Maybe I should just pull the quick fade. Maybe Kat and the rest—ALOHA or not—would help me disappear into the shadows. Maybe—and this was a big maybe—I'd be able to stay one jump ahead of the factions already out looking for me. Oh yes, and add to the playlist the Yamatetsu payback team that Barnard would send after me when he learned I hadn't delivered his message to the Ali'i . I was pretty good at keeping a low profile, I knew that ... but over the long haul, "pretty good" wouldn't cut no ice. I figured my odds at surviving a week at about fifty-fifty. A month—call it seventy-five-twenty-five. A year? Maybe a one-in-ten chance. Long enough to look back on all this and laugh? I'd rather bet on the survival of a snowball in a plasma furnace, chummer.