms resting on her thighs, hands dangling into the space between. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was something hunted in her expression.