Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 22

COLIN Istanbul was on the European side, up near Taksim Square and nestled amid a forest of similar purple or bronze glass towers inhabited mostly by banks. At night, a skeleton security staff and automated guns kept the base levels open, lit in pools of soft blue, for whatever business might crop up. The Colony Initiative, to paraphrase its own advertising hype, was an enterprise on which the sun never set. You never knew when or where it might need to flex itself fully awake and deploy some geopolitical muscle. Best always to remain on standby. Sevgi, who associated Taksim primarily with the murder of her grandfather and great-uncle by overzealous Turkish security forces, stopped in just long enough to collect keytabs for one of the COLIN-owned apartments across the Bosphorus in Kadiköy. Pretty much anything else she needed, she could access through her dataslate. Talking to Stefan Nevant was in any case not going to be a COLIN gig.

The less official presence he can smell on you, the better, Marsalis told her. Nevant’s special, he’s one of the few thirteens I know who’s come to an accommodation with external authority. He’s emptied out his rage. But that doesn’t mean he feels good about it. Be best if we don’t poke a finger in that particular blister.

The same limo that had collected them from the airport rolled them down to the Karaköy terminal, where the ferries to the Asian side ran all night. Sevgi shrugged off the driver’s protests about security. Riding around via the bridge was going to take as long as or longer than waiting for the ferry, and she needed to clear her head. She hadn’t wanted to come here, wanted still less to be here with Marsalis. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t have folded and taken the press conference after all.

They’d watched it broadcast on New England Net while the midafternoon THY suborb spun them up from JFK and dropped them on the other side of the globe, Norton looking sober and imposing in his media suit. TV audiences still loved a solid pair of shoulders and a good head of hair above pretty much anything they’d actually hear coming out of a speaker’s mouth, and Tom Norton excelled in both areas. He really could, Sevgi was convinced, have run for office of some sort. He fielded the questions with exactly the right measure of patrician confidence and down-home good humor.

Dan Meredith, Republic Today. Is it true COLIN are now employing hypermales as security?

No, Dan. Not only is it not true, it’s also deeply flawed as an assumption. Inclusive gesture to the whole room. I think we’re all aware what a hypermale would look like, if anyone was actually criminally stupid enough to breed one.

Ripple of muttering among the gathered journalists. Norton gave it just long enough, then squashed it.

Hypermale genetic tendency is, not to put too fine a point to it, autism. A hypermale would make a pretty poor security guard, Dan. Not only would he likely not recognize signs of an impending attack from another human being, he’d probably be too busy counting the bullets in his gun to actually fire them at anything.

Laughter. The footage swung momentarily to Meredith’s face in the crowd. He offered a thin smile. Ladled urbane southern irony into his voice. I’m sorry, Tom. Leaving aside the fact we all know the Chinese have bred super-autists for their n-djinn interface programs, that’s not what I meant. I was referring to variant thirteens, which most normal Americans would call hypermales. Hypermales like the one you admit was present at today’s attempt on Alvaro Ortiz’s life. Are you employing any of those as security guards?

No, we’re not.

Then—

But Norton had already raised his head to scan the crowd, already signaled for the next question.

Sally Asher, New York Times. You’ve described this variant thirteen, Carl Marsalis, as a consultant. Can you please tell us what exactly he is consulting on?

I’m sorry, Sally, I’m not currently at liberty to say. All I can tell you is that it has nothing to do with the tragic events of this afternoon. Mr. Marsalis was simply a bystander who took the action any good citizen with the opportunity might.

Any good citizen armed with an assault rifle, maybe. Asher’s voice was light. Was Mr. Marsalis armed?

Norton hesitated a moment. You could see the dilemma—data was out there, it was loose in the flow by now. Footage of the crime scene, eyewitness accounts, maybe even backdoor gossip from the path labs. No way to tell what was or wasn’t known, and Norton didn’t want to get caught in a lie. On the other hand—

No. Mr. Marsalis was not armed.

Quiet but rising buzz. They’d all seen the bullet-riddled limo, at least.

How can a man, an ordinary man, possibly—

Meredith again, voice pitched loud before Norton’s arm cut him off again, hauled in another question from the opposite side of the room. The feed didn’t show Meredith’s face, but Sevgi felt an ignoble stab of pleasure as she imagined the Jesuslander’s chagrin.

Mr. Norton, is it true, I’m sorry, Eileen Lan, Rim Sentinel. Is it true, Mr. Norton, that COLIN is training personnel on Mars in previously unknown fighting techniques?

No, that’s not true.

Then can you please throw light on this comment from an eyewitness at today’s events. Lan held aloft a microcorder, and a male voice rinsed cleanly through the speaker. The guy was like a fucking wheel. I’ve seen that stuff on Ultimate Fighting tapes from Mars, that’s tanindo. That’s stuff they won’t teach back here on Earth, they say it’s too dangerous to let ordinary people get to know because—

The microcorder clicked off, but Lan left it upheld like a challenge. Norton leaned an arm across the lectern and grinned easily.

Well, I’m not really an Ultimate Fighting fan—polite laughter—so obviously I can’t comment accurately on what your eyewitness there is talking about. There is a Martian discipline called tanindo, but it’s not a COLIN initiative. Tanindo has emerged spontaneously from existing martial arts in response to the lower-gravity environment on Mars. In Japanese, it means, literally, “way of the newcomer,” because on Mars, as I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, we are all of us newcomers. It’s also known in some quarters as Float Fighting and, in Quechua, as—you’ll perhaps forgive my pronounciation here—pisi llasa awqanakuy. Mr. Marsalis has served time on Mars, and may for all I know be an aficionado of the style, but really a martial art designed for a low-gravity environment isn’t likely to be all that dangerous, or even useful, here on Earth.

Unless you’re inhumanly strong and fast, Sevgi qualified for him silently. Her gaze slipped sideways from the lap screen to Marsalis, dozing in the seat at her side. Norton had dug up fifty mil of COLIN-grade betamyeline and an inhaler just before they left, and Marsalis had dosed up in the departure lounge at JFK. He got some nosy sidelong glances, but no one said anything. Aside from a grunt of satisfaction as the chloride took, he made no comment, but as soon as they got to their seats he’d closed his eyes and a beatific grin split his face with ivory. He was asleep not long after.

Bonita Hanitty, Good Morning South. You don’t feel that by liberating a condemned criminal from a Florida penal institution, COLIN are flouting the very concept of American justice?

More muttering, not all of it sympathetic. Republican journalists were a minority in the room, and the Union press wore Lindley v. NSA on their collective chest like a medal of honor. Cub reporters came up on the legend; senior staffers told pre-Secession war stories and talked about their Republican colleagues with either snide pity or disdain. Norton knew the ground, and rode with it.

Well, Bonita, I think you need to be careful there talking about justice. As the briefing disk you’ll have received does specify, Mr. Marsalis had not actually been charged with anything during his four months of incarceration. And then there’s the question of the initial alleged entrapment, no let me finish please, the alleged entrapment techniques used by the Miami police to arrest Mr. Marsalis in the first place. And this is without mentioning that Republican and state law in the matter of pregnancy termination both run counter to well-established UN principles of human rights.

Choked splutters from several quarters, muted cheers elsewhere. Norton waited out the noise with a stern expression, then trod onward.

So what I’d say is that COLIN has liberated a man who is in all probability innocent, and whom the state of Florida didn’t really seem to know what to do with anyway. Yes, Eileen, back to you.

There was a lot more after that, of course. Hanitty, Meredith, and a couple of other Jesusland reps trying to dig back into Marsalis’s prior record and the deaths in the Garrod Horkan camp. Mercifully nothing about Willbrink. Norton rode cautious and courteous herd on it all, didn’t quite shut the Jesuslanders down, but leaned heavily toward Union journalists he knew and trusted enough not to throw curves. Sevgi yawned and watched it sputter to a close. Beside her in the suborbital, the object of all their fears and attentions dozed on unconcerned.

Sleep of her own was unforthcoming—the syn wouldn’t allow it. She was still buzzing a couple of hours later as she slumped in the cheap plastic seating of the ferry hall, watching the few other waiting passengers with a cop’s eye. The place was bare bones and drafty, lit from above by sporadic spotlights on the roof girders and at the sides by the ghostly flicker of a few LCLS advertising boards whose sponsors hadn’t specified particular time slots for activation. efes extra!! jeep performance!! work on mars!! The inactive panels between looked like long gray tombstones hung on the corrugated-steel walls.

Through rolled-back shutter doors at the side, the white-painted superstructure of the moored ferry showed like a sliced view of another age. More modern additions to Istanbul’s diverse collection of water transport had a boxy, plastic look that made them out as no more than the seabuses they were, offering nothing at journey’s end but the completion of the daily commute. But the high, wide bridge, hunched smokestack, and long waist of the antique ships still on the Karaköy-Kadiköy run spoke of departure to farther-flung places, and an era when travel could still mean escape.

Marsalis came back from a prowl of the environs. She supposed in her grandfather’s time, he’d have gotten more looks for his skin, but now he stood out no more than the half a dozen Africans waiting around the dock as passengers and the two who stood in coveralls on the deck of the ferry beyond the shutters. No one gave him more than a glance, and that mostly for his bulk and the bright orange lettering on the inmate jacket he still wore.

“Do you have to keep wearing that?” she asked irritably.

He shrugged. “It’s cold.”

“I said at the airport I’d buy you something else.”

“Thanks. I like to buy my own clothes.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

Klaxons groaned in the girdered space over their heads. An LCLS arrow on a movable barrow lit up pointing to the cranked-back shutters, destinations inscribed: HAYDARPASA, kadiköy. The two men on the ferry rolled out gangplanks, and a slow drift of humanity began moving toward the boat.

Impelled by memories of childhood visits, Sevgi moved along the starboard rail and seated herself on the outward-facing bench near the stern, propping herself there with her booted feet on the rail’s bottom rung. Thrum of the ship’s motors through the metal at her back. The mingled reek of engine oil and damp mooring ropes carried her back in time. Murat’s hand ruffling her hair as she stood beside him at the rail, barely tall enough to see over the top rung. The soft, chuntered rhythms of Turkish pushing out the English in her head. The impact of a whole world she’d previously seen only in the photos, a city that wasn’t New York, a place that was not her home but meant something vital—she sensed it in the way they looked around, exclaimed to each other, clutched each other’s hands at her eye level—to her parents. Istanbul had shocked her to her four-year-old core, and each time she went back, it did it again.

Marsalis dropped into the seat beside her, copied her stance. The rail clanked dully as it took the weight of his legs.

“Now I’m really going to need this jacket,” he said cheerfully. “See.”

The engine thrum deepened, became a roar, and the stern of the ferry rose in a mound of seething water. Shouts from the crew, ropes thrown, and a rapidly widening angle of space opened between the ferry and the dock. The boat thrashed about and picked up a vector out across the darkened water. Karaköy fell away, became a festooned knot of lights in the night. A chilly sea breeze came slapping at Sevgi’s face and hair. The city opened out around her, color-lit bridges and long low piles of skyline, all floating on a liquid black dotted with the running lights of other ships. She breathed in deep, held on to the illusory sense of departure.

Marsalis leaned toward her, pitching his voice to beat the engines and the wind of their passage. “Last time I came here, there was a delay at the suborb terminal, some kind of security scare. But I only found out about it after I’d checked out of my hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to get out to the airport.” He grinned. “I spent the whole two hours doing this, just riding the ferries back and forth till it was time to go. Nearly missed my fucking flight. Out here, looking at all this, you know. Felt like some kind of escape.”

She stared at him, touched to shivering by the echo of her own feelings in his words.

His brow creased. “What’s the matter? You getting seasick?”

She shook her head. Threw something into the gap. “Why’d you come back, Marsalis? Back to Earth?”

“Hey.” Another grin. “I won the lottery. Would have been pretty ungracious not to take the prize.”

“I’m serious.” Fiercely, into the wind between them. “I know it’s grim out there, but every thirteen I ever heard talk about it loved the whole idea of Mars. Escape to a new frontier, a place you can carve out something of your own.”

“It isn’t like that.”

“I know. But that doesn’t stop anyone believing it.” She looked out across the water. “It’s where they’re all heading, isn’t it. The ones you hunt down. They’re heading for the camps and a one-way ticket to the Martian dream. Somewhere they’ve been told they’ll be wanted, valued for their strengths. Not rounded up and kept on fenced ground like livestock.”

“Most of them try for the camps, yeah.”

“You ever ask yourself why UNGLA doesn’t just let them run, let them hitch a cryocap ride out of everyone’s hair?”

He shrugged. “Well, primarily because the Accords say they can’t. The Agency exists to make sure every genetic variant on Earth is filed and monitored appropriate to their level of risk to society, and in the case of variant thirteens that means internment. If we start turning a blind eye to fence-breakers just because we think they’re going to skip for Mars, pretty soon some of them aren’t going to skip for Mars, they’re just going to hole up somewhere here on Earth and maybe start breeding. And that puts the whole fucking human race back to pre-Munich levels of panic.”

“You talk as if they weren’t like you,” she said, accusation rising in her voice. “As if you were different.”

“I am different.”

Just like Ethan, just fucking like him. Her own despair guttered upward on its wick. Her voice sounded dull in her own ears. “It doesn’t matter to you that they’re treated this way?”

Another shrug. “They’re living the choices they made, Ertekin. They could have gone to Mars when COLIN opened the gates at Munich. They chose to stay. They could get on with their lives on the reservations. They choose to break out. And when I come for them, they’ve got the option to surrender.”

Jagged memory of Ethan’s bullet-ripped corpse on the slab. Called to make the identification, trembling and cold with the shock.

“Choices, yes,” she snarled. “Every choice a fucking humiliation. Give up your freedom, roll over and do as you’re told. You know full fucking well what kind of choice that is for a thirteen.”

“It’s a choice I made,” he said mildly.

“Yeah.” She looked away again, disgustedly. “You’re right. You are different.”

“Yeah, I’m smarter.”

Another ferry passed them a hundred meters off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug toward the little island of lights and windowed warmth, the vaguely glimpsed figures moving about within. Then the stupidity of the situation came and slapped at her like the sea wind. Right behind her, pressing into her shoulders, were the window rims of an identical haven of lit and heated space, and she’d turned her back on it.

Yeah, much better that way, Sev. Turn away. Stay out in the cold and stare across the water at the fucking unattainable as it sails away from you.

Fucking idiot.

“So he went down fighting?”

She snapped around to face him again. “Who did?”

“The thirteen you were having a relationship with.” The same mild calm in his voice. “You told me he’s dead, you’re angry about what I do for a living. Makes a certain kind of sense this guy got taken down by someone like me.”

“No,” she said tightly. “Not someone like you.”

“Okay, not someone like me.”

He waited, let it sit between them like the darkness and the noise of their passage through it.

She clenched her teeth.

“They sent the SWATs,” she said finally. “A fucking dozen of them. More. Body armor and automatic weapons, against one man in his own home. They—”

She had to swallow.

“I wasn’t there, it was morning and I’d already gone to work. He was off duty, just off a stack of night work. Someone in the department tipped him off they were coming, they found a call on the phone later, downtown number. He—”

“He was a cop?”

“Yeah, he was a cop.” She gestured helplessly, hand a claw. “He was a good cop. Tough, clean, reliable. Made detective in record time. He never did anything fucking wrong.”

“Apart from faking his ID, presumably.”

“Yeah. He got himself Rim States citizenship back before the internments started. Said he saw it coming way ahead of time. He bought a whole new identity in the Angeline Freeport, lived up and down the West Coast for a couple of years building it up, then put in for official immigration to the Union. They still weren’t testing for variant thirteen then, and once he was in he had the Cross Act to protect him, the whole right-to-genetic-privacy thing.”

“Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.”

“Yeah?” She gave him a smile smeared with pain. “That your professional opinion?”

“For what it’s worth. I guess he was smart.”

“Yeah, well. Like Jacobsen says—sociopathic tendency allied with dangerous levels of raw intelligence. That’s why we’re locking thirteens up, right?”

“No. We’re locking thirteens up because the rest of the human race is scared of them. And a society of scared humans is a very dangerous thing to have on your hands. Well worth a bit of internment to avoid.”

She scanned his face for the irony. Couldn’t tell.

“His name was Ethan,” she said at last. “Ethan Conrad. He was thirty-six years old when they killed him.”

The other ferry was almost gone now, fading amid the other flecks of traffic and the lights of the European side. She drew a deep breath.

“And I was six months’ pregnant.”

CHAPTER 23

On the Asian side, with Europe reduced to glimmering lights across the water, she got drunk and told him the rest.

He wasn’t sure why—it might have been a by-product of the alcohol, or a desired result. Either way, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d watched the way her mouth clamped shut behind the sudden admission of loss, and he recognized damage that wouldn’t be healing anytime soon. They got off the ferry in Kadiköy without speaking, carrying a personal silence between them that deadened the clank and clatter of disembarkation. The same bubble of quiet stayed with them as they trudged the half a dozen rising blocks up from the waterfront, following the street-finder holo in the keytab, until they reached the winding thoroughfare of Moda Caddesi and the low-rise apartment tower that COLIN owned there. It was a residential neighborhood, long since put to bed, and they saw no one along the way.

There was a strange, secretive feeling of release and refuge in it all. Quietly, quietly, up and away from the lights of the ferry terminal, past the shuttered frontages of a market and the curtained windows of the sleeping world, the glimmering map in the hollow of Ertekin’s palm and the pale bluish light it cast up into her face. When they arrived, she opened the door in from the street with exaggerated care, and they took the stairs rather than wake the machinery of the elevators. In the apartment—air infused with the slightly musty chill of no recent occupancy—they fetched up together in the kitchen, still without speaking, and found an open but barely touched bottle of Altinbaş raki on the counter.

“You’d better pour me some of that,” she told him grimly.

He searched for the appropriate long slim glasses, found them in a cabinet, while Ertekin filled a jug with water from the tap. He poured each glass half full with the oily transparent weight of the raki and watched as she topped the measures off from the jug. Milky, downward-tumbling avalanche cloud of white as the water hit. She grabbed up a glass and drank it off without drawing breath. Set it down again and looked expectantly at him. He poured again, watched her top up. This one she sipped at and carried through to the abandoned chill of the living room. He took bottle and jug and his own glass, and followed her.

They were on the top floor, a broad picture-window vantage opening out over the rooftops of Kadiköy at a couple of stories’ advantage. With the lounge lighting dimmed back, they had a clear view all the way to the Sea of Marmara and the minaret-spiked skyline of Sultanahmet back on the European side. Staring at it, Carl had the sudden, hallucinatory sensation of leaving something behind, as if the two shores were somehow drifting apart. They sat in squashy mock-leather armchairs facing the window, not each other, and they drank. Out on the Sea of Marmara, big ships sat at anchor, queuing for entry to the Bosphorus Straits. Their riding lights winked and shifted.

They’d killed well over half the bottle by the time she started talking again.

“It wasn’t fucking planned, I can tell you that much.”

“You knew what he was?”

“By then, yes.” She sighed, but it got caught somewhere in her throat. There was no real relief in the noise it made. “You’d think we’d have terminated it, right? Knowing the risks. Looking back, I’m still not really sure why we didn’t. I guess…I guess we’d both started thinking we were invulnerable. Ethan had that from the start, that whole thirteen thing. He always acted like bullets would have bounced off him. You could see it in him across a crowded room.”

Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.

“And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is good, this is right, this is what’s supposed to be. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling now it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the air lock. You tell yourself the genetic-privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that the legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD. You’re the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on your door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.”

“You met Ethan through the force?”

It got him a sour smile. “How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialize much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.” She shrugged. “I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cozy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.”

“Not quite. You can always leave the police force.”

She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. “You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself. The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.”

“And did you? Tear it all down?”

“You mean, did we fuck?”

“Actually, no. But—”

“Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.” She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again. Snac. “Like that. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blond bitch worked Datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organize a move across the river when I made Midtown Homicide. Just an old neighborhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.” Another frown. “Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.”

“Had he told you what he was?”

“Not then, no. I mean—” She gestured again, more carefully this time. “—not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?”

“Not generally, no.”

“No.” She nursed her drink for a while. “I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.”

“What did he want?”

Her lip curled. “He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of Central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still aboveground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while till he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.”

“He recognized him? I’d have thought—”

“Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim states, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face, it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.” She clenched a fist in the low light. “He wouldn’t believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way. That’s not the way we do things, he kept saying. You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip.”

A darted look. “That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.”

“It’s been known.”

“Yeah, well this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case—” She shrugged. “Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right? Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.”

Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out at sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.

“So what happened?” he asked finally.

She looked away. “I think you know.”

“Ethan solved the problem.”

“Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.” Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. “Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned me, when Ethan wasn’t around.”

“Did you tell Ethan about it?”

“I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.”

She paused. Picking words.

“But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth. There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?”

He shrugged. “So the psychomonster flicks would have us believe.”

“Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, Internal Affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that, and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.”

“Until.”

She nodded. “Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Skinned knuckles, finger gouges in his throat.” A faint, weary smile. “And the house was cleaner than I’d seen it in months. Washed floors everywhere, bathroom like a screen ad, everything nanodusted. You could still hear the stuff working if you put your ear up close to the tub. He never cleaned up like that again in the whole time we were together.”

More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the raki bottle. Offered it to him.

“You want?”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

He watched as, a little unsteadily, she built herself a new drink. When she was done, she held the glass without drinking from it and stared out at the ships.

“It seemed like we held our breath all summer,” she said quietly. “Waiting to see. I knew a lot of cops in Queens from before I moved to Midtown, I started hanging out with them again, on and off, to see if there was a missing persons filed, or if a body had turned up. We checked the NYPD links to UNGLA’s most wanted all the time for news. Keegan never made it onto the list. Ethan reckoned you guys had him down as such a fuckup he wasn’t worth chasing, he’d dig his own grave soon enough if you’d just give him some time.”

Carl shook his head. “No, we like the stupid ones. They’re easy to track down, and that makes the Agency look good. If your guy wasn’t listed, the most likely thing is whoever helped him over the wire at Cimarron found some way to keep it quiet. Or whoever had the contract to run the place at the time just hushed the whole thing up to keep the statistics sweet. Oversight provision for Cimarron is pretty fucking weak, even by Jesusland standards, and if the contract was up for a renewal bid, well.” He spread his hands. “Every lag on that reservation knows the best time to plan an escape is just before tender. They know the operating corporation is going to try like crazy to squeeze maximum efficiency out of badly paid staff and end up with riot-level tension instead, and they know that if they do make it over the wire, there’s going to be no public nationwide manhunt, because the contract holders can’t afford the publicity. It’s how half these guys keep getting away so easily.”

“Fucking Jesusland,” she slurred.

He gestured lazily. “Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s the sort of thing keeps me in work. Come to that, Jesusland isn’t the only place I’ve seen weak oversight.”

“No. Only place they’re fucking proud of it, though.” She peered morosely into her drink. “Still can’t fucking believe it sometimes, you know?”

“Believe what?”

“Secession. What America did to itself. I mean.” She made an upward-groping gesture with her free hand. “We fucking invented the modern world, Marsalis. We modeled it, on a continental scale, got it working, sold it to the rest of the world. Credit cards, popular air travel, global dataflow. Spaceflight. Nanotech. We put all that in place, you know? And then we let a bunch of fucking Neanderthal Bible-thumping lunatics tear it all to pieces? What the fuck is that, Marsalis?”

“Don’t ask me. Little before my time.”

“I mean.” She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. “If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had come and just chased us out of the driver’s seat, you know I could maybe handle that. Every culture has to give way to something in the end. Someone fresher and sharper always comes along. But we fucking did this to ourselves. We let the grasping, hating, fearing idiot dregs of our own society tip us right over the fucking precipice.”

“You live in the Union, Sevgi. That’s hardly the abyss, is it?”

“But that’s just the fucking point. That’s what they always wanted, Marsalis. Separation from the North. Secession. Their own fucking mud puddle of ignorance to wallow in. It took them two hundred fucking years to do it, but in the end they got exactly what they wanted.”

“Come off it. They lost the Rim States. That’s what, a third of American GDP?” He couldn’t work out why he was arguing so hard with her. He knew the ground because anyone working for UNGLA had to, but it wasn’t like he was an expert. It wasn’t like he cared. “And look, from what I hear out of Chicago these days, they might not be able to hang on to the Lakes much longer either. Then you’ve got Arizona—”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted, and sank deeper into her chair. “Fucking Arizona.”

“They’re talking about admission to the Rim.”

“Marsalis, it’s Arizona. They’re more likely to declare an independent republic of their own than anything else. And anyway, if you think Jesusland is going to let either them or any of the Lake states secede the way the Northeast did, you’re crazy. They’ll put the national guard in there faster than you can say Praise the Lord.”

Because he didn’t care one way or the other—right?—he said nothing, and the conversation closed up on her final words with a snap. There was a long pause. They both looked out at the ships.

“Sorry,” she muttered after a while.

“Skip it. You were telling me about Keegan. Waiting to hear if his body turned up.”

“Yeah, well.” She sipped her drink. “Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the beginning. That was when we started getting confident. Started not worrying about the situation, just living as if there were no danger, as if Ethan was just some regular guy. Year or so of that and, bang, oops.” She smiled bleakly. “Biology in action.”

“And they took it away from you.”

The smile dropped off her face. “Yeah. Union law’s pretty progressive, but they won’t buck the consensus that far. No siring of offspring from variant thirteen stock, any and all incubated genetic material to be destroyed. I’ve got lawyers fighting it, claiming moral precedent from pre-Secession cases on late-stage abortion, right to life, all that shit. Been nearly five years now, and we’re still fighting. Appeal, block, object, counterappeal. But we’re losing. UNGLA have all the money in the world to fight this one, and their lawyers are better than mine.”

“Sort of thing that makes a COLIN salary very attractive, I imagine.”

“Yeah.” Her expression hardened. “Sort of thing that makes working for an organization that doesn’t give a fuck about UNGLA very attractive, too.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m freelance.”

“Yes. But it was someone like you in UNGLA liaison at City Hall that came looking for Ethan, that put the SWATs onto him. It was someone like you that authorized inducing my fucking baby at six and a half months and sticking it in a cryocap until UNGLA’s legal team can get a ruling to have it fucking murdered.”

Her voice caught on the last word. She buried herself in her drink. Wouldn’t look at him anymore.

He didn’t try to disabuse her and deflate the jagged anger she’d fenced herself in with, because it looked like she needed it. He didn’t point out the obvious flaws.

In fact, Sevgi, he didn’t say, it probably wasn’t someone like me, because in the first place there aren’t that many like me around. Four other licensed thirteens working UNGLA that I know of, and none of them in a liaison capacity.

And more to the point, Sevgi Ertekin, if it had been someone like me hunting Ethan Conrad, that someone would have shown up in person. He wouldn’t have handed it to a mob of SWAT cudlips and stood on the sidelines like some fucking sheep hierarch supervising.

Someone like me would have done his killing himself.

Instead he sat quietly and watched as Ertekin slid from brooding silence into a raki-sodden doze. Awareness of where he was made its way back into his consciousness, the darkened apartment in the cloven city, the distant lights, the sleeping woman at barely arm’s length but curled away from him now, the quiet—

Hey, Marsalis. How you been?

—the tidal fucking quiet, like swells of black water, the seeping silence and Elena Aguirre, back again, talking softly to him—

Remember Felipe Souza? Stars and silent, empty corridors and safely dreaming faces behind glass that locked you out in the alone. That little whining I made in the pits of your ears, the way I’d come up behind you and whisper up out of it. Thought I’d gone away, did you? No chance. I found you out there, Marsalis, and that’s the way it’s always going to be. You and me, Marsalis. You and me.

—and the ships out at anchor on the silent swell, waiting.

CHAPTER 24

They kept him waiting at reception. Not entirely an unpleasant experience; like a lot of Rim States v-formats, the Human Cost Foundation’s site was subtly peopled with short-loop secondary ’faces, hardwired into the system to provide the environs with what product brochure enthusiasm liked to call a more authentic feel. Sitting across from him in the waiting area, a svelte young woman in a short business skirt crossed one long thigh over the other and gave him a friendly smile.

“Do you work for the foundation?” she asked.

“Uh, no. My brother does.”

“You’re here to see him?”

“Yes.” The format sculpters had done their work well. He felt positively rude stopping on the dry monosyllable. “We don’t see each other that much these days.”

“You’re not local then?”

“No. Wiring in from New York.”

“Oh, that is a long way. So how do you like it out there?”

“It isn’t out there for me, it’s home. We both grew up in the city. My brother’s the one who moved.” Tiny flicker of sibling rivalry riding a base of Manhattan exceptionalism, and the tiny adrenal shock as he recognized both. He began to see how the interface psychiatry he’d always sneered at might work quite well after all.

“So, uh.” The question rose to his lips; he tasted its idiocy but weariness let it through anyway, part challenge, part deflection from more talk about Jeff. “Where are you from?”

She smiled again. “That’s almost a metaphysical question, isn’t it. I suppose I’d have to say I’m from Jakarta. Conceptually, anyway. Have you ever been there?”

“Couple of times, wiring in. Not for real.”

“You should go. It’s beautiful now the nanobuild is finished. Best to try to see it in…”

And so on, effortlessly evading any conversational currents that might bring them up too hard against the fact of what she was. He guessed that this must be how high-class prostitution worked as well, but he was too tired to really care. He let go, let himself be lulled by the erudite flow of what she knew, the participative dynamic she ran the conversation on, the stocking-sheathed geometry of her elegantly crossed legs. There seemed to be a reactive subroutine that measured how much he wanted to talk and adjusted the response output accordingly. He found, oddly enough, that he wanted to talk quite a lot.

He wasn’t aware of Jeff approaching until his brother stood almost over him, smiling wearily.

“Okay.” He fumbled to his feet, recovered himself. “At last.”

“Yeah, sorry. Whole boatload of washups came in from Wenzhou a couple of days ago, it’s going to put us way over budget for the quarter. Been negotiating with the legislature all fucking day.” He nodded at the still-seated woman. “I see you’ve met Sharleen.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Lovely, isn’t she. You know, sometimes I’ll come out here and talk to her just for the fun of it.”

Norton looked at the ’face. She smiled up at the two of them, head lifted, expression gone very slightly vacant, as if what they were saying was birdsong, or a played segment of some symphony she liked.

“Need to talk to you,” he said uncomfortably.

“Sure.” Jeff Norton gestured. “Come on through. Bye, Sharleen.”

“Good-bye.”

She smiled over her shoulder as they left, then swiveled and sat immobile and silent as they passed out of trigger range. Jeff led him past the reception island and down a truncated corridor with a watercooler at the end. Half a dozen steps along, the passageway grayed out around them and became Jeff’s office. It was pretty much as Norton remembered the actual suite from a visit a couple of years back, a few décor differences in the pastel shades of the walls and fittings, maybe one or two ornaments on shelves that he didn’t recall. A photo of Megan on the desk. He drew a compressed breath and seated himself on the right-angled sofa facing the window and the skyline view of Golden Gate Park. His brother leaned across the desk and punched something out on the deck.

“So?”

“I need some more advice. You heard about Ortiz?”

“No.” Jeff leaned against the side of his desk. “What’s he up to, more UN handholding tours?”

“He’s been shot, Jeff.”

“Shot?”

“Yeah. It’s all over the feeds. Where have you been? I thought you’d know. I gave a COLIN press conference all about it yesterday afternoon.”

Jeff sighed. Shook his head as if it weren’t working properly. He crossed to the adjacent angle of the sofa and collapsed into it.

“Christ, I’m tired,” he muttered. “Been on this Wenzhou thing for the last day and a half solid. I didn’t even go home from the office last night. Been in virtual most of this morning. Is he still alive?”

“Yeah, holding up. They’ve got him wired into intensive-care life support over at Weill Cornell. Medical n-djinn says he’s going to be okay.”

“Can he talk?”

“Not yet. They’re going to patch him into a v-format once he regains consciousness, but that might be awhile.”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” Jeff gave him a haggard look. “So what’s this got to do with me? What do you need?”

“For Ortiz, nothing. I don’t think you could help right now anyway. Like I said, he’s not even conscious. They’ve got family and close friends at the hospital but—”

His brother gave him the corner of a smile. “Yeah, I know. Not my world anymore. Blew my chance at the Union power game, didn’t I.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Ran west and ended up a bleeding-heart charity chump.”

Norton gestured impatiently. “That’s not what this is about. I want to talk to you about Marsalis. You know, the thirteen we levered out of South Florida State?”

“Oh. Right.” Jeff rubbed at his face. “So how’s that working out?”

Norton hesitated. “I don’t know.”

“You got problems with him?”

“I don’t…” He lifted his hands. “Look, the guy signed up okay. You were right about that much.”

“What, that he’d bite your hand off for the chance to get out of a Jesusland jail?” Jeff shrugged. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Yeah, well I guess I owe you for the suggestion. And I’ve got to say, he lives up to the hype. He was there when they tried to hit Ortiz, and it looks like this guy’s the only reason Ortiz is still breathing. He took out two of the three shooters and chased the third one off. Unarmed. You believe that?”

“Yes,” said Jeff shortly. “I do believe that. I told you, these guys are fucking terrifying. So what’s the problem?”

Norton looked at his hands. He hesitated again, then shook his head irritably and raised his eyes to meet his brother’s curious gaze.

“You remember I told you I’ve got a partner now? Ex-NYPD detective, a woman?”

“Who you want to get horizontal with, but won’t admit it. Yeah, I remember.”

“Yeah, well, there’s something I didn’t tell you about her. She had a relationship with a renegade thirteen a few years back. Didn’t work out, and there were some, uh, complications.”

Jeff raised his brows. “Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. I didn’t give it much thought, even when we hired this guy.”

“Bullshit.”

Norton sighed. “Okay, I gave it some thought. But you know, I figured, she’s tough, she’s smart, she’s got a handle on the situation. Nothing to worry about.”

“Sure.” Jeff leaned forward. “So what are you worrying about?”

Norton stared around the office miserably. “I don’t know.” He threw up his arms. “I don’t know, I don’t fucking know.”

His brother smiled, sighed.

“You ever chew coca leaves, Tom?”

Norton blinked. “Coca leaves?”

“Yeah.”

“What has that got—”

“I’m trying to help here. Just answer the question. You ever chew coca leaves?”

“Of course I have. Every time we have to go down to the prep camps for a Marstech swoop, they give us a big bag at the airport and recommend it for the altitude. Tastes like shit. So what has that got to do with—”

“Do you get high when you chew coca?”

“Oh come on—”

“Answer the question.”

Norton set his jaw. “No. I don’t get high. Sometimes your mouth goes numb, but that’s it. It’s just to give you energy, stop you feeling tired.”

“Right. Now listen. That energizing effect is part of an evolved working relationship between humans and the coca plant. Coca gives humans medicinal benefits, humans ensure that there’s plenty of coca being cultivated. Everybody wins. And human physiology copes very comfortably with the effects the leaf provides. It’s a benefit that doesn’t interfere with any of your other necessary survival dynamics. You’re not going to do anything stupid just because you’re chewing those leaves.”

“Why is it,” Norton asked heavily, “that every time I come to you for help, you have to lecture me?”

Jeff grinned at him. “Because I’m your older brother, stupid. Now pay attention. If you extract the alkaloid from the coca leaf, if you take it through the artificial chemical processes that give you cocaine, and then you slam that stuff into the human brain, well, then you’re going to see a whole different story. You do a couple of lines of that shit, and you surely will get high. You’ll also probably do some stupid things, things that might get you killed in a more unforgiving evolutionary environment than New York. You won’t pay attention to the social and emotional cues of the people around you, or you’ll misread them. Fail to remember useful personal detail. You’ll maybe hit on the wrong woman, pick a fight with the wrong guy. Misjudge speeds, angles, and distances. And long-term, of course, you’ll put your heart under too much strain as well. All good ways to get yourself killed. What it comes down to is that we’re not evolved to deal with the substance at the level our technology can give it to us. Age-old story, same thing with sugar, salt, synadrive, you name it.”

“And variant thirteen,” Norton said drearily.

“Right. Though this is a software issue we’re talking about now, rather than a hardware problem. At least to the extent that you can make that distinction when it comes to brain chemistry. Anyway, look—by all the accounts I’ve read, the Project Lawman originators reckoned that variant thirteens would actually have been pretty damn successful in a hunter-gatherer context. Being big, tough, and violent is an unmitigated plus in those societies. You get more meat, you get more respect, you get more women. You breed more as a result. It’s only once humans settle down in agricultural communities that these guys start to be a serious problem. Why? Because they won’t fucking do as they’re told. They won’t work in the fields and bring in the harvest for some kleptocratic old bastard with a beard. That’s when they start to get bred out, because the rest of us, the wimps and conformists, band together under that self-same kleptocratic bastard’s paternal holy authority, and we go out with our torches and our farming implements, and we exterminate those poor fuckers.”

“Apart from the kleptocrats.” Legacy of a lifetime in sibling rivalry, Norton tugged at the loose threads in his brother’s theorizing. “I mean, they’ve got to be variant thirteen themselves, right? Otherwise, how do they get to be in charge in the first place?”

Jeff shrugged. “Jury’s still out on that, apparently. The odd thing is the gene profiles for a kleptocrat and a thirteen don’t look as similar as you might think. Thirteens don’t seem to be much interested in material wealth for one thing. Anything they can’t carry over one shoulder, they show very limited enthusiasm for.”

“Oh come on. How are you going to measure something like that?”

“Wouldn’t be that hard. Involuntary mental response to visual stimulus, maybe. We do that here with the washups when they come in. Helps us to profile them. Anyway, there’s observational evidence as well—apparently before Jacobsen and the roundup, most of these guys were living in small apartments with not much more stuff than you’d fit in a decent-size backpack. So maybe the kleptocrats weren’t thirteens at all, they were just smart guys like us who figured out a socially constructed way to beat the big bad motherfuckers to the pick of the women.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Speaking for all of us, Tom. Because for the last twenty thousand years or so, these guys have been gone. We wiped them out. And by wiping them out, we lost any evolved capacity we might have had for dealing with them.”

“Which means what?”

“Well, what’s the preeminent quality of any good leader, any successfully dominant member of the group?”

“I don’t know. Networking skills?”

Jeff laughed. “You are such a fucking New Yorker, Tom.”

“So were you, once.”

“Charisma!” Jeff snapped his fingers, struck a pose. “Leaders are charismatic. Persuasive, imposing, charming despite their forcefulness. Easy to follow. Sexually attractive to women.”

“What if they are women?”

“Come on, I’m talking about hunter-gatherer societies here.”

“I thought you were talking about now.”

“Hunter-gatherer society is now, in terms of human evolution. We haven’t changed that much in the last fifty to a hundred thousand years.”

“Apart from wiping out the thirteens.”

“Yeah, that’s not evolution. That’s civilization getting an early start.”

Norton frowned. It was an abrupt bitterness you didn’t often hear in Jeff’s voice. “Kind of sour about it all of a sudden, aren’t we?”

His brother sighed. “Yeah, what can I tell you? Work for Human Cost long enough, it starts to corrode your fucking soul. Anyway, point is variant thirteen seems to come with a whole suite of genetic predisposition toward charismatic dominance, and it operates at levels the rest of us haven’t had to handle for twenty thousand years. It’s like they carry around an emotional vortex that tears up everyone they touch. Women get pit-of-the-stomach attraction for them, men hate their guts. The weak and the easily influenced follow them, give in, do what they want. The violently inclined kick back. The rest of us quietly hate them but don’t dare do anything about it. I mean, you’re talking about so much force of personality that if one of these guys ran for any elected office, he’d flatten anyone you ran against him. They’d be pure political Marstech, guaranteed black-label winners every time. Why do you think Jacobsen wanted them interned and chemically castrated? The way he saw it, let them out into general population and within a couple of decades they’d be running every democratic nation-state on the planet. They’d demolish the democratic process, roll back everything feminized civil society’s achieved in the last couple of centuries. And they’d breed right back into base humanity like rabbits, because any woman who’s at all drawn to male sexuality is going to fall like a bomb for these guys.” Jeff gave him another wry grin. “The rest of us wouldn’t stand a chance. That what’s bothering you, little brother?”

Norton gestured irritably “No, that’s not what’s bothering me. What’s bothering me is that Marsalis is going to cooperate with us for just as long as it takes him to put a blind corner between us and him, and then he’ll run. And what bothers me more is that my partner may be wandering around blind to that particular danger, giving Marsalis a long leash when we can least afford it. So what I really want to know is exactly how far I can rely on Sevgi Ertekin not to screw up while this guy’s around.”

“Well, how’s she doing?”

“I don’t know. But she’s gone off to Istanbul with him, chasing a lead he came up with pretty much out of thin air. That was yesterday, and she hasn’t called in yet.”

“Exotic Istanbul, huh?”

“Oh shut up.”

Jeff quelled his grin. “Sorry, couldn’t resist it. Look, Tom, as far as it goes, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over what you’ve told me so far. Chances are at some level she does want to fuck this guy raw—”

“Great.”

“—but wanting to fuck a guy’s brains out isn’t necessarily the same thing as switching your own brain off. I mean, look—the bonobo thing is similar. They’ve got an amped-up feminine appeal that’ll blast the average guy’s sexual systems like a cocaine hit every time—”

“Yeah, you’d know all about that.”

Jeff stopped and looked at him reproachfully. “Tom, I said I was sorry about the Istanbul crack. Give me a fucking break, will you? What I meant was, you don’t see me leaving Megan and the kids for Nuying, do you. Risking divorce, separation from Jack and Luisa, maybe a lawsuit for professional misconduct, all because I’m crazy for some modified pussy. Those things are important to me, and I manage to balance them against what Nu does for me. And I come out ahead, Tom. In control, the best of both worlds. Sure, I’ve got a drug problem, and the drug is bonobo tendency. But I’m handling it. That’s what you do, you deal with your weaknesses. You take up the strain. If this woman you’re talking about really is professionally focused, serious about her work, knows who she is and what she’s about, then there’s no reason she can’t do the same cost—benefit analysis and play the game accordingly. If anything, the genetic evidence suggests women are better at that shit anyway, so she’s got a wired-in head start right there. I mean, I’m not saying I’d want to have to hand-wash the sheets in whatever Istanbul hotel they’re in right now—”

“Oh Christ, Jeff.”

Jeff spread his hands. “Sorry, little brother. You want me to make you feel better, tell you the field’s clear for you to make your Manhattan urbanite move on this woman? I can’t. But if what you’re concerned about really is her professional grip on things—then I wouldn’t worry.”

They sat quietly for a few moments. To Norton, letting Jeff have the last word felt like a kind of defeat.

“Well, what about this Istanbul clue then? I mean, seriously, it doesn’t come close to any of our current investigation, it’s right out of left field. Some other thirteen the Europeans have interned in Turkey, who might have a connection to some Peruvian gangster who might have ties to the people who maybe had our renegade thirteen shipped back from Mars. I mean, am I supposed to trust that? It’s pretty thin.”

Jeff stared out of the window.

“Maybe it is,” he said absently. “Thirteens don’t think the same way as us. They have a whole different set of synaptic wiring. Some of that, the more extreme end, we just go ahead and label paranoia or sociopathic tendency. But often it just comes out as a different way of looking at things. That’s why UNGLA employs guys like this Marsalis in the first place. In some ways, that’s why I suggested you dig him out of Florida and hire him. Give you access to those other angles.” A sudden, hard look. “You didn’t tell anyone that was my suggestion, did you?”

“Of course not.”

“Yeah? Not even this ex-cop you’ve got under the skin so badly?”

“I made you a promise, Jeff. I keep my promises.”

“Yeah, okay.” His brother pressed thumb and forefinger into tight closed eyes for a moment. “Sorry. I shouldn’t get so harsh with you, just I’m stressed out of my fucking box right now. This job’s a political tightrope act at the best of times, and now isn’t the best of times. Someone gets to hear that the director of the Human Cost Foundation is giving informal advice to a COLIN officer on matters relating to the genetically enhanced, I’m going to be looking for another job. We’ll get the whole Rim-China-Mars superconspiracy bullshit blowing up in our faces all over again, probably lose the bulk of our funding overnight. Bad enough that we’re taking in black lab refugees and giving them Rim citizenship. Arranging for dangerous genetic variants to be released from jail, that’d be the final straw.”

“Yeah, well, like I said. Relax. No one knows.” Norton felt an unaccustomed tightness in his throat as he looked at his brother. “I appreciate all this, Jeff. Maybe it doesn’t come across that way sometimes, but I do.”

“I know.” Jeff grinned at him. “Been looking out for you since you were knee-high anyway. That’s what big brothers are for, right? Whole stack of genetic predisposition right there.”

Norton shook his head. “You’ve been working this field too long, Jeff. Why not just say you care.”

“I thought I just did. Base reasons for caring about your siblings are genetic. I didn’t have to join Human Cost to know that.”

An image of Megan bloomed brightly in his mind. Long tanned limbs and freckled smile, sun and hair in her eyes. The recollection forced its way aboard, seemed to dim his vision. It felt as if the v-format and his brother had suddenly been tuned down into a muted distance. His voice sounded vague in his own ears.

“Yeah, so what about sibling rivalry? Where does that come in?”

His brother shrugged. “Genetic, too. At base, all this stuff is. Xtrasomes aside, everything we are is built on some bedrock genetic tendency or other.”

“And that’s how you justify Nuying.”

Jeff’s expression tightened. “I think we’ve had this conversation, and I didn’t enjoy it much last time. I don’t justify what I did with Nu. But I do understand where it comes from. Those are two very different things.”

Norton let the memory of Megan fade. “Yeah, okay. Forget it. Sorry I started on you again. I’m feeling pretty stressed myself right now. Got my own genetic tendencies to handle, you know?”

“We all do,” his brother said quietly. “Thirteen, or bonobo, or just base fucking human. Sooner or later, we all have to face what’s inside.”

CHAPTER 25

Morning came in laced with the sounds of traffic along Moda Caddesi and children shouting. Bright, angled sunlight along the sidewall of the room he’d chosen to sleep in and the reluctant conclusion that out here at the back of the apartment there was a school playground directly under the window. He pried himself out of bed, shambled about looking for the bathroom, stumbled in on a lightly snoring Ertekin in the process; she slept sprawled on her back with her mouth half open, long-limbed and gloriously inelegant in the faded NYPD T-shirt and tangle of sheets, one crooked arm thrown back over her head. He drank in the sight, then slid quietly out again, found the bathroom, and took a long, much-needed piss. A faint hangover nagged rustily at his temples, not nearly as bad as he’d been expecting. He stuck his head under a tap.

He left Ertekin to sleep, padded to the kitchen, and found a semi-smart grocery manager recessed in next to the heating system panel. He ordered fresh bread and simits both, not knowing Ertekin’s preferences, milk, and a few other bits and pieces. Found an unopened packet of coffee—Earth-grown, untwisted—in a cupboard and a Mediterranean-style espresso pot on the counter. He fired up the stove and set up the pot; by the time it started burbling to itself, the breakfast delivery was buzzing for entry down at the main door. He let them in, found a screen phone, and carried it through to the kitchen table. He unwrapped the simits—gnarled rings of baked and twisted dough, dusted with sesame seeds, still warm—broke one up into segments, poured himself a coffee, and went looking for Stefan Nevant.

It took awhile.

The duty officer at the internment tract HQ in Ankara wasn’t anyone he knew, and he couldn’t pull UNGLA rank because his operating codes were six months out of date. Naming friends didn’t help much. He had to settle for a referral to one of the site offices, where, apparently, Battal Yavuz was putting in some overtime. When he tried the site, Battal was out in a prowler and not answering his radio. The best the woman on site could do was take a message.

“Just tell him he’s a reprobate motherfucker, and a big bad thirteen’s going to fly right out there and steal his woman if he doesn’t call me back.”

The face on screen colored slightly. “I don’t think—”

“No, really. That’s the message. Thanks.”

Noises from the corridor. He cut the call and broke another simit. Found an unexpected grin in the corner of his mouth, frowned it away. Ertekin used the bathroom, went back to the bedroom by the sound of it, and for a moment he thought she was going to go back to sleep. Then he heard footfalls in the corridor again, approaching. He leaned back in his chair to watch her come into the kitchen. Wondering if she’d still be in the T-shirt. His hangover, he noticed vaguely, was receding.

She was dressed. Hair thickly untidy, face a freshly scrubbed scowl.

“Morning. Sleep well?”

She grunted. “What are you doing?”

“Working.” He gestured at the phone. “Waiting for a callback on Nevant. Why, what did you think? I’d skip out on you as soon as you passed out? Perfidious, self-regarding thirteen motherfucker that I am.”

“I didn’t pass out.”

“Well, you dropped your glass while you were resting your eyes then. I figured you’d finished drinking anyway, so I went to bed. How’s your head?”

The look she gave him was answer enough.

“Coffee still in the pot, but it must be nearly cold. I can—”

The phone chimed. He raised an eyebrow and prodded it to life. Ertekin busied herself with the coffee, and he dropped his gaze to the screen. A picture fizzled into focus, grainy with patch-through. Wide angle on an arid backdrop through the dust-plastered windshield and side window of an all-terrain prowl truck. Battal Yavuz in the driver’s seat, chubby features narrowed in peering disbelief.

“Carl? No fucking way that’s you.”

“The one and only.”

“They had you in a Jesusland jail, man. Di Palma told us. Special powers invoked, indefinite retention without trial. How the fuck you get out of that?”

“I got out of Mars, Battal. What did you think, Jesusland was going to hold me?”

“Man, you never know. They’ve got a history of that indefinite retention shit. Fucking barbarians.”

Across the table from him, Sevgi Ertekin snorted. Carl flashed her a quizzical look. She shrugged and sipped her coffee.

“So what are you doing in Istanbul, anyway? You coming out to visit?”

“Don’t think I’ve got time for that, Battal. But listen, I was hoping you could do me a favor.”

When he’d hung up, Ertekin was still slumped opposite, staring a hole in the bottom of her coffee cup. He eyed her curiously.

“So what was that about?”

“What was what about?”

He mimicked her snort. “That.”

“Oh. Yeah. Just kind of amusing to hear a Turk talking about someone else’s barbarism.”

“Well, he was talking about Jesusland.”

“Yeah, whatever.” She sat up suddenly. “See, Marsalis, my father left this country for a reason. His father and his uncle both died back on that fucking square in Taksim because the illustrious Turkish military suddenly decided freedom of speech was getting a little out of hand. You know, you fucking Europeans, you think you’re so fucking above it all with your secular societies and your soft power and your softly softly security forces that no one likes to talk about. But in the end—”

“In the end,” he said, a little harshly because Battal was a friend, and he didn’t have many, “Turkey’s still in one piece. They had a psychotic religious element here, too, you know, and a problem with rabid patriotic dogma. But they solved it. The ones who stayed, the ones who didn’t cave in to fundamentalist idiocy or just make a run for some comfortable haven elsewhere—in the end they made the difference, and they held it together.”

“Yeah, with some judicious funding from interested European parties, is what I heard.”

“None of which invalidates the fact that Jesusland is a fucking barbaric society, which you’re not from anyway, so what’s your point?”

She glared back at him. He sighed.

“Look. My head hurts, too, all right. Why don’t you talk to Battal when he gets here? He’s the one filled me in on local history, guy used to teach in a prison before he got this gig, he knows his stuff. He wrote his doctoral thesis on Turkey and the old US, how they were more similar than you’d think. Talk to him.”

“You think he’ll come here?”

“If Nevant comes, he’ll have to have an escort. And I don’t see Battal passing up the chance to see his teahouse friends in Istanbul at someone else’s expense. Yeah, he’ll come.”

Ertekin sniffed. “If Nevant comes.”

“Don’t worry about Nevant. Just the fact I’m asking for his help is going to be enough to get him here. He’s going to love that.”

“Maybe he’s going to love turning you down.”

“Maybe. But he’ll come here to do it. He’ll want to see my face. And besides—” Carl spread his hands, gave her a crooked grin. “—there’s a good chance this’ll be his only opportunity to get off the internment tract for the next decade.”

She nodded slowly, like someone assimilating a new concept. Gaze still on her coffee. He had the sudden, uneasy feeling that what she’d just grasped wasn’t much to do with what he’d just been saying.

“Of course,” she said, “there’s really no need for either of them to come here at all. We could just as easily have gone out to them, couldn’t we?” And her gaze flipped up, locked onto his face. “Out to the tract?”

It was only a beat, but she had him.

“Yeah, we could have,” he answered, smoothly enough. “But we’re both hungover, and I like the view from this place. So—why bother going there, if we can get him to come to us?”

She got up from the table and looked down at him.

“Right.”

For a moment, he thought she was going to push the point, but she just smiled, nodded again, and left him sitting there in the kitchen, memories of the tract and those he’d dragged back to it swirling through his mind in hungover free association.

He was still sitting there when Nevant called.

CHAPTER 26

“Knew I’d come, eh?”

“Yeah.”

Nevant drew on his cigarette, let the smoke gush back out of his mouth, and sucked it in hard through his nose. “Fuck you did.”

Carl shrugged. “All right.”

“Want to know why I did come?”

“Sure.”

The Frenchman grinned and leaned across the table, mock confidential. “I came to kill your ass, Mars man.”

Out beyond the glass-panel frontage of the restaurant, sunset bruised and bloodied the sky over the Sea of Marmara. Torn cloud, clotted with red. Carl met Nevant’s gaze and held it.

“That’s original.”

“Well.” Nevant sat back again, stared down at the tabletop. “Sometimes the old gene-deep reasons are the best, you know.”

“Is that why you tried to persuade Manco Bambarén to give you house room? Gene-deep reasons?”

“If you like. It was a question of survival.”

“Yeah, survival as a cudlip.”

Nevant looked up. Carl saw the twitch of a suppressed fight instruction flowing down the nerves of one arm. Like most thirteens, the Frenchman was physically powerful, broad in chest and shoulders, long limbs carrying corded muscle, head craggy and large. But somehow, in Nevant, the bulk seemed to have whittled down to a pale, lycanthropic coil of potential. He’d lost weight since Carl saw him last, and his nose and cheekbones made sharp angles out of his flesh. The narrowed gray-green eyes were muddy dark with anger, and the smile when it came was a slow-peeling, silent snarl. He’d been fast, back in Arequipa three years ago—it had taken the mesh for Carl to beat him. If he came across the table now, it would be like a whip, like snake-strike.

“Don’t like your jacket much. What is that, fucking incarceration chic?”

Carl shrugged. “Souvenir.”

“That’s no excuse. What’d it cost you?”

“About four months.”

Brief pause. The Frenchman raised an eyebrow. “Well, well. What happened, your license expire?”

“No, that’s still good.”

“Still doing the same shit, huh?” Nevant plumed a lungful of smoke across the table. “Still hunting your brothers down for the man?”

“Oh, please.”

“You know, it wouldn’t just be for me, Mars man.”

“Sorry?”

“Killing you. It wouldn’t just be for me. You have a large fan club back there in the tract. Can hardly blame them, right? And if I killed you, and they knew about it.” Nevant yawned and stretched, loosening the combat tension from his frame. “Well, I’d probably never have to buy my own cigarettes again.”

“I’d have thought they’d want to kill me themselves.”

The Frenchman gestured. “The limits of revenge. They can’t all kill you, and stuck where they are right now none of them can. You learn a kind of wisdom in the tract—settle for what you can get, it’s better than nothing.”

“Am I supposed to feel bad about that?”

The wolfish grin came back. “Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.”

“They had their chance, Stefan. You all did. You could have gone to Mars.”

“Yeah, it’s not all red rocks and air locks, apparently. Saw the ads on my way in.” Nevant touched the raki glass on the table in front of him with one fingernail. He hadn’t yet picked it up, or touched the tray of meze laid out between the two men. “Sounds great. Hard to see why you came back.”

“I won the lottery.”

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot. It’s so much fun on Mars that the grunts buy a ticket every month to see if they can’t get the fuck out of there and home again.”

Carl shrugged. “I didn’t say it was paradise. It was an option.”

“Look, man. You came back, and the reason you came back is that life on Mars is a pile of shit.” Nevant blew more smoke at him. “Some of us just didn’t need to make the trip to work that one out.”

“You were busy making plans to spend the rest of your life up on the altiplano when I caught up with you. That’s just Mars with higher gravity.”

Nevant smiled thinly. “So you say.”

“Why should I lie?”

Outside, streetlights were glimmering to life along the seawall walkway. Sevgi Ertekin sat with Battal Yavuz on tall stools at a salep stall a dozen meters down the promenade. They sipped their drinks in cupped hands and were apparently getting along okay. Nevant tipped his head in their direction.

“Who is she, then?”

“No, I’m not his partner.” Sevgi struggled to keep the edge out of her voice. “This is strictly a temporary thing.”

“Okay, sorry. My mistake. Just the two of you seem, you know…”

“Seem what?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Connected, I guess. That’s unusual with Marsalis. Even for a thirteen, he’s pretty locked up. And it’s not like it’s easy getting close to these guys in the first place.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Yeah. I don’t want to sound like those Human Purity fuckwits, but I’ve been working the tract for nearly a decade now, and I’ve got to say variant thirteen are the closest thing to an alien race you’re ever going to see.”

“I’ve heard the same thing said about women.”

“By men, yeah.” Yavuz slurped at his salep and came up grinning. He cut a cheery figure in the evening gloom and the yellowish lights from the stall. His jacket collar framed a tanned, well-fed face, and there was a small but unapologetic paunch under his sweater. Life at UNGLA Eurozone seemed to be treating him well. His hair was academic untidy, his eyes merry with reflected light. “Naturally. The way you people are wired, compared with the way we are.”

“You people?”

“I’m joking, of course. But the same way male and female genetic wiring is substantially different”—Yavuz jerked a casual thumb back toward the lit interior of the restaurant, and the two men who sat facing each other in the window—“that’s the way those two are substantially different from you and me both.”

“Bit closer to you people, though,” said Sevgi sourly. “Right?”

Yavuz chuckled. “Fair point. In testosterone chemistry, in readiness for violent acts and suspension of basic empathy, yes, I suppose so. They are more male than female, of course. But then, no one ever tried to build a female thirteen.”

“That we know of.”

“That we know of,” he echoed, and sighed. “From what I understand, readiness for violent acts and suspension of empathy were exactly the traits the researchers hoped to amplify. Small surprise they opted for the male model, then.”

For just a moment, his gaze drifted out past her shoulder to the sea.

“At times,” he said quietly, “it shames me to be male.”

Sevgi shifted uncomfortably on her stool. She turned her salep mug in both hands. They were speaking Turkish, hers a little creaky with lack of use, and for some reason, some association maybe with childhood misbehavior and scolding, the Turkish phrasing of that sentiment—it shames me—lent an obscure force to Yavuz’s words. She felt her cheeks warm against the cold air in sympathy.

“I mean,” he continued, still not looking at her. “We index how civilized a nation is by the level of female participation it enjoys. We fear those societies where women are still not empowered, and with good cause. Investigating violent crime, we assume, correctly, that the perpetrator will most likely be male. We use male social dominance as a predictor of trouble, and of suffering, because when all is said and done males are the problem.”

Sevgi’s eyes flickered away to the restaurant window. Stefan Nevant was leaned across the table, gesturing, talking intently. Marsalis looked back at him, impassive, arms draped on the back of his chair, head tilted slightly to one side. The same intensity seemed to crackle off both men for all the differences in their demeanor. The same raw sense of force. It was hard to imagine either of them ever talking about a sense of shame. For anything.

Deep in the pit of her stomach, despite herself, something warmed and slid. She felt her cheeks flush again, harder. She cleared her throat.

“I think there’s another way to look at it,” she said quickly. “Back in New York, I’ve got a friend, Meltem, who’s an imam. She says it’s a question of stages in social evolution. You’re Muslim, right?”

Yavuz put tongue in cheek, grinned. “Nominally.”

“Well, Meltem says—she’s Turkish, too, Turkish American, I mean, and she’s a believer, of course, but—”

“Yeah,” Yavuz drawled. “Comes with the job, I imagine.”

She laughed. “Right. But she’s a feminist Sufi. She studied with Nazli Valipour in Ahvaz before the crackdown. You’ve heard of the Rabia school?”

The man in front of her nodded. “Read about them. That’s the Ibn Idris thing, right? Questions all authorities subsequent to the Prophet.”

“Well, Valipour cites Idris, yeah, but really she’s tracing a line right back to Rabia al-Basri herself, and she’s arguing that Rabia’s interpretation of religious duty purely as religious love is uh, is you know, the prototypical feminist understanding of Islam.”

And then she dried up, suddenly self-conscious. Back in New York, she wasn’t used to talking about this stuff. She was rarely at the mosque these days, never found the time for it. Her conversations with Meltem had stopped soon after Ethan died. She was too angry, with a God she wasn’t at all sure she believed in anymore, and in his echoing absence with anybody who made the mistake of taking his side.

But Battal Yavuz just smiled and sipped at his salep.

“All right, that sounds like an interesting angle,” he said. “So how does your imam square her Islamic feminism with all that inconvenient textual shit in the hadiths and the Book?”

Sevgi frowned, mustering her rusty Turkish. “Well, it’s cycles, you know. The way it looks from the historical context, the male cycle of civilization had to come first, because there was no other way outside of male force to create a civilization in the first place. To have law and art and science, you have to have settled agrarian societies and a nonlaboring class that can develop that stuff. But that kind of society would have to be enforced, and pretty brutally in the terms we look at things today.”

“That’s right.” Yavuz nodded at the two thirteens in the restaurant window. “You’d have to wipe out all those guys, for a start.”

“She’s the client.” Carl picked up a fork and helped himself to a slice of eggplant from the meze tray. “Are we going to eat some of this?”

Deep, final draw on the cigarette, raised brow. Nevant stubbed out the butt. “You freelancing now?”

“I always was, Stefan. UNGLA hold the license, but they only call me when they need me. Rest of the time, I’ve got to make a living like everybody else.”

“So what does the client want with me?”

“We’re chasing some familia andina connections. Trying to bust a Marstech ring in the induction camps.”

“There’s some reason that I’d help you do that?”

“Apart from the fact that Manco Bambarén sold you out to me three years back? No, no reason I can think of. I always did have you down as the forgiving sort.”

Nevant skinned a brief grin. “Yeah, tayta Manco sold me out. But it was you that came to collect.”

“Blame the messenger, huh?”

“Oh, I do.”

Carl helped himself to more meze. “You really think a cut-rate godfather with delusions of ethnicity was ever going to go up against UNGLA for you? Were you really that desperate to believe you’d found a bolt-hole, Stefan? There’s a reason Manco made it to tayta level, and it’s not his charitable nature.”

“What the fuck do you know about it, Mars man? As I recall, you were on urban fucking pacification detail most of your time in the Middle East.”

“I know tha—”

“Do you know that they’ve got warlord alliances operating in Central Asia still that I fucking built from nothing back in ’87? Do you know how many of those puppet presidents you see mouthing the words on Al Jazeera I helped launch?”

Carl shrugged. “Works in Central Asia doesn’t mean it’ll fly in South America. That’s a whole different continent, Stefan.”

“Yeah, and a whole different goal.” Nevant shook a new cigarette out of the packet. He fit it in the corner of his mouth, drew it to life, and raised his eyebrows. “You want one of these?”

“I’m eating.”

“Suit yourself.” He leaned forward, blew smoke across the table, and grinned. “See, the familias aren’t like those warlord motherfucks, they never were. Warlord wants the same thing any cudlip politician wants—legitimacy, recognition, and respect from the rest of the herd. The whole nine-car motorcade.”

Carl nodded, chewing. He’d had pretty much the same lecture from Nevant three years ago, waiting for the paperwork to clear so he could take the Frenchman out of Lima in restraints. But let Nevant lecture. It was Carl’s best chance of gleaning something he could use.

“So habitually, you’ve got a lawless vacuum and a bunch of these assholes fighting to put their stamp on a new order that lets them ride up front in the lead limo. Now, with the familias, that’s never going to be the case. There’s already a structure in place, and it’s already full of legitimized scumbags, criollo whites, and trained token indigenas who’ve got the parliament, the military, the banks, the landowners, all that good shit right there in their pockets. The familias are locked out, all they’ve got is crime and this faint echo of an ethnic grievance.” Nevant cupped a hand at his ear. “And the echo’s fading, man. COLIN’s shipped so many altiplano natives out to Mars over the past fifty years, poured so much money into the region, the familias just can’t recruit like they used to. Only places they’re strong anymore are ghetto populations in the Republic. No one else can be bothered. Nobody’s scared of them anymore.”

“So you were going to provide the fear.”

More smoke, billowing. Nevant gestured through it. “Play to your strengths. Everybody’s scared of the thirteens.”

“Yeah, would be, if they weren’t all locked up.”

The Frenchman grinned. “You wish.”

“Oh come on.” Carl waved the fork. “We’ve got a couple of dozen out there at any one time, at most.”

“Not the point, Mars man. Not the point at all.”

“No? Then what is the point?”

Nevant toyed with the cutlery on his side of the table, just touching it with the fingertips of his right hand. “The point is that we exist. We’re a perfect fit for all those atavistic fears they have. They’ve been desperately looking for witches and monsters ever since they wiped us out the first time around. Now they’ve got us back.”

“Okay, so male force and hierarchy nail the human race into a coherent social order, weed out the worst of the loose cannons, and provide a stable base, all so that thousands of years later female principles can emerge to govern with a modicum of civilized decency. That’s your imam’s stance?”

Sevgi nodded. “It’s Valipour’s stance as well, give or take. And a valid Sufistance, too, insofar as it represents a continuing revelation.”

“Sort of explains the backlash, though, doesn’t it.” Yavuz grinned. “Thanks, guys, you’ve done a bang-up job, given your gender limitations, but we’ll take it from here. I mean, it’s hard to imagine the shahuda sitting still for that.”

“Well.” She shrugged. “They didn’t, no.”

“Yeah, I remember the mobs here, chanting in the streets when I was a kid.” Yavuz put a raised, droning note into his voice. “Men have authority over women because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other. So forth.”

Sevgi snorted. “That tired old shit.”

“That tired old shit’s the Qu’ran, as I recall. Is the Qu’ran not a part of Islam in New York?”

“Very funny. Is historical context not a part of intelligent human thought around here?”

The impish grin again. Yavuz seemed to be shrugging off his sudden bout of male guilt. “Around here, sure. But you don’t have to go too far southeast before intelligent human thought is pretty severely frowned on. Come to that, from what I hear you don’t have to go too far southwest of New York before the same thing applies.”

She laughed. “Fair comment. Marsalis told me you wrote a thesis on that stuff. Similarities in the US before Secession and Turkey, something like that?”

“‘Psychosocial Parallels in Turkish and American Nationalisms,’” Yavuz quoted with mock-bombast. He gestured modestly, undercut the effect. “Nothing’s ever that simple, of course, but there were a lot of similarities. Both big, stroppy nationalisms founded in very shallow cultural soil. Both constitutionally secular societies with a resentful fundamentalism snapping at their heels. Both running a massive cultural gap between urban and rural society. Both very uneasy with the New Math, both trying to beat back the virilicide with draconian drug laws and wishful thinking. You know this place might have fractured apart, too, the way the US did, if we hadn’t had the Europeans sneaking about pulling levers from the outside.”

“You don’t sound that pleased about it.”

The Turk sighed. “Yeah, I know. And I should be, I guess. Certainly don’t want the fucking shahuda prowling the streets here, stoning my daughters if they go out unchaperoned or showing more flesh than a wrapped corpse. But it’s no fun, either, knowing your whole country’s just the new backyard for a bunch of over-the-hill ex-imperial cynics.”

“Now you sound almost patriotic.”

“Not me.” He shook his head grimly. “Did Carl tell you I used to teach in the prison system before I got this gig?”

“He mentioned it.”

“Yeah, well you get to see some unpleasant things in the Turkish penal system. I’ve met a few too many torture-scarred political prisoners to be much of a Turkish patriot anymore. The way I see it, anyone who’s proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn’t read enough history yet.”

“I like that.” Sevgi smiled into her salep. “So you think the US might have held together the way Turkey did. I mean, if there’d been an outside force to apply the right pressure?”

“Not necessarily, no.” Yavuz looked unaccountably sad as he said it. “I mean, you’ve got the whole states’ rights issue, which we never had. Two centuries of southern resentment and cultural abrasion, religious fury, racial tension. Those are pretty deep fissures. Plus the anti-drug laws meant less chance for the virilicide to do its weeding out the way it was elsewhere.”

He put his salep mug down on the counter, sat back, and held his open palms toward it, as if in obscure invocation.

“But anyway, it’s academic, isn’t it. Because there never was an outside force big enough to make you people behave. COLIN didn’t exist as such back then, the UN was still a toothless tiger trying to find its dentures, the Chinese just didn’t give a shit. Homegrown corporate interests were all behaving like thugs, they just wanted the cheap resources and labor for as long as it lasted. You’ve got the environmental lobby screaming, Zhang fever scaring the shit out of the Asian populace. Pacific Rim commercial interests don’t want a fight, they just step in and make their offer, and pretty much everyone on the West Coast breathes a big sigh of relief when they do. Los Angeles goes first, toe in the pool, and then the whole coast takes the plunge when it works.”

Sevgi nodded. Somewhere in a box on top of a wardrobe, she still had a replica scroll of the Angeline Freeport charter. Murat had brought it back from a West Coast medical conference for her when she was still in junior high. Like most successful first-generation immigrants, he’d been passionate about his adoptive homeland, even after it fractured apart under his feet almost as he stepped off the plane.

“Yeah,” she said grayly. “And anything the fucking West Coast can do…”

Yavuz nodded, teacher-like. “Just so. The northeastern states seize the precedent and walk away as well. And on all sides, the rhetoric has been stoked so high that there can be no climb-down for anyone. It’s the classic male impasse. Honor satisfied, and everybody loses. A textbook case. Have you ever read Mariela Groombridge? Evolving States?”

She shook her head.

“You should. She’s brilliant. Taught at the University of Texas until they threw her out for signing an anti-creationist petition. She’s in Vienna these days. Basically, she argues that the Secession was an example of a nation-state going extinct because it failed to adapt. America couldn’t cope with modernity, it died from the shock and was torn apart by more adaptive entities. Though I think she tends to skate around the edge of what America really died of.”

“Which is what?”

Yavuz shrugged. “Fear.”

“It’s a power beyond numbers.” Nevant still hadn’t touched the meze, but he was a couple of fingers down the raki glass now. He sneered. “You think the cudlips give a shit about facts? Statistics and formal studies? It’s the knee-jerk, man. That’s what these people live and breathe. There are monsters, there is evil, and it’s somewhere out there in the dark. Whoo-oo-oo. You know, before I got out to Peru, Manco was putting out a rumor that he had pistacos working for him. Settling scores for that turf squabble they had back in ’03.”

Carl nodded. On Mars, he’d seen the familias run a similar dynamic among the less educated end of the Uplands Initiative workforce. He’d been offered pistaco work himself a couple of times, lack of pale skin notwithstanding.

“Whatever works, I guess.”

“Yeah, well. Worked for a while.” Nevant snorted disgustedly and knocked back another chunk of his raki. “Manco was so fucking pleased with himself, he couldn’t see it’d crash and burn soon as one of his fake pistacos got called and couldn’t cut it. I told him—the way I had it mapped out, he could have that monster threat for real. Real, honest-to-DNA monsters doing his enforcing for him. Something to scare everybody, not just the illiterates. Just think what would have happened if the word got around: Cross the familias and they’ll send a fucking thirteen to visit you.”

“Always assuming you and your future army of thirteens could cut it any better than tayta Manco’s fakes.”

Nevant looked at him. “You lose many fights to a normal human recently?”

“No. But like you just got through telling me, it isn’t the facts that do it for humans. Maybe Manco didn’t need a real threat. Or at least, he didn’t need it badly enough to cuddle up with a bunch of fucking twists.”

“Didn’t have any problem cuddling up to that hib cunt Jurgens,” said Nevant sourly. “Amazing how your prejudices can go out the window when there’s a decent rack in the equation.”

“Greta Jurgens?” Carl summoned vague recollection of a languid, gray-eyed blonde from his inquiries after Nevant three years back. She’d been running front-office operations for Manco in Arequipa. “She was a hibernoid?”

“Yeah, she was. Why?”

Carl shrugged. “No reason. Just the way Manco was about the whole twist thing, it’s strange he’d tolerate one that far up the ladder on the inside.”

“Like I said, check out the rack. The ass. And hey, for all I know, hibs do some dickshift tricks you can’t get out of a human woman.”

Carl sipped his drink, shook his head. “That’s bonobos, and even then it’s bullshit hype. Anyway, Manco wants that kind of thrill, he can go down to Lima and have his pick of twist brothels. Come on. It doesn’t add up.”

“Well then, maybe it’s just that there are twists and twists.” Nevant’s lip curled. “Not many people are scared of the ones whose party piece is curling up and sleeping for four months at a time. Doesn’t threaten your masculinity much, that. It’s only people like us they feel the need to lock up and stop breeding.”

Carl gazed at the cutlery on the table. He nodded, a little sadly. “People like you. They lock people like you up. Me, I’m licensed.”

“Domesticated, you mean.”

“Call it what you like. You can’t turn the clock back twenty thousand years, Stefan.”

Nevant unsheathed the wolf-snarl grin again.

“Can’t you?”

“See, once upon a time,” Yavuz was saying, “fear was a unifying force. Back then, you could make a country strong with xenophobia. That’s the old model, the nation-state fortress thing. But you can’t live in a fortress when your whole way of life depends on globalized interdependence and trade. Once that happens, xenophobic tendency becomes a handicap, in Groombridge’s terms a non-adaptive trait. She cites—”

Down the promenade, the splintering crack of glass. Sevgi whipped about in time to see the restaurant window shattered outward around two grappling bodies. Someone shrieked.

“Ah, fuck.”

She grabbed after the gun she wasn’t permitted to carry here, blind fingers registering the lack ahead of conscious thought. Flung herself off the stool—it teetered and toppled behind her, she heard it go down clattering—and toward the fight. Yavuz was at her side, brandishing an authorized pistol…

On the floor, the pale thirteen had Marsalis pinned. His arm hauled up, something in it, slashed down. Somehow, Marsalis twisted aside, did something with his legs that shifted the balance of the fight. Nevant reeled, shaking a hand that must have hit the concrete floor with killing force, must have broken bones. He was trying to keep the black man down with his other arm, but the lock wasn’t working. Marsalis skated sideways by fractions, his shoulder slipped loose. His hand flapped, grabbed, pulled the Frenchman down toward him. He hinged upward from the stomach, hard, met Nevant’s face with the crown of his skull. Sevgi heard the noise it made, and her teeth went on edge.

They arrived.

“That’s it, motherfucker.” Yavuz, in English. Voice shocked hoarse, pistol jammed in Nevant’s ear. “Game over.”

Nevant swaying, one hand clutched to his face, blood dripping between fingers from a nose that had to be broken. Coughing, bubbling, but through it came laughter. Marsalis grunted and tugged himself out from beneath, folded a leg, and shoved the Frenchman sideways with his knee. Nevant went halfway to collapsing, still clutching his face. Still chuckling. The hand he was using was the same one he’d just broken on the concrete.

“Going to have to.” He sucked a breath, wetly. “Buy my own cigarettes after all.”

“Looks like it, yeah.” Marsalis rolled to his feet, one smooth coiling motion. He was checking himself for cuts from the glass.

“I did warn you.”

“Yeah, and you made a real pig’s ear of palming that cutlery knife as well.” The black man’s tone was absent. He turned his right hand, frowning, and Sevgi saw tear-track ribbons of blood in the cup of it. Marsalis lifted the hand to eye level, twisted it palm-outward, and pulled back his sleeve. He grimaced. There was a long cut, narrow sliver of glass still embedded, in the flesh on the outer edge of his palm.

“You stay there, you fuck,” Yavuz was telling Nevant shakily. The pistol muzzle floated about close to the pale thirteen’s forehead. “You sit there, and you don’t fucking move.”

He fished in his jacket with his spare hand, brought out a phone, and punched a speed-dial number. Beyond, in the cave made by the hole through the window, people stood about and gaped at the tumbled chairs and table. Waiters hovered, uncertain. A big downward-jagged triangular chunk of glass dropped suddenly from among its fellows in the top of the frame and broke undramatically in three pieces on the ground.

At the apex of the narrowest fragment, as if indicated by an arrowhead of glass, Sevgi saw the glint of the cutlery knife where Nevant had dropped it. The words the two thirteens had just traded caught up with her. She stared at Marsalis.

“You. Knew he was going to do this?”

The black man pinched the glass sliver between finger and thumb and tugged slowly until it emerged whole from the wound. He turned it curiously this way and that in the dim light for a moment, then dropped it.

“Well.” He flexed the injured hand and grimaced again. “There was always a risk he’d get genetic about it, yeah.”

“You told us the two of you were friends.”

Choked chortle from Nevant where he now sat with his back to the undamaged neighboring window panel. Marsalis looked at Sevgi levelly over his wound.

“I think I said we got on okay.”

Sevgi grew aware of the thuttering in her chest and temples. She took a long breath, took stock. Gestured around her.

“And you call this okay?”

Marsalis shrugged. “Hey, what can I say? Blame the wiring.”

On the floor, Nevant chuckled again, through blood and broken bone.

CHAPTER 27

His hand needed glue, and there were still minute fragments of glass in the wound. He sat in a UN medical unit in Fenerbahçe and waited patiently while a nurse cleaned him up. Glare of overhead lighting and—something he could have lived without—a screen in one corner with a microscopic blowup of the wound as it was treated. He looked fixedly elsewhere.

Ertekin had wanted the COLIN facilities on the European side instead, but couldn’t argue with the immediacy of the UN hospital’s location. It took them less than five minutes in a taxi—the bloodied promenade and gathering, gawping crowds dumped for the quiet residential streets of Fenerbahçe and the welcome-beacon lamps out front at the medical center’s modestly appointed nanobuild façade. Now Ertekin was gone, along with Battal Yavuz and Nevant, down the corridor to wherever they were treating the Frenchman’s injuries. He guessed she wanted a shot at hearing the other thirteen’s side of the story. He also judged she was still a little numb from the action, and couldn’t blame her much. The strain of the encounter with Nevant still twanged in his own blood, more than he showed.

The door opened and a Turk in a suit slipped in, yawning. Grizzled hair and matching, close-clipped mustache, not quite clean-shaven slate-gray chin. The suit was expensive and came with a carefully knotted silk tie. Only the sleep-swollen eyes and the yawn suggested the bed he’d been called out of. The sleepy gaze calibrated Carl for a moment, then the newcomer murmured something to the nurse, who immediately laid down his microcam-enhanced tools and excused himself. The door shut quietly behind him. Carl raised an eyebrow.

“Am I going to have to pay for this?”

The Turk smiled dutifully. “Very droll, Mr. Marsalis. Of course, as a licensed UNGLA accountant, you have a health plan with us. That’s not why I’m here.”

He came forward and offered his hand. “I am Mehmet Tuzcu, UNGLA special liaison.”

Carl took the hand, careful of his wound. He stayed seated. “And what can I do for you, Mehmet bey?”

“Your Colony Initiative escort is on the next floor.” Tuzcu’s gaze flicked toward the ceiling. “There is transport waiting for you in the street at the back of this building. We will leave by the bulk elevator, unseen. In half an hour we can have you on a suborbital to London, but”—a glance at a heavy steel watch—“we will have to hurry.”

“You’re. Rescuing me?”

“If you like.” The patient smile again. “They expected you in New York, but events seem to have overtaken us. Now we really must—”

“I, uhm.” Carl gestured with his nearly repaired hand. “I don’t really need rescuing. COLIN aren’t holding me under any kind of duress.”

The smile paled out. “Nevertheless, you are part of an unauthorized retrieval operation. COLIN are in breach of the Munich Accords by employing you in this capacity.”

“I’ll mention it to them.”

Tuzcu frowned. “You are refusing to come with me?”

“Yeah.”

“May I ask why?”

Ask away, he was tempted to say. Been asking myself the same thing, don’t have an intelligent answer yet.

“Do you know Gianfranco di Palma?”

Tuzcu’s eyes were careful. “Yes. I have met Signor di Palma a number of times.”

“Slimy piece of shit, isn’t he?”

“What is your point, please?”

“You were asking me for a reason. Tell di Palma this is what happens when you run your licensed operatives on a no-win/no-fee bounty and a three-month delay on expense reimbursement. They start to have loyalty issues.”

The UNGLA man hesitated. He glanced back at the door. Carl stood up.

“Don’t let’s force this, Mehmet,” he said easily.

Sevgi found him later, seated in the ground-floor waiting area watching some low-grade global music show on an overhead screen. A miked-up and dyed blonde pranced back and forth on stage in clothing that wasn’t much more than slashed ribbons, stances, and motion designed to maximize the display of the tanned flesh beneath. A dance troupe of young men and women, similarly unclad, followed her in mindless body echo. The song wittered on, backed by instruments you couldn’t see being played.

“See anything you like?” she asked.

“It’s better than what I was watching earlier.” He glanced past her. “What did you do with Nevant?”

“He’s coming down.”

“Right.” Marsalis’s eyes drifted back to the screen. “Got to hand it to you people, this is something you do really well.”

“You people?”

“Humans. Look at that.” He waved his bandaged hand up at the gaily colored images. “Perfect lockstep. Group mind. No wonder you guys make such good soldiers.”

“Kind of ironic, coming from you,” she said waspishly. “Compliments from the state-of-the-art gene warrior.”

He smiled. “Ertekin, you don’t want to believe everything they tell you on the feeds.”

The elevator chimed, and Battal Yavuz exited, shepherding Nevant. The pale thirteen wore a mask of bandaging across the middle of his face and a similar wrapping on his broken hand. He seemed in good spirits.

“See you again,” he said to Marsalis. He lifted the damaged hand. “When this is back to functional, maybe.”

“Sure. You know where I live. Look me up soon as you get out.”

Yavuz looked sheepish. “Sorry about this, Carl. If I’d known he was going to—”

“Skip it. No harm done.” Carl got up and clapped the Turk on the shoulder. “Thanks for coming out. Been good to see you.”

Sevgi hovered, watching Nevant peripherally.

“You want me to come with you to the heliport?” she asked Yavuz.

He shook his head. “No need.”

“But if—”

Marsalis grinned. “Show her your ankle, Stefan.”

As if they were all sharing a joke, the Frenchman pulled up the left leg of his pants. Tight at the bottom of his shin, a slim band of shiny, pored black fiber wrapped around. It wasn’t much larger than a man’s watch, but a tiny green light winked tirelessly on and off at one edge. She shouldn’t really have been surprised, but her breath still hitched to a halt for a moment as she saw.

“Excursion restraint,” said Yavuz. “No one comes off the tract without one. Stefan here’s not going to give me any trouble.”

“And if he slips it? Finds a way to cut it loose?”

“It’s anti-tamper,” said Nevant, curiously gentle. “Wolf-trap-formatted. Any interference, it triggers. Want to know what happens then?”

She already knew. The wolf-trap cuffs had a long and unpleasant history, made worse in her case by close personal connection. News stories of mutilated Muslim prisoners of war in American custody had dogged her father in his choice of émigré destination—his mail in the last weeks before he left Istanbul for good had been sprinkled with badly spelled death threats. Controversy raged in the feeds, cheap and violent vitriol overshadowing Murat’s personal struggle with culture and conscience—Western pundits retorted angrily to the war-crime accusations with detail on modified cuff use for Sharia punishments in many of the self-declared Islamic republics, a rebuttal that stood for a while, then rang increasingly hollow as it became apparent who was selling the Islamic purists their mutilative technology. Murat, tasting a sour expedient hypocrisy whichever fruit he bit into, stormed out of Turkey anyway, and never looked back.

But later, as if they were some kind of family curse, Sevgi ran across the wolf-trap cuffs herself.

“She’s a cop, Stefan.” Marsalis, there at her shoulder, filling in for her sudden drop into silence. “I reckon she’ll be familiar with the hardware.”

She had been a cop, but only just, less than two years in, when she developed her familiarity with the hardware. Internal Affairs landed on the 108th like a bomb, brought a case against a group of detectives she knew who’d used the cuffs on hard-core suspects, apparently—but who the fuck could really fathom the logic of it—in an attempt to scare up a usable confession. During the interrogation, the pressure got cranked up a little too high. A young Sevgi Ertekin got dragged into the mix by association, was rapidly cleared, but still had had to stand in a field in upstate New York at dawn, watching mist cling just above the fallow earth, listening to the precise scrape—crunch rhythm of machine spadework, and, finally, gagging as the IA digging robot gently exhumed the three nine-week-old corpses and their cuff-severed hands.

Welcome to NYPD.

Small consolation—look at it this way, Sev, an uninvolved brother officer suggested at the time—that the cuffs, long outlawed in the Union, had come surreptitiously to the 108th via a Jesusland brother-in-law to one of the convicted detectives, a senior officer for a private policing outfit in Alabama, Republican law enforcement—of course—still making widespread use of the cuffs in defiance of three international treaties and a nominal federal ruling yet to be ratified anywhere except Illinois.

Look at it this way, Sev;

IA backed off from her speedily enough to avoid Officer Ertekin being tarred as a collaborator; better yet, her exemplary balancing act between loyalty to her fellow officers and duty to her calling was noticed by senior heads who would, years down the line, smooth her entry into Midtown Homicide.

Look at it this way, Sev;

The dead men in the field would not be much missed—all three had prior convictions as cross-border sex traffickers, hoodwinking young women from the Republic with promises of lucrative casual labor among the bright lights, then disciplining them via rape and battery until most went numbly to work providing orifices for New York’s low-end paying males.

She looked to the small consolations, as advised. All that spring she looked at it that way, but in the end it still came down to the remembered reek of decomposed human flesh in the early-morning mist. Something changed in her that day—she saw the recognition of it in Murat’s eyes when she came home to him afterward. It was the day he stopped trying to persuade her there were better career paths than the police, perhaps because he saw that if she didn’t quit for this then she never would.

Nevant dropped his pants leg over the cuff, and she blinked back to the present. A small bubble of quiet expanded in the waiting area.

“I thought those were illegal in Europe,” she said, to break the silence.

“On humans,” agreed Nevant, darting a glance at Marsalis. “With thirteens, though, well, you can’t be too careful. Isn’t that right, Mars man?”

The black man shrugged. “Depends how bright they are, I’d say.”

He watched Yavuz take the Frenchman out and put him in the dedicated UN teardrop without speaking again, or moving. His face could have been carved from anthracite. Only when the vehicle pulled softly away did he glance up at the dance troupe on the screen above his head, and something happened in the lines around his eyes. Sevgi made it for disgust, but she couldn’t have said with any certainty at what or whom it was aimed, and she wondered if Marsalis could, either.

So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it wasn’t really cold outside or really late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the street-finder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda Caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down toward the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.

At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question. “When did you know he was going to try for you?”

He shrugged. “When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.”

“And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?”

“If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.”

They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahçe loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Atatürk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed, and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. NE MUTLU TURKUM DIYENE. What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.

“What’s that say?” he asked her.

She groped after a translation. “Uhm, ‘male-pattern baldness—it’s a bigger problem than you think.’”

He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.

“Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.”

She shook her head. “Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humor. They would have just defaced it.”

“And you?”

“It’s not my country,” she said flatly.

At a second-story balcony ahead, an old man leaned amid pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.

“So did you get anything useful out of Nevant?” He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.

“I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambarén.”

“In Peru?”

“Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.”

“It’s your ground, too, isn’t it?” He thought she smiled. “Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?”

“If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it awhile ago.”

“I know,” she said. “I was joking.”

“Oh.”

They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred meters farther on, the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.

“That cuff,” she said as they spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. “You knew Nevant was wearing it.”

“Never really thought about it.” He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.”

“It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.”

“Well, those things are slow acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have gotten my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stefan would have buried that knife in my spine.” He paused, reviewing the fight. “Or my eye.”

“That’s not what I mean.” There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.

“Well, what do you mean then?”

“I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her Are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the pavement along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.

“Look,” he said experimentally. “First of all, Stefan Nevant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.”

“But that’s fucking stupid,” she flared.

“Is it?” This time he stopped on the pavement, turned toward her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-soled boots she wore them with. “I put Nevant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or an UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometers, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot—which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment—you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.”

“Worth dying for?”

“You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.”

“I meant you might have killed him.”

Carl shrugged. “I might. You’re also forgetting that Nevant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.”

She locked her gaze on his.

“Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t gotten there first?”

He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand molded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment house entryway.

It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts, and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and inner thighs, his fingers worked the moistness apart. She shuddered, groped vaguely at the swollen lump in his trousers, finally got both hands on his belt and opened it. He flopped out, tightened to fully erect in the cool air. She laughed, short and throaty as she felt the length of his prick, ghosted an open palm up and down the underside of it.

Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose. No luck—the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” She stopped, bent toward him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. “Look, stop, wait.”

She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place. She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet, and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.

She felt the change, made a muffled, querying noise and went to work in earnest, mouth and fingers; he felt himself climbing the curve again, but knew again he would not make it. His hands uncurled, came loose from the wall, hung there. He stared at the shadows.

“Hey,” she said softly.

“Look, I’m—”

“No, you look.” Sudden instruction in her voice, it hooked his gaze downward and she grinned up at him. With her left hand, she gathered her exposed breasts up and together. She gripped his shaft hard in the other hand, pushed the glans back and forth in the press of her cleavage. He felt something leap violently in his chest. She grinned again, bent her head and spat gently, drooled spit onto the head of his prick and then, still gripping hard, pushed the wet-gleaming flesh back between her breasts, rubbed it there, in and out, in and out, for the ten or twenty more seconds it took before he felt the furious heat come raging up through him, no hitch now, no stopping…

And out.

He made a noise like a drowning man hauled back aboard, like the sound he’d made the day the rescue ship hailed Felipe Souza for the first time, and he sagged back against the wall, then slid down it, as if shot. He felt her fingers let go, stickily, felt her gathering her disordered clothing together, and put out his hand.

“Wait.”

“We should go, it’s—”

“You’re going. Nowhere,” he said unsteadily. “Stand up.”

He pushed her upright again, where she’d been, against the wall, and this time he crouched, slid hands up the insides of the long thighs to part them, pulled the scrap of lace cotton firmly to one side, and sank his tongue in her as deep as it would go.

Back at the apartment, he did it again, this time on the bed where he’d seen her asleep that morning. Pulled up close to breathe her scent, one hand raising the cushion of her buttocks up so the lips of her cunt met his mouth like a mismatched kiss, the fingers of his other hand deep inside her and the breadth of his tongue lapping up against the rubbery switch of her clit. He felt a carnivore itch rising in him, a deep thirst that was only partly slaked when she bucked and flexed across the bed and clamped hands and thighs around his head as if she could push him by sheer force inside her.

She flopped, panting, face rolled sideways, eyes closed, gone, and he gathered her under him and slid into her to the hilt of his newly swollen-tight erection. Her eyes flew open, and she said oh, just that single sound, lightly, delightedly, fresh hunger rolling on the edge of the syllable.

And then it was like the hard evercrete steps they’d taken up to Moda, steep and stiff breathing and no speech at all on the long, steady climb together to the top.

CHAPTER 28

“He did what?”

Norton glowered out of the screen at her, disbelief and anger struggling for the upper hand on his face.

“Ended up in a fight with Nevant,” said Sevgi patiently. “Relax, Tom, it’s already happened. There’s nothing anybody could have done.”

“Yes there is. You could have refused to let him have his way.”

“Let him have his way?” She felt the faint stain of a blush start in her neck. All the places Marsalis had bitten softly into her flesh were suddenly warm again. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means Marsalis suddenly decides he needs to fly out to the other side of the globe, and you just lie down for it. Our cannibal friend is killing people in America, not Europe. I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that Marsalis is looking for a way to get home without fulfilling his contract.”

“Yes, that occurred to me, Tom. Quite awhile ago in fact, back when you were happy to stick him in an unguarded New York hotel for the night.”

Pause. “As I recall, I was going to put him up at my place.”

“Whatever, Tom. The point is, we hired Marsalis to do a job. If we aren’t going to trust him to do it, then why did we bother springing him in the first place?”

Norton opened his mouth, then evidently thought better of what he was going to say. He nodded. “All right. So having beaten up Nevant, what does our resident expert want to do now?”

“He’s talking about Peru.”

“Peru?”

“Yes, Peru. Familias andinas, remember. He got leads from Nevant that point back to the altiplano, so that’s where we need to go.”

“Right.” He cleared his throat. “So, Sevgi, you think we’re actually going to do any investigating at all in the places the crimes are being committed? You know, I was never a cop, but—”

“Fuck it, Tom.” She leaned into the screen. “What’s wrong with you? This is the twenty-second century. You know, global interconnection? The integrated human domain? We can be in Lima in forty-five minutes. Cuzco a couple of hours later at worst. And back in New York before the end of the day.”

“It is the end of the day,” said Norton drily. “It’s past midnight here.”

“Hey, you called me.”

“Yeah, because I was getting kind of alarmed at the silent running, Sev. You’ve been gone two days without a word.”

“Day and a half.” The retort was automatic, but in fact she wasn’t sure who was closer. Her sense of time was shot. Crossing the Bosphorus seemed weeks in the past, New York and Florida months before that.

Norton didn’t seem disposed to argue the toss, either. He glanced at his watch, shrugged.

“Fact remains. You stay gone much longer, Nicholson and Roth are going to start barking.”

She grinned. “So that’s what you’re pissed about. Come on, Tom. You can handle them. I saw the press conference. You played Meredith and Hanitty like a pair of cretins.”

“Meredith and Hanitty are a pair of cretins, Sev. That’s the point. Whatever you say about Nicholson, he’s not stupid, and he’s our boss, and that goes double for Roth. They won’t wear this for long. Not without more payback than your new playmate’s hunches.” Norton’s gaze flickered across the quadrants of the screen, scanning the space over her shoulders. “Where is wonderboy, anyway?”

“Asleep”—she caught herself—“I’d guess. It’s a pretty antisocial hour here as well, you know.”

In fact, when the phone rang, she’d rolled over in the bed and felt a shivery delight as she found the bulk of him there at her side. The frisson turned into a jolt as she saw, at a distance of about ten centimeters, that he was awake, eyes open and watching her. He nodded in the direction of the ringing. COLIN apartment, he said, I figure that’s for you. She nodded in turn, groped over the side of the bed for her T-shirt, and sat up to pull it over her head. She could feel his eyes on her, on the heavy swing of her breasts as she completed the move, and it sent another quiver of jellied warmth through her. The feeling stayed as she blundered out to the phone.

“On COLIN’s endeavor, the sun never sets,” quoted Norton, deadpan. “Anyway, if you’re going to Peru, you’ll need an early start.”

“Have you talked to Ortiz?”

He grew somber. “Yeah, earlier today. They put him through to a v-format for about ten minutes. Doctors won’t run it for longer than that, they say the mental strain’s the last thing he needs. They’ve got nanorepair fixing the organ damage, but the slugs were dirty, some kind of trace carcinogen, and it’s fucking up the new cell growth.”

“Is he going to die?”

“We’re all going to die, Sev. But from this, no, he won’t. They’ve got him stabilized. Still a long road out, but he’ll make it.”

“So what did he say, in the virtual?”

A grimace. “He told me to trust your instincts.”

They got a late-morning suborb to La Paz—like most nations aligned with the Western Nations Colony Initiative, Turkey ran connections to the altiplano hubs every couple of hours. Sevgi had the COLIN limo pick them up at the door. No leisure to ride the ferries this time around.

“We could have waited for the Lima hook,” Marsalis pointed out as they neared the airport at smooth, priority-lane speed. “Less rush that way. I’d have time to buy those clothes you were bitching about.”

“I’m under instructions to rush,” she told him.

“Yeah, but you know there’s a good chance Bambarén might be in Lima, anyway. He does a lot of business down the coast.”

“In that case, we’ll go there.”

“That’ll take some time.”

She gave him a superior grin. “No, it won’t. You’re working for COLIN now. This is our backyard.”

To underline the point, she had a reception detachment meet them at the other end. Three unsmiling indigenas, one male, two female, who brought them out of the terminal with hardened, watchful care to where an armored Land Rover waited under harsh lighting in the no-parking zone. Beyond was soft darkness, a smog-blurred moon and the vague bulk of mountains rising in the distance. As soon as they were all inside the Land Rover, the female operative gave her a gun—a Beretta Marstech, with two clips and a soft leather shoulder holster. She hadn’t requested it. Welcome to La Paz, the woman said, with or without irony Sevgi could not decide. Then they were in motion again, shuttled smoothly through the sleeping streets to a dedicated suite in the new Hilton Acantilado, with views out across the bowl of the city, and Marstech-level security systems. A beautifully styled Bang & Olufsen data/coms portal sat unobtrusively in the corner of every section but the bathroom, which had its own phone. The beds were vast, begging to be used.

They stood at opposite ends of the floor-to-ceiling window and stared out. It was, once again, obscenely early in the morning—they’d outrun the sun, dumping it scornfully behind them as the suborbital bounced off its trajectory peak and plunged back down to Earth. Now the predawn darkness beyond the windows jarred, and the inverted starscape bowl of city lights below them whispered up a weightless sense of the unreal. It all felt like too much time in virtual. Thin air and hunger just added to the load. Sevgi could feel herself getting vague.

“Want to eat?” she asked.

He shot her a glance she recognized. “Don’t tempt me.”

“Food,” she said primly. “All I’ve eaten in the past day is that simit.”

“Price of progress. On a flatline flight, they would have fed us twice at least. The untold downside of the suborb-traveler lifestyle.”

“Do you want to eat or not?”

“Sure. Whatever they’ve got.” He went to the Bang & Olufsen, checked the welcome-screen protocol, and fired the system up. She shook her head, took a last look at the view, and went to order from the next room.

Midway through scanning the services menu, she accidentally brought up the health section. Her eye caught on the subheading tab stimulants and synaptic enhancers, and she realized with a slight jolt that she hadn’t taken any syn for the best part of twenty-four hours.

Hadn’t wanted any.

The first time Carl wanted Manco Bambarén’s attention, three years back, he’d gotten it by the simple expedient of sounding out the tayta’s business interests and then doing them as much rapid damage as he easily could. It was an old Osprey tactic from the Central Asian theater, and it transferred without too much trouble.

Bambarén’s particular limb of the familias were moving exotic fabric out of prep camp warehouses in quantities small enough not to trigger a COLIN response, amassing the scavenged gear in isolated village locations and then trucking it down to Lima to feed the insatiable maw of the Marstech black market. It wasn’t hard to get detail on this—pretty much everyone knew about it, but bribes and kickbacks kept the much-vaunted but badly paid Peruvian security forces out of the equation, and Bambarén was smart enough to limit his pilfering to relatively commonplace tech items no longer sensitive at a patent level. The corporations claimed on their insurance, made the right noises but no great effort otherwise to plug the leaks. In tacit quid pro quo, Bambarén stayed out of their hair on the more vexing issue of local labor relations, where the familias had a traditional influence that could have been problematic if it were ever deployed. Local loyalties and Bambarén’s ferocious Cuzco slum street rep did the rest. It was a sweet-running system, and since it kept everyone happy, it showed potential to run that way for a long time to come.

Carl had entered the equation with no local ax to grind and nothing to lose but his bounty for Stefan Nevant. For two quiet weeks, he’d done his research, and then one night he held up one of tayta Manco’s trucks on the precipitous, winding highway down from Cuzco to Nazca and the coast. The armed muscle in the passenger seat took exception, which from a logistical point of view was a blessing in disguise. Carl shot him dead, then gave the driver the option of either joining his companion in the white powdered dirt by the side of the road or helping Carl roll the vehicle over the edge with an incendiary grenade—Peruvian army stock, he’d bought it from a friendly grunt—taped to its fuel tank. The driver proved cooperative, and the hardware worked. The truck exploded spectacularly on its first cartwheeling bounce, trailed flame and debris down into the canyon below, and burned there merrily for an hour or so, releasing enough exotic long-chain pollutants into the atmosphere to attract the attention of an environmental monitoring satellite. Not many things burned with that signature, and the things that did had no business being on fire outside of COLIN jurisdiction. Helicopters gathered in the night, like big moths around a campfire. With them came the inevitable journalists, and not far behind them a sprinkling of local politicians, environmental experts, and Earth First reps, all keen to get some media profile. Presently, an official recovery team made its painstaking way down into the ravine, but not before a lot of embarrassing spectrographics had been shot and a lot of equally embarrassing questions sharpened to a fine edge on the whetstone of starved journalistic speculation.

By then, Carl was long gone. He’d given the truck driver a lift down to Nazca and a message to hand on to tayta Manco with a number to call. Bambarén, who was no fool, called the next day, and after a certain amount of male display rage asked what exactly the fuck Carl wanted, motherfucker. Carl told him. Thirty-six hours after that, Stefan Nevant walked back into his Arequipa hotel room and found himself looking down the barrel of the Haag gun.

Subtlety, Carl had discovered, was a much overrated tool where organized crime was concerned.

In the Bolivian predawn, he dialed accordingly.

“This had better be life or fucking death,” Greta Jurgens said coldly when she finally answered. The screen showed her settling in front of the phone, pulling a gray silk dressing gown closer about her. Her face was puffy. “Do you know what time it is?”

Carl made a show of consulting his watch.

“Yeah, it’s October. I figure that gives me another couple of weeks before it’s your bedtime. How’s things, Greta?”

The hibernoid squinted at the screen, and her face lost all expression. “Well, well. Marsalis, right? The bogeyman.”

“The very same.”

“What do you want?”

“That’s what I like about you, Greta. Charming small talk.” Carl floated a casual, open-handed gesture. “It’s nothing much. Wanted to talk to Manco. Strictly a chat, old-times stuff.”

“Manco’s not in town right now.”

“But you know how to get hold of him.”

Jurgens said nothing. Her face wasn’t just puffy, it was rounder than he remembered it, smooth-skinned and chubby with late-cycle subcutaneous fat uptake. He guessed her thinking was groggier than usual, too—silence was the safe option.

Carl grinned. “Look, we can do this one of two ways. Either you can tell Manco I want a word and we arrange a friendly sitdown, or I can start making your lives difficult again. What’s it going to be?”

“You might find that a little harder to do these days.”

“Really? Made some new Initiative friends, have we?” He read the confirmation in the hibernoid’s face. “Do yourself and Manco both a favor, Greta. Trace this call and find out whose wafer I’m running on. Then decide whether you want to piss me off.”

He killed the line and Greta Jurgens blinked out in midretort.

Carl got up and went to stare down at the lights of La Paz. A couple of hours at worst, he reckoned. Jurgens had specialists a phone call away who could run the trace, and it wouldn’t take them very long to nail it to COLIN’s dedicated Hilton suite. Marstech-level systems showed up in the dataflow like implanted metal on an X-ray plate. The familia datahawks probably wouldn’t be able to get past the tech; Jurgens in any case probably wouldn’t ask them to. But it would still be pretty fucking clear what they were looking at, thank you very much. Say an hour to do all that. Then, allow that Jurgens had been telling the truth and Manco Bambarén wasn’t with her in Arequipa. Wherever he was, he could be reached, and that wouldn’t take long, either. And with what Jurgens had to tell him, he’d call back.

Ertekin came back through from the other room. She’d changed into the NYPD T-shirt and a pair of running sweats.

“Food’s here,” she said.

In the buffered quiet of the suite, he hadn’t heard it arrive. He nodded. “Shouldn’t eat too much at this altitude. Your body’s working hard enough as it is.”

“Yeah, Marsalis.” She gave him a hands-on-hips sort of look. “I have been on the altiplano a couple of times before. COLIN employee, you know?”

“That’s not what it says on your chest,” he told her, looking there pointedly.

“This?” She pressed a hand to one breast and tapped the nypd logo with her fingertips. A grin crept into the corner of her mouth “You got a problem with me wearing this?”

He grinned back. “Not if you let me take it off you after breakfast.”

“We’ll see,” she said, unconvincingly.

But after breakfast, there was no time. The phone chimed while they were still talking, sitting with the big clay mugs of mate de coca cupped in both hands. Outside call, the system announced in smooth female tones. Carl took his mug through to the next room to answer. He dropped into the chair in front of the Bang & Olufsen and thumbed the accept button.

“Yeah?”

Manco Bambarén’s weather-blasted Inca features stared out at him from the screen. His face was impassive, but there was a slow smoking anger in the dark eyes. He spoke harsh, bite-accented English.

“So, black man. You return to plague us.”

“Well, historically, that ought to be a change for you guys.” Carl sipped the thin-tasting tea, met the other man’s eyes through rising steam. “Better than being plagued by the white man, right?”

“Don’t play word games with me, twist. What do you want?”

Carl slipped into Quechua. “I’m only quoting your oaths of unity there. Indigenous union, from the ashes of racial oppression, all that shit. What do I want? I want to talk to you. Face-to-face. Take a couple of hours at most.”

Bambarén leaned into the screen. “I no longer concern myself with your scurrying escapee brothers and their bolt-holes. I have nothing to tell you.”

“Yeah, Greta said you’d gone up in the world. No more fake-ID work, huh? No more low-level Marstech pilfering. I guess you’re a respectable criminal these days.” Carl let his voice harden. “Makes no difference. I want to talk anyway. Pick a place.”

There was a long pause while Bambarén tried to stare him down. Carl inhaled the tea steam, took down the damp, green-leaf odor of it, and waited.

“You still speak my language like a drunken peasant laborer,” said the familia chief sourly. “And act as if it were an accomplishment.”

Carl shrugged. “Well, I learned it among peasant laborers, and we were often drunk. My apologies if it offends. Now pick a fucking place to meet.”

More silence. Bambarén glowered. “I am in Cuzco,” he said. Even in the lilting altiplano Quechua, the words sounded bitten off. “I’ll see you out at Sacsayhuamán at one this afternoon.”

“Make it three,” Carl told him lazily. “I’ve got a few other things I want to do first.”

CHAPTER 29

He still had the deep oil-and-salt scent of Sevgi Ertekin on his fingers later as he sat in the COLIN jeep with his chin propped up on his thumb, staring glumly at the scenery and waiting for Manco Bambarén. It was his sole source of cheer in an otherwise poisonous mood. Jet lag and the showdown with Nevant were catching up with him like running dogs. He’d bought two new sets of clothes through the hotel’s services net, didn’t much like any of them when they arrived, could not be bothered to send them back and start again. They were black and hard wearing—like me, he thought sourly—and top-of-the-line. The latest generation of declassified Marstech fabrics, released to the high-end public amid a fog of testimonials from global celebrities and ex-Mars personnel. He hated them, but they’d have to fucking do.

Out of sheer contrariness, he kept the S(t)igma jacket.

“He’s late,” she said, from behind the jeep’s wheel.

“Of course he’s late. He’s making a point.”

Through the windshield, the grassy terraces of Sacsayhuamán rose on walls of massive, smoothly interlocking stone, dark under a glaring white-clouded sky. This late in the day, they had the ruins almost to themselves, and the emptiness lent the ramparts a brooding air. There were a few late-season tourists wandering about the site, but the scale of the Inca building blocks dwarfed them. Similarly reduced, a small knot of locals in traditional dress had withdrawn to the margins, women and children minding long-suffering llamas done up in ribbons, all waiting for a paying photo opportunity. They made tiny flecks of color against the somber stone.

It wasn’t the first time Carl had seen Sacsayhuamán, but as always the stonework fascinated him. The blocks were shaped and finished but hugely irregular, echoing the slumped solid enormity of natural rock formations. The jigsaw lines between them drew your eye like detail in a painting. You could sit there just looking at it all for quite a while, which—he glanced at his watch—they had been.

“You think he’s making a point with this as well?” Ertekin nodded forward at the walls. “Land of my fathers, that kind of thing?”

“Maybe.”

“But you don’t think so?”

He shot her a side glance. “Did I say that?”

“You might as well have.”

He went back to staring at the stonework. Ghostly beyond, Nevant grinned at him out of a bloodstained, broken-nosed face, pale with hospital lighting. Your feelings are your own, Mars man. Wallow in them as you see fit.

He made an effort.

“You could be right,” he admitted. “The guy does talk like a fucking poet half the time, and he’s seriously impressed with himself. So yeah, maybe he is getting all cultural on us.”

Ertekin nodded. “Thought so.”

Ten more minutes crept by. Carl was thinking about getting out to stretch his legs when an armored black Range Rover rolled bumpily across the rough turf parking area to their left. Smoked-glass windows, glossy curved flanks, anti-grenade skirt almost to the floor. Carl dropped his introspection. The jet lag folded away.

“Here we go.”

The new arrival braked to a halt, and a door cracked in the black carapace. Manco Bambarén stepped out, immaculately attired in a sand-colored suit and flanked by bodyguards in Ray-Bans that matched his own. No visible weapons, but there didn’t need to be. The stances and blank, reflective sun-shade menace were old-school South America; Carl had seen the same thing deployed all over, on streets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá. The mirror patches Bambarén and his guards had in place of eyes talked up the same exclusive power as the shiny bombproof flanks on the Range Rover. You saw yourself thrown back in the reflecting surfaces, sealed outside and of no importance to the eyes within.

Carl climbed out of the jeep.

“I’m coming with you,” said Ertekin quickly.

“Suit yourself. It’s all going to be in Quechua anyway.”

He crossed the turf to the Range Rover, pushing down an unnecessary surge from the mesh. He intended to lean on Bambarén, but he didn’t think it’d come to a fight, however much he’d have liked to smash the mirror shades back in splinters into the eyes behind, take a limb from the bigger of the two guards, and—

Whoa, Carl. Let’s keep this in perspective, shall we?

He reached the familia chief and stopped, just out of reach.

“Hello, Manco. Thanks for coming. Could have left the kids at home, though.”

“Black man.” Manco jerked his chin. “Nice coat you have there. Jesusland threads?”

Carl nodded. “South Florida State.”

“Thought so. Got a cousin had one just like it.”

Carl touched finger and thumb to the lapel of the S(t)igma jacket. “Yeah, going to be a major fashion anytime now.”

“It was my understanding,” said the familia chief urbanely, “that in Jesusland it already is. Highest incarceration rate on the planet, they say. So who’s your tits and ass?”

Carl turned casually and saw that Ertekin had gotten out as well, but hadn’t followed him. As he watched, she leaned back on the jeep beside the COLIN decal and put her hands in her pockets. The movement shifted her jacket aside, showed the strap of her shoulder holster. She’d put on her shades.

He held down a grin. “That’s not tits and ass, that’s a friend.”

“A thirteen with friends.” Bambarén’s eyebrows showed above the curve of the sunglasses. “Must go against the grain for you.”

“We adapt to circumstance. Want to walk?”

Manco Bambarén nodded at his security and they relaxed, opening space around their tayta. He took a couple of paces away from the Range Rover, in the direction of the stone walls. Carl fell into step. He saw the familia chief squinting sideways behind his sun lenses, toward the jeep and Ertekin’s casual watchfulness.

“So you work for COLIN now?”

“With.” Carl let his grin out. “I work with COLIN. It’s a cooperative venture. You should understand that.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you’ve made a niche career out of coexisting with the Initiative, and from what Greta said it’s a flourishing relationship.”

Bambarén shook his head. “I don’t believe Greta Jurgens discussed my business associations with you.”

“No, but she tried to threaten me with them. The implication was that you have bigger friends these days, and you keep them closer.”

“And this is what you wanted to talk about?”

“No. I want to talk about Stefan Nevant.”

“Nevant?” A frown wrinkled the tayta’s forehead. “What about him?”

“Three years ago, he was trying to talk your people up here into an alliance. I want to know how far that went.”

Bambarén stopped and looked up at him. Carl had forgotten how short and stocky he was. The palpable force of the familia chief’s personality wiped the physical factors away.

“How far it went? Black man, I gave Nevant to you. How far do you think it went?”

“You gave him to me because it was less trouble than having me disrupt your business in the camps. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t offering you something of value.”

The tayta took off his sunglasses. In the harsh glare from the altiplano sky, his eyes barely narrowed. “Stefan Nevant was up here scrabbling for his miserable twist life. He had no friends and no allies. He had nothing I could use.”

“But he might have, given time.”

“I do not have the luxury of dealing in what might have been. Why don’t you ask these questions of Nevant himself?”

Carl grinned. “I did. He tried to kill me.”

Bambarén’s eyes flickered to the glued-up wound on Carl’s hand. He shrugged and put on his sunglasses again. Resumed walking.

“That is not an indication that he had anything to hide,” he said tonelessly. “In his place, I would very likely have tried to kill you as well.”

“Quite.”

They reached the wall. Carl put up a hand to brush along the smooth, dark surface of interlocking blocks, each the size of a small car. It was instinctive: the edges of the stone sections curved inward to meet each other with a bulged organic grace that made him think of female flesh, the swell of breasts and the soft juncture of thighs. You wanted to run your hands over it, your palms twitched with the desire to touch and cup.

Manco Bambarén’s ancestors had put together this jigsaw of massive, perfectly joined stonework with nothing for tools but bronze, wood, and stone itself.

“I’m not suggesting you personally bought in to Nevant’s plans,” Carl offered. Though if you didn’t, why did he choose you to deal with? “But you’re not the only tayta around here. Perhaps someone else saw the potential.”

Bambarén paced in silence for a while.

“My familiares share a common dislike of your kind, Marsalis. You cannot be unaware of this.”

“Yes. You also share a sentimental attachment to ties of blood, but that didn’t stop you all going to war with each other in the summer of ’03, or cutting deals with Lima afterward. Come on, Manco, business is business, up here the same as anywhere else. Racial affectation’s got to come a poor second to economics.”

“Well, it’s not really a race thing where thirteens are concerned,” said the other man coldly. “More of a species gap.”

Carl coughed a laugh. “Oh you wound me, Manco. To the core.”

“And in any case, I see no fruitful business application, for myself or any other tayta, to be had from association with your kind.”

“We make very convenient monsters.”

Bambarén shrugged. “The human race has more than enough monsters as it is. There was never any need to invent new ones.”

“Yeah, like the pistacos, right? I heard you were busy playing that card back in ’03 as well.”

A sharp glance. “Heard from who?”

“Nevant.”

“You told me Nevant tried to kill you.”

“Yeah, well, we had a little chat first. He told me he applied to be your tame pistaco, maybe funnel some more thirteens in to do the same trick. Form some sort of elite genetic monster squad for you. Ring any bells?”

“No.” The familia chief appeared to consider. “Nevant talked a great deal. He had schemes for everything. Streamlining for my ID operation, leverage tricks in the camps, security improvements. After a while, I stopped listening.”

Carl nodded. “But you still kept him around.”

Bambarén spread his hands. “He’d come to me like his fellow escapees before him, for documentation and fresh identity. That takes time if you’re going to do it right. We don’t operate like those chop shops on the coast. So yes, he was around. Somehow he stayed around. Now, when I ask myself how he managed that, I have no answer. He made himself useful in small ways, he had a skill in this.”

Carl thought of warlords and petty political chess pieces across Central Asia and the Middle East, making use of Nevant making himself useful, without ever seeing how the insurgency specialist maneuvered them deftly into geopolitical place even as they were using him. A failure to understand social webbing at an emotional level, Jacobsen had found, and so a lack of those emotional restraints that embedding within such webbing requires. But Carl didn’t know a single thirteen who hadn’t laughed like a fast-food clown construct when they read those lines. We understand, he told Zooly one drunken night. Fingers snapped out one by one, enumerating, like stabbing implements, finally the blade of a hand. Nationalism. Tribalism. Politics. Religion. Fucking soccer, for Christ’s sake. Pacing her apartment living room, furious, like something caged. How could you not understand dynamics that fucking simplistic. It’s the rest of you people who don’t understand what makes you tick at an emotional fucking level.

Later, hungover, he’d apologized. He owed her too extensively to freight her with that much genetic truth.

Beside him, Bambarén was still talking.

“…cannot tell, but if his schemes did include this genetic pistaco fantasy, then he was a fool. You do not need real monsters to frighten people. Far from it. Real monsters will always disappoint. The unseen threat, the rumor, is a far greater power.”

Carl felt an abrupt surge of contempt for the man at his side, a quick, gusting flame of it catching from the fuse of remembered rage.

“Yeah, that plus the odd object lesson, right? The odd exemplary execution in some village square somewhere.”

The tayta must have heard the change in his voice. He stopped again, pivoted abruptly to face the black man, mouth smeared tight. It was a move that telegraphed clear back to the parked vehicles. Peripheral vision gave Carl sight of the two bodyguards twitching forward. He didn’t see if Ertekin moved in response, but he felt the flicker of a sudden geometry, the lines of fire from the Range Rover to where he stood, from the jeep to the Range Rover and back, the short line that his left hand would take on its way to crush Manco Bambarén’s throat while he grabbed right-handed at the tayta’s clothing and spun him for a shield, all of it laid out like a virtuality effect in predictive, superimposing red, distance values etched in, the length of ground he couldn’t possibly cover in time when the guards drew whatever probable high-tech hardware they had under their leather coats, he’d have to hope Ertekin could take both men down in time…

He saw her falling, outgunned, or just not fast enough…

“Easy, Manco,” he murmured. “You don’t want to die today, do you? Shit weather like this?”

The tayta’s upper lip lifted from his teeth. His fists clenched at his sides. “You think you can kill me, twist?”

“I know I can.” Carl kept his hands low, unthreatening. Open. The mesh ticked in him like a countdown. “I don’t know how it’ll boil down after that, but it won’t be your problem anymore, that’s a promise.”

The moment hung. A quiet wind snuffled along the massive stone rampart at his back. He stared into Manco’s mirror lenses. Saw the motion of gray cloud across the sky, like departure, like loss.

Oh fuck…

The familia chief drew a hard breath.

His fists uncurled.

His gaze lowered, and Carl lost the view of the moving cloud in the sunglasses, saw himself twinned there instead.

The moment, already past, accelerated away. The mesh sensed it, stood down.

Bambarén laughed. The sound of it rang forced and uncertain off the jigsaw blocks of stone.

“You’re a fool, black man,” he said harshly. “Just as Nevant before you was a fool. You think I need to put out rumors about the pistacos? You think I need an army of monsters, real or imagined, to maintain order? Men will do that for me, ordinary men.”

He gestured, but it was a slack motion, a turning away toward the huge jigsaw walls. His anger had thinned to something more general and weary.

“Look around you. This was once an earthquake-proof city built to honor the gods and celebrate life in games and festivals. Then the Spanish came and tore it down for the stone to build churches that fell apart every time there was a minor tremor. They slaughtered so many of my people in the battle to take this place that the ground was carpeted with their corpses and the condors fed for weeks on the remains. The Spanish put eight of those same condors on the city coat of arms to celebrate the fact of those rotting corpses. Elsewhere, their soldiers tore nursing infants from the breast and tossed them still living to their attack dogs, or swung them by the heels against rocks to smash their skulls. You do not need me to tell you what was done to the mothers after. These were not demons, and they were not genetically engineered abominations like you. These were men. Ordinary men. We—my people—invented the pistacos to explain the acts of these ordinary men, and we continue to invent the same tales to hide from ourselves the truth that it is ordinary men, always, who behave like demons when they cannot obtain what they want by other means. I pass no rumors of the pistaco, black man, because the lie of the pistaco is already in us all, and it comes to life time and time again on the altiplano without any encouragement from me.”

Carl glanced back toward the two enforcers and the Range Rover. They stood at ease again, hands clasped demurely before them at waist height, studiously ignoring him. Or perhaps, it occurred to him, simply trying to stare down Sevgi Ertekin. It was hard to tell at this distance.

“So,” he said breezily. “Those two attack dogs back there got much Spanish blood in them?”

Bambarén drew a breath through his teeth. But he wasn’t going to bite, not now. The soft, indrawn hiss was the sound of control.

“Is it your intention to spend the afternoon offending me, black man?”

“It’s my intention, tayta, to get some straight answers out of you. And speechifying on atrocities past isn’t going to cut it.”

“You dismiss—”

“I dismiss your carefully cultivated sense of racial outrage, yeah, that’s right. You are a fucking criminal, Manco. You talk like a poet, but your enforcers are a byword for brutality from Cuzco to Copacabana, and the stories they tell about you coming up on the street make me think you probably take a personal interest in training them that way. Not unlike those Spanish dogs of war you feel so dreadfully sensitive about.”

“I have to have the respect of my men.”

“Yes, as I said. Not unlike dogs. You humans are just so fucking predictable.”

Beneath the sunglasses, Bambarén’s mouth stretched in an ugly sneer. “What do you know about it, black man? What do you know about human life in the favelas? What do you know about struggle? You grew up in some cotton-wool-wrapped Project Lawman rearing community, catered to, cared for, provided with every—”

“British. I’m British, Manco. We didn’t have a Project Lawman.”

“It makes no difference. You.” The familia chief’s face twitched. “Nevant. All of you. You all had the same treatment. No expense spared, no nurturing too excessive. You all got born into a place scarcely less protected than the rented wombs you grew in, sucking on the bought-and-paid-for milk and maternal affections of colonized women too poverty-stricken to afford children of their own—”

“Go fuck yourself, Manco.”

But it was out of his mouth too quickly to be the studied irritation he’d intended, his voice was too bright and jagged with the unlooked-for memory of Marisol. And Manco smiled as he heard it, gangster’s attuned sense for vulnerability homing in on the shift.

“Ah. You thought perhaps she loved you for yourself? What a shock it must have been that day—”

“Hey, fuck you, all right. Like I said.” Now he had the tone, the drawl. “We’re not here to discuss my family history.”

But tayta Manco had grown up a knife fighter in the slums of Cuzco, and he knew when a blade had gone home. He leaned in and his voice dripped, low and corrosive. “Yes, the little steel debriefing trailer, the men in uniforms, the awful truth. What a shock. The knowledge that somewhere out there, your real mother had sold out her half of you for cash, let herself be harvested of you, and that some other woman, for cash, had taken on her role for fourteen years and then, on that day, walked away from you like a prison sentence served. How did that feel, twist?”

And now it came pulsing down on him, the killing fury, the black tidal swell of it in the back of his brain like faint fizzing, like detachment. Harder by far to hold out against than the cold calculations he’d made two minutes ago, the certain knowledge of Manco Bambarén’s death at the edge of his striking hand. There was no art in this; this was thumbs hooked into the familia chief’s eyes and sunk brain-deep, a snapping reflex in the hinge of the jaws, the surf-boom urge to smash and bite—

If we are ruled by what they have trained into us, said Sutherland, somewhere distant behind the breaking waves of his rage, then we are no more and no better than the weapon they hoped to make of us. But if we are ruled instead by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth. We must seek another way. We must think our way clear.

Carl flexed a smile and put his rage away, carefully, like a much-loved weapon in its case.

“Let’s not worry about my feelings right now,” he said. “Tell me, how are you getting along with your Martian cousins?”

He’d intended it to come out of the blue, and from the look on the other man’s face, it had. Bambarén blinked at him as if he’d just asked where the long lost treasure of the Incas was kept.

“What are you talking about?”

Carl shrugged. “I’d have thought it was a simple enough question. Have you had much contact with the Martian chapters recently?”

Bambarén spread his hands. His brow creased in irritation. “No one talks to Mars. You know that.”

“You’d talk to each other if there was something in it for you.”

“They walked away from that possibility back in ’75. In any case, at present it would be pointless. There is no practical way to beat nanorack quarantines.”

Sure, there is. Haven’t you heard? Just short-circuit the n-djinn on a ship home, climb inside a spare cryocap—you can always eat the previous occupant if you’re hungry—and dive-bomb the Pacific Ocean with the survivable modules. Piece of cake.

“You don’t think it’s also pretty pointless having a declared war across those quarantines? Across interplanetary distance?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

Carl grinned. “Hate will find a way, huh? That old deuda de sangre magic.”

The familia chief studied the ground. “Did you really come all the way to Cuzco to discuss the afrenta Marciana with me?”

“Not as such, no. But I am interested in anything you and your colleagues might know about a resurgence.”

Again, the flicker of irritation across Manco’s face. “A resurgence of what, black man? We are at war. That’s a given, a state of affairs. Until technology gives us a new way to wage that war, the situation will not change.”

“Or until you curry enough favor with COLIN to get some nanorack leverage.”

Manco looked pointedly back toward the jeep that had brought Carl to the meeting place.

“COLIN is a fact of life,” he said somberly. “We all reach an accommodation of one sort or another with the realities, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, very fucking poetic.”

Sevgi drove back down the twisting road into Cuzco, taking the curves with a deliberate lack of care. Marsalis held on to the rough-ride strap above his door.

“Well, he has a point.”

“I didn’t say he didn’t. I’d just like to know what you got out of him—apart from cheap poetics—that was worth coming all this way for.”

Marsalis said nothing. She shot him a sideways glance. The jeep drifted a little with her inattention, back toward the center of the corkscrew curve on the road, and they met an autohauler rig head-on. Sick, sudden jump of adrenaline and sweat through her pores. But slow—she was still a little soggy from the near showdown with Bambarén’s men. She dragged the wheel back, they swerved out of the rig’s path, bumped a curb. The autohauler’s collision alert blasted at them as it crawled past, machine-irate. People on the pavements stood and looked. The man sitting next to her said nothing still.

“Well?”

“Well, I think you should keep your eyes on the road.”

She slammed the heel of her palm into the autocruise button. Let go of the wheel. The jeep’s navigational system lit blue across the dashboard and chimed.

“Please state your destination.” Fucking Asia Badawi’s perfect dulcet tones again.

“City center,” she snapped. They’d come direct from the airport, had no hotel as yet. She evened her voice, turned across the space between the seats to face him. “Marsalis, in case you hadn’t noticed, we came close to a firefight up there. I got your back.”

“I know that.”

“Right. Now I don’t mind taking risks, but I want to know why I’m doing it. So you start fucking telling me what’s in your mind before it explodes all over us.”

He nodded, mostly, she thought, to himself.

“Bambarén’s clean.” He said it reluctantly. “I reckon.”

“But that’s not all?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. Look, I sprang the Martian angle on him, he didn’t blink. Or rather, he looked like I was talking in tongues. The war’s still on, and I’d bet everything I made last year that no one up here has seen or heard anything to change that. I don’t think he knows anything about our pal Merrin’s trip home.”

She heard the raised tone at the end. “But?”

“But he’s jumpy. Like you said, we nearly got into it up there. Last time I had to deal with Manco Bambarén, I’d just blown up a truckful of his product and killed one of his thugs, and I was promising to do it again if I didn’t get what I wanted. He was about as emotional about it as that wall of stone up there. This time around, all I want to do is ask him some questions and he nearly gets us all killed for it. It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

She grunted. She knew what it felt like, the nagging, loose-thread itch of something not right. The sort of thing that kept you awake and thinking last thing at night, stole your mind from elsewhere in your caseload during the day, and had you staring a hole in the detail while your coffee went cold. You just wanted to pull on that thread until it unraveled or snapped.

“So what do you want to do about it?” she asked.

He stared out of the side window. “I think we’d better talk to Greta Jurgens. She’s getting near the sleepy end of the season, and hibernoids generally aren’t at their best when that happens. She might let something slip.”

“That’s Arequipa, right?”

“Yeah. We could drive it overnight, be there in the morning.”

“And be approximately as fried as Jurgens when we talk to her. No thanks. I’m sleeping in a bed tonight.”

Marsalis shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just, it takes us off the scope if we go by road. Chances are Manco’s going to have someone at the airport checking when we leave, checking where we leave to. And if he sees it’s Arequipa, well, it doesn’t take a genius to work out what we want there.”

“You think he’d try to stop us seeing Jurgens by force? You think he’d risk that with accredited COLIN reps?”

“I don’t know. A couple of hours ago, I’d have said no. But you were there when the mirror-shade twins got twitchy. What did you think was going to happen?”

Long pause. Sevgi recalled the way it had gone, like her reaction to the near collision a couple of minutes ago, the sudden, pore-pricking sweat as the familia bodyguards moved, the surge of adrenal overdrive in her guts and up the insides of her arms. It had taken conscious will to keep her hand away from the butt of her gun, and she’d been afraid, rusty with too long away from the brink and not trusting her judgment, not knowing if she’d be fast enough or just call it wrong.

She sighed.

“Yeah, okay.” She sank back into her seat, thudded an irritable elbow into the padding a couple of times. “Insha’Allah, we can get a halfway decent recline out of these things.”

Then she pitched her voice louder, for the jeep.

“Course-correct. Long haul, Arequipa.”

Scribbles awoke on the displays.

“This journey will take until the early hours of tomorrow morning,” Asia Badawi told her coolly.

“Yeah, fucking tell me about it.”

CHAPTER 30

The center of Cuzco was solid with traffic, most of it driven by humans. No cooperation, no overview—the late-afternoon air rang with irate hornblasts and the queues backed up across intersections. Drivers went to the brink in duels to change lanes or inject themselves from filter systems into already established traffic flow. Windows were down to facilitate yelled abuse, but most people just sat rigidly behind the wheel and stared ahead as if they could generate forward motion through sheer willpower. That, and continual, frustrated blasts on the horn. Traffic cops stood amid it all with arms raised as if stuck in a swamp, gesturing like manic orchestra conductors and blowing whistles incessantly, to no appreciable effect. Perhaps, Sevgi thought sourly, they just didn’t want to be left out of the noisemaking process.

The jeep was a carpool standard. Its automated systems, safety-indexed down to a patient deference, could not cope. After they’d sat at a particularly fiercely contested intersection for twelve minutes by the dashboard clock, Marsalis shifted in his seat.

“You want to drive?”

Sevgi looked out gloomily at the unbroken chain of nose-to-tail metal they were trying to break into.

“Not really.”

“You mind if I do?”

The lights changed, and the truck blocking the intersection crept out of the way. The jeep jerked forward half a meter, then jerked to a halt again as the vehicle behind the truck surged to take up the slack. The opening vanished.

Behind them, someone leaned on the horn.

“Right.”

It was the matter-of-fact tone that slowed her down. Before she realized what was going on, he’d cracked the passenger door and swung down onto the street. The sound of the horn redoubled. He looked back, toward the car behind them.

“Marsalis, don’t—”

But he was already gone, striding back toward the car behind them. She twisted in her seat and saw him reach the vehicle, take two steps up and over the hood—she heard the clunk as his foot came down each time—and then jump lightly down again beside the driver’s-side window. The hornblast stopped abruptly. He leaned at the window a moment, she thought he reached in as well, but couldn’t be sure.

“Ah, shit.”

Checked her gun in its holster, was turning to open her door when he appeared there beside the window. She scrabbled it open.

“What the fuck are you—”

“Scoot over.”

“What did you just do?”

“Nothing. Scoot over, I’m going to take it on manual.”

She threw another look back at the vehicle behind them, couldn’t see anything through the darkened glass windshield. For a moment, she opened her mouth to argue. Saw the lights change back to their favor again and shook her head in weary resignation.

“Whatever.”

He took down the automation, engaged the drive, and rolled the jeep out hard, angling for a narrow gap in the opposing flow. He got the corner of the jeep in, waved casual thanks to the vehicle he’d cut off, and then levered them into the gap as it opened. They settled into the flow, crept forward a couple of meters and away from the intersection. She looked at his face and saw he was smiling gently.

“Did you enjoy that?”

He shrugged. “Had a certain operational satisfaction.”

“I thought the point of going by road was to keep a low profile. How’s that going to work with you starting fights all the way across town?”

“Ertekin, there was no fight.” He looked across and met her eye. “Seriously. I just told the guy to please shut up, we were doing our best.”

“And if he hadn’t backed down?”

“Well.” He thought about it for a moment. “You people usually do.”

It took the best part of another hour to get through to the southern outskirts and pick up the main highway for Arequipa. By then the day was thickening toward dark and lights were coming on in the buildings on either side of the road, offering little yellowish snapshots into the lives of the people within. Sevgi saw a girl no older than nine or ten leaned intently on the edge of an opened truck engine in a workshop, peering down while an old man with a white walrus mustache worked on the innards. A mother seated on a front step, smoking and watching the traffic go by, three tiny children clinging about her. A young man in a suit leaning into a shop doorway and flirting with the girl behind the counter. Each scene slipped by and left her with the frustrated sense of life escaping through her fingers like sand.

On the periphery, they pulled into a Buenos Aires Beef Co. and ordered pampaburgers to go. The franchise stood out in the soft darkness like a grounded UFO, all brightly colored lights and smoothly plastic modular construction. Sets of car lights docked and pulled away in succession. Sevgi stopped for a moment on her way back to the jeep, bagged food hot through the wrappings against her chest, Cuzco’s carpet of lights spread out across the valley. Sense of departure colliding with something else, something that hurt like all those passing yellow-lit moments of life she’d seen. She thought of Murat, of Ethan, of her mother somewhere back in Turkey, who knew the fuck where. Couldn’t make sense of any of it—just the general ache.

Supposed to get better at this with age, Sev.

Right.

Marsalis came up behind her, clapped her on the shoulder. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she lied.

At the jeep, he got into the driver’s seat then powered up the autopilot. Sevgi blinked. Ethan would have kept the wheel until his eyelids were sagging.

“You don’t want to drive anymore?”

“No point. Going to be dark out there, and I don’t speak the same language as most of the long-haul traffic.”

He was right. As they pulled away from Cuzco, the autohaulers began to materialize out of the gloom, routed straight out from corporation depots and warehouses on the city periphery. They seemed to come out of nowhere, like breaching whales beside a rowboat, no warning, no white wash of headlights from behind, surging up alongside with a sudden dark rush of air, hanging there for moments with high steel sides vibrating and swaying in the faint gleam from their running lights, then pulling ahead and away into the night. The jeep’s systems chirruped softly in the dashboard-lit cabin space, talking to each rig, interrogating, adjusting. Maybe bidding farewell.

“You get used to that on Mars?” she asked him. “The machine thing?”

He frowned. “Got used to it from birth, just like everybody else. Machine age, you know?”

“I thought on Mars—”

“Yeah, everybody does. It’s the reflex image. Machines keeping everyone alive, right? I guess it’s got to be a hangover from the early years, before they got the environmental stuff really rolling. I mean, from what I read about it, back in the day even the scientists thought the terra-forming would take centuries. Guess they just never saw what the nanotech was going to do to our time scales. Technology curve accelerates, we all spend our lives playing catch-up.” He gestured. “So now we’re still stuck with the red-rocks-and-air-locks thing, all those images from back before the air was breathable. Takes a long time for stereotypes like that to change. People form a picture of something, they don’t like to let it go.”

“Ain’t that the fucking truth.”

He paused, looked at her. Cracked a smile. “Yeah, it is. Plus of course Mars is a long way off. Little too far to go and see for yourself, dispel the illusion. It’s a lot of empty black to cross just for that.”

The smile faded out on the last of his words. She saw the way his gaze slipped out of focus as he spoke, heard the distance he was talking about in the shift of his voice, and suddenly a door seemed to have blown open somewhere, letting in the chill of the space between worlds.

“It was bad, huh?” she said quietly. “Out there?”

He shot her a glance. “Bad enough.”

Quiet settled into the cabin, the blue display-lit space, rocking gently with the motion of the jeep through the darkness.

“There was this woman,” he said at last. “In one of the cryocaps. Elena Aguirre, I think she was from Argentina. Soil technician, coming home off tour. She looked sort of like…someone I used to know. So anyway, I used to talk to her. Started out as a joke, you know, you say a lot of stuff out loud just to stay sane. Asking her how her day’d been, like that. Any interesting soil samples recently? Trouble with the nanobes? And I’d tell her what I’d been doing, make stupid shit up about meetings with Earth Control and the rescue ship crew.”

He cleared his throat.

“See, after a while, when you’re on your own out there, you start to make patterns that aren’t there. The fact that you’re fucked starts to seem like more than an accident. You’re asking yourself, Why me? Why this fucking statistical impossibility of a malfunction on my watch? You start to think there’s some kind of malignant force out there, someone controlling all this shit.” He grimaced. “That’s religion, right?”

“No, that’s not religion.” Sudden asperity in her voice.

“It’s not?” He shrugged. “Well, it’s the closest I ever came. Got to the point, like I said, I was starting to believe there was something out there trying to take me down, and then it seemed like maybe if that were true, there’d be something else as well, a kind of opposed force, something in there with me, something maybe looking out for me. So I started looking for it, started looking for signs. Patterns, like I said. And it didn’t take me long to make one—see, every time I stopped by Elena Aguirre’s cryocap, every time I looked in at that face and talked to her, I felt better. Pretty soon feeling better came to seem like feeling protected, and pretty soon after that I decided Elena Aguirre was put on the Felipe Souza to watch over me.”

“But she was.” Sevgi gestured. “A person. Just a human being.”

“I didn’t say it made any sense, Ertekin. I said it was religion.”

“I thought,” she said severely, “thirteens were supposed to be incapable of religious faith.”

Ethan certainly had been. She remembered his incurious, stifled-yawn incomprehension whenever she tried to talk about it, as if she were some Jesusland fence-hopper stood on his doorstep trying to sell him something plastic and pointless.

Marsalis stared into the blue glow of the dashboard displays. “Yeah, they say we’re not wired for it. Something in the frontal cortex, same reason we don’t take direction well. But like I said, it got pretty bad out there. You’re stuck in the empty dark, looking for intent where there’s only incidence. Feeling powerless, knowing you’ll live or die dependent on factors you can’t control. Talking to sleeping faces or the stars because it beats talking to yourself. I don’t know about the cortical wiring argument, all I can tell you is that for a couple of weeks aboard Felipe Souza it felt like I had religion.”

“So what changed?”

He shrugged again. “I looked out the window.”

More silence. Another autohauler droned by, buffeting them with the wind of its passage. The jeep rocked in its wake, adrift on the night.

“Souza had vision ports let into the lower cargo deck,” Marsalis said slowly. “I went there sometimes, got the n-djinn to crank back the shields. You have to kill the interior lights before you can see anything, and even then…”

He looked at her, opened his hands.

“There’s nothing out there,” he said simply. “No meaning, no mindful eye. Nothing watching you. Just empty space and, if you travel far enough, a bunch of matter in motion that’ll kill you if it can. Once you get your head around that, you’re fine. You stop expecting anything better or worse.”

“So that’s your general philosophy, is it?”

“No, it’s what Elena Aguirre told me.”

For a moment, she blanked. It was like those moments when someone talked to her in Turkish out of the blue and she was still working in English, a failure to process the words she’d heard.

“I’m sorry?”

“What I said. Elena Aguirre told me to stop believing all that shit and face up to what you can see out the window.”

“Are you laughing at me?” she asked him tautly.

“No, I’m not laughing at you. I’m telling you what happened to me. I stood at that window with the lights off, looking out, and I heard Elena Aguirre come up behind me. She’d followed me down to the cargo deck and she stood there behind me in the dark. Breathing. Talking into my ear.”

“That’s impossible!”

“Yeah, I know that.” Now he did smile, but not at her. He was looking into the light from the dashboard again, eyes blind, washed empty with the electric blue glow. “She’d have left tank gel all over the deck, wouldn’t she. Not to mention, she would have rung every alarm on the ship climbing out of the tank in the first place. I mean, I don’t know how long I stood frozen to the window after she’d gone, you tend to lose track of time out there, and I was pretty scared, but—”

“Stop it.” She heard the jagged edge on her tone. Felt the urge to shudder creep up her neck like a cold, cupped hand. “Just stop it. Be serious.”

He frowned into the blue light. “You know, Ertekin, for someone who believes in a supreme architect of the universe and a spiritual afterlife, you’re taking this remarkably hard.”

“Look.” Thrown down like a challenge. “How could you know it was her? This Elena Aguirre. You’d never even heard her voice.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

There was a quiet simplicity in the question that tilted her, suddenly, weightlessly, like sex the first time she got to do it properly and came, like her first dead-body crime scene by the tracks off Barnett Avenue. Like watching Nalan’s breathing stop for the final time in the hospital bed. She shook her head helplessly.

“I—”

“See, you asked if it got bad,” he said softly. “So I’m telling you how bad it got. I went down deep, Sevgi. Deep enough for some very strange shit to happen, genetic wiring to the contrary or not.”

“But you can’t believe—”

“That Elena Aguirre was the incarnation of a presence watching over me? Of course not.”

“Then—”

“She was a metaphor.” He breathed out, as if letting something go. “But she got out of hand, like metaphors sometimes can. You go that deep, you can lose your grip on these things, let them get free. I guess I’m lucky whatever was waiting for me down there spat me out again. Maybe my genetic wiring gave it indigestion after all.”

“What are you talking about?” Flat anger. She couldn’t keep it out of her voice. “Indigestion? Metaphors? I don’t understand anything you’re telling me.”

He glanced across at her, maybe surprised by her tone.

“That’s okay. I’m probably not explaining it all that well. Sutherland would have done better, but he’s had years to nail it all down. Let’s just say that out there in transit I talked myself into something at a subconscious level, and it took an invented subconscious helper to talk me back out. Does that make more sense?”

“Not really. Who’s Sutherland?”

“He’s a thirteen, guy I met on Mars, what the Japanese would call a sensei, I guess. He teaches tanindo around the Upland camps. He used to say humans live their whole lives by metaphor, and the problem for the thirteens is that we fit too fucking neatly into the metaphorical box for all those bad things out beyond the campfire in the dark, the box labeled monster.”

She couldn’t argue with that. Memory backed it to the hilt, faces turned to her full of mute accusation when they knew what Ethan had been. Friends, colleagues, even Murat. Once they knew, they didn’t see the Ethan they’d known anymore, just an Ethan-shaped piece of darkness, like the perp sketch that served in virtual for the man who’d murdered Toni Montes.

“Monsters, scapegoats.” The words dropped off his tongue like cards he was dealing. His voice was suddenly jeering. “Angels and demons, heaven and hell, God, morality, law and language. Sutherland’s right, it’s all metaphor. Scaffolding to handle the areas where base reality won’t cut it for you guys, where it’s too cold for humans to live without something made up. We codify our hopes and fears and wants, and then build whole societies on the code. And then forget it ever was code and treat it like fact. Act like the universe gives a shit about it. Go to war over it, string men and women up by the neck for it. Firebomb trains and skyscrapers in the name of it.”

“If you’re talking about Dubai again—”

“Dubai, Kabul, Tashkent, and the whole of fucking Jesusland for that matter. It doesn’t matter where you look, it’s the same fucking game, it’s humans. It’s—”

He stopped abruptly, still staring into the blue-lit displays, but this time with a narrowed focus.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. We’re slowing down.”

She twisted in her seat to look through the rear windows. No sign of an autohauler they might be blocking. And no jarring red flashes anywhere on the display to signify a hardware problem. Still the jeep bled speed.

“We’ve been hacked,” Marsalis said grimly.

Sevgi peered out of the side windows. No road lighting anywhere, but a miserly crescent moon showed her a bleached, sloping landscape of rock and scrub, mountain wall to the right, and across on the far side of the highway what looked like a steep drop into a ravine. The road curved around the flank of the mountain, and they were down to a single lane each way. The median had shrunk to a meter-wide luminous guidance marker painted on the evercrete for the autohaulers. No lights or sign of human habitation anywhere. No traffic.

“You’re sure?”

“How sure do you need me to be?” He took the wheel and tried to engage the manual option. The system locked him out with a smug triple chime and pulsing orange nodes in among the blue. The jeep trundled sluggishly on down the gradient. He threw up his hands and kicked the pedals under his feet. “See? Motherfucker.”

It wasn’t clear if he was talking to the machine or to whoever was reeling them in. Sevgi reached for her pistol, freed it from the shoulder holster, and cleared the safety. Marsalis heard the click, fixed on the gun in her hands for a moment. Then he leaned across the dashboard and hit the emergency shutdown stud. The display lit red across, and the brakes bit. They still had solid coasting velocity. The jeep’s tires yelped at the abuse and locked. They slewed, but not far. Jerked to a tooth-snapping halt.

Silence—and the blink, click of the hazard lights on automatic. Cherry-red glow pooled at each corner of the jeep, vanished. Pooled, vanished. Pooled, vanished.

“Right.”

He fumbled the mechanism of his seat so it sank and allowed him access to the back of the jeep. Dived over and hung from the seat back by his hips, groping around. His voice tightened up with the pressure on his stomach muscles. “Seen this before in the Zagros. Mostly from the other side of the scam. We used to flag down the Iranian troop carriers like this for ambush. Hook them well before they could see you.” A blanket rose and fell in his hand, tossed away. “Once you’ve cracked the pilot protocols, you can do pretty much what you like with them.” Rattle of something plastic spilling. He reached harder. “Crash them into each other, drive them off the edge of a cliff, if there is one. Or over a carefully placed mine fuck.”

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a weapon. I figure you’re not going to share that Beretta with me, right? Contractual obligations and all that.” He bounced back into the seat, teeth tight in frustration, glared around him, and then threw open the door. He ran around to the back of the jeep. Road dust from the emergency stop caught on a soft breeze and blew forward over and around them in a cloud. It floated away, ghostly quiet and intermittently lit up red by the hazard lights. Sevgi looked back and saw Marsalis working to loosen something from the rear hatch. The jeep rocked on its suspension with every tug. The flashing lights lit him amid the dust, turning his face demonic with tension and focused effort. She thought she heard him grunt. Something clanked loose.

He came back to the door, hefting a collapsible shovel.

“All right, listen,” he said, suddenly calm. “If we’re lucky, these are local thugs, used to flagging down easy-mark trucks and the odd tour bus. If they are, I’m guessing we’ve got a couple more minutes before they realize what we’ve done. Maybe another three or four minutes after that for them to mount up and come find us. Not long, however you look at it. So, textbook response, we need to get out of the vehicle and find some cover, fast.”

Sevgi nodded mutely, suddenly aware of how dry her mouth was. She snapped the slide on the Beretta, textbook style, tilting it to the horizontal so she could read the load display on the side. Thirty-three, and one in the pipe. The Marstech guns took state-of-the-art expansion slugs, pencil-slim, accurate at long range, and explosive on impact. She cleared her throat and lifted the Beretta.

“You think we’ll be able to chase them off?”

He stared at her. The hazards painted him red, dark, red, dark, red, dark. He looked down at the folded shovel in his hands. Snapped the blade out into the functional position. Then he looked up at her again, hands tightening the locking mechanism in place, and his voice was almost gentle.

“Sevgi, we’re going to have to kill these guys.”

CHAPTER 31

There were seven of them.

From his limited vantage point, Carl made them for Peruvian regulars and relaxed a little. Familia hit men would have been worse. He let the mesh come on, felt it seep into his muscles like rage. His vision sharpened on the lead soldiers. They were walking three-abreast on the opposite lane, ten paces ahead of a slow-crawling open army jeep that carried the other four and a mounted machine gun. The vehicle moved with the main lights doused—that much, at least, they were doing right—and the vanguard party held their assault rifles ready for use. A gawky tension in the way they moved screamed conscript nerves. These guys could have been the same easy-grin, soccer-talking uniforms he’d blagged a ride from months back on his way to kill Gray. With luck, they’d be as young and unprepared.

They came to a halt twenty meters from the red hazard flash pooling and fading at each corner of the stranded COLIN jeep. Muttered Spanish, too far off to catch. The curve on the road was gentle—they’d have been able to see the lights for the last hundred meters at least, but they’d chosen now to stop and discuss tactics. Carl smiled to himself and gripped the shaft of the shovel. The eroded metal edge of the blade touched his face, cold and notched with use against his cheek.

The jeep backed up a little. The vanguard soldiers crossed the luminous median, looking both ways like well-trained children. Carl thought he could hear the distant drone of an autohauler somewhere in the night, impossible to tell how far off or which direction it was headed. Otherwise there was nothing but thin moonlight on porous rock and jagged mountain backdrop. Stars shingled across the sky, almost as clear as on Mars. It was quiet enough to hear the scuff of booted feet across the evercrete now that they were close, the follow-up grumble of the jeep’s antique engine.

Fucking seven of them. Christ, I hope you’re up for this, Ertekin.

He’d asked her if she knew how to kill someone with the matte-gray Beretta, if she’d ever shot anyone dead. Half hoping she’d crumble and give him the weapon. The look he got in return was enough. But she hadn’t answered his question and he still didn’t know.

The vanguard arrived at the COLIN vehicle. They crept up crabwise and peered inside the cabin. Tugged at the door handles and barked surprise when the doors pulled open on smooth hydraulic servos. Poked their weapons nervously inside. Now he could hear them talking. Forced bravado rinsing through the soft coastal Spanish accents like grit through a silk screen. Young-boy talk.

“You check the back, Ernesto?”

“Already done it, man. They’re fucking gone. Run off. Told the sarge we should have pulled them over old style. Flashing lights, roadblock, it never fails.”

“That’s all you fucking know.” A third voice, from around the other side of the jeep. It sounded a little older. “This isn’t some Bolivian strike leader, this is a fucking thirteen. He would have driven right through us, fucked us in pieces.”

“That gringa cunt, that’s what I’ll fuck in pieces when we catch up with them.”

Laughter.

“She’s not a gringa, Ernesto. Didn’t you see the photo? I got a sister-in-law in Barranca got lighter skin than that.”

“Hey, she’s from Nueva York. That’s good enough fucking for me.”

“You know something, you guys disgust me. What if your mothers could hear you now?”

“Ah, come on, Ramón. Don’t be an altar boy your whole fucking life. You seen the photos of this bitch or not? Tits on her like Cami Chachapoyas. Don’t tell me you don’t want a piece of that.”

Ramón said nothing. The slightly older one filled in for him.

“Tell you what, you do fuck her, either of you, you’d better spray on first. Those gringas got a dose of everything going. I got a cousin in Nueva York says those bitches are out fucking everything that moves.”

“Man, you got fucking family all over, don’t you. How come—”

An NCO bellow from the jeep: “Report, Corporal!”

“Nothing here, sir,” the older voice called back. “They’re gone. Have to quarter the area.”

In the jeep, something indistinct was said about fucking infrareds. Probably, Carl guessed, that they didn’t have any.

“Ground search. Oh for fuck’s sake. I’m telling you, when we catch up with this twist and his bitch—”

And time.

He let the rage drive him, rolled, braced himself off the edge of the molded roof storage pan, and came down a meter clear, on the side opposite the other jeep. The heat-resistant elastic tarpaulin that had hidden him stretched taut as he rolled, let him free, and then snapped back with a flat slapping sound.

It was all the warning they ever had.

He hit the evercrete amid uniformed bodies. Sent them staggering and sprawling—no time to count. The one in front had his back turned, did not quite go down—

“Fuck, Ramón, what are you doing?”

He hadn’t understood what was happening. Was turning, unguarded, no worse than irritated, when Carl swung the shovel blade into his face. Blood splattered, warm and unseen in the dark, but he felt it on his cheek. The man dropped his assault rifle and clutched at his shattered cheekbone, made a wet sound, fell down screaming. Carl was already spinning away. A second uniform, struggling on his hands and knees. Ramón the altar boy? Carl hacked down with the shovel, into the soft top of the skull. The man made a noise like a panicked cow and collapsed prone. More blood spritzed, painted his face with its warmth.

The third soldier was still on the far side of the COLIN jeep. He came around the back of the vehicle at speed and Carl met him head-on, grinning, black and splattered with the other men’s blood. The soldier panicked, yelled. Forgot to raise his rifle.

“He’s here—”

Carl lunged. Jabbed hard with the shovel, blade end into the soldier’s throat. The warning shout died to a choked gurgle. Carl zipped up the gap between them, blocked off the late-rising barrel of the assault rifle with one splayed hand, smashed the butt end of the shovel into the man’s nose. The fight died, the soldier went down choking. Carl reversed the shovel and hacked down with the point of the blade, into the throat until the other man stopped making a noise.

The night flared apart with headlight beams from the other jeep. Shouts of alarm from the other side. Four more, he knew. No way to be sure how many were still sitting in their vehicle, how many deployed by now…

Come on, Ertekin. Pick it up.

Gunfire—the flat, high crack of the Marstech gun, six rapid shots in succession. The lights doused. Panicked yells from the jeep.

Fuck. Nice shooting, girl.

“Open fire!”

Carl hit the asphalt. Kicked the screaming, rolling victim with the shattered face out of his way, snagged the man’s assault rifle. Dimly he registered it as a use-worn Brazilian Imbel, not exactly state-of-the-art but—

From somewhere, the mounted machine gun on the army jeep cut loose. The noise ripped the night apart. Stammering thunder from the gun, and the shattering clangor as the .50-cal rounds smashed themselves apart on the COLIN vehicle’s armored flank. Marstech, Marstech, we got the Marstech. The idiot rhyme marched through his head, flash image of the kids who used to chant it out back of the bubblefabs at Wells. Carl grinned a tight combat rictus, crabbed about in the cover the jeep gave him, and poked the Imbel under the vehicle. He sprayed a liberal burst of return fire through the gap, then cut it off. Confused yelling. The machine gun coughed, suddenly silent. Carl pressed his face flat to the road surface and peered. Nothing—his vision was still blasted from the headlamps. He squeezed both eyes shut, tried again.

“Motherfucking twist piece of—”

The injured soldier was on him, flailing with fists, face hanging off in flaps where the shovel had sliced it apart. His voice was a high weeping torrent of abuse, a boy’s fury. Carl smacked him under the chin with the butt of the Imbel, then again in the region of the wound. The soldier screamed and cringed back. Carl brought the barrel of the assault rifle to bear. Short, stuttering burst. The muzzle flash lit the boy’s ruined face, reached out and touched him on the chest like fizzling magic—kicked him away across the road like rags.

The machine gun cut loose again, died just as abruptly at yelled orders from the jeep. Still grinning, Carl got to his feet and crept to the wing of the COLIN vehicle. He crouched and squinted, squeezed detail from his flash-burned vision. Saw the silhouette of the soldier manning the mounted gun. About forty meters, he reckoned. It hurt to hold on to the detail through aching pupils, but—

Better get this done.

As if she’d heard him, Ertekin’s Marstech pistol cracked again across the night, three times in rapid succession. The soldier on the mounted gun pivoted his weapon about, chasing the sound. Carl put the Imbel to his shoulder, popped up over the jeep hood, cuddled the weapon in, and squeezed the trigger. Clattering roar at his ear and the muzzle flash stabbed out again in the cool air. Long burst, drop back into cover, don’t stop to see…

But he already knew.

The mounted machine gun stayed silent.

He gave it another minute, just to be safe—just to beat that bullshit thirteen arrogance, right, Sutherland?—then poked the weapon up over the hood again, butt-first. No returning fire. He moved to the rear of the COLIN jeep and eased his head out far enough to see the other vehicle.

Silent, tumbled figures in and alongside the open-topped jeep. The mounted gun, stark and skeletal amid the carnage, unmanned and tilting butt-first at the sky. Carl stepped out of cover. Paused. Moved slowly forward, mesh-hammer ebbing along his nerves now that the fight was done. He covered the distance to the other jeep in a cautious, curving arc. Peripherally, he was aware of Ertekin climbing up onto the road from the ravine side where she’d hidden. He got to the jeep well ahead of her, circled it once, warily, and then stood looking at his handiwork.

“Well, that seemed to work,” he said, to no one in particular.

It looked as if the sergeant had gotten clear of the jeep, was on the way to support his men when he ran into the hail of fire from the Imbel. Now he lay flung back against the forward wheel arch like a drunk who’d just tripped on a curb. Above his slumped form, the jeep’s driver was still behind the wheel, hands folded neatly in his lap, face ripped away, brains dripping down his shirtfront like spilled gravy. The soldier manning the mounted gun hung twisted over the back of the jeep, one foot tangled in something that had prevented the impact of the Imbel’s rounds from knocking him bodily out of the vehicle. His head was almost touching the evercrete surface of the road, boy’s face slack with shock, staring from frozen, upside-down eyes as Carl moved past him.

The remaining man lay huddled in the back of the jeep like a child playing hide-and-seek. In the low light, blood shone wet and dark on his battledress, but his chest still rose and fell. Carl reached in and gripped his shoulder. The soldier’s eyes flickered open drowsily. He blinked at Carl for a moment, bemused. Blood-irised spit bubbles moved at the corner of his mouth as his lips parted.

“Uncle Gregorio,” he muttered weakly. “What are you doing here?”

Carl just looked at him, and presently the soldier’s eyes slid closed again. His head tipped a little to one side, came to rest against the inside trim of the jeep. Carl reached in again and felt for a pulse. He sighed.

Ertekin reached his side.

“You okay?” he asked her absently.

“Yeah. Marsalis, you’ve got blood—”

“Not mine. Can I see that Marstech piece of yours for a second?”

“Uh. Sure.”

She handed the weapon to him, took the Imbel as he offered it over in return. He weighed the Beretta for a moment, checking the safety and the load display. Then he raised it and shot the young soldier through the face. The boy’s head jerked back. Lolled. He knocked the safety back on, palmed the warmth of the barrel, and handed the pistol back to Ertekin.

She didn’t take it. Her voice, when it came, was leashed tight with anger. “What the fuck did you do that for?”

He shrugged. “Because he wasn’t dead.”

“So you had to make him that way?” Now the anger started to bleed through. Suddenly she was shouting. “Look at him, Marsalis. He was no threat, he was injured—”

“Yeah.” Carl gestured around at the deserted road and the empty landscape beyond. “You see a hospital out there anywhere?”

“In Arequipa—”

“In Arequipa, he’d have been a fucking liability.” Running a little anger of his own now. “Ertekin, we need to hit Greta Jurgens fast, before she finds out what went down here tonight. We don’t have time for hospital visits. This isn’t a…what?”

Ertekin was frowning, anger shelved momentarily as she reached into her jacket pocket. She fished out her phone, which was vibrating quietly on and off, pulsing along its edges with pale crystalline light.

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Carl looked away down the perspectives of the road in exasperated disbelief. “At this time of night?”

“Rang before,” she said, putting the device to her ear. “Just before the fireworks kicked off. Didn’t have time to pick up. Ertekin.”

Then she listened quietly. Made monosyllabic agreement a couple of times. Hung up and put the phone away again, face gone calm and thoughtful.

“Norton,” he guessed.

“Yeah. Time to go home.”

He gaped at her. “What?”

“That’s right.” She met his eye, something harder edging the calm. “RimSec called. They’ve got a body. We’ve got to go back.”

Carl shook his head. Twinges of the firefight backed up in his nerves, fake-fired the mesh. “So they’ve got a body. Another body. Big fucking deal. You going to pull out now, just when we’re getting somewhere?”

Ertekin gazed around at the carnage. “You call this getting somewhere?”

“They tried to stop us, Sevgi. They tried to kill us.”

“They tried to kill us in New York as well. You want to go back there? Come to that, Nevant tried to kill you in Istanbul. Violence follows you around, Marsalis. Just like Merrin, just like—”

She clamped her lips.

Carl looked at her and felt the old weariness seeping in. He cranked up the rind of a smile for cover.

“Go ahead, Sevgi, say it. Just like Ethan.” He gestured. “Go on, get it off that gorgeous chest of yours. It’s what you’re thinking anyway.”

“You have no fucking right to assume—”

“No?” He paused for effect. “Oh yeah, I forgot. You get some kind of perverse thrill out of fucking unlucks, and that makes you think you don’t see us the same way the rest of the whole fucking human race does. Well, it takes more than a Cuban wank and a few sheet stains to—”

Abruptly, he was on the ground.

He lay there on his back in the road dust, staring up while she stood over him, clutching her right fist in her left hand.

“Motherfucker,” she said wonderingly.

She’d stepped in before she threw the punch, he realized. Right hook, or an uppercut, he couldn’t work out which. He never saw it coming.

“You think I haven’t been where you are now, Marsalis?”

He propped himself up on an elbow. “What, flat on the your back in the road??

“Shut up.” She was trembling visibly. Maybe with comedown from the firefight. Maybe not. “You think I don’t know what it’s like? Think again, fuckwit. Try growing up Muslim in the West, while the Middle East catches fire again. Try growing up a woman in a Western Muslim culture fighting off siege-mentality fundamentalism again. Try being one of only three Turkish American patrolwomen in a New York precinct dominated by male Greek American detectives. Hey, try sleeping with a thirteen, you’ll get almost as much shit as being one, not least from members of your own fucking family. Yeah. People are stupid, Marsalis. You think I need lessons in that?”

“I don’t know what you need, Ertekin.”

“No, that’s right, you don’t. And listen—you got some fucking problem with what we did back in Istanbul, then deal with it however you need to. But don’t you ever, ever call into question my relationship with Ethan Conrad again. Because the next time I swear I will put a fucking bullet in you.”

Carl rubbed at his jaw. Flexed it experimentally left and right.

“Mind if I get up now?”

“Do what you fucking like.”

She stood away from him, staring off somewhere beyond the corpses and the arid landscape. He climbed carefully to his feet.

“Ertekin, just listen to me for a moment. Look around you. Look at this mess.”

“I am looking at it.”

“Right. So it’s got to mean something, right?”

Still she didn’t look at his face. “Yeah, what it probably means is that Manco Bambarén’s tired of you pushing him around in his own backyard.”

“Oh come on, Ertekin. You’re a cop, for fuck’s sake.”

“That’s right, I’m a cop.” Suddenly she whipped around on him. Fast enough to halfway trip a block reflex. “And right now, while I get dragged around the globe watching you fulfill your genetic potential for wholesale slaughter, other cops elsewhere are doing real police work and getting somewhere with it. Norton was right about this, we’re wasting our time. We are going back.”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“No.” She shook her head, decision taken. “I made a mistake in Istanbul. Now I’m going to put it right.”