Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 32

Greta Jurgens came to work early, shuffling across the deserted white stone courtyards just off the Plaza de Armas before the sun got high enough to make them blaze. Still, she wore heavy-framed sunglasses against the light, and her pace was sluggish enough for summer heat or a woman twice her age. She wasn’t small-boned, or even especially pale given her Germanic ancestry, but the tanned, muscle-freighted bulk of the two Samoan bodyguards detailed to escort her from the limousine each day made her seem delicate and ill by comparison. And as she reached the cloistered edge of the courtyard where her office was, stepped under the cloister’s stone roof and up to the office door, she shivered, harder than most humans would. October was a knowledge, a cold creeping tide in her blood. Darker, colder days, coming in.

Back in Europe, the seasonal cycle her metabolism had originally been calibrated for was already well into autumn and winding slowly down to winter. And you never could quite get it together to get recalibrated, could you, Greta. Too little faith in the local service providers—it was a complicated procedure, went very deep—and too little disposable income or time to go back and pay someone she’d trust. Yeah, and if you’re honest, just never the right time, either: too fucking busy, then too fucking depressed, then just too fucking asleep. It was a pretty standard hib complaint—along with the more obvious physiological factors, the hibernoid hormonal suite lent itself to mental fluctuations that were almost bipolar in their intensity. All through the waking segment of the cycle, she whirred like an overloaded magdrive dynamo, working, dealing, brokering, living but always too busy, too busy, too busy to rest or relax or sleep or worry about minor considerations like changing her life for the better. Then, as the hormonal tide began to ebb and such considerations finally managed to creep to the front of her conscious concerns, they came in freighted with such a surging sense of weariness in the face of insurmountable odds that it was all she could do not to weep at the pointlessness of trying to do anything about a thing like that now. Better just to sleep on it, better just let it go this time around, pick up again in spring and…

And around she went again.

An unfortunate psychological side effect, went the arid, tut-tutting text of the Jacobsen Protocol, and somewhat debilitating for those implicated, but not a failing this committee need concern itself with unduly, nor a social threat as such.

Somewhat debilitating. Right. Her fingers mashed at the door code panel, slow and clumsy, as if they weren’t really hers. The Samoans stood by. Isaac and Salesi, both of them familia enforcers since their youth, long schooled in a sort of hard-faced butler’s diplomacy where escort duties were concerned—they knew better than to offer her help. She’d been in a foul mood for days now, snappish and strung out at the wrong end of her waking tether. Judgment fraying, social skills barely operational. Under normal circumstances, she’d already have handed over operations here to one of Manco’s brighter minions, given in to the inevitable changes in her blood chemistry, and let the cold tide turn opiate-warm along her veins. She’d already be housebound, down at the Colca retreat, pottering about, prepping for the long sleep ahead. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have to—

He came out of nowhere.

She still had her sunglasses on, blurry early-morning vision, and not much peripheral sense at all this late in the cycle—no surprise she didn’t see it happen. Her first warning was the sound of a solid, untidy impact behind her. The door, coded open, was already swinging inward off the latch. She felt the huge hand of one of the bodyguards hit her in the small of her back, shoving her bodily inside. She stumbled, caught the corner of a desk in the cramped office space, struggled foggily to comprehend.

We’re being hit.

Impossible. Her mind rejected it out of hand, objections in a blurry rush. Manco had put his stamp on the Arequipa gangs a decade ago, made his allegiances, wiped out the rest. No one—no one—was stupid enough to buck the trend. And the courtyard, the white stone courtyard, was pristine when they crossed, empty this early.

The sound behind her played back in her head. Shock jumped in her blood as she put it together.

Someone had come off the paved walkway above the cloister, jumped better than five meters directly down and onto one of her escorts. Was outside now, finishing the job…

Isaac cannoned into the doorjamb and sagged there, clinging. Blood matted his hair and poured down his face between the eyes. He made a convulsive effort to gain his feet again, failed, went down in a heap.

Behind him in the doorway, a black figure silhouetted against the gathering glare of the early-morning sun. Something flopped in her sluggish blood, deep jolt of instinctive fear just ahead of recognition.

“Morning, Greta. Surprised to see me?”

“Marsalis.” She spat it out, temper snapping across. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

He stepped carefully into the office, skirting Isaac’s toppled bulk with cat-like care and a wary sideways glance. Behind him, through the open door, she saw Salesi stretched out unmoving on the chessboard white-and-gray pavement of the courtyard like a beached whale. Marsalis didn’t have a mark on him; didn’t even appear to be breathing heavily. He stood just inside reaching distance and looked impassively at her.

“I haven’t had much sleep, Greta. I’d bear that in mind if I were you.”

“I’m not afraid of you.”

He saw it was true. Smiled a little. “I guess not. Welcome to the twist brotherhood, right? All just monsters together.”

“I repeat.” She stepped away from the desk corner, straightened up to him. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“I might ask Manco the same question. See, I’ve been pretty polite so far. Couple of quick conversations and I’m out of your hair for good. No damage, no disruption, everybody’s happy. That’s the way I wanted it, anyw—”

“We don’t always get what we want, Marsalis. Didn’t your mummy ever tell you that?”

“Yeah. She also told me it was rude to interrupt.” He reached in, whiplash-swift, and her sunglasses were gone, plucked into his hand. Her vision watered and swam. “Like I said, Greta, I could have been out of everyone’s hair in nothing flat. Instead, last night, while I was on my way here to talk to you, someone paid a bucketful of your illustrious local military to have me disappeared.”

She blinked hard to clear her vision. Silent curse at the tears it squeezed visibly out at the corners of her eyes.

“What a shame they didn’t manage it.”

“Yeah, well, you just can’t get the help these days. Point is, Greta, who do you think I should blame?”

She tipped her head to look past him at the crumpled form by the door. “Looks to me like you’ve already decided that one.”

“You’re confusing purpose with necessity. I don’t think your islander friends would have been overkeen on us all having a sitdown chat.”

She met his gaze. “I don’t seem to be sitting down.”

For a moment, they stared at each other. Then he shrugged and tossed her sunglasses onto the desktop. He nodded at the chair behind the desk.

“Be my guest.”

She made her way around the edge of the desk and seated herself. At the door to the little office, Isaac stirred, shook his head muzzily. Marsalis glanced his way, looked back at Greta and pointed a warning finger, then crossed to where the Samoan lay. Isaac snarled and spat blood, glaring up at the black man in disbelieving rage. He braced his arms at his sides, and pressed huge hands flat to the floor.

“You stand up,” Marsalis said without passion, “I will kill you.”

The Samoan didn’t appear to hear. His arms flexed, his mouth formed a grin.

“Isaac, he means it.” Greta leaned over the desk, put urgency into her tone. “He’s thirteen. Unluck. You stay where you are. I’ll square this.”

Marsalis shot her a glance. “Generous of you.”

“Fuck you, Marsalis. Some of us got loyalties past getting paid.” Sudden, unstoppable, cavernous yawn. “Wouldn’t expect you to understand that.”

“Am I keeping you up?”

“Fuck off. You want to ask me questions, ask me. Then get the fuck out.”

“You talk to Manco today?”

“No.”

He seated himself on the edge of the desk. “Yesterday?”

“Before he went to meet you. Not since.”

“Why would he use the army and not familia talent?”

“You’re assuming it was him.”

“He came close to greasing me himself, up at Sacsayhuamán. Yeah, I’m assuming this was him.”

“You got no other enemies?”

“I think we agreed I was asking the questions.”

She shrugged. Waited.

“Manco got any interests up in Jesusland?”

“That I know of? No.”

“The Rim?”

“No.”

“He had a cousin did jail time in Florida. Wore a jacket just like this one, apparently. Know anything about that?”

“No.”

“You guys move medical tech at all?”

She held down another yawn. “If it pays.”

“Heard of a guy called Eddie Tanaka?”

“No.”

“Texan. Strictly small-time.”

“I said no.”

“What about Jasper Whitlock?”

“No.”

“Toni Montes?”

“No.”

“Allen Merrin?”

She threw up her hands. “Marsalis, what the fuck is this? Gone Walkabout? Do I look like Shannon Doukoure to you? We’re not a fucking missing persons agency.”

“So you don’t know Merrin?”

“Never heard of him.”

“What about Ulysses Ward?”

She sat back in the chair. Sighed. “No.”

“Manco treat you okay, Greta?”

She flared again, for real this time. “That’s none of your motherfucking business.”

“Hey, I’m just wondering here.” He gestured. “I mean, you’re good looking and all, but in the end you’re a twist, just like me, and—”

“I am nothing like you, unluck,” she said coldly.

“—we all know how the familias feel about twists. I don’t imagine Manco’s any different from the other taytas. Must be tough for you.”

Greta said nothing.

“Well?”

“I didn’t hear you ask me a question.”

“Didn’t you?” He grinned mirthlessly. “My question, Greta, was how does a gringa hib twist like yourself end up working front office for the familias?”

“I don’t know, Marsalis. Maybe it’s because some of us twists can transcend what it says in our genes and just get on and do the work. Ever think of that?”

“Greta, you’re asleep four months out of every twelve. That’s going to put a serious dent in anyone’s productivity. Add to that you’re white, you’re a woman, and you’re not from here. The familias aren’t known for their progressive attitudes. So I don’t see any way this works, unless my sources are right and you’re fucking the boss.”

Across the room, Isaac’s eyes widened with disbelieving fury. She caught his gaze and shook her head, then fixed Marsalis with a stare.

“Is that what you’d like to believe?”

“No, it’s what Stefan Nevant tells me.”

“Nevant?” Greta sneered. “That shithead? Fucking wannabe pistaco, too stupid to realize—”

She stopped, sat silent.

Fucking end-of-cycle slippage, she knew dismally. Fucking traitorous genetic bullshit modifi—

Marsalis nodded. “Too stupid to realize what?”

“To realize. That he needed us, and we didn’t need him at all.”

“That’s not what you were going to say.”

“Oh, so now you’re a fucking telepath?”

He got off the edge of the desk. “Let’s not make this more unpleasant than it’s got to be, Greta.”

“I agree. In fact, let’s stop this shit right now.”

The new voice held them both frozen for a pair of seconds. Greta locked onto the figure in the doorway, then looked back just in time to see Marsalis’s face slacken into resignation. His lips formed a word, a name, she realized, and realized at the same moment, confusedly but surely, that it was all over.

Sevgi Ertekin stepped into the room, Marstech Beretta in hand.

In the taxi, they sat with a frigid thirty centimeters of plastic seat between them and stared from opposite side windows at the passing frontages. Outside, the sun was on its way up into a sky of flawless blue, striking the early-morning chill out of the air and lighting the white volcanic stonework of the old town almost incandescent. Traffic already clogged the main streets, slowed passage to a jerky crawl.

“We’re going to miss our fucking flight,” she said grimly.

“Ertekin, this place has a dozen flights a day to Lima. We’ve got no problem getting out of here.”

“No, but we’ve got a big fucking problem making the Oakland suborbital out of Lima if we miss this flight.”

He shrugged. “So we wait in Lima, catch a later bounce to Oakland. This guy they’ve found is dead, right? He’s not in a hurry.”

She swung on him. “What the fuck were you doing back there?”

“Working a source, what did it look like?”

“To me? Looked like you were winding up to beat a confession out of her.”

“I wasn’t looking for a confession. I don’t think she knows about our little reception committee last night.”

“Shame you didn’t think to find that out before you cut loose on the hired help.”

Carl shrugged. “They’ll live.”

“The one out in the courtyard may not. I checked him on my way in. At a guess I’d say you fractured his skull.”

“That’s hardly the point.”

“No, the point is that I told you we were done here. I told you we were going to stay put in the hotel until we were ready to fly out. The point is that you told me you would.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She said something in Turkish under her breath. He wondered whether to tell her the truth: that he had slept, but not for very long. Had stung himself awake with dreams of Elena Aguirre muttering behind him in the gloom of Felipe Souza’s cargo section, had thought for one icy moment that she stood there beside the bed in the darkened hotel suite, staring down at him glitter-eyed. He’d dressed and gone out, itching to do violence, to do anything that would chase out the remembered powerlessness.

Instead, he told her: “She knows Merrin.”

Momentary stillness, a barely perceptible stiffening, then the scant shift of her profile from the window, a single, sidelong glance.

“Yeah, right.”

“I ran a long list of names on her, mostly victims from your list. Merrin’s was the only one that got a reaction. And when I moved on to the next name, she relaxed right back down again. Either she knew him before he went to Mars, or she knows him now.”

“Or she knows someone else with that name, or did once.” She’d gone back to looking out of the window. “Or it sounded like something or someone she knew, or you’re mistaken about the way she reacted. You’re chasing shadows and you know it.”

“Someone tried to kill us last night.”

“Yeah, and on your own admission Jurgens knows nothing about it.”

“I said she didn’t seem to.”

“Like she seemed to know Merrin, you mean?” She looked at him again, but this time there was no hostility. She just looked tired. “Look, Marsalis, you can’t have it both ways. Either we trust your instincts or we don’t.”

“And you don’t?”

She sighed. “I don’t trust this.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, this?”

“It means this fucking dive back to the visceral level all the time. This throwing your weight around and pissing people off and pushing until something breaks loose and gives us someone new to fight. Confrontation, escalation, fucking death or glory.” She gestured helplessly. “I mean, maybe that worked for Project Lawman back in the day, but it isn’t going to cut it here. This is an investigation, not a brawl.”

“Osprey.”

“What?”

“Osprey. I’m not American, I was never part of Project Lawman.” He frowned, flicker of something recalled, too faint now to get back. “And another thing I’m not, Ertekin, just so you keep it in mind. I’m not Ethan.”

For a moment, he thought she’d explode on him, the way she had the night before on the highway, with the corpses draped across the stalled and blinded jeep. But she only hooded her gaze and turned away.

“I know who you are,” she said quietly.

They didn’t speak again until they reached the airport.

They made the Lima flight with a couple of minutes to spare, got into the capital on time, and confirmed their places on the Oakland suborb an hour before it lifted.

Time to kill.

Quiet amid the bustle and vaulted space of the Lima terminal, Sevgi faced herself in a washroom mirror. She stared for what seemed like a long time, then shrugged and fed herself the syn capsules one at a time.

Dry-swallowed and grimaced as they went down.

CHAPTER 33

Alcatraz station. Special Cases Division.

By the time she got there, the superfunction capsules had kicked in with a vengeance. Her feelings were her own again, vacuum-packed back into the steel canister she’d made for them. An icy detachment propped up focus and attention to the detail beyond the mirror.

Another fucking mirror, she noted.

But this time she sat behind the glass and watched the scene in the interview room on the other side. Coyle and Rovayo and a woman who sprawled leggily in the chair provided, wore formfitting black under a heavy leather jacket she hadn’t bothered to take off, and watched her interrogators with energetic, gum-chewing dislike. She was young, not far into her twenties, and her harsh-boned, Slavic face carried the sneer well. The rest was pure Rim mix—short blond hair hacked about in a classic Jakarta shreddie cut that didn’t really suit her, crimson Chinese characters embroidered down the leg of her one-piece from hip to ankle, the baroque blue ink of a Maori-look skin-sting curled across her left temple. Her voice, as it strained through the speaker to the observers’ gallery, was heavily accented.

“Look, what you fucking want from me? Everything you ask me, I give you answers. Now I got places I got to be.” She leaned across the table. “You know, I don’t show up for shift tonight, they don’t pay me. Not like you public sector guys.”

“Zdena Tovbina,” said Norton. “Filigree Steel co-worker. They got her off video archive from the building where this guy used to live. Seems she came looking for him when he didn’t show up for work two shifts running.”

“Nice of her. Shame Filigree Steel didn’t think to do the same thing.”

Norton shrugged. “Fluid labor market, you know how it is. Apparently they did call him a couple of times, but when he didn’t call back, they just assumed he’d moved on. Hired someone else to fill his shifts. These security grunts make shit, staff turnover’s through the roof. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Unionize, maybe?”

“Ssssh.”

In the interview room, Alicia Rovayo was pacing about. “We’ll inform your shift manager if we need to keep you much longer. Meantime, let’s go over it one more time. You say you didn’t actually know anything was wrong with Driscoll.”

“No, I knew was something wrong. Something wrong was he saw inside of that ship.” For just a moment, Zdena Tovbina looked haunted. “When we saw, we all got sick. Joey was first, but we all saw what was there.”

“You actually saw Driscoll vomiting?” Coyle asked from his seat.

“No, we heard.” Tovbina tapped her ear twice, graphically. “Squad net. Radio.”

“And later, when you saw him?”

“He was quiet. Would not talk.” A phlegmatic, open-handed gesture. “I tried, he turned away from me. Very male, you know.”

“These guys went in masked,” Norton murmured. “Minimal stuff, upper-face goggle wrap, but they were smearing anticontaminants as well. You beginning to see where this is going?”

Sevgi nodded glumly. She glanced across the gallery at Marsalis, but he was focused wholly on the woman beyond the glass.

“When was the last time you actually saw Joseph Driscoll?” Coyle asked patiently.

Tovbina all but ground her teeth in frustration. “I have told you. He went back on Red Two shuttle. Climbed in by mistake. We were all shaken. Not thinking right. When we’re back at base, I looked for him in squad room. He was already gone.”

“Oh yeah,” breathed Marsalis. “He was gone all right.”

“Where’d they find the body?” Sevgi asked.

“Caught up in deep-water cabling a hundred and something meters down, on the edge of one of these bioculture platforms they’ve got out there. It’s pretty much the area where Horkan’s Pride came down, allowing for drift. Whoever threw Driscoll over the side weighted him around the legs with a couple of bags of junk from the Horkan’s Pride galley. Probably made them up in advance. Took him down fast and clean, heading for the seabed until he hit something that snagged him. Pure chance a repair crew was out that way yesterday.”

“Did he drown?”

“No, looks like he was dead before he went into the water. Crushed larynx, snapped neck.”

“Fuck. Weren’t these guys wearing vital signs vests?”

“Yeah, but no one checks them, apparently. Staffing cuts, Filigree Steel eliminated the deck medics on their shuttles sometime last year when they went up for retender.”

“Great.”

“Yeah, market forces, don’t you just love them. Oh yeah, and there are a lot of smaller contusions on Driscoll, some abrasions, too. Forensics reckon he was stuffed inside one of the disposal chutes up near the kitchen section, then dumped straight out into the ocean. A couple of those hatches at least would have been on the submerged side of the hull. No one would have noticed.”

Sevgi shook her head. “Blowing an outer hatch should have shown up on a scanner somewhere. Takes power. Either that, or you have to use the explosive bolts like he did with the access hatches, and that would have made a noise, even submerged.”

“There’d be plenty of power in the onboard batteries,” said Marsalis distantly. “You wouldn’t need the bolts. And by the look of it, these people were too busy puking their guts up to be watching their screens for low-level electrical activity.”

He sat back and puffed out his cheeks.

“Our boy Merrin really played this one.” He shook his head. “A thing of beauty, really.”

Norton shot him an unfriendly look.

“So.” Sevgi wanted to hear someone say it, even if it was her. “Merrin walks out of there as Driscoll. Steals his gear, masks up, and slips aboard the wrong transport in the general confusion. Think that was deliberate, or did he just luck out?”

Marsalis shook his head again. “Deliberate, absolutely. He’d be paying attention for that stuff.”

“He makes it back to the base, gets off the base somehow. I’d guess that’s not hard. Got to be a hundred different outs for someone with Merrin’s training. Security’s going to be focused on incoming personnel anyway, not the graveyard shift going home. And with all this breaking loose, everyone’s running around like a Jesusland snake-handling meet.” She stopped. “Wait a minute, what about the quarantine?”

Norton sighed. “Fudged. They applied it, made the announcement on the way back. Everyone through the nanoscan. Apparently”—irony lay heavy on the word—“no one at Filigree Steel realized Driscoll didn’t take the scan.”

Marsalis grunted. “Or by the time they realized, it was too late and they just covered their arses.”

“Yeah, well, in any case, quarantine cleared inside the first couple of hours. Some biohazard outfit down from Seattle, they checked the hull for contaminants before it was towed. If someone at Filigree Steel was covering their asses, they knew they were safe by lunchtime.”

Sevgi nodded gloomily. “And by the time we’d get to digging any deeper with Filigree Steel, Ward shows up dead so we assume that’s how Merrin got ashore, and we don’t bother. What a fucking mess.”

“It’s classic insurgency technique,” Marsalis said. “Misdirect, cover your tracks.”

“Can you sound a little less fucking impressed, please.”

In the interview room, they were done. Zdena Tovbina was escorted out, ostentatiously checking her watch. Rovayo stayed behind, played a long, weary glance through the one-way glass to the gallery as if she could see the three of them sitting there.

“That’s all, folks,” she said.

“He planned this.” Sevgi was still talking to make herself believe it. “He opened up the cryocaps and ripped the bodies apart to create a fucking diversion.”

“Yeah.” Marsalis got up to leave. “And you guys thought he’d just gone crazy.”

Coyle and Rovayo had been busy. There was a full CSI virtual up and running for Joey Driscoll’s death, including a gruesomely modeled corpse-recovery site. They stood, briefly, in fathomless, lamplit blue and Driscoll peered down at them out of the tangled cabling, one puffy hand waving gently in the current. A CSI ’face reached up helpfully and pulled in magnified detail that Sevgi, syn or no syn, could really have done without. Driscoll’s eyes were gone, and the earlobes, the mouth eaten back to a lopsided harelip snarl, and the whole swollen face gone waxy with adipocere seepage through the skin from the subcutaneous fat layers beneath. Sevgi’d seen worse, much worse, fished out of the Hudson or the East River every so often, but it was all a long time ago, and now the illusion of floating beneath the waterlogged corpse in the depths of the ocean kept triggering an impulse to hold her breath.

“You said Forensics have been over the apartment,” she said. “Any chance of seeing that?”

Coyle nodded. “Sure. We all done here?”

“I think so,” said Norton uncomfortably.

Marsalis nodded impassively.

“Full shift, datahome six,” Coyle told the ’face, and the drowned blue murk amped up to a blinding flash of white, then soaked back out into the somber colors of cheap rental accommodation. Driscoll’d either been saving for something better, or maybe didn’t rate home environment as much of a budget priority. The furniture was functional and worn; the walls carried generic corporate promo artwork from what looked like a string of different employers. A window gave them a view of what must be an identical apartment building twenty meters away across an alley.

Sevgi breathed in relief.

“You got matching genetic trace?” she asked.

“Yeah.” Rovayo pointed, and all around the room tiny scuffs of transparent red lit up on the furniture and fittings. “He was definitely here. Used the place for a couple of days at least.”

Marsalis went to the window and peered out. “Any sightings? Eyewitnesses?”

The female Rim detective frowned. “Not much from witnesses, no. These blocks are purpose-built for immigrant labor. Tenant turnover’s high, and people keep pretty much to themselves. There’s some security video from the corridors, but not much of that, either. It looks like he took out most of the surveillance equipment in the building right after he got here. They didn’t get around to fixing it for a couple of weeks.”

“Pretty standard,” Marsalis muttered.

“Yeah, right,” Coyle growled. “And I suppose you don’t got immigrant labor slums in the Euro-fucking-Union.”

The black man flickered a glance at him.

“I was talking about the surveillance takedown. Pretty standard urban penetration procedure.”

“Oh.”

“You want to see some of what we did get?” Rovayo asked. She was already gesturing a viewpatch screen into existence on the empty air. Marsalis shrugged and shifted from the window.

“Sure. Can’t hurt.”

So they all watched at a foreshortening camera angle as Merrin walked gaunt and hollow-eyed through the lobby, stared thoughtfully up at the lens for a moment, and then walked on again. Sevgi, watching Marsalis as well, thought she saw the black man stiffen slightly as Merrin seemed to look up at them all from the screen. She wasn’t sure what he saw there to tighten him like that; maybe just a worthy opponent. For her, the moment flip-flopped abruptly in her head, Merrin looking up, the corpse of Joey Driscoll looking down, corpse and killer, little windows opening out of time to let the dead and destructive peer in. Fucking virtual formats. Copied worlds, no place for anything but ghosts and the machine perfection of the ’faces drifting between, administering it all with the inhuman competence of angels.

She wondered suddenly if that was what the paradise the imams talked about would be like. Ghosts and angels, and no place for anything human or warm.

“We’ve got a problem here,” she said to dispel the sudden, creeping sense of doom. “If this is how Merrin got off Horkan’s Pride, then—”

“Yeah.” Coyle finished it for her. “How does he end up at Ward BioSupply the same afternoon, painting the dock with Ulysses Ward’s blood?”

“More important than how,” said Marsalis quietly. “You might want to wonder why?”

Coyle and Rovayo shared a look. Sevgi wrote the subtitles. Who knows why the fuck an unluck twist does anything? She wasn’t sure if Marsalis caught it, too.

Norton cleared his throat. “Ward was out there. The satellite footage and the filed sub plans prove it. We’ve assumed that was coincidence, his bad luck he happened to be in the region. He rescued Merrin from the wreck and got murdered for his kindness.”

“Big assumption,” said Marsalis, less quietly.

“We didn’t assume anything.” Irritable tiredness in Rovayo’s voice. Now that Sevgi thought about it, neither of the Rim cops looked as if they’d had a lot of sleep recently. “We ran background checks on Ward at the time. COLIN-approved security n-djinn. There’s no evidence of a link to Merrin, or Mars generally.”

“There is now. Maybe you just didn’t dig deep enough.”

Coyle bristled. “What the fuck do you know about it? You some kind of cop all of a sudden?”

“Some kind of, yeah.”

“Marsalis, you’re full of shit. You’re a licensed hit man at best, and from what I hear you weren’t even very good at that. They bailed your ass out of a Florida jail for this job, right?”

Marsalis smiled faintly.

“We’ll go back to Ward,” Rovayo said quickly. She’d stepped subtly into the space between the two men, body language a blend of backing Coyle up and defusing the situation. Sevgi made it as instinctive—you couldn’t brawl in a virtuality, but Rovayo seemed to have forgotten where they were. “We’ll change the protocols, maybe run it through a different n-djinn. We’ll go deeper until we find the link. Now, it’s a given that they knew each other. So it’s probably a safe bet that Ward went out there with the specific intention of bringing Merrin back.”

Coyle nodded. “Only Merrin won’t play ball. He doesn’t show, after what’s happened to him in transit from Mars, he doesn’t trust Ward or anybody else who’s in on this thing. And Ward has a limited window before Filigree Steel shows up; he doesn’t have time to search the hull for the guy he’s supposed to be collecting.”

“Or,” offered Rovayo, “Ward climbs down into the hull and when he sees the mess, he freaks and runs.”

“Yeah, could work that way, too.” Coyle grimaced. “Either way, Merrin finds his own way out, then goes looking for Ward anyway. You know what that sounds like to me? Revenge.”

Sevgi turned to look at Marsalis. “That make sense to you?”

“Well, you know us thirteens.” Marsalis glanced across at Coyle. He burlesqued a caricature Jesusland drawl. “We’re all real irrational when someone pisses us off.”

Coyle shrugged it off. “Yeah. What I heard.”

“Merrin’s just endured seven months in transit,” Norton pointed out. “He’s had to resort to cannibalism to survive. All because someone messed up his cryocap thaw. If he blamed Ward for that—”

“Or if Alicia here is right, and Ward did freak and run—” Coyle gestured. “Come on, however you look at it, this twi…this guy isn’t going to be in the most forgiving of moods. This is payback, pure and simple.”

“Marsalis.” Sevgi tried again. “I asked you what you think. You want to answer my question?”

He met her eyes. Face unreadable. “What do I think? I think we’re wasting our time here.”

Coyle snorted. Rovayo laid a hand on his arm. The black man barely looked in their direction. He took a step across the virtual apartment, faced the screen where Merrin was locked in freeze frame walking away, slipping out of the security camera’s angle of capture.

“He was clear,” he said slowly. “He’d beaten your half-arsed private sector security effort, he’d left them puking their guts up exactly as planned. He’d run rings around them, misdirected everyone’s attention, and then disappeared into local population, just the way he was trained. Going back for Ward meant exposing himself, coming out into the open again.” A long, speculative stare across at Coyle. “When you’re operational in enemy territory, you don’t take risks like that for some kind of revenge kick.”

“Sure,” said Coyle. “Your kind, you’d just let that be. Let the people who abandoned you out there in space get away with it.”

“Who said anything about getting away with it?” Marsalis grinned unpleasantly. “My kind know how to wait, cudlip. My kind would let the people who did this live with the knowledge that we’re coming, let them wake up every day knowing—”

“What did you call me?” It had taken Coyle a moment or two to grasp the unfamiliar insult he’d just been handed.

“You heard me.”

“Will you two knock it off,” snapped Sevgi. “Marsalis, you’re saying this isn’t revenge. Then what is it?”

“I don’t know what it is,” the black man said irritably. “I’m not Merrin, and contrary to what our friend here thinks, not everyone with a variant thirteen geneprint thinks exactly alike.”

Norton stepped into the breach. “No, but you were trained similarly, and that must count for something. You say his training wouldn’t allow an impulse of revenge. What would it dictate in this situation?”

“Maybe he just needed to shut Ward up,” Rovayo said. “Cover his retreat. If Ward talked—”

Sevgi shook her head. “Doesn’t fit. Ward isn’t far enough up the chain of command. Self-made biosupply magnates don’t swing the weight to get things done on Mars, even in California. If Ward was a part of this, he was a small cog. They hired him to fish Merrin out of the Pacific and hand him on. End of function. He didn’t know anything that he hadn’t already been told.”

“Right,” said Coyle slowly. “But he must have known his chain of command, or at least his nearest contact. We’re looking at this the wrong way around. Merrin didn’t go to Ward to shut him up, he went to make him talk. To get the names of the people who were giving the orders.”

Norton looked suddenly hopeful. “You think Merrin got his hit list out of Ward?”

“Unlikely.” Marsalis prowled the virtual apartment like someone looking for a hidden exit somewhere high up. “The way Merrin’s been hopping the border back and forth, he’s working off either partial or sequential knowledge. Whatever he got out of Ward, it wasn’t his hit list.”

“Or maybe just not the whole list,” said Norton hopefully. “Maybe Ward had the first couple of names.”

“There are no links from Ward to Whitlock,” Rovayo pointed out.

“Or Montes,” said Coyle.

Norton sighed. “Right. Or any of the Jesusland kills, as far as we can tell. Shame, it would have been nice to find ourselves getting somewhere for a change.”

“Yeah, well, for that you’ve got to be looking in the right place.” Marsalis gestured around the apartment. “And like I said before, we’re wasting our time here.”

Coyle’s lip curled. “Then perhaps you’d care to tell us how we could more profitably employ that time.”

“Outside of going back to the altiplano and coming down hard on Manco Bambarén?” A shrug. Marsalis caught Sevgi’s eye, clashed gazes like swords. “Well, you could start by asking yourselves why this corpse shows up now, all of a sudden, just as we’re cracking the ice off the familias. You could wonder why it’s taken nearly six months for someone to go sniffing around the aquaculture environs of the crash site—”

“Who the fuck is Bambarén?” Rovayo wanted to know. She shuttled a glance between Norton and Sevgi. Sevgi shook her head wearily. Don’t ask.

Meanwhile, Coyle’s sneer had made it to a full-blown grin. “The reason it’s taken four months to find this corpse—fucked-up, gene-enhanced paranoia aside—is that the outfit that run routine maintenance on Ward BioSupply’s deep-water platforms are mobile contractors with a biannual contract. Daskeen Azul. They’re based out of a co-op factory raft called Bulgakov’s Cat, and they come by here just about every six months to do the work. They just got here.”

“You think I’m paranoid?” asked Marsalis, with the same gentle smile he’d used on Coyle earlier.

The big Rim cop snorted. “Are you shitting me? You people were fucking designed paranoid, Marsalis.”

Norton cleared his throat. “I think—”

“Nah, let’s just lay this out where we can all see it.” Coyle jabbed a finger at the thirteen. “In case you missed it, Marsalis, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like what you are, and I don’t think you should be walking around in public without a wolf-trap cuff on. But that’s not my call.”

“No, it’s not,” said Norton. “So why don’t we—”

“I’m not done yet.”

Marsalis watched the Rim cop quietly. Measuring, Sevgi realized. He was measuring the other man.

“This is a Rim States police investigation,” Coyle said. “Not some black ops slaughter ground out in the Middle East. We’re in the business of catching criminals, not murdering them—”

“Yes. You don’t seem to have caught Merrin yet, though, do you?”

Coyle bared his teeth. “Cute. No, we haven’t caught this one yet. But we will. And when we do—”

“Roy.” It was the first time Sevgi could remember hearing Rovayo use her partner’s first name. “Crank it down, huh?”

“No, Al, I’m sick of the assumptions here. This has got to be said.” Coyle looked pointedly at Sevgi and Norton on his way back to staring down the thirteen. “If your COLIN masters here decide they want Merrin summarily executed when we’ve done our job and brought him in, well then I guess we’ll come to you for your professional expertise. Meantime, why don’t you just curb your fucking twi…gene-enhanced tendencies and let us work?”

Wall of silence. The last of the words seemed to hit it like pebbles off evercrete. It was a space, Sevgi realized with syn-sharpened surety, that outside virtual would have filled with violence the way blood rises to fill a wound. Marsalis and the Rim cop were wired eye-to-eye, like nothing else existed around them. She caught something in Rovayo’s face she couldn’t define. The other woman seemed locked up, an impossible step away from doing something. Norton wavered, helpless exasperation in the way he twitched. And she, Sevgi, watching the situation decay like—

“Okay,” said Marsalis, very softly.

Sevgi thought he’d finished. She opened her mouth, but the black man went on speaking.

“A couple of things.” Still soft, like the touch of cotton-wool wadding on fingertips. “First, if you think you’ll bring Allen Merrin down in any condition other than dead, then you’re not living in the real world. None of you are. And second, Roy, if you ever speak to me like that again, in the real world, I’ll put you in intensive care.”

The Rim cop flared up. “Hey, you want to fucking step outside with me?”

“Very much, yes.” But Sevgi had the curious sensation that Marsalis was imperceptibly shaking his head as he said it. “But it isn’t going to happen. I want you to remember a name, Roy. Sutherland. Isaac Sutherland. He saved your life today.”

Then he was gone.

Scribbled out in a flicker of virtual light as he left them to the empty virtual apartment, Merrin’s viewpatch freeze-frame portrait walking away, and the hundred red glow traces of his forensic passing.

CHAPTER 34

Oddly enough, it was Rovayo who came looking for him. By the time she tracked him down, he’d stopped prowling angrily about the Alcatraz station and drifted instead to an irritable halt on an outside gallery at the western end of the complex. She found him leaning on the rail, staring across the silver-glinting chop of the sea toward the mouth of the bay and the rust-colored suspension span that bridged it. There was a towering bank of fog rolling in against the blue of the sky, like a pale cotton-candy wave about to break.

“Enough water for you?” she asked.

Carl shot her a curious glance. “I’ve been back a long time.”

“Yeah, I know.” Rovayo joined him at the rail. “I got this cousin down in the Freeport, he did six years on Mars when he was younger. Soil engineer. Two three-year qualpro stints back-to-back. He told me you never get used to the size of the water again, doesn’t matter how long ago you went.”

“Well, that’s him. Everyone handles it differently.”

“You ever miss it?”

He looked at her again. “What do you want, Rovayo?”

“Says he misses the sky,” she went on neutrally, as if Carl hadn’t spoken. “Sky at night, you know. All that landscape on that tiny horizon, says it looks like furniture crammed into a storeroom that’s too small for everything to fit. And all the stars. He says it was like you were all camping out together, like you were all part of the same army or something. You and every other human being you knew was on the planet with you, all with the same reason for being there, like you were all doing something that mattered.”

Carl grunted.

“You ever feel like that?” she asked.

“No.”

It came out more abrupt than he’d meant. He sighed and opened his hands where they rested on the rail. “I’m a thirteen, remember. We don’t suffer from this need to feel useful that you people have. We’re not wired for group harmony.”

“Yeah, but you don’t always let your wiring tell you what to do, right?”

“Maybe not, but I’d say it pays to listen to it from time to time. If you plan on ever being happy, that is.”

Rovayo rolled over on the railing, put her arched spine to it, and hooked her elbows back for support. “I seem to remember reading somewhere we’re none of us wired for that one. Being happy. Just a chemical by-product of function, a trick to get you where your genes want you to go.”

His gaze slipped sideways, drawn by the lithe twist she’d used to reverse her position on the rail. He caught her profile, lean high-breasted body and long thighs, the dark flaring facets of her face. The wind off the bay fingered through the curls in her hair, flattened it forward around her head.

“You don’t want to worry too much about Coyle,” she said, not looking at him.

“I’m not.”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s just. See, we don’t get a whole lot of thirteens out here on the Rim. They crop up occasionally, we just bust ’em and ship ’em out. Dump them in Cimarron or Tanana. Jesusland’s always a good place to export the stuff you don’t want in your own backyard. Nuclear nondegradables, nanotech test runs, cutting-edge crop research. The Republic takes it all at a fraction what it’d cost us to do the processing ourselves.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you worked a couple of Cimarron breaks, right?”

“Six.” He considered. “Seven if you count Eric Sundersen last year. He escaped en route, never actually got to Cimarron itself.”

“Oh yeah, I remember that one. The guy who shorted out the autocopter, right?”

“Right.”

“You the one who brought him in?”

“No,” he said shortly. Eric Sundersen had died in a hail of assault rifle fire on the streets of Minneapolis. Standard police ordnance and tactics; apparently he’d been mistaken for a local drug dealer. Carl was chasing false leads down in Juarez at the time. He went home with day-rate expenses and minor lacerations from a razor fight triggered by one too many questions in the wrong bar. “I missed out on that one.”

“Yeah?” Rovayo hitched herself up on the rail. “Well, anyway, like I said. Having guys like you around isn’t something any of us are used to. Coyle’s got a pretty standard Rim mentality about what a good thing that is. And with the mess Merrin made on that ship…well, Coyle’s a cop, he just doesn’t want to see any more blood in the streets.”

“You trying to apologize for him? That what this is about?”

She grimaced. “I’m just trying to make sure you two don’t kill each other before we get the job done.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I can guarantee you Coyle won’t kill me.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and her mouth tightened. “Well, just so you know, he’s my partner. It’s not a fight I’ll stay out of if it cuts loose.”

He let it sit for a while, waiting to see if she was finished, if she’d leave him alone with the threat. When she didn’t, he sighed again.

“Okay, Rovayo, you win. Go back and tell your good, honest, compassionate cop partner that if he can keep the word twist hedged a little tighter behind his teeth next time, I’ll cut him some slack.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. You’re not the one who said it.”

She hesitated. “I don’t like that word any more than you do. It’s just, like I said, we don’t get—”

“Yeah, I know. You don’t get many like me in the Rim, so Coyle gets to throw the words around without repercussions. Don’t worry, it’s not much different anywhere else I’ve been.”

“Apart from Mars?”

He hunched around to look at her properly.

“Mars, huh? This cousin of yours really planted some seeds, didn’t he? What’s the deal, you thinking about going yourself?”

She didn’t meet his gaze. “Nothing like that. Just Enrique, my cousin, he talked a lot about how no one had a problem with the thirteens there. Like they had this kind of minor celebrity status.”

Carls snorted. “Pretty fucking minor, I’d say. Sounds to me like your cousin Enrique’s having a bad attack of qualpro nostalgia. That’s pretty common once you get safely back, but you notice most of these guys don’t sign up for another tour. I mean, he didn’t, right?”

She shook her head. “I think part of him wanted to, part of him would have stayed out there longer, maybe not come back at all. But he got scared. He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you could pick it up from what he said, you know.”

“Well, it’s an easy place to get scared,” Carl admitted grudgingly.

“Even for a thirteen?”

He shrugged. “We’re not that good at fear, it’s true. But this is something deeper, it’s not an actual fear of anything. It’s something that comes up from inside. No warning, no trigger you can work out. Just a feeling.”

“Feeling of what?”

Carl grimaced, remembering. “A feeling that you don’t belong. That you shouldn’t be there. Like being in someone else’s home without them knowing, and you know they might be coming home any minute.”

“Big bad Martian monsters, huh?”

“I didn’t say it made any sense.” He stared out at the bridge. The southern tower was almost lost in the encroaching fog bank now, wrapped and shrouded to the top. Tendrils crept through under the main span. “They say it’s the gravity and the perceived horizon that does it. Triggers a survival anxiety. Maybe they’re right.”

“You think you handled it better?” She made an embarrassed gesture. “Because. You know, because of what you are?”

He frowned. “What do you want to hear from me, Rovayo? What’s this really about?”

“Hey, just making conversation. You want to be alone, say the word. I can take a hint if you hit me upside the head with it.”

Carl felt a faint smile touch the corners of his mouth.

“You work at it, you can reach a balance,” he said. “The fear tips over into exhilaration. The weakness turns into strength, fuels you up to face whatever it is your survival anxiety thinks it’s warning you about. Starts to feel good instead of bad.” He looked down at the backs of his hands where they rested on the rail. “Kind of addictive after a while.”

“You think that’s why they’re happy to have you on Mars?”

“Rovayo, they’re happy to have anyone on Mars. The qualpro guys mostly go home as soon as their stint’s up—to be fair to your cousin, he’s a tough motherfucker if he stayed even for a second tour—and you’ve got a high rate of mental health problems in the permanent settlers, that’s the grunts and the ex-grunts who’ve upskilled, doesn’t seem to make much difference either way. End result—there’s never enough labor to go around, never enough skilled personnel or reliable raw human material to learn the skills. So yeah, they can put up with the fact you’re a born-and-bred twist sociopath if they think you’ll be able to punch above your weight.” A thin smile. “Which we mostly can.”

The Rim cop nodded, as if convincing herself of something.

“They say the Chinese are breeding a new variant for Mars. Against the Charter. You believe that?”

“I’d believe pretty much anything of those shitheads in Beijing. You don’t keep a grip on the world’s largest economy the way they have without stamping on a few human rights.”

“You see any evidence? When you were there, I mean?”

Carl shook his head. “You don’t see much of the Chinese at all on Mars. They’re mostly based down in Hellas or around the Utopia spread. Long way from Bradbury or Wells, unless you’ve got some specific reason to go there.”

They both watched the silvered chop of the water for a while.

“I did think about going,” Rovayo said finally. “I was younger when Enrique came back with all his stories, still in my teens. I was going to get some studies, sign up for a three stint.”

“So what happened?”

She laughed. “Life happened, man. Just one of those dreams the logistics stacked up against, you know.”

“You probably didn’t miss much.”

“Hey, you went.”

“Yeah. I went because the alternative was internment.” A brief memory of Nevant’s jeering slipped across his mind. “And I came back as soon as I got the chance. You don’t want to believe all your cousin’s war stories. That stuff always looks better in the rearview mirror. A lot of the time, Mars is just this cold, hardscrabble place you won’t ever belong to no matter how hard you scrabble at trying.”

Rovayo shrugged.

“Yeah, well.” A hard little smile came and went across her mouth, but her voice was quiet and cop-wisdom calm. “You think it’s any different here on Earth, Marsalis? You think down here they’re ever going to let you belong?”

And for that, he had no answer. He just stood and watched the disappearing bridge until Rovayo propped herself upright off the rail and touched his arm.

“C’mon,” she said companionably. “Let’s get back to work.”

They were working the Horkan’s Pride case out of a closed suite in the lower levels of the Alcatraz station. Shielding in the superstructure above them ensured a leak-tight data environment, the transmission systems in and out ran Marstech-standard encryption, and all the equipment in the suite was jacked together with python-thick coils of black actual cable. It gave the offices a period feel that sat well with the raw, sandblasted stone walls and the subterranean cool that soaked off them. Sevgi sat in a commandeered desk chair and stared at a rough-hewn corner, keeping her eyes off Marsalis and furious with herself for the feeling that had snaked across her belly when Rovayo came back with the black man in tow.

“Coyle and Norton went to talk to Tsai,” she told them. “Going to book some n-djinn time, run a fresh linkage model on Ward and the victims, soon as we can get on the machine.”

Rovayo nodded and went to her desk, where she stood prodding through a pile of hardcopy with limited enthusiasm. Sevgi turned to Marsalis.

“There’s a Mars datafile you might want to take a look at here. Seems Norton got on to Colony while we were in Istanbul, had them pull Gutierrez in. You want to screen it?”

She thought she saw a subtle tightening go through him. But he only shrugged. “Think it’s worth looking at?”

“I don’t know,” she said acidly. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

“The chances Colony got anything useful out of an old familia hand like Gutierrez are pretty thin.”

“Not really the main point,” said Rovayo absently from across the room without looking up from her paperwork. “Cop’ll tell you it’s what the guy doesn’t say as often as not gives you the angle.”

“Uh, exactly,” said Sevgi, startled.

Marsalis shuttled a sour look between the two women.

“All right,” he said ungraciously. “So let’s all watch the fucking thing, shall we.”

But in the screening chamber, she saw how the quick-flaring irritation damped down to an intent stare that might have passed for boredom if she hadn’t seen him looking the same way after the third skater in New York, the man he’d failed to kill. She had no way of knowing where exactly Marsalis’s attention fell—the file was a standard split-screen interrogation tape, six or seven facets slotted together on the LCLS display, frontal on Gutierrez, face and body from the tabletop up, vital signs in longitudinal display below, minimized footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in dropdown to the left. Cop custom had her skimming detail from the whole thing in random snatches. But if she’d had to guess, she’d say the thirteen at her side was riveted on the slightly gaunt, sun-blasted features of the familia datahawk as he sat unimpressed and smoking his way through the interrogation.

“They let him take fucking cigarettes in there?” asked Rovayo, outraged.

“It’s not a cigarette as such,” Sevgi told her patiently. She’d been a little shocked the first time she saw it, too. “That’s a gill. You know, like in the settler flicks. Chemical ember, gives off oxygen instead of burning it. Like a lung supercharger.”

Rovayo snapped her fingers. “O-kay. Like, Kwame Oviedo’s always got one stuck in the corner of his mouth, practically every scene in that Upland Heroes trilogy.”

Sevgi nodded. “Yeah, same with Marisa Mansour. Even in Marineris Queen, which when you think about it, is pretty—”

“Weren’t we supposed to be watching this,” said Marsalis loudly.

Sevgi cocked an expressive eyebrow at the Rim cop, and they turned back toward the screen. Gutierrez was settling comfortably into his role of career criminal cool. Upland-dialect Quechua drawled out of him—the language monitor tagged it in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, provided a machine-speed simultaneous subtitle in Amanglic, but for the original interrogators it would have been hard work. They’d have some street Quechua, Sevgi supposed, you’d have to have, be a decent cop out there, but you could see they were uncomfortable with it. Instead, they fell back repeatedly on Amanglic or Spanish—both of which the file said Gutierrez spoke well—and listened constantly to their sleek black earplug whisperers. The datahawk smirked through it.

“Look, let’s cut the bouncing about, Nicki,” he said, apparently. “There is no motherfucking way you have anything on me. You’ll have to give me my phone call sooner or later. So why not save us all a lot of fucking around and do it now?”

The ranking officer on the other side of the table sat back in her chair and fixed the ex-datahawk with a somber stare.

“I think you’ve forgotten which planet you’re on, Franklin. You’ll get to make a phone call when I say you can.”

Her companion got up out of his chair and began to pace a slow circle around the table. Gutierrez tipped his head back a little to watch the move, drew on his gill and puffed a long feather of fumes up into the air, then went back to looking at the woman. He shook his head.

“They’ll come and dig me out of here before breakfast, Nicki. You know that.”

The other cop hit him, dropped body weight into the swing, one cupped striking hand to the datahawk’s ear and side of the head. The gill went flying. In the slack grip of Mars gravity, so did Gutierrez and the chair. Clatter of plastic on evercrete, soft human yelp. Rovayo flinched—Sevgi caught it peripherally from two seats over. On screen, Gutierrez rolled to a halt and the cop was on him. The datahawk was shaking his head muzzily, trying to pick himself up—his assailant locked a thick muscled arm around his throat, hauled him upright by it. The ranking officer watched impassively.

“Wrong guess, fuckwit,” hissed the strong-arm cop into the ear he hadn’t deafened. “See, we got a lot of leeway on this one. You really fucked up with Horkan’s Pride, and I mean big-time. There’s a lot more juice coming down from COLIN right now than your buddies over in Wells know how to soak up. I’d say we’ve got you down here for a fortnight at least.”

The datahawk choked out a reply. “Reyes,” said the subtitles. “You’re confusing your wet dreams with reality again.”

The cop bared his teeth in a grin. He reached down and grabbed Gutierrez by the crotch. Twisted. A suffocated screech made it up the datahawk’s throat.

“Can he—” Rovayo began numbly.

Marsalis rolled his head slightly in her direction. Met her eye. “Colony police. Oh yeah. He can.”

The ranking officer made a tiny motion with her head. Her companion let go of Gutierrez’s testicles and dumped the datahawk forward onto the tabletop like a load of laundry. He lay there, face to one side, breath whistling hoarsely in and out of his teeth. The cop called Reyes pressed a flat palm down hard against their suspect’s cheek, leaned on it, and then closer, over him.

“You’d better fucking learn to behave, Franklin,” he said conversationally. “What they tell me, we can blow this whole year’s compensation budget on you if we have to.” He looked at the woman. “What’s the rate for testicular damage these days, Nick?”

The ranking officer shrugged. “Thirty-seven grand.”

Reyes grinned again. “Right. Now, that’s for each one, right?”

“No, that’s for both.” The woman leaned forward a little. “I hear the restorative surgery’s a bitch, Franklin. Not something you’d want to go through at all.”

“Yeah, so how about you speak English to us for a change.” Reyes marked the emphasis, skidding his palm hard off the datahawk’s face, as if wiping it clean. His face wrinkled up with disgust. “Because we all know you can, sort of. Just wrap the fucking Upland chatter for a while. Do us that small favor, huh? Maybe then I leave your cojones intact.”

He stepped back. A thin sound trickled out of Gutierrez. Sevgi, disbelieving, made it as laughter. The datahawk was chuckling.

Reyes hooked back around to stare. “Something amusing you, pendejo?”

Gutierrez got up off the table. He straightened his clothes. Nodded, as if he’d just had something entirely reasonable explained to him. His ear, Sevgi knew, must still have been singing like a fire alarm.

“Only the dialogue.” His English was lightly accented, otherwise flawless. “You say you got me down here indef. Okay, I’ll bite. Nicki, you want to put a leash on your dog?”

Reyes tensed, but the woman made another barely perceptible motion with her head, and he slackened off again. Gutierrez lowered himself gingerly back into his chair, wincing. He patted his pockets for the pack of gills, found them, and fit a new one into his mouth. He twisted the end till it tore open, puffed it to life. Breathed the fumes out of his mouth and up his nose. Sevgi made it for buying time. The datahawk shrugged.

“So what do you want to know?”

“Horkan’s Pride,” said Reyes evenly.

“Yeah, you mentioned it. Big spaceship, went home last year. Crashed into the sea, they say.” He plumed pale smoke “So what?”

“So why’d you do it?”

“Why’d I do what?”

The two Colony cops swapped a glance of theatrical exasperation. Reyes took a couple of steps forward, hands lifting.

“Hold it,” said the woman. It rang staged, patently false after the imperceptible signals the two cops had exchanged before.

“Yeah, hold it,” agreed Gutierrez. “You’re going to tie me to some systems crash on another fucking planet? I mean, back in the day I was good. But not that good.”

“That’s not what we hear,” growled Reyes.

“So what do you hear, exactly?”

“Why don’t you tell us, pendejo?”

Gutierrez cocked his head. “Why don’t I tell you what you’ve just heard? What am I, telepathic now?”

“Listen, fuckwit…”

Marsalis groaned, a little theatrical exasperation of his own. It was hard for Sevgi not to sympathize. Colony were fucking it up beyond belief.

They sat it out, nonetheless. The interrogation cycled a couple more times, reasonable to third degree and back again, but spiraling downward all the way. Gutierrez drew gill fumes and strength in the soft spells, weathered Reyes’s brutality when it came around. He didn’t give a millimeter. They took him out limping, broken-mouthed, and bruised around one eye, nursing a sprained wrist. He gave one of the cameras a bloodied smile as he was led away. The vital signs monitors collapsed as he left the room; the ranking officer signed off formally. Fade to black.

Marsalis sighed. “Happy now?”

“I will be when you tell me what you think.”

“What do I think? I think short of professional torture with electrodes and psychotropics, Gutierrez isn’t going to tell Colony anything worth knowing. How long ago did this happen?”

“Couple of days. Norton put in the arrest order the night we flew out to Istanbul.”

“They worked on him since?”

“I don’t think so. This is all we have. I don’t think they’ll go to the next level with him until they get something solid from us.”

“Yeah, and they’ll probably still be wasting their time. Earth or Mars, the familias have too much invested in guys like this. They get in early on with the good ones, give them the same synaptic conditioning you see in covert ops biotech. Stuff where the brain’ll turn to warm porridge sooner than give up proscribed information.”

“You think he’d really be wearing something like that?” Rovayo asked, slightly wide-eyed.

“If I were running him, I’d have had it built in years ago.” Marsalis yawned and stretched in his seat. “Plus, you want to remember Gutierrez is a datahawk. Those guys live for the virtual, they spend their whole lives switching off exactly the kind of physical realities torture involves. If they’re good at one thing, it’s distancing themselves from their own bodies. Back in the early days, back when the technology was fresh and the hookups were a lot more jack-and-pray than they are now, lot of ’hawks died from stupid shit like dehydration or burning to death because they missed a fire alarm. I remember Gutierrez telling me once, Hey, pain, that’s just your body letting you know what the thing you’re doing is going to cost—just got to get in there and pay the bill, soak. At that level, he’s as tough a motherfucker as you’ll ever see walk into an interrogation chamber. And with the familias behind him, he’s not much scared of physical damage, either, because he knows it can be repaired.”

“Scared of dying, though, I guess,” Sevgi said snappishly.

“Yeah, and that’s part of your problem. See, Colony are a real bunch of thugs, but they can’t actually kill you, except maybe by accident. But the people Gutierrez works for, the familias—now, that’s a whole other skyline. If they think he’s talked, or even that he might talk, then they got no problem putting him away. None at all, and he knows that. So yeah, Gutierrez is scared of dying, just like anybody else. But you’ve got to be able to deliver on the threat.”

They sat for a couple of moments, facing the dead LCLS screen. Sevgi looked across at Rovayo.

“You mind giving us a couple of minutes?” she asked.

“No,” he said, as soon as they were alone.

“I’m not saying—”

“I know exactly what you’re saying, and you can just fucking forget it. They’re on Mars, Ertekin. You saw the footage. You think I can scare Gutierrez any worse than that from two hundred fifty million kilometers out?”

“Yes,” she said steadily. “I think you can.”

He shook his head. Voice creased with irritation. “Oh, based on what?”

“Based on the fact you and Gutierrez have history. I’m a cop, Marsalis. Eleven years in, so give me some fucking credit, why don’t you. I saw the way you were when his name popped out of the n-djinn scan. I saw the way you watched him up on that screen just now.” She drew a deep breath, let it go. “Gutierrez wired you to wake up midway home on Felipe Souza, didn’t he?”

“Did he?” Now there was nothing in his voice at all.

“Yeah, he did.” Gathering certainty, the way he sat like stone. “It’s too much of a coincidence, you and Merrin. The way I figure it, you did some kind of deal with Gutierrez for the lottery win, but Gutierrez didn’t like his end when it paid off. He sent you home with a little farewell kick. Fuck with your head, wake you up out there and hope you maybe go insane before recovery can get to you. That how it was?”

He rolled his head toward her on the back of the seat, looked at her, and suddenly for the first time in days she was afraid of him again.

“Well, you’re the cop,” he said tonelessly. “You got it all worked out, what do you need me for?”

She threw herself to her feet, paced toward the screen and turned to look back at him. Told herself it was not a retreat.

“What I need you for is to look at Gutierrez like you just looked at me. Look him in the eye and tell him you’ll kill him if he doesn’t tell us what we need to know.”

“That standard operating procedure for the NYPD these days, is it?”

She was back in the field, upstate New York at dawn and the gagging stench of disinterred flesh. The speculative stare of the IA detectives.

“Fuck you.”

“See. I can’t even scare you. And you’re right here in the room with me. How am I going to scare Gutierrez on Mars?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know what you’re talking about. Talking about the mythos, right? You think that because Gutierrez was a thirteen aficionado, he bought in to this whole implacable gene-warrior bullshit that goes with it. But it’s Mars, Sevgi. It’s hundreds of millions of kilometers of empty fucking space and no way to cross it without a license. Don’t you understand what that does to all those fucking human imperatives Jacobsen goes on about? What it does to love and loyalty, and trust, and revenge? Mars isn’t just another world, it’s another fucking life. What happens there, stays there. You come back, you leave it behind. It’s like a dream you wake up from. Gutierrez helped send me home. He isn’t going to believe in a million years that I’d go back there just to kill him for what he did, let alone just to shake him down for you people.”

“He might believe you’d order it done. Pay for someone else to do it at the other end.”

“Someone who isn’t scared of the familias?”

She hesitated a beat. “There are options that—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I don’t doubt COLIN could rustle up a hit squad for me if your pal Norton makes the right calls. But I do my own killing, and Gutierrez knows that. I can’t fake him out on that one. And Sevgi, you know what? Even if I thought I could do it—I won’t.”

The last word grated in his mouth, like braking on gravel. Sevgi felt her expression congeal. “Why not?”

“Because this is bullshit. We are being led around by the dick here, and it’s got nothing to do with what may or may not have happened back on Mars. We are looking in the wrong places.”

“I am not going back to Arequipa.”

“Well then, let’s start closer to home. Like maybe looking a little harder at your pal Norton.”

Quiet dripped into the room. Sevgi folded her arms and leaned against the back of a chair.

“And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

He shrugged. “Work it out for yourself. Who else knew where I was sleeping in New York the morning the skaters jumped us? Who called you the same time we were getting hijacked on the way to Arequipa? Who dragged us all the way back here to look at a fucking four-month-drowned lead when we were just about to start getting somewhere?”

“Oh,” She gestured helplessly. “Fuck off, Marsalis. Coyle was right, this is pure thirteen paranoia.”

“Is it?” Marsalis came to his feet with a jolt. He stalked toward her. “Think about it, Ertekin. Your n-djinn searches have failed. They didn’t find the link between Ward and Merrin, they didn’t find Gutierrez. Everything we’ve found since I started shaking the tree points to a cover-up, and Norton is ideally placed to pull it off. He’s fucking perfect for it.”

“You shut the fuck up, Marsalis.” Sudden rage. “You know nothing about Tom Norton. Nothing!”

“I know men like him.” He was in her face, body so close she seemed to feel the warmth coming off it. “They were all over the Osprey project from as young as I can remember. They dress well and they talk soft and they smile like they’re doing it for the society pages. And when the time comes, they’ll order the torture and slaughter of women and children without blinking because at core they do not give a shit about anything but their own agenda. And you, you people hand control over to them every fucking time, because in the end you’re just a bunch of fucking sheep looking for an owner.”

“Yeah, well.” The anger shifted, sluggish in her guts. Intuitive reflex, maybe the years with Ethan, told her how to use it, kept her voice nailed-down detached. “If they ran Osprey, then I’d say you people handed over control to them pretty neatly, too.”

It was like pulling a plug.

You can feel a good shot, an NYPD firearms instructor told her once, early on in training. Like you and the target and the gun and the slug are all part of this one mechanism. Shoot like that, you’ll know you’ve hit the guy before you even see him go down.

Like that. The anger drained almost visibly out of Marsalis. Though he didn’t move at all, somehow he seemed to step away.

“I was eleven,” he said quietly.

And then he did walk away, without looking back, and closed the door and left her alone with the dead LCLS screen.

CHAPTER 35

“She’s not your mother,” the pale-eyed uncle in the suit tells him.

“Yes,” he says, pointing through the chain link at Marisol. “That one.”

“No.” The uncle places himself in Carl’s line-of-sight, leaning back against the fence so that it sags, makes a springy, shivery sound as it takes his weight. There’s a careless, hard-buffet wind coming in off the sea, and the uncle pitches his voice to beat it. “None of them is a mother, Carl. They just work here, looking after you. They’re just aunts.”

Carl looks up at him angrily. “I don’t believe you.”

“I know you don’t,” the uncle says, and there seems to be something in his face, as if he’s not feeling very well. “But you will. This is a big day for you, Carl. Climbing that mountain was just the start of it.”

“Have we got to go up there again?” He tries to ask the question casually, but there’s a tremor in his voice. The mountain was scary in a way none of the uncles’ games so far has been. It wasn’t just that there were parts where you could easily fall and kill yourself, and that this time they had no ropes; it was the feeling he had that the uncles were watching him closely when it came to those parts, and that they weren’t watching to see if he was okay, that they didn’t really care if he was okay, they only wanted to know if he was scared or not. And that was even scarier because he didn’t know whether he should be scared or not, didn’t know if they’d want him to be scared or not (though he didn’t think that was likely). And besides, now it’s getting late and while Carl’s pretty confident he can do the climb again, he doesn’t think he could do it in the dark.

The uncle forces a smile. “No. Not today. But there are some other things we have to do. So you’ve got to come back inside with the others now.”

On the other side of the chain link and the multiple razor-wire coils beyond, Marisol has moved across the helicopter landing apron so he can see her past the uncle’s obstructing bulk. She’s staring at him, but she doesn’t raise her hand or call out. She stood and kissed him that morning, he recalls, before the uncles came to collect him, held his head between her hands and looked into his face intently, the way she sometimes did when he’d gotten cuts and scrapes from fighting. Then, hurriedly, she let him go and turned away. She made a soft sound in her throat, reached up and fiddled with the way she’d fixed her hair, as if it were coming loose, and then of course it was coming loose because she’d fiddled with it and now she really did have to fix it again the way she always…

He recognized the signals. But he just couldn’t see how he’d made her cry this time. He hadn’t been in a fight with any of the other kids for at least a week. He hadn’t mouthed off to an uncle for even longer. His room was tidy, his schoolwork was gold-starred in everything except math and blade weapons, and both Uncle David and Mr. Sessions said he was improving even in those. He’d helped in the kitchen most evenings that week, and when he burned himself on the edge of a pan the day before, he’d shrugged it off with one of the control techniques they were working through in Aunt Chitra’s pain-management class, and he could see in Marisol’s eyes how proud she was of that.

So why?

He racked his brains on the way out to the mountain, but couldn’t find an answer. Marisol didn’t cry often, and she didn’t cry without reason at all, except that once, he would have been about five or six, he came home from school with a raft of questions about money, how did some people end up with more than others, did uncles get more than aunts, did you have to have it, and would you ever do something you really, really didn’t like to get some. That time she cried out of nowhere, suddenly, still talking to him at first as the tears rushed up out of her, before she could turn away and hide them.

He knows, knew then as well, that the other mothers cried like this sometimes, for reasons no one could work out, and of course Rod Gordon’s mother had to go away in the end because she kept doing it. But he’d always been vaguely sure that Marisol wasn’t like that, that she was different, the same way he was absently proud of how dark her skin was, how her teeth glowed white in her face when she smiled, the way she sang in Spanish about the house. Marisol is something special, he knows. Discovers it, in fact, for the first time now, wisps of knowledge, taken for granted, taken on trust, coalescing suddenly into a solid chunk of understanding that sits in his chest like damage. She jumps into sudden focus in his mind. He sees her across the chain link and razor wire, as if for the first time.

She raises her hand, slowly, as if she’s in a class and not sure whether she really knows the answer or not. Waves to him.

“I want to talk to her,” he says to the uncle.

“I’m afraid you can’t, Carl.”

“I want to.”

The uncle straightens up off the fence, frowning. The chain link rebounds with another metallic shiver. “You already know not to talk like that. Your wishes are very small things in this world, Carl. You are valuable because of what you can do, not because of what you want.”

“Where are you taking her?”

“She’s going away.” The uncle stands over him. “They all are. She’s done her job now, so she’s going home.”

It’s what he already knew, somehow, but still the words are like the slap of the wind in his face, buffeting, robbing him of breath. He feels the strength in his legs drain out, his stance shift fractionally on the worn concrete beneath his feet. He wants to fall down, or at least sit down somewhere, but knows better than to show it. He stares out across the huddled structures of the Osprey Eighteen settlement, the cottages in tidy rows, the schoolhouse and dining hall, lights just starting to come on here and there as the afternoon tips toward evening. The bleak undulations of coastal moorland under a darkening pewter sky, the distant rise of mountains worn smooth and low with age. The cold Atlantic behind it all to the north.

“This is her home,” he tries to convince himself.

“Not anymore.”

Carl looks suddenly up into the man’s face. At eleven, he’s already tall for his age; the uncle tops him by barely half a head.

“If you take her, I’m going to kill you,” he says, this time with conviction as deep as all his sudden knowledge about Marisol.

The uncle punches him flat.

It’s a short, swift blow, into the face—later he’ll find it’s split the skin across his cheekbone—and the surprise alone puts him on the ground. But when he bounces to his feet, the way he’s been taught, comes back with his rage fully unleashed, the uncle blocks him and hits him again, right fist deep in under the base of his ribs so he can’t breathe. He staggers back and the uncle follows, chops left-handed into the side of his neck with a callused palm edge and puts him down a second time.

He hits the ground, whooping for air he can’t find. He’s fallen facing away from the helicopter apron and Marisol. His body hinges convulsively on the asphalt, trying to turn over, trying to breathe. But the uncle knows his pressure points and has found them with effortless accuracy. Carl can barely twitch, let alone move. Behind him, he thinks Marisol must be rushing toward him, but there’s the razor wire, the chain link, the other aunts and uncles…

The uncle crouches down in his field of vision and scrutinizes the damage he’s done. He seems satisfied.

“You don’t talk to any of us like that, ever again,” he says calmly. “First of all because everything you have ever had, including the woman you think is your mother, was provided by us. You just remember that, Carl, and you show a little gratitude, a little respect. Everything you are, everything you’ve become, and everything you will become, you owe to us. That’s the first reason. The second reason is that if you ever do speak to one of us like that again, I personally will see to it that you get a punishment beating that’ll make what we had to do to Rod Gordon look like a game of knuckles. Do you understand that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long was I out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Problems?” she asked neutrally.

“You could say that.”

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

“Want to get a drink?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crackled dispute. Rovayo glowered.

“…No, it fucking wasn’t…”

Coyle crackled some more. She cut him off.

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

Spit, spit, crack.

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

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

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

She killed the call.

“People are looking for you,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. You want to be found?”

“Not particularly.”

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

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

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

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

Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.

“So what do you want to do now?”

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

“I thought you were tired.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I said okay, Detective.”

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

“Sorry,” she muttered. “We’re all just a little fucking tired of the Asia Badawis and the Meredith Changs around here.”

“Badawi’s New York Sudanese,” he pointed out.

“Yeah? You want to see the house she’s got down the coast. Lot of fucking acreage for a foreigner. Anyway, that’s not what I meant.”

“No?” Suddenly the postcoital intimacy was too tight, like binding on his limbs and a masking film across his face. Rovayo was abruptly the stranger she’d always been, but naked and in too close. He felt an unlooked-for visceral surge of nostalgia for sex with Sevgi Ertekin. “So you’re not a big fan of enhancement generally, then?”

She snorted. “You think anyone’s a big fan of Xtrasomes that doesn’t have them?”

“I am.” But he knew at base he was trying to provoke her. “You think I’d be in this fucking mess if they’d had working artificial chromosome technology for humans forty years back? You think we’d be running around looking for some superannuated supersoldier turned cannibal fucking survivalist if thirteen tendency could be platform-loaded and switched on and off at need? Take a good look at me, Rovayo. I’m the walking fucking embodiment of last century’s pre-Xtrasome jump-the-gun genetics.”

“I know.”

“I seriously doubt that.” Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. “You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.”

The Rim cop shrugged. “Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong color for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were? A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?”

“I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.”

She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.

“You did four months in there? I thought—”

“Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on-off switch to fall back on.”

“You don’t think?” Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt, and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. “What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean, really know?”

He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.

“Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think that means anything.”

He gestured. “Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.”

It got him a thin, unamused smile. “Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.” She sat back in the sofa. “I’m a bonobo.”

He stared. “No, you’re fucking not.”

“No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?”

“No, but—”

“I’m not full. My mother’s the hundred percent deal, she used to work escort for a Panama agency, met my father when he was on a fishing trip down there. He smuggled her out.”

“Then you’re not a bonobo.”

“Half of me is.” Said defiantly, jaw tight, eyes locked with his. “Read your Jacobsen. Inherited traits will be an unknown factor for generations to come. Quote, unquote.”

Something happened to the room. A dense, deafening quiet sat behind her voice, washed in like a tide when she stopped talking.

“Does Coyle know?” he asked, for something to break the stillness.

“What do you think?”

And quiet again.

Finally, her mouth crimped at one corner. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I look at what I am, the way I react to things, and then I look at her, and I just don’t know. My old man tells me she never fit in down there, never was submissive the way bonobos are supposed to be. He says that she was different from all the others, that’s why he picked her out. I don’t know whether to believe that shit or write it off to rose-tinted romantic fucking nostalgia.”

Carl thought back to the bonobos he’d seen in the transit camps in Kuwait and Iraq, the ones you couldn’t get away from on R&R in Thailand and Sri Lanka. Some that he’d talked to, one or two he’d fucked. And back in London, Zooly’s friend from the club, Krystalayna, who always claimed she was but never showed him any proof that wasn’t fan-site fantasy bullshit.

“I think,” he said carefully, “you don’t want to confuse submissive with maternal or nonviolent. Most of the bonobos I ever ran into knew how to get what they wanted about as well as anyone else.”

“Yeah.” Violence rose simmering in her voice. “I know how to give a pretty good blow job myself. Don’t you think?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“You know what it feels like, Marsalis? Constantly testing your actions against some theory of how you think you might be supposed to behave. Wondering, every day at work, every time you make a compromise, every time you back up one of your male colleagues on reflex, wondering whether that’s you or the gene code talking.” A sour smile in Carl’s direction. “Every time you fuck, the guy you chose to fuck with, even the way you fuck him, all the things you do, the things you want to do, the things you want done to you. You know what it feels like to question all of that, all the time?”

He nodded. “Of course I do. You just pretty much described where I live.”

“I’m a good cop,” she said urgently. “You don’t last in RimSec if you’re not. I’ve shot and killed three men in the line of duty, I don’t lose sleep over any of them. I mean, I got sick at the time, went through the counseling like everyone else, but after that I was fine. I’ve got commendations, early promotion to special cases, clearance rates that—”

“Rovayo, stop it.” He held up a hand, surprised at how weary the sudden mirroring of his younger self in her was making him feel. “I told you, I know. But you’re going about this the wrong way. You don’t have to justify yourself to anyone except you. In the end, that’s all that matters.”

She smiled the hard, humorless smile again. “Spoken like a true variant thirteen. Pretty obvious you’ve never had to face a genetic suitability assessor.”

“I thought in the Rim—”

“Yeah, Rim States citizens have a lot of rights that way. But citizen or not, I’ve still got my Jacobsen license to live with. And before you say it, yes, that is confidential data, Charter-protected up the ass. But you waive your right to that protection when you sign up for RimSec.”

“And Coyle still doesn’t know about you?”

“No. Assessment comes as part of the standard officer vetting procedure. There’s no way for anyone to know I went through anything different from all the other grunts. Tsai knows, he’s my commanding officer, he’ll have the file. And there are a few others at divisional level, the ones who were on the vetting committee. But it’s more than any of their jobs are worth to let something like that leak.”

“You think if Coyle knew, he’d care?”

“I don’t know. You tell all your friends what you are?”

“I’m a thirteen,” he said with a straight face. “We don’t have any friends.”

She made the effort, laughed. There was some genuine amusement in it this time. “That why you’re here?”

“I’d have thought my reasons for being here were transparently obvious.”

“Well.” She tilted her head to one side. “I guess you did explain yourself pretty thoroughly earlier, yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“Question remains, though.” Her stance opened a little. She crossed one long ebony thigh over the other, bounced her foot up and down lightly at the end of the raised leg, and spread her arms cruciform along the back of the sofa. “What do you want to do now?”

He smiled.

“Got an idea,” he said.

CHAPTER 36

Seen from the descending autocopter, Bulgakov’s Cat had the blunt, blocky look of a nighttime skyscraper chopped off across its base and floated lengthwise on the ocean. Lights festooned every segment of the factory raft’s structure, studded its aerials and dishes, marked out landing pads and open-air sports arenas along the upper levels. Carl picked out a baseball diamond, a soccer pitch, a scattering of basketball courts and softly underlit swimming pools, some half of which appeared to be in use. Like most of its floating sisters, the raft sold itself on being a twenty-four-hour city, a pulsing engine of production, employment, and leisure whose reactor-powered heart never missed a beat. The publicity specs said she was home to thirty thousand people, not including the tourists. Just looking down at her made Carl feel itchy and sociopathic.

In the next seat, Alicia Rovayo yawned cavernously and shot him a sour look over her turned-up jacket collar. “I can’t fucking believe I let you talk me into this.”

“You asked what I wanted to do.”

“Yeah.” She leaned across his lap to peer out of the cabin port. “Not quite what I had in mind at the time.”

The autocopter swung closer, made a courtesy circuit before touchdown so its decals could be read by sight and not just by machines. Carl picked out individual figures on a basketball court, shadowed forms plowing laps up and down in the tranquil, rippling lights of the pools.

“Think of it as an intuitive leap,” he said absently.

“I’m thinking of it as a paranoid fantasy outing. Which is exactly the way it’s going to look when I have to write up the chopper time. I told you, Donaldson and Kodo came down here yesterday and talked to these people. Got the interviews and the report on file. We’re wasting our time. Long flight for nothing.”

“Yeah, that’s something else you might want to think about. Cat there is still a couple of hundred klicks off optimum range for maintenance on Ward’s spread. How come they rushed up here to do it now instead of waiting until next week?”

“How the fuck would I know?” she grumbled. “Maybe if you’d accessed the file instead of insisting on coming down here personally, you’d already have an answer.”

“Yeah, I’d have an answer. I’d have whatever lie Daskeen Azul have decided to tell you to cover themselves. That’s not what I want.”

Rovayo rolled her eyes. “Like I said. Fucking paranoid.”

The autocopter found its designated landing pad, exchanged brief electronic chatter with the traffic-management systems, and floated down to land with characteristic, inhuman perfection. The cabin hatch hinged open, and Carl jumped down. Rovayo followed him, still mutinous.

“Just don’t break anything,” she said.

Daskeen Azul had an unremarkable mall frontage somewhere amidships for direct client contact and a couple of elevator-served workshops down in the hull where they kept the submarine hardware. They subcontracted landing pad time and aircraft support through a secondary provider, but had their own surface and sub vessels moored in dry dock, aft and starboard. This much Rovayo could tell him off the top of her head, detail skimmed from what she remembered of Donaldson and Kodo’s briefing. There was more in the file, and in theory they could have requested it via the autocopter’s datahead, but the Rim cop seemed disinclined to use the machine systems more than they already were—was already, it seemed, regretting the way they’d requisitioned the transport with her Special Cases badge—and Carl didn’t much care one way or the other. He had more than enough to work with.

So they flagged their business aboard Bulgakov’s Cat as simple follow-up investigation, which the autocopter told the factory raft’s datahead, and the Rim Security protocols did the rest. Technically, vessels like the Cat were autonomous nation-states, but any nation-state that lived so solidly from niche entry into the hyperdynamic Rim States economy had to live with the political realities the relationship entailed. Bulgakov’s Cat cruised freely in and out of the Rim’s coastal jurisdiction, its citizens had right of access to Rim States soil, its contracts were legally enforceable in Rim courts—but it all came at a stiff colonial price. Rovayo led Carl along the promenades and corridors of the factory raft with a proprietorial lack of self-consciousness and an authorized, loaded gun beneath her jacket. They might have been taking a stroll inside Alcatraz station for all the tension she showed. They’d spoken to no one when they came aboard, notified no one, taken no courtesy measures whatsoever at a human level. Somewhere in the walls, the machines whispered to one another about them in incomprehensible electronic tones, but beyond that they came on Daskeen Azul unannounced.

“And at this time of night,” the Daskeen Azul front desk agent complained, with barely disguised irritation. “I mean, our usual hours of business—”

“—are not my problem,” Rovayo told him crisply. “We’re here for follow-up on a RimSec murder investigation, and the last I heard Bulgakov’s Cat was a twenty-four-hour service community. You’ve seen my ID, so how about you roll out some of that twenty-four-hour service and answer my questions.”

The agent switched his eyes to Carl. “And he is?”

“Getting impatient,” Carl said impassively.

“I’ve seen no ID,” the agent insisted. Below the smooth upper shelf of the reception desk, his hands were busy pressing buttons. “I have to see ID for both of you.”

Rovayo leaned on the shelf.

“Did your mother get you this job?” she asked curiously.

The agent gaped at her, belated anger dropping his jaw for a retort he wasn’t fast enough to make.

“Because it appears to be a job you don’t feel any pressing need to do properly. This man is a private consultant for Rim Security and his liaison is with me, not you. I’ve shown you my fucking ID, sonny, and in about another ten seconds I’m going to be showing you the front end of a RimSec probable-cause shutdown order. Now either you’re going to answer my questions or you’re going to get someone better paid out of bed to do it for you. I don’t much care either way, so which is it going to be?”

The man behind the desk flinched as if slapped.

“I’ll just see,” he muttered, prodding more buttons on the screens beneath his hands. “Just, please, just, uhm, have a seat.”

“Thank you,” said Rovayo with heavy irony.

They folded themselves into the utilitarian bank of chairs opposite the desk. The reception agent fit a phone hook to his ear, muttered into it. Outside, on the broad sweep of the mall, a thin but unending nighttime herd of shoppers browsed past the open storefronts, clothing bright, gait unhurried and undirected, like sleepwalkers or the victims of some multiple hypnotic trick. Carl sat and tried, the way Sutherland had taught him, not to feel the usual seeping contempt. It wasn’t easy.

On Mars…

Yeah, like fuck.

On Mars, things are different because they have to be, soak. Lopsided grin, like he was giving away some secret he shouldn’t. But that’s strictly temporary. No more long-term truth in it than all that bullshit they sell in the qualpro ads. Day’s going to come, this place’ll be just like home only less gravity. It’s them, Carl. It’s the humans. Take ’em wherever and give ’em time, they’ll build you the same fairy fucking playground as ever was. And that’s the construct you got to live inside, soak, like it or like it not.

A slim, elegantly dressed woman emerged from an inner door behind the front desk. Tailored jacket and slacks in olive green and black, just a chic hint of work coveralls about the ensemble. Striking looks, strong on Chinese genes but salted with something else. She leaned down beside the reception agent, spoke briefly in low tones, then looked up again. Carl met her eyes from across the room and saw a depth of calm there that told him they’d just gone up an entire level. He saw something that might have been an acknowledgment in the return gaze; then the woman straightened up and came around the side of the desk toward them. She walked like a dancer, like a combat pro.

Carl came to his feet, on automatic, the way he would have if someone in the room had pulled a gun.

The new arrival saw it and smiled a little. It hit him secondarily, riding in past the wave of caution, that she was very beautiful in that Rim-blended, Asia Pacific fashion you saw in Freeport movie stars and major female political figures up and down the West Coast. She put out her hand, offered to Carl first. The grip and the look that backed it up were both coolly evaluative. Shaking hands with Rovayo was strictly a side issue, a formality dealt with and then set aside.

“Good evening,” she said. “I’m Carmen Ren, assistant duty manager. I must apologize for the way you’ve been received. We’re all still a little shaken from our discovery up at Ward BioSupply. But of course, we want to cooperate fully with the investigation. Please come with me.”

She led them back through the door she’d used, through cramped storage space racked with shelves of underwater equipment and other less identifiable hardware. On the far side of one sparsely loaded freestanding unit, Carl glimpsed two commercial-size elevator hatches set into a sidewall. A faint sea-salt dampness hung about in the air. At the back, the storeroom had another door that opened into an office cubicle where Carmen Ren gestured them to the two visible chairs and pulled down a third, folding seat from the wall. They sat with knees almost touching. The Chinese woman looked back and forth between them.

“So then,” she said brightly. “I’d been given to understand that your colleagues had all the information they needed, but clearly that’s not the case. So what is it I can do for you?”

Rovayo looked over at Carl and nodded with ironic largesse. She was still visibly fuming from their reception at the front desk and the subtle relegation Ren had dealt her. Carl shrugged and stepped up.

“Ward BioSupply’s fields are a good two hundred kilometers northwest of here,” he said. “Nearer three hundred, when you went up there two days ago. You mind telling us why you didn’t hold off until the Cat got a little closer?”

“Well.” Carmen Ren gestured apologetically. “I wasn’t the duty manager for that shift, so it’s not a question I can answer fully. But we quite often do attend to a contract ahead of time that way. It depends more on staffing rotations, hardware overhaul, that kind of thing, than actual proximity. As you’ll probably know from our promotional literature, Daskeen Azul has an operational deployment radius of up to five hundred kilometers should the need arise.”

“And the need arose here.”

“So it appears, yes. Though, as I said—”

Rovayo joined the play. “Yeah, you weren’t on duty. We heard you. So who was?”

“I would really need to check the duty logs to be certain.” A hint of reproach tinged Ren’s voice. “But I’m reasonably sure that the officers who visited us yesterday will already have that information.”

Carl ignored the significant look he was getting from Rovayo.

“I’m not concerned with what you told Donaldson and Kodo,” he said bluntly. “I’m looking for Allen Merrin.”

Ren frowned, genuine puzzlement or immaculate control. “Alan…?”

“Merrin,” said Rovayo.

“Alan Merrin.” Ren nodded seriously, kept to the slightly vowel-heavy mispronunciation of the first name. “I’m afraid we don’t have an employee of that name. Or a client, as far as I’m aware. I could—”

Carl smiled. “I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice but one way or another, it’s going to get done. He can skulk about America, hiding in the crowd like a cudlip if he wants, but it isn’t going to save him. This game is over. Next time you hear from him, you can tell him that from me.”

Ren let go a small, sliding breath, the sound of politeness embarrassed. “And you are, exactly?”

“Who I am isn’t very important. You can call me Marsalis, if it matters. What I am, well.” He watched her face closely. “I’m a variant thirteen, just like your pal Merrin. You can tell him that, too, if you like.”

A defensive smile hesitated at the corners of the woman’s mouth. Her eyes slipped sideways to Rovayo, as if in appeal.

“I’m afraid I really don’t know who you’re referring to with this Merrin. And, Detective Rovayo, I have to say that your colleague here is being considerably less well mannered than the two officers who preceded you.”

“He’s not my colleague,” said Rovayo indifferently. “And I don’t think he’s that bothered about manners, either. I’d start cooperating if I were you.”

“We are already cooperating fully with—”

“You put in to Lima on your way up here,” Carl asked her. “Right?”

This time, he thought the frown was genuine. “Bulgakov’s Cat very rarely puts in, as you express it, anywhere. We are dry-docked in the Angeline Freeport on average every five years, but otherwise—”

“I’m not talking about the Cat. I’m talking about Daskeen Azul. You got friends on the Peruvian coast, right?”

“I, personally, do not. No. But it may be that some of our employees do. Bulgakov’s Cat is, as I’m sure you’re aware, licensed for the whole of the Pacific Americas Rim. And Daskeen Azul certainly has contracts along the Peruvian segment. As do many of our fellow companies aboard. But this, all of this, is common knowledge—you could have ascertained it using any corporate commerce register for the region.”

“Seen Manco Bambarén recently? Or Greta Jurgens?”

Another elegant furrowing of the clean white brow. Lips pursed, regretful shaking of the head. Her long glossy hair shifted in sheaves. “I’m sorry, these names. None of them is familiar to me. And I’m still not clear exactly what—if anything—you are accusing us of.”

“What are they paying you, Ren?”

Pause. The brief smile again. “I really don’t think, Mr. Marsalis, that my salary is any of your—”

“No, really. Give it some thought. I think the people I represent would make it worth your while to turn. And this is coming down around you anyway. We don’t have enough yet, but we will. And when Merrin breaks cover, I’ll be there. You don’t want to get caught in that particular crossfire, believe me.”

“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marsalis?”

“No, I’m appealing to your sense of reality. I don’t think you scare easily, Ren. But in the end, I think you’re smart enough to recognize when it’s time to cut cable and bounce.” He held her gaze. “That time is now.”

The polite, sliding-breath sound again. “I don’t really know how to respond to that. You’re attempting to…bribe me?” Another shuttled glance at Rovayo. “Into what, exactly? Is this standard RimSec procedure these days?”

“I already told you I’m not a cop, Ren. I’m just like you. For hire and—”

Ren shot to her feet, clean and rapid motion, no leverage with either arm on the furniture around her. In the confined office space, it was a remarkable piece of physical precision. She brought loosely cupped fists together at her chest, a formal stance that echoed dojo training.

“That’s it,” she flared. “This conversation is over. I have been as cooperative as possible, Detective Rovayo, and all I have received in return are innuendo and insult. I will not be compared to some…variant in this way. Take your offensive, genetically enhanced friend, and get out. If you wish to speak to me again, you will contact our legal representatives.”

“Think that was for real?” Rovayo asked him as they walked back to the landing pad. She was still fingering the tiny lawyer’s card Ren had handed her.

Carl shook his head. “She wanted us out of there, and she hooked the best opportunity there was to shut us down fast.”

“Yeah. What I thought.”

“If she’s a Daskeen Azul duty manager, then I’m a fucking bonobo. You see the moves on her?”

Rovayo nodded reluctantly.

“Still think I’m paranoid?”

“I think you—”

And out of nowhere, a corner in the mall, shoppers still around them, out of the fractured crowd, out of the sweet piped Muzak and murmur, suddenly a panicked bystander screamed, and then the figure leaped, tall and lean, distorted face around the gut-deep yell, eyes blown wide with hate, and gunmetal glint of the machete hacking down.

CHAPTER 37

Scott Osborne had seen and heard enough.

Nearly five months of sitting on his hands, waiting because Carmen told him that was how it had to be. Months while Bulgakov’s Cat churned up and down the coast of the Americas, coastline always out of sight, just below the horizon, like the harrowing that Carmen had promised was to come but hadn’t still. Months adrift. Scott had never seen the ocean for real before he came to the Rim, and living afloat in the middle of it, week after landless week, didn’t seem natural, never would. He bore it because he must, and because when Carmen came to him, it all seemed worth it. Lying with her afterward, he seemed to feel the approaching storm, and to accept it with the same comfortable ache he’d felt that last summer before he left for Bozeman and the fence run. It was the sense of your time running out, and the sudden value in everything you’d ordinarily take for granted, everything that would soon be swept away.

But the storm never came.

Instead they waited, and life aboard the factory raft took on the same dismal proportions as life anywhere else you tried to survive that wasn’t home. He hung around Daskeen Azul, looking for things to do and taking on whatever work they’d give him. He kept out of the stranger’s way—even now that he’d learned to call him Merrin, now that his knees no longer trembled when he looked into the hollow eyes—and he didn’t ask when Merrin and Carmen disappeared together for long periods of time. But something was happening to the exhilaration he’d felt on the deserted airfield all those months ago, and it was something bad.

He didn’t want to believe it was lack of faith, not again. He prayed, more now than he ever had even back home, and what he prayed for mostly was guidance, because what had seemed so clear back at the airfield with his head still bandaged and the fear fresh in his heart was slowly but surely giving way to a mess of conflicting voices in that self-same head and heart. He knew the judgment was at hand, had at first derived an almost smug superiority among the other workers and shoppers aboard the Cat as he watched them living out what were probably the last months of their lives in ignorance. But that was fading fast. Now that same blissful ignorance rubbed at him like a badly fitting boot, irritated something deep inside that made him want to grab them by the throat as they browsed sheep-like through the glittery-lit glass storefronts of the mall, or sat on a break in the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat guffawing and barking like subnormals about what they’d give that slinky bitch Asia Badawi if they ever got in an elevator with her. He wanted to choke them, slap them, smash down their idiot complacency, scream into their faces Don’t you understand, it’s time! He is coming, don’t you see! You will be weighed in the balance and found wanting!

He forced it down, deeper inside him. Prayed for patience, talked to Carmen.

But these days, even Carmen was not the refuge she had once been. When they slept together now, he sometimes felt an impatience smoking off her in the act, as if he were some awkward tangle of weed around a marker buoy on the Ward estates. She’d snapped at him a couple of times postcoital, apologized immediately of course, told him she was sorry, she was tired, yes, she was tired of waiting, too, but that was the way it had to be, it was a hard path for the, uh, the righteous.

And there was Merrin.

Now the terror of precarious faith came sweeping in for real, up along his arms, lifting the hair with a ghost caress. It pricked out sweat on his palms and swathed him in a cool dread, like standing over a precipice. What if he was wrong? What if Carmen was wrong, what if they all were? Merrin was out of sight so much, Scott had no way of knowing what he did with his time. But when he was there, it didn’t feel like the presence of a Savior, of the King of Heaven come again in triumph. It was more like sharing v-time with a stripped-protocol ’face, one of the bare-bones chassis models you could buy off the rack and customize the way those kids he’d once shared a flop with in the Freeport were always doing. Merrin spoke little, answered questions even less, sat mostly wrapped in his own silence and staring out at the sea from whatever vantage point there was. It was like he’d never seen the ocean before, either, and for a while that gave Scott a warm feeling of kinship with the other man. He thought it might mean he could be a more worthy disciple.

Of course he knew to leave Merrin alone; Carmen had been clear on that if on nothing else. But every now and then, in the tight corridors and storage spaces of Daskeen Azul, he caught the stranger’s eye and the returned gaze did nothing but chill him. And he never told Carmen, didn’t dare tell her, about the time he’d come up behind Merrin at one of his ocean vigils and said, in as steady and respectful voice as he could manage, Yeah, it got me that way when I first saw it, too. Just didn’t seem possible, that much water in one place. And Merrin whipped around on him like some bar tough whose drink he’d just spilled, only faster, so much inhumanly faster. And said nothing, nothing at all, just glared at him with the same blank unkindness in those eyes that Nocera had sometimes had, the same but not, because this time there was something in the eyes so deep, so cold, so distant that whatever else Scott believed about this man, he knew for certain that what Carmen Ren had told him was true, that Merrin really had come here across a gulf that nothing human could cross unprotected. He looked back into those eyes for the scant seconds he could bear to, and he felt the cold of it blowing over him as if Merrin’s gaze were an open door into the void he’d crossed to get here.

Scott winced, he turned away, mumbling half-formed apologies.

He moved like a snake.

Walking away, he heard Merrin say something that sounded like cunt lips, knew it couldn’t be those words, tried to put the encounter out of his mind. But the way the stranger had turned on him, the whiplash-speed and venom of it, would not go away. He moves like a snake ran in his thoughts like dripping poison. He could not reconcile it with what he wanted to believe.

Judgment means what it says, Pastor William had always warned them. You think the Lord is gonna come like some bleeding-heart UN liberal and make us all love one another? No, sir, He will come in judgment and vengeance for those who defile His gifts. Like it says in the Good Book itself—the big, black, limp-cover Bible brandished aloft—Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I come not to send peace but a sword. Yes, sir, when the Lord comes, He will be wrathful and those who have not walked in righteousness will know the terror of His justice.

Terror, Scott could accept, could understand, but should the Savior of mankind really move like a snake?

Questions and doubts, coiling back and forth in his head, and Carmen withdrawing, cooler now with every time they lay together, drifting away from him. There’d been times recently when she simply didn’t want him, shrugged him off, made excuses that convinced him less and less. He could see the time coming when—

And then, instead, the black man came.

“You stay out of it,” Carmen snapped at him as she threw on clothes. “You don’t make a move unless I call it, right?”

At the door of the tiny lower-deck apartment, she turned back, softened her voice with an effort he saw on her face.

“Sorry, Scott. It’s just, you know how hard this is for all of us. Just let me handle it. It’ll be fine.”

So he watched on the monitors instead, and he saw the black man for himself. No doubt in his mind anymore; he felt the thud of certainty in his blood. The black man, betraying himself in his arrogance. I’m not a policeman, Ren. Don’t make that mistake with me. I’m here for Merrin. If you don’t give him up, I’ll go through you to get him. Your choice, but one way or another, it’s going to get done. Scott felt his previous confusion shrivel away. Regained conviction was a solid joy in his throat, a pulsing in his limbs.

And Carmen, showing no fear—his heart swelled with love and pride for her—but he knew the terror she must feel, there alone, facing the darkness. Carmen, brave enough to keep silent in the face of the black man’s threats, to stand his presence, but not strong enough to do what needed to be done.

We have a part to play in this, Scott. You have a part.

And now he knew what it was.

The machete was cling-padded to a panel under the bed. He hadn’t told Carmen, but he’d seen how it might come down, the enemy smashing in the door like the faceless helmeted UN police in End Times Volume I Issue 56, dragging them naked and defenseless from the bed.

He wouldn’t go that way.

He dressed, pulled on a midlength deck coat with DASKEEN AZUL logos across back and sleeves. He freed the machete from its cling-pads, tucked it under the coat, under one arm. Checked himself in the mirror and saw that it worked—not enough to get past any kind of door with security on it, but in the incessant crowds of the shopping decks, more than enough to let him get close.

The rest was in God’s hands.

He looked into the mirror, saw the taut determination his face threw back, and for just a moment it was as if it were Him, Merrin, looking out from behind Scott’s eyes, lending him the force of will he’d need.

Scott murmured a swift prayer of thanks, and walked out to face the black man.

It was like the fucking Saudi opsdog all over again. Like Dudeck and the Aryans. Carl saw the eyes, locked with them on instinct, and it was the same blank, driven hatred that filled them. Who the fuck—

No time—the machete swung down. His attacker was a big guy, tall and reachy, the response wrote itself. Carl hurled himself forward, inside the chopping arc, blocked and stamped, took the fight to the ground. Against all expectation, the other man flailed like an upturned beetle. Carl got in with an elbow, stunning blow to the face, tanindo grasp on the machete arm, twist and the weapon clattered free. A knee came up and caught him in the groin, not full force but enough to half kill his strength. The other man was screaming at him, weird invective and what sounded like religious invocation. Hands came clawing for his throat. It was no kind of fighting Carl knew. He fended, expecting a trick. Got feeble repetition instead. He did the obvious thing, grabbed a finger and snapped it sideways. The invocation broke on a scream. Another long leg lashed at him, but he smothered it, kept hold of the snapped finger, twisted some more. His attacker screamed again, quivered like a gaffed fish. Carl had time to look down into the eyes again, saw no surrender there. He chopped down, into the side of the throat, pulled it a little at the last moment—he’d need to talk to this guy.

The fight died.

Rovayo circled in, gun drawn, leveled on the unmoving figure on the floor. Carl grunted around the ache in his balls, shot the pistol an ironic glance.

“Thanks. Little late for that.”

“Is he dead?”

“Not yet.” Carl levered himself to his feet, groaned again, glanced around. The gathered crowd gaped back. “Just him, huh?”

“Looks that way.” Rovayo hauled an arm aloft, showed the holo in her palm to the spectators.

“RimSec,” she stated it like a challenge. “Anyone work security around here?”

Hesitation, then a thickset uniform with blunt Samoan features shouldered his way through the others.

“I do.”

“Good, you’re deputized.” She read the name off his chest ID. “Suaniu. Call this in, get some backup. The rest of you, give me some space.”

On the floor, Carl’s attacker coughed and flopped. They all looked. Carl saw suddenly that he was young, younger even than Dudeck had been. Barely out of his teens. He cast about and saw a cluster of carbon-fiber chairs and tables around a sushi counter that had closed for the night. He hauled the boy up by the lapels and dragged him toward the nearest chair. The crowd skittered back out of his path. The boy’s eyes fluttered. Carl dumped him into the chair, settled him there, and slapped him hard across the face.

“Name?”

The boy gagged, tried to rub at his neck where Carl’s stunning chop had gone home. The black man slapped him again.

“Name,” he said again.

“You can’t do that,” said a woman’s voice from the crowd. Australian twang to it. Carl turned his head, found her with a narrow look. Elegant olive-skinned shopper, early fifties, stick-thin. A couple of bags, ocher and green parcels, black cord handles, flicker ad for some franchise or other across the ocher in black Thai script.

His lip curled. “Haven’t you got some shoes to go buy?”

“Fuck you, buddy.” She wasn’t backing down. “This isn’t the Rim. You can’t walk all over us like this.”

“Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind.” Carl went back to the boy in the chair, backhanded him and got blood. “Name.”

“Marsalis,” Rovayo was at his side. “That’s enough.”

“You think?”

Her voice dropped to a mutter. “She’s right, this isn’t the Rim. There’s only so far we can push this.”

Carl looked around. The Samoan security guard was talking into a phone, but his eyes were fixed on the boy and the black man standing over him. And the crowd had shuffled back when Rovayo ordered them to, but beyond that they were staying put. Carl guessed maybe one in ten had actually seen the fight, even less the machete attack that preceded it. The scenario was wide open for interpretation.

He shrugged. “You’ve got the gun.”

“Yeah, I do. And I’m not about to start shooting these people with it.”

“I don’t think it’d come to that.”

“Marsalis, forget it. I’m not—”

Spluttering cough. The boy in the chair floundered there, grasping the carbon-weave arms. His gaze was locked on Carl’s face.

“Black man,” he spat.

Carl glanced sideways at Rovayo. “Observant little fucker, isn’t he.”

The Rim cop grimaced and put herself between Carl and the chair. She showed the RimSec holo to the boy. “See that? Do you know how much trouble you’re in, son?”

The boy glared back at her. “I know you lie for him. Authority out of Babylon, and black lies that shield the servants of Satan. I know who your master is.”

“Oh great.”

“Marsalis, shut up a minute.” Rovayo closed her hand, stowed her gun, and scrutinized their prisoner with hands on hips. “You’re from Jesusland, right? You’re a fence hopper? You got any idea how quickly I can have you sent back there?”

“I do not answer to your laws. I do not bow down before Mammon and Belial. I have been chosen.” In the crystalline lighting of the mall, the boy’s face was pale and slick with sweat. “I have gone beyond.”

“You certainly have,” said Carl wearily.

“Marsalis!”

“Hey, he didn’t come at you with the fucking machete.”

The boy tried to stand. Rovayo stiff-armed him impatiently in the chest, sent the chair skidding back a little as he collapsed back into it.

“Sit down,” she advised him.

Rage detonated in his eyes. His voice scaled upward.

“You are false judges. False lawgivers, money changers, sunk in stinking sins of flesh and corruption.” It was as if he were vomiting up something long suppressed. “You will not lead me astray, you will not pre—”

“You want me to shut him up?”

“—vail, I am beyond your traps. Judgment—”

“No, I fucking don’t. I want—”

“—is coming. He is here! He lives, in the flesh, among us! You know Him as Merrin but you know nothing, He is—”

The tirade ebbed a little, lost some of its shrill rage, as Carl and Rovayo both stared down at the boy with fresh interest.

“—the Commander of the legions of Heaven,” he finished uncertainly.

“Merrin’s here?” jerked out of Carl. “Aboard the Cat? Now?”

The boy’s lips tightened. Carl switched gazes to Rovayo. She reached for her phone.

“Can you lock this place down?”

“On it.” She was already dialing. She put the phone to her ear, looked at him as she listened. “Alcatraz can authorize a block on traffic in and out. Might have to get a couple of people out of bed to do it, but—”

The phone crickled audibly with scrambler protocols and then a voice. Rovayo cut across it.

“Alicia Rovayo, Special Cases. Print me, and then get me the Alcatraz duty officer.”

Pause. Very deliberately, Carl turned his back on the boy in the chair. Casually, he asked, “Is that going to be satellite-enforceable?”

Rovayo nodded. “There’s bound to be something overhead. One of ours, or something we can rent the time on. Special Cases can usually. Hello? Yeah, this is Rovayo, listen—”

“Hey! No!”

Carl didn’t really need the anonymous yell. Tanindo, as taught by Sutherland, worked up a high level of proximity sense, and the mesh tuned it tighter still. He felt the boy come out of the chair without needing to turn and see it. He turned anyway, at a leisurely rate, and caught the escape bid with a peripheral glimpse, the same peeled awareness that had saved him from the machete attack in the first place. The boy was already out of tackle range, heading for the refuge of a side access walkway. Pumping limbs, head thrown back, a spurt of desperate speed. Not bad, all things considered.

He saw Rovayo stiffen, stop speaking to Alcatraz. Reach for her stowed gun. He put out an arm to forestall her, shook his head.

“Let him go. I’m on it.”

“But you—”

“Relax. Running after idiots is what I do for a living.”

He turned away. Would have liked the gun, but it wasn’t like there was the time to talk it through—

“He’s getting away,” shouted the Australian woman.

Carl spared her a murderous look, then he was in motion. Slow run building to a sprint, gathering speed and purpose, the fine focal intensity of the hunt.

Time to find Merrin and shut him down.

CHAPTER 38

Wide awake, jet-lagged to pieces even the syn didn’t seem able to fix, she sat in the window of the hotel room and stared out over the bay. COLIN privileges—top-floor suite, unobstructed views. The marching lights of the Bay Bridge led her gaze inexorably across to where Oakland’s own nighttime display glowed from the waterline and twinkled up into the hills.

Cheap fucking piece of shit.

Norton wanted to put out a citywide search and detain, but neither she nor Coyle was interested. They both knew damn well where Marsalis was, and the fact that he was technically absent without authorization was the least of it. Rovayo wasn’t answering her phone, and what that meant was punched onto the other Rim cop’s face like bruising from a street fight. Sevgi couldn’t be sure if Coyle and Rovayo had ever been an item as such, but they were partners and most of the time that ran deeper. Higher loyalty stakes—the people you accepted into your bed weren’t likely to have to save your life on any given day. Back with NYPD, Sevgi’d had her share of ill-advised co-worker liaisons, but she never, never crossed that particular line with anybody she partnered, not because she hadn’t occasionally been tempted, but because it would have been stupid. Like taking one of harbor patrol’s big powerboats into the shallow waters off some white sand tourist beach. You just knew that you were going stick and tip.

Not like now, huh, Sev, the syn sneered at her. This one, you’ve got well under control, don’t you? Deep water and an even keel all the way.

Oh shut up.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been sitting there, disconnected into the sprinkle-lit night, when someone started hammering on the door.

“Sevgi?”

She blinked. It was Norton’s voice, muffled through the soundproofing on the door, and slightly slurred. They’d sat up in the hotel bar for a while earlier, barely touched drinks and not much to say. At least she’d thought the drinks were barely touched until, out of nowhere, he said to her quietly, Just like cocaine, right. No evolved defenses, too much strain on your heart. She stared back at him, aware that he’d nailed her somehow but unable to make exact rational sense of the words. I don’t know what you’re thinking about, Tom, she answered stiffly. But I’m sitting here thinking about Helena Larsen and how we still haven’t caught the motherfucker who murdered her. It was only halfway to a lie. The promises she’d made to herself and the mutilated corpse back in June weighed heavily whenever she gave them headroom.

So she’d fled the bar, left Norton sitting there with a brief good night. Now it seemed he’d stayed for the long haul.

“Sev. You in there?”

She sighed and levered herself off the window shelf to the floor. Padded across to the door and opened it. Norton leaned on the door frame with one raised arm, not as drunk as she’d feared.

“Yeah, I’m in here,” she said. “What’s going on?”

He grinned. “This you are going to love. Coyle just called.”

“Yeah?” She turned away, left the door open. “Come on in. So what happened? He storm over to Rovayo’s place and drag Marsalis out of her bed?”

“No, not quite.” Norton followed her in, waited until she turned back to face him. He was still grinning. She folded her arms.

“So?”

“So Rovayo and Marsalis stormed Bulgakov’s Cat this evening, bullied their way into Daskeen Azul’s offices, and made a mess. Someone took exception and came at Marsalis with a machete.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Now Rovayo’s called a RimSec lockdown on the whole raft, and Marsalis is somewhere down in the belly of the beast, chasing the machete artist because he thinks it’s all part of some grand conspiracy that’ll lead him to Merrin.”

“Oh you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I wish I were.”

“Well—where’s Coyle?”

“On his way here, now. He’s heading out to the party with a detachment of RimSec’s public order thugs in tow. I sort of insisted he stop by and pick us up.”

Sevgi grabbed her jacket off the bed and shouldered her way into it.

“Would have settled for him just fucking her,” she muttered, then suddenly remembered she was no longer alone.

Norton pretended not to hear.

In the bowels of Bulgakov’s Cat, Carl found a curious relief. There were at least no fucking stores down here.

His short-term memory spilled recall of endless smooth-floored covered thoroughfares and changing frontages in such volume that their individuality finally blurred into perceptible patterns of appeal. Clothing under glass, museum exhibit sober or in shout-out garish display, depending on the prey it was designed to hook. Little chunks and slices of hardware under soft gleaming lights. Food and drink laid out in holo-real impressionistic tumbles of plenty designed to imitate some ghost memory of a street market. Psychochemicals blown up in holodisplay to sizes where pills and the molecules they were made of each started to resemble the fetishized pieces in the hardware shops. Services and intangibles sold with broad cinematic images that offered almost no intelligible connection with the product. Level after level after level of it, walkway after walkway, maze of corridors, of elevators and staircases, all bright and endless.

He tuned it out and chased the machete boy, as close as the sparse nighttime crowds would allow.

He’d long ago learned that when the untrained are chased, they look back a lot in the early stages of the pursuit, but rapidly gain confidence if no pursuer is readily apparent. He supposed it was evolved tendency—if the big predator doesn’t get you in the first few minutes, you’re probably clear. In any event, the trick was to hang back and let your quarry build up that confidence, then tighten up and follow until they take you where you want to go. It rarely failed.

Of course, he would have liked more cover. The late shoppers were a thin crowd and to make matters worse a typical Rim mix, which meant black or white faces were a lot less common than Asian or Hispanic. And the boy with the machete seemed curiously fixated on Carl’s skin color. That might just have been standard, antiquated race hate—the boy was after all from Jesusland and spouting religious gibberish to match, so anything was possible—but even if it wasn’t, machete boy would be looking back for a black face, and there weren’t that many in the crowd. Carl needed him to see a few, suffer the jolt-drop of terror and then the relief as he wrote the sighting off. The more times that happened, the more the boy’s adrenal response to a black face was going to decay, and the more he’d relax.

He hung back, he used the mirrored surfaces, the camera playback-and-display narcissism of the mall space, and he watched as his quarry’s frantic, spinning, backward staring run damped down to a slower, purposeful threading through the crowd. The full-body turns became frequent over-the-shoulder glances, and then not so frequent. Carl eased forward, keeping behind knots of shoppers and going bent-kneed where there was no one tall enough to give him cover.

Then the stores ran out.

They’d been dropping levels slowly but steadily, taking gleaming marbled stairways and the odd gleaming jewel-box elevator, all consistently downward. At first Carl thought they might be heading back to Daskeen Azul, but they’d already gone too low for that, and he didn’t think the boy had the skills or presence of mind to lay a double-back track. In the frontages, prices came down. Empty rental space began to interpose itself between the taken units. The holodisplays got ragged, the merchandise and the way it was sold took on an imitative quality, a not-quite-good copy of what the upper decks carried. The services on offer became less wholesome, or at least less smoothly packaged. killbitch available, he saw in cheap neon, wasn’t sure what it referred to, wasn’t sure he wanted to. Elsewhere, someone had spray-canned a huge empty rectangle on the glass front of an untenanted unit and filled it with the words buy consume die—artwork to follow. No one had cleaned it off.

The boy flickered left out of the flow of shoppers and took another staircase. This time it was a utilitarian unpolished metal affair, and no one else was using it. When Carl got to it, he could hear his quarry’s steps clattering down in the well.

Fuck.

He waited until the metallic footfalls stopped, then went down after them, trying to make as little noise as possible. At the bottom of the well, he found himself in a low-rent residential section, simple green security doors set in bleak gray corridor walls whose ragged graffiti scars were almost a relief. A steady thrum in the structure suggested heavy-duty engines somewhere close. The floor was dirty, stains and patches of dust that crunched underfoot, neat lines of detritus swept to the sides either by mechanical cleaning carts or possibly the residents themselves. Clear evidence, if he’d been in need of it, that the nanohygiene systems didn’t make it down here much. Nor, he supposed, did anyone else who didn’t either live here or know someone who did.

Which, of course, made it perfect for Merrin.

The corridor was deserted. Receding rows of closed doors and no sign of machete boy anywhere. Branch corridors up ahead to left and right, the same story again when he reached them and peered down the dingy perspectives they offered. Meshed-up tension sagging slowly into the realization that his quarry had gone to ground. He held off the settling feeling as best he could, prowled down the left-hand branch passage, ears tuned past the engine thrum for the sound of voices or footsteps. Well aware—I know, I fucking know—that the doors would have security cameras and that each one he passed upped the risk of being spotted if his quarry was in one of the apartments behind, watching the screen.

He did it anyway. Maybe machete boy had gotten hold of another weapon and was up for another shot at killing the black man.

He found a zone plan screwed to a wall at the next intersection, studied it, got a sense of how the area was laid out. The wall next to the map offered the deadpan grafittoed legend: you are here i’m afraid—deal with it. He grinned despite himself and prowled back the way he’d come, aiming to start a proper search pattern. Something to do until RimSec got there in force. He’d have to hope the lockdown worked.

Behind him, the clank-punt of a door disengaging its locks. He spun about, combat crouch in the making when he saw the woman backing out of the open doorway. She wore nondescript coveralls, some logo he didn’t recognize, and had her corkscrew-unruly hair gathered up in a tight band. Mestiza complexion, unlit spliff tucked into the corner of her mouth. By the time she’d fully turned, he was casual again.

“Hey there.”

She appraised him with a head-to-foot look. “What’s the matter, you lost?”

“Next best thing.” He built her a smile. “I’m supposed to meet some guy down here works for Daskeen Azul, think either I’ve taken a wrong turn or he has.”

“That right?”

She was looking at the S(t)igma jacket, he realized. Maybe the corporation and what it did wasn’t standard knowledge out this far west, but unless you were immune to continental American news digests, it was hard to misunderstand the style of the jacket and the bright chevrons down the sleeve. He sighed.

“Chasing a job, you know,” he said, faking weariness. “Guy says he can maybe get me some hours.”

Another flickered assessment. She nodded and took the spliff out of her mouth, turned and gestured with it, back to the corner with the map. “See that right turn there. Take that, two blocks straight then one left. Takes you through the bulkhead to starboard loading. Think Daskeen got a couple of berths there. You’re not far out—probably just got the wrong stairwell down off Margarita thoroughfare.”

“Right.” He let the renewed pulsing of the mesh leak through as eagerness. “Hey, thanks a lot.”

“No problem. Here.” She handed him the spliff. “You get the work, celebrate on me.”

“Oh hey, you don’t have to do—”

“Take it, man.” She held it out until he did. “Think I’ve never been where you are now?”

“Thanks. Thank you. Look, I’d better—”

“Sure. Don’t want to be late for your job interview.”

He grinned and nodded, wheeled about, and stalked rapidly back to the corner. As soon as he rounded it, he broke into a flat run.

“Who is this?”

“This is Guava Diamond. We are blown, Claw Control. Repeat, we are blown. Heaven-sent is endangered at best, fully exposed at worst. I don’t know what the fuck you’re playing at over there, but this is out of nowhere. We have no cover and no exit strategy I can guarantee. Request immediate extraction.”

The bulkhead was a lustrous nanofiber black, raw and shiny and as distinct from the gray walls of the residential section as his Hilton-bought shirt was from the inmate jacket he wore over it. Bright yellow markings delineated the access hatches. By the look of it, they could be simply coded shut at a molecular level, hinges and locks turning to an unbroken whole with the surface of the hatch. He passed through, stabbed suddenly with memories of Mars. It hit him that ever since he’d gotten down from the shopping levels, that was what this place brought to mind. Life on Mars. Right down to the camaraderie of the helpful mestiza, the freely offered spliff.

Don’t think you’re going to miss all this, Sutherland had grinned at him. But you will, soak. You wait and see.

Beyond lay starboard loading.

He’d been on factory rafts a few times before this, but it was always easy to forget the scale of the things. Looking over the rail of the gantry he’d stepped onto was like viewing some immense factory testing rank for cable cars. The loading space was a fifty-meter slope up from the ocean and a vast roof of the same nanofiber construction as the bulkhead, vaulted so high overhead it could almost have been the night sky. Cut into this base, a dozen or more cable-crank slipways led up out of the water to the undersides of the perched docking sheds they served. The nanofiber cables shone in their channels like roped licorice, new and wet looking in the overhead blast of LCLS arcs. Poised at various points between the underbelly entrances of the sheds and the sea, heavy-duty cradles held a variety of seagoing vessels secure on their respective slipways. Latticed steel gantries and stairs ran up and down the sides of the slips for maintenance and clung to the outer edges of the dock facilities above. Cranes and pylons bristled off the sloping surface. Dotted figures scrambled about, and faint yells lofted back and forth across the cavern-cold air. Carl scanned the roofing of the sheds for the Daskeen Azul logo, found it on the sixth unit in line, and started to run.

“Guava Diamond?”

“Still holding.”

“We are unable to assist, Guava Diamond. Repeat, we are unable to assist. Suggest—”

“You what? You bonobo-sucking piece of shit, you’d better tell me I misheard that.”

“There are control complications at this end. We cannot act. I’m sorry, Guava Diamond. You’re on your own.”

“You will be fucking sorry if we make it out of this in one piece.”

“I repeat, Guava Diamond, we cannot act. Suggest you implement Lizard immediately, and get off Bulgakov’s Cat while you can. You may still have time.”

Pause.

“You’re a fucking dead man, Claw Control.”

Static hiss.

Carl was almost to the Daskeen Azul unit when the crank cables leading up to it whined into sudden life. Shifting highlights on the nanofiber black in its recessed channel, it looked more like something melting and running than actual motion. He heard the change in engine note as the cables engaged a load. Somewhere down the line, a cradled minisub jerked and started to climb.

Here we go.

He was still at the initial access level he’d come in on, behind and three meters above the roofing of the line of docking sheds. Long, shallow sets of steps ran out from the walkway he stood on, sank between the units, and joined with a lower-level gantry that fringed each shed. He made for the access level to the doors and hatches leading inside the facilities. Below again, further sets of steps snaked down on themselves and connected to the slope the slipways were built into.

There were hatches set into the roof of the Daskeen Azul unit, but they were very likely sealed from the inside, and even if they weren’t, going in that way was a good recipe for getting shot in the arse. Carl slowed to a crouched jog, made the corner of the shed, and started down the flight of stairs at its side. The murmur of the winch engine came through the wall at his ear. A couple of small windows broke the corrugated-alloy surface, and there was a closed door at the bottom of the stairs. No easy way in. He paused and weighed the options. He had no weapon, and no sense of the layout within the unit. No idea how many Daskeen Azul employees he might be up against, or what they’d be armed with.

Yeah, so this is where you back off and wait for Rovayo’s cavalry.

But he already knew he wasn’t going to do that.

He crept under one of the windows and eased his head up beside it, grabbed a narrow-angled view into the space on the other side of the wall. Cleanly kept flooring, stacked dinghy hulls and other less identifiable hardware, LCLS panels shedding light from the walls and ceiling. The squat bulk of the winch machinery at the head of the slipway and four gathered figures. He narrowed his eyes—the glass was filthy, and the winch system blocked a lot of the room’s light. The four were all wearing Daskeen Azul jackets, and the face he could see clearly was a stranger, a man. But the profile of the figure next to him was machete boy, gesticulating frantically at a woman whom Carl identified as Carmen Ren by poise and stance before he made out her face. She had a phone in her hand, held low, not in use.

The fourth figure had his back turned to the window, had long hair gathered into a loose tail that hung below the collar of his jacket. Carl stared at him and a solid slab of something dropped into his chest. He didn’t need to see the face. He’d watched the same figure walk away from him in the mind’s eye of the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, along the deadened quiet of the spacecraft’s corridors. Had seen him stop and turn and look up at the camera, look through it as if he knew that Carl was there.

He looked around now, as if called.

Carl jerked his head back, but not before he’d seen the gaunt features, a little more flesh on the bones now maybe, but still the same slash-cheeked, hollow-eyed stare. He was checking the door, twitched around on some whisper of intuition from the weight of Carl’s gaze.

Allen Merrin. Home from Mars.

Carl sank back to the step, fuming. With the Haag gun, Rovayo’s gun, any fucking gun, he would have just stormed through the door and gotten it over with. Merrin’s mesh and thirteen instincts, Carmen Ren’s combat poise, the unknown quantity that the other Daskeen Azul employee represented, any weapons the four of them might have—it wouldn’t matter. He’d fill the air with slugs going in, looking for multiple body hits, clean up the mess after.

Unarmed, he was going to end up dead.

Where the fuck are you, RimSec?

Rovayo’s words rinsed back through his mind. Alcatraz can authorize a block on traffic in and out. Might have to get a couple of people out of bed to do it, but—

But nothing. Merrin and his pals here are going to bail out before RimSec’s dozy fucking authorities get the sleep out of their eyes…

The cradled sub came on up the slipway.

And stopped.

Carl peered down through the steel lattice of the gantry he stood on. The haul cradle was still a good twenty meters down the slope, frozen there. Inside the docking shed, the winding engine ran on but its sound had shifted. The licorice black of the cable was frozen in its channel. The winch had disconnected.

He peered across the sweep of the loading slope and saw the same story all the way along. No motion: none of the cables was working.

Lockdown. He’d done RimSec an injustice.

He saw it coming, just ahead of time. Moved off the wall, shifted stance for the combat crouch, and then the door ahead clanked open, three steps down. The mesh pounded inside him. Ren came out, the others crowding behind.

“…yank the cradle releases and ride it down. There’s no other—”

She saw him. He jumped.

Their numbers made it work for him. He cannoned into Ren, knocked her flying back along the walkway and to the floor. Machete boy roared and swung at him, hopelessly wide. Carl blocked, locked up an elbow, and shoved the boy back into the two other men behind him. All three staggered back through the confines of the doorway. The nameless Daskeen Azul employee yelped and brandished a weapon awkwardly, one-handed. Yelling Get out of the way, get out of the fucking way. Carl made it as a sharkpunch and his flesh quailed. He rode the attack momentum through the door, sent them all stumbling. He got his hands on the gunman’s arm and wrenched, forced him to the floor, followed him down, knee into the stomach. Found the pressure point in the wrist, wrenched again. The sharkpunch went off once, symphony of dull metallic plinks and clanks as the murderous load punched ragged holes in the roof. Then he had possession and the former owner was flailing under him disarmed. Carl twisted, pointed down point-blank, and pulled the trigger. The other man turned abruptly to shredded bone and flesh from the waist up. Blood and gore splattered, drenched him from head to foot.

Proximity sense signaled left. Carl rose and twisted at mesh speed, still blinking the blood from his eyes. Machete boy ran onto the sharkpunch, screaming abomination and hellfire. This time, Carl pulled the trigger in sheer reflex. The impact kicked the boy back toward the open door and tore him apart in midair. The screaming died in midsyllable, the wall and doorway suddenly painted with gore. Carl gaped at the damage the weapon had done—

—and Merrin hit him from the side. Locked out the gun in exactly the same way Carl had taken it from its original owner. Carl grunted and let the other thirteen’s attack carry the two of them around in a stumbling dance. Kept the gaping muzzle of the sharkpunch angled hard away as best he could. He tried for a tanindo throw, but Merrin knew the move. They lurched again, feet on the edge of the opening in the shed floor where the slipway ran in.

“Been looking for you,” Carl gritted.

Merrin’s fingers dug into his wrist. Carl heaved and let the sharkpunch go, through the hole in the floor. It hit the slope below and clattered heavily away downward. Better than leaving it lying around for Ren to pick up and use. He tried another technique to get loose, worked his feet back from the hole and hitched an elbow strike at Merrin’s belly. The other thirteen smothered the blow, hooked out Carl’s ankle with a heel, and brought both of them down. He got in an elbow of his own, blunt force into the side of Carl’s face. Vision flew apart. Merrin got on top. Grinned down at the black man like a wolf.

“I did not cross the void to be killed like a cudlip,” he hissed. “To die like meat on the slab. You have not understood who I am.”

He drove a forearm up into Carl’s throat, bore down and began to crush his larynx. Carl, vision still starry, took the only option left: levered with one leg, rolled, and tipped them both over the edge.

It wasn’t a long drop, the height of the haulage cradle when it slotted into place at the top of the ramp, three meters at most. But the impact broke their holds on each other and they rolled down the slope apart. Twenty meters farther down, the solid steel bulk of the locked-up cradle waited to greet them. Impact was going to hurt.

Carl got himself feetfirst in the tumble and tried to jam a foot into the crank-cable channel. The sole of his boot skidded off the nanofiber, braked him, but not a lot. Merrin came plowing past at his shoulder, grabbed at him, and tugged him loose again. He kicked out, missed, slithered after the other thirteen. The cradle loomed, smooth curve of the sub’s hull held in its massive forked iron grasp. Merrin hit, shrugged it off at mesh speed, braced himself upright against one of the forks. He turned to face Carl with a snarling grin. Carl panicked, jammed his foot hard into the cable space again, tried to sit as his knee bent. He must have hit a bracket or a support brace. His fall locked to a halt a couple of meters off impact with the cradle. The momentum flipped him almost upright, hurled him down to meet Merrin like a bad skater fighting to stay upright. The other thirteen gaped: Carl was coming in impossibly high. Carl snapped out a fist, some reflex he didn’t know he owned, and drove into the side of Merrin’s neck with all the force of his arrival.

It nearly broke his wrist.

He felt the abused joint creak with the impact, but it was lost in the surge of savage joy as Merrin choked and sagged. He pivoted off the punch and cannoned into the side of the sub. Merrin made some kind of blocking move, but it was weak. Carl beat it down, seized the other thirteen’s head in both hands, and smashed it sideways as hard as he could against the edge of the cradle fork. Merrin made a strangled, raging noise and lashed out. Carl shrugged off the blow, smashed the thirteen’s head into the metal again—and again—and again—

Felt the fight go finally out of the other man. Didn’t stop.

Didn’t stop until blood made a sudden blotched spray across the gray hull of the sub, and sprinkled warm on his face again.

CHAPTER 39

Sevgi came down the gantry stairs through a flood of CSI lighting and experts setting up their gear. RimSec had cordoned off the whole of starboard loading, shepherded everyone out for questioning, and then locked the place down. There were uniforms along the upper walkways at every entry point, and a sharkish black patrol boat prowled the ocean alongside the open bay. Smaller inflatables fringed the water’s edge at the bottom of the slipway like orange seaweed, wagging back and forth with the slop of the waves against the slope. There was a sense of hollowness under the vaulted roof, of something emptied out and done.

Sevgi fished her COLIN identification from a pocket and showed it to a supervising officer at the Daskeen Azul docking shed. Surprised herself with the faint stab of nostalgia for the days of her palm-wired NYPD holobadge. Being a cop, back in the day. The officer looked back at her blankly.

“Yeah, what do you want?”

“I’m looking for Carl Marsalis. I was told he’s still down here.”

“Marsalis?” The woman stayed mystified for a moment, then the light dawned. “Oh, you’re talking about the twist? The guy that did all this damage?”

Sevgi was too churned to up to call the Rim cop on her terminology. She nodded. The officer pointed down the slope.

“He’s sitting down there on that empty cradle, one across from this slip. Was going to have him forcibly removed for questioning, but then some Special Cases badge calls down and says to leave him be, the guy can sit there all night if he wants.” She made a weary gesture. “Who am I to argue with Special Cases, right?”

Sevgi murmured something sympathetic and headed on down the stairs beside the Daskeen Azul slipway. When she got level with the empty cradle on the other slip, she had to pick her way awkwardly across the sloping surface, once or twice teetering and dropping to a crouch to stop herself from falling. She reached the cradle and hung on to one of the forks with relief.

“Hey there,” she said awkwardly.

Marsalis glanced down, apparently surprised to see her. It was the first time she’d seen him so unaware of his surroundings, and it jolted her more than the surprise had shaken him. She wondered, briefly, if he was in shock. His clothes were covered with drying blood in big uneven patches, and there were smeared specks and streaks still on his face where he’d washed but apparently hadn’t scrubbed hard enough.

“You okay?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Few bruises. Nothing serious. When did you get here?”

“Awhile ago. Been upstairs, shouting at Daskeen Azul’s management.” Sevgi hauled herself up onto the cradle, propped herself against the fork next to him, and slid her legs out in front of her. “So. Turns out you called it right after all.”

“Yeah. Thirteen paranoia.”

“Don’t gloat, Marsalis. It’s not attractive.”

“Well, I’m not looking to get laid.”

She shot him a sideways glance. “No, I guess you’ve probably had enough of that for one night.”

He shrugged again, didn’t look at her.

“Daskeen Azul are denying any knowledge,” she said. “As far as they’re concerned, Merrin, Ren, and Osborne were all casual employees, automatically renewed contracts every month unless there’s a problem, and there never was. They’re lying through their teeth, but I don’t know if RimSec are going to be able to prove that.”

“Osborne?”

“The guy who jumped you with the machete. Scott Osborne, Jesusland fence-hopper. RimSec Forensics reckon he was one of the Ward BioSupply employees who ran when Merrin showed up there. DNA match with genetic trace leavings from here and Ward’s place.”

He nodded. “And Ren?”

“That’s a tougher one. There was no genetic trace for her at Ward’s place, so looks like she or someone else went over there and cleaned up after they left. But we’re working off witness description composites and yeah, looks like she was there, too.”

“What about gene trace here. Have they run that?”

“Not yet.” She looked at him again, curiously. “You don’t seem very happy about any of this.”

“I’m not.”

She frowned. “Marsalis, it’s over. You get to go home now. You know, back to London and your smug European social comfort zone.”

He raised an eyebrow, stared out at the water. “Lucky me.”

Abruptly, there was a light tripping pulse in her throat. She tried for irony. “What, you going to miss me?”

He turned to look at her now.

“This isn’t over, Sevgi.”

“It isn’t?” She felt a little crime scene macabre creep into her tone. “Well, you could have fooled me. I mean, you did just kill them all. Osborne and the other guy are all over the walls and floor up there. Merrin, you just brained. I’d say we’re pretty much done, wouldn’t you?”

“And Ren?”

Sevgi gestured, throwaway. “Pick up her up, sooner or later.”

“Yeah? Like you did after she split from Ward BioSupply?”

“Marsalis, you’re fucking up the victory parade here. Ren’s aftermath, she’s a detail at most. Merrin’s dead, that’s what counts.”

“Yeah. Suppose we should be celebrating, right?”

“That’s right, we should.”

He nodded and reached into his inmate jacket. Produced a well-made blunt and held it up for her approval.

“Want some?”

“What is it?”

“Don’t know. Someone gave it to me. In case I needed to celebrate.” He put the blunt in his mouth and crunched the ember end to life. Drew in smoke, coughed a little. “Here, try. Not bad.”

She took it and drew her own toke. The smoke went down sweet and silty, enhanced dope and an edge of something else on it. She held it in, let it go. Felt the cool languor of the hit come stealing along her limbs. All sorts of knots seemed to loosen in her head. She drew again, let it up quicker this time, and handed the blunt back to him.

“So tell me why you’re not happy,” she said.

“Because I don’t like being played, and this whole fucking thing was a setup from the start.” He smoked in gloomy quiet for a while, then held the blunt up and examined the burning end. “Fucking monster myths.”

“Eh?”

“Monsters,” he said bitterly. “Superterrorists, serial killers, criminal masterminds. It’s always the same fucking lie. Might as well be talking about werewolves and vampires, for all the difference it makes. We are the good, the civilized people. Huddled here in our cozy ring of firelight, our cities and our homes, and out there”—a wide gesture, warming to his theme now—“out in the dark, the monster prowls. The Big Evil, the Threat to the Tribe. Kill the beast and all will be well. Never mind the—”

“You going to smoke that, or not?”

He blinked. “Yeah, sorry. Here.”

“So you don’t think we’ve killed the beast?”

“Sure. We’ve killed it. So what? That doesn’t give us any answers. We still don’t know why Merrin came back from Mars, or what the point of all these deaths was.”

“Should have asked him.”

“Yeah, well. Slipped my mind at the time, you know.”

She stared at the toes of her boots. Frowned. “Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe we don’t have the answers yet. But the fact we don’t know what this was about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be happy we’ve stopped it.”

“We didn’t stop it. I already told you, this whole thing was set up.”

“Oh come on. Set up how? Rovayo says you took Daskeen Azul totally by surprise. They weren’t expecting this to happen.”

“We were early.”

“What?”

He took the blunt from her. “We were early. They didn’t expect me to push so hard, they were maybe going to let this play out sometime next week.”

“Let what play out next week?” Exasperation slightly blurred by whatever they were smoking. “You think Merrin planned to let you kill him?”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “He certainly didn’t fight as hard as I expected him to. I mean, I got lucky in the end, but the whole thing felt, I don’t know. Slack. Anyway, that’s not the main point. Ren could have come in at any point and tipped the balance. She wasn’t injured; all I did was knock her on her back.”

“So? She just cut her losses, got out while she could.”

“After partnering this guy for the last four months? I don’t think so. Ren was a pro, it was stamped right through her. The way she moved, the way she stood. The way she looked at you. Someone like that doesn’t panic. Doesn’t mistake one unarmed man for a RimSec invasion.”

“Did you tell her you were a thirteen?”

He gave her a tired look.

“Well? Did you?”

“Yeah, I did, but—”

“There you are then.” She bent one knee, eased around to face him more. “That’s what panicked her. Look, Marsalis, I’ve been around you when the fighting starts, and it scares me. And I know what a thirteen really is.”

“So did she. She’d been caretaking one for the last four months, remember.”

“That’s not the same as facing one in combat. She’d have a standard human response to that, a standard—”

“Not this woman.”

“Oh, you think you’re an expert on women, do you?”

“I’m an expert on soldiers, Sevgi. And that’s what Ren was. She was someone’s soldier, the same someone who hired Merrin out of Mars. And whoever that someone was, for whatever reasons, they were getting ready to sell him out. Maybe because he’d served his purpose, maybe because we were getting too close to the truth down in Cuzco. Either way, this”—he nodded back toward the CSI buzz on the slope above them—“all this was a planned outcome. COLIN with its boot on the corpse of the beast, big smiles for the camera, congratulations all around. Fade out to a happy ending.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she muttered.

“Really?” He plumed smoke up at the nanofiber vault. “And there I was thinking you were a cop.”

“Ex-cop. You’re confusing me with Rovayo. You really ought to try and keep the women you fuck separate in your head.”

She took the blunt from him, brusquely. He watched her smoke for a couple of moments in silence. She pretended not to notice.

“Sevgi,” he said finally. “You can’t tell me you’re happy to walk away, knowing we’ve been played.”

“Can’t I?” She met his eyes. Exploded a lungful of smoke at him. “You’re wrong, Marsalis. I can walk away from this happy, because the fucked-up psycho who cut Helena Larsen into pieces and ate her is dead. I guess for that, at least, I should thank you.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“Yeah. And maybe we don’t know why Merrin came back, and maybe we’ll never know. But I can live with that, just like I lived with more unsolved cases than you’ll ever know when I worked Homicide. You don’t always get a clean wrap. Life is messy, and so is crime. Sometimes you just got to be happy you got the bad guy, and call time on the rest.”

He turned away to look at the sea. “Well, that must be a human thing.”

“Yeah. Must be.”

“Norton’ll be pleased.”

She rolled her head sideways, blew smoke, nailed him through it with another look. “We’re not going to talk about Tom Norton.”

“Fine. We’re not going to talk about Norton, we’re not going to talk about Ren. We’re not going to talk about anything inconvenient, because you’ve got your monster and that’s all that matters. Christ, no wonder you people are in such a mess.”

Anger ignited behind her eyes.

“Us people? Fuck you, Marsalis. You know what? Us people are running a more peaceful planet now than the human race has ever fucking seen. There’s prosperity, tolerance, justice—”

“Not in Florida, that I noticed.”

“Oh, what do you want? That’s Jesusland. Globally, things are getting better. There’s no fighting in the Middle East—”

“For the time being.”

“—no starving in Africa, no war with China—”

“Only because no one has the guts to take them on.”

“No. Because we have learned that taking them on is a losing game. No one wins a war anymore. Change is slow, it has to come from within.”

“Tell that to the black lab refugees.”

“Oh, spare me the fucking pseudo-empathy. You could give a shit about some Chinese escapee you never met. I know you, Marsalis. Injustice is personal for guys like you—if it didn’t happen to you or someone you think belongs to you, then it doesn’t touch you at all. You don’t—”

“It did fucking happen to me!”

The shout ripped loose, floated away in the immensity of the vaulted space. She wondered if the RimSec CSI crew heard it. His hands were on her shoulders, fingers hooked into her flesh, head jutting close, eyes locked into hers. They hadn’t been this close since they fucked, and something deeply buried, some ancestor subroutine in her genes, picked up on the proximity and sent the old, confused signals pulsing out.

It was the part of herself she most hated.

She kept the locked stare. Reached up and jabbed the lit ember of the blunt into the back of his hand.

Something detonated in his eyes, inked out just as fast. He unhinged his fingers with a snap. Backed off a fraction at a time. She drove him back with her eyes.

“Keep your fucking hands off me,” she hissed.

“You think—”

His voice was hoarse. He stopped, swallowed and started again.

“You think I can’t empathize with someone out of the black labs, some gene experiment made flesh? I am them, Sevgi. I mean, what do you think Osprey was? I am a fucking experiment. I grew up in a controlled environment, managed and checklisted by men in fucking suits. I lost—”

He stopped again. This time, his eyes slid away from hers. A faint frown furrowed his brow. For a split second she thought he was going to weep, and something prickled at the base of her own throat in sympathy.

“Motherfucker,” he said softly.

She waited, finally had to prompt him. “What?”

Marsalis looked at her, and his eyes were washed clean of the rage. His voice stayed low.

“Bambarén,” he said. “Manco fucking Bambarén.”

“What about him?”

“He was fucking with me, back at Sacsayhuamán. He thought they took Marisol—my surrogate—away from me when I was fourteen. But that’s Lawman. In Osprey, they did it at eleven. Different psych theory.”

“So?”

“So he was too close to the detail. It wasn’t just the age, it was the other stuff. He was talking about men in uniforms, debriefing in a steel trailerfab. Osprey’s handlers all wore suits. And we never had any trailers, the whole place was purpose-built and permanent.”

She shrugged. “Maybe he’s read about it. Seen footage.”

“That’s not how it sounded, Sevgi. It sounded personal. As if he’d been involved.” He sighed. “I know. Thirteen paranoia, right?”

She hesitated. “It’s pretty thin.”

“Yeah.” He looked away from her. Seemed to make an effort: she saw his mouth clamp. He met her eyes again. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that. Thought I had that shit locked down.”

“’sokay. Just don’t do it again. Ever.”

He took the blunt from her, very gently. It was down to the stub and smoldering unequally from where she’d stabbed his hand with it. He coaxed a little more from it, drew deep.

“So what’s going to happen now?” he asked, voice tight with holding down the smoke.

She grimaced. “Aftermath, like I said. We’re going to be chasing the detail for months, but they’ll start to fold the case priority away. Someone somewhere’s going to figure out how to knock off some major unlicensed Marstech again, and we’ll get switched to that. File Merrin for a rainy day.”

“Yeah. What I thought.”

“Look, let it go, Carl.” Impulsively, she reached out and took his hand, the same hand she’d scorched. “Just let go and walk away. You’re home free. We’ll look at the familia thing, who knows, maybe we’ll get somewhere with it.”

“You go down there without me, all you’ll get is killed.” But he was smiling as he said it. “You saw what happened last time.”

She flickered the smile back at him. “Well, maybe we’ll be a bit less full-frontal in our approach.”

He grunted. Held up the dying blunt, querying. She shook her head, and he just held it there between them for a moment or two. Then he shrugged, took one last toke, and pitched it out through the cradle forks, down the long slope to the water.

“You chase that aftermath,” he said.

“We will.”

But out beyond the vault of starboard loading, the waves were starting to pale, black to gunmetal, as the early light of a whole new day crept in.

CHAPTER 40

Back at the hotel, he opaqued the windows against the unwelcome dawn. Jet lag and fight ache stalked him through the darkened suite to the bed. He shed his clothes on the floor and stood staring down at them. s(t)igma, the back of the inmate jacket reminded him in cheery orange. Sevgi Ertekin stood in his thoughts and waved—she’d walked him up to the helipad on Bulgakov’s Cat and seen him off. Was still standing there with one arm raised as the Cat dropped away below and behind the autocopter, visible detail blurring out.

He grimaced, tried to shake the memory off.

He ripped the bed open irritably, crawled in, and tugged a sheet across his shoulder.

Sleep came and buried him.

The phone.

He rolled awake in the still-darkened room, convinced he’d only just closed his eyes. Steady blue glow digits at the bedside disputed the impression: 17:09. He’d slept through the day. He held up his wrist, peering stupidly at the watch he’d forgotten to take off, as if a hotel clock could somehow be wrong. The wrist ached from the fumbled blow he’d hit Merrin with. He turned it a little, flexing. Might even be—

Phone. Answer the fucking—

He groped for it, dragged the audio receiver up to his ear.

“Yeah, what?”

“Marsalis?” A voice he should know but, sleep-scrambled, didn’t. “Is that you?”

“Who the fuck is this?”

“Ah, so it is you.” The name came just ahead of his own belated recognition of the measured tones. “Gianfranco di Palma here. Brussels office.”

Carl sat up in bed, frowning.

“What do you want?”

“I have just been speaking to an agent Nicholson in New York.” Di Palma’s perfect, barely accented UN English floated urbanely down the line. “I understand that COLIN have no further use for your services, and that they have arranged that all charges against you in the Republic will be dropped forthwith. It seems you will be returning to Europe very shortly.”

“Yeah? News to me.”

“Well, I don’t think we need to wait around on formalities. I’ll have an UNGLA shuttle dispatched to SFO tonight. If you would care to be at the suborbital terminal around midnight—”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“I am sorry?”

South Florida State swirled up into his mind, like dirty water backing up from a blocked drain. A sudden decision gripped him, cheery as the lettering on his S(t)igma jacket.

“I said you can fuck off, di Palma. Write it down. Fuck. Right. Off. You let me sit in a Jesusland jail for four months and I’d still be there for all the fucking efforts you made to get me out. And you still owe me expenses from fucking January.” And just like that, out of nowhere he was furious, trembling with the sudden rage. “So don’t think for one fucking moment I’m going to jump into line just because you finally got your dick out of your own arse. I am not done here. I am very far from done here, and I’ll come home when I’m fucking good and ready.”

There was a stiff pause at the other end of the line.

“You understand, I assume,” said di Palma silkily, “that you are not authorized to operate without UNGLA jurisdiction. Of course, your time is your own to dispose of, but we cannot agree to you having any further professional contact with COLIN or the Rim States Security Corps. In the interests of—”

“What’s the matter with you, di Palma. Don’t you have a pen there? I told you to fuck off. Want me to spell it?”

“I strongly advise you not to take this attitude.”

“Yeah? Well, I strongly advise you to go and get a caustic soda enema. Let’s see which of us takes direction best, shall we.”

He broke the connection. Sat staring at the phone for a while.

So. Planning to pay for our own suborb ticket, are we? And look for a new job when we get back?

It won’t come to that. They need me worse than di Palma’s dented pride.

They don’t need you worse than a breach of the Accords. Which is what it’s going to be if you pick up that phone again and call Sevgi Ertekin. You heard the man. Any further professional contact.

The phone sat in his hand.

Just go home, Carl. You gave them their monster, got another notch on your belt, right up there next to Gray. Thirteen liquidator, top of your game. Just take that and ride it home, maybe even bluff it into a raise when you get back.

The phone.

Come on, leave her alone. You’re not doing her any favors, pushing this. Let her walk away like she wants to.

Maybe she doesn’t really want to walk away.

Oh, how very alpha-male of you. What’s next, form an Angry Young tribute band? People got to lead their own lives, Carl.

He tightened his fingers on the smooth plastic of the receiver. Touched it to his head. His whole body ached, he realized suddenly, a dozen different small, jabbing reminders of the fight with Merrin.

Merrin’s done, Carl. All over.

There’s still Norton. Lying fuck tried to have you killed in New York, maybe down in Peru as well.

You don’t know that.

He’s right next to her still. She starts asking awkward questions, he could have her hit the same way he tried with you.

You don’t know he did that. And anyway, he’s a little too dewy-eyed around Sevgi Ertekin to let anything like that happen to her, and you know it.

He grunted. Lowered the phone and stared at it again.

Give it up, Carl. You’re just looking for excuses to get back inside something you never wanted to be a part of in the first place. Just cut it loose and go home.

He grimaced. Dialed from memory.

Sevgi took the call on her way through a seemingly endless consumer space. Late-afternoon crowds clogged the malls and the open-access stores, crippled her pace to limping. She had to keep slowing and darting sideways to get past stalled-out families or knots of dawdling finery-decked youth. She had to queue on escalators as they cranked their slow, ease-of-gawking trajectories up and down in the dizzying cathedral spaces of racked product. She had to shoulder through gathered accretions of bargain hunters under holosigns that screamed reduced, reduced, reduced to this.

It had been the same fucking thing all day, everywhere she went in the upper levels of Bulgakov’s Cat. The temptation to produce badge and gun to clear passage was a palpable itch in the pit of her stomach.

“Yeah, Ertekin.”

“Alcatraz Control here. I have a patched call for you, will you take it?”

“Patched?” She frowned. “Patched from where?”

“New York, apparently. A Detective Williamson?”

She grappled with memory—saw again the tall, hard-boned black man amid uniforms and incident barriers and the shrink-wrapped corpses outside her home. Marsalis, seated on the front steps, gazing at it all like a tourist, as if the dead men were nothing to do with him at all. Crisp October air, and the never-stilled sounds of the city getting on with life. New York seemed suddenly as far away as Mars, and the gun battle some part of her distant past.

“Yeah, I’ll take it.”

Williamson came through, wavery with the patch. “Ms. Ertekin?”

“Speaking.” A little breathless from her pace through a bookstore with mercifully few browsing customers.

“Is this a bad time?”

“No worse than any other. What can I do for you, Detective?”

“It’s more what I can do for you, Ms. Ertekin. We have some information you might like.” He hesitated for a moment. “I ran into Larry Kasabian. He speaks very highly of you.”

She blinked back to the mist-deadened sounds of the IA digging robot, the field at dawn, and the sudden waft of the bodies. Kasabian at her side, blunt and silent, an occasional flickered glance under knotted brows. Once, he nodded grimly at her, some barely perceptible amalgam of solidarity and weariness, but he never spoke. It was the habit of weeks now—they were all watching their words. IA were all over the place, authorized to listen electronically who knew where.

“That’s very kind of Larry.” She fended off a bovine gaggle of shoppers grazing amid menswear, hopped half to a halt, and dodged around them. “And kind of you to call me. So what have you got?”

“What I’ve got, Ms. Ertekin, is your third shooter for Alvaro Ortiz.”

She nearly stopped again, in clear space. “Is he alive?”

“Very much so. There’s a hole in his shoulder, but otherwise he’ll be just fine. Got into a fight in a bar over in Brooklyn, pulled a piece, and it turns out the place is full of off-duty cops.” Williamson chuckled. “You believe that luck?”

“Not a local boy then?”

“No, he’s from the Republic, someplace out west. Dirk Shindel. Right of residence in the Union, he’s got a grandparent up in Maine somewhere, but no official citizenship. We can’t put him at the scene with genetic trace, but he’s copped to it anyway.”

“How’d you manage that?”

“We’re sweating him pretty hard,” Williamson said casually. “Got one of the Homicide psych teams on it. Thing is, our boy Dirk was all fucked up on hormone jolts and street syn when the Brooklyn thing went down. You know what a cocktail like that’ll do. He’s babbling like a snake handler.”

Along her nerves, Sevgi felt the subtle thrum of her own decidedly nonstreet syn dosage. She summoned a dutiful chuckle. “Yeah, seen that before. So what’s he said about Ortiz?”

“Said a whole lot of stuff, I can file it over to you if you want. Boils down to he was hired out of Houston by some front guy he’s never met, friend of the other two in the crew. Quite a lot of money, which I guess for a hit on a guy like Ortiz you’d expect, but it doesn’t explain why the low-grade hires. Shindel says he’s whacked guys before, in the Republic, but the psych team think he’s lying. At best, they reckon he was maybe a driver or a backup man.”

“What about the others?”

“Yeah, Leroy Atkins. That’s the guy your, uh, enhanced friend put down with the machine pistol. Turns out he’s got some record in the Republic, but strictly spray-and-run stuff. Cop I talked to in the Houston PD said he thought Atkins might have upped his game in the last couple of years, gone out of state for the work. Nothing they can touch him for, it’s just street rumor and implied Yaroshanko links from some West Coast n-djinn Houston rent time on. Same with the other guy, uh, Fabiano, Angel Fabiano. Houston resident, some gang affiliations down there. Been doing time since he was a kid, but they never got him for worse than possession of abortifacients with intent to sell, and some aggravated assault. But Houston reckon he might have upgraded as well. He’s a known associate of Atkins.”

“Okay.” Disloyalty for Norton snaked in her, deep enough to force a grimace onto her face. She asked anyway. “Did Shindel have anything to say about Marsalis?”

“Marsalis? The thirteen guy?” Pause while Williamson presumably scrolled through the report. “No. Nothing here outside of we would have brought the whole thing off, too, that fucking nigger twist hadn’t been there. No offense.”

“No offense?”

“Yeah.” Williamson’s tone shifted into sour amusement. “One of the psych team’s the same color as me. This is one sensitive Jesuslander we’re dealing with here.”

Sevgi grunted. “Probably the syn talking. He tell you how they ended up outside my front door?”

“Yeah, he was pissed about that, too. Told us they’d been watching Ortiz for weeks, mapping his moves. Seems he always went by this coffeehouse he liked on West Ninety-seventh, they were going to track him across there on the skates and light him up outside. The skates, that’s an old Houston sicario standby, apparently. Good for city-center hits where you’ve got high-volume, slow-moving traffic. Anyway, the way Shindel paints it, Ortiz breaks his routine and heads uptown suddenly, they go after him but it nearly kills them to keep up. By the time they get to Hundred eighteenth, they’re panting like dogs, they just want to get this thing finished.”

“Very pro.” She could hear the lightness in her own tone. The vindication of Norton blew through her like a cool breeze. She even found a smile for some face-painted idiot who collided with her coming around a support column and then backed off all apologies and smiles.

“Right,” Williamson agreed. “Not quite Houston’s finest, it seems.”

“No.”

“Yeah.” The New York detective hesitated again. “So like I said, I talked to Kasabian. He told me you’d want to know. Was going to hang on to this until you were back in town, but then I caught you on that news flash out of the Rim this morning. So I figure the Rim, that’s where Ortiz is from originally, maybe this ties in to whatever you’re dealing with out there.”

The press conference, hastily called in a deck-level government garden amidships, her dry lack-of-progress report buffered by wooden professions of coordinated effort from RimSec and the Cat’s security services, a brief, sonorous pronouncement from a local political aide—it all seemed to be sliding into the past at alarming speed as well. She made a fleeting match with the feeling she’d had on the highway out of Cuzco, the sense of time slipping through her fingers. Marsalis at her side like a dark rock she could maybe cling to. She grimaced. Shouldered the image aside, like another drowsy shopper getting in her way.

“Well, listen, Detective, I appreciate you taking the trouble to hand me this. See if I can’t return the favor someday.”

“No need. Like I said, saw the news flash. Lot of talk about agency cooperation in America these days, a lot of talk. I figure maybe it’s time there actually started to be some, too.”

“I hear that. Can you wire the Shindel file across to RimSec at Alcatraz? I’ll pick it up there later.”

“Will do. Hope it helps.”

The New York patch clicked out, taking Williamson’s accent and the winter city with it. Left her with the star-static almost-hush of satellite time, and then nothing at all.

“Nothing. That’s what I’m telling you.”

Carl shook his head irritably. “Matthew, I told you this guy just doesn’t feel right. Are you sure?”

“I am better than sure, Carl. I am mathematically accurate. Tom Norton’s associational set is as close to perfectly behaved citizenship as it’s possible for a human to get. The worst blemish I can find is a data-implication that his brother may have helped him get his job at COLIN. But you’re talking about a good word in the right ear, not outright nepotism. And it’s years in the past, no sense of a continuing influence.”

“You certain about that?”

“Yes, I am certain. In fact, the data suggests that he and his brother don’t get on all that well. Same-sex sibling relationships are often combative, and in this case the Nortons seem to have resolved theirs by living at opposite ends of the continent.”

Carl stared at the hotel window, where evening was already starting to shut down the sky. His reflection stared back, hemmed him in. He put a crooked elbow to the glass and leaned on it with his forearm over his head, fingers stroking through his hair. It was something Marisol used to—

“And the New York hit? The fact he was the only person who knew where I was sleeping?”

“Is coincidence,” said Matthew crisply.

He met his reflection’s eyes in the glass. “Well, it doesn’t feel much like it from where I’m standing.”

“Coincidence never does. It’s not in the nature of human genetic wiring to accept it. And as a thirteen, you have your own increased predisposition toward paranoia to contend with as well.”

Carl grimaced. “Has it ever occurred to you Matt, that—”

“Matthew.”

“Yeah, Matthew. Sorry. Has it ever occurred to you that for a thirteen, for someone who doesn’t connect well with group dynamics, paranoia might be quite a useful trait to have?”

“Yes, and evolutionarily selective, too.” The datahawk’s didactic tone had not shifted. It almost never did; didactic was part of the way Matthew was wired. “But this is not the point. Human intuition is deceptive, because it is not always consistent. It is not necessarily a good fit for the environments we now live in, or the mathematics that underlie them. When it does echo mathematical form, it’s clearly indicative of an inherent capacity to detect the underlying mathematics.”

“But not when they clash.” Carl leaned his forehead against the glass. They’d had this discussion before, countless times. “Right?”

“Not when they clash,” Matthew agreed. “When they clash, the mathematics remain correct. The intuition merely indicates a mismatch of evolved capacities with a changed or changing environment.”

“So Norton’s clean?”

“Norton is clean.”

Carl turned his back on his reflection. Leaned against the window and looked around the room that caged him. He recognized the reflex—seeking exits. Stupid, there was the fucking door, right there.

So use it, fuckwit.

“Does it ever bother you?” he asked into the phone.

“Does what bother me, Carl?”

“This whole thing.” He gestured as if Matthew could see him. “Jacobsen, the fucking Accords, the Agency and the enforcement. Having to be licensed like some fucking hazardous substance.”

“To the extent that personal identification records are a form of social licensing, we are all licensed, base humans and variants alike. If the type of licensing reflects certain gradients of social risk, is that a bad thing?”

Carl sighed. “Okay, forget it. I’m asking the wrong person.”

“In what way?”

“Well, no offense, but you’re a gleech. Your whole profile is post-autistic. This is an emotional thing we’re talking about.”

“My emotional range has been psychochemically rebalanced and extended.”

“Yeah, by an n-djinn. Sorry, Matthew, I don’t know why I’m fronting you with this stuff. You’re no more normal than I am.”

“Leaving aside for a moment the question of what exactly you would consider to be a normal human, what makes you think you would receive a more valid answer from one? Are normal humans especially gifted in discovering complex ethical truths?”

Carl thought about that.

“Not that I’ve noticed,” he admitted gloomily. “No.”

“So my perception of the post-Jacobsen order is probably no more or less useful than any other rational human’s.”

“Yeah, but that’s just the big fat point.” Carl grinned. There was a solid pleasure in showing up the datahawk and his hyperbalanced mind-set, mainly because he didn’t get to do it very often. “This isn’t about rational humans. The Jacobsen Report wasn’t about a rational response to genetic licensing, it was about a group of rational men trying to broker a deal with the gibbering mass of irrational humanity. The religious lunatics, the race purists, the whole doom-of-civilization crew.” For a moment, he stared off blindly into a corner of the room. “I mean, don’t you remember all that stuff back in ’89, ’90? The demonstrations? The vitriol in the feeds? The mobs outside the facilities and the army bases, crashing the fences?”

“Yes. I remember it. But it did not bother me.”

Carl shrugged. “Well, you didn’t scare them like we did.”

“And yet Jacobsen was not a capitulation to the forces you describe. The report is critical of both irrational responses and simplistic thinking.”

“Yeah. But look who ended up in the tracts anyway.”

Matthew said nothing. Carl saw Stefan Nevant’s lupine grin, rubbed at his eyes to make it go away.

“Look, Matt, thanks—”

“Matthew.”

“Sorry. Matthew. Thanks for the check on Norton, ’kay? Talk to you soon.”

He hung up. Tossed the phone on the bed and got rapidly dressed in the least used and bloodied garments from among his limited wardrobe. He let himself out of the hotel room, paused briefly on his way past Sevgi Ertekin’s door, then made an exasperated noise in his throat and stalked on. He waited ten impatient seconds at the elevator, then stiff-armed the door to the emergency stairwell open instead and went down the steps two at a time. Crossed the lobby at a fast stride and went out into the city. He walked a single block to get the feel of the evening, then flagged down an autocab.

The interior was low-lit and cozy, an expansive black leatherette womb with slash-narrow views to the passing street. In the gloom on the front panel, an armored screen blipped into life and showed him a rather idealized female driver interface. Generic Rim beauty, the classic Asian-Hispanic blend. Pinned dark hair, a hint of a curl in it, chic high-collar jacket. Something of Carmen Ren in the features and the poise, but machined up to an inhuman perfection. The voice was an Asia Badawi rip-off.

“Good evening, sir. Welcome to Cable Cars. What will be your choice of destination this evening?”

He hesitated. Sutherland, he knew, would not have been impressed with this.

Sutherland’s on fucking Mars.

“Just take me somewhere I can get in a fight,” he said.

Switched off and careless from jet lag, long sleep, and yesterday’s combat, he never noticed the figure on the corner that watched him leave the hotel, or the nondescript teardrop that slid out from parking on the opposite side of the street and dropped into the traffic behind his cab.

CHAPTER 41

Dougie Kwang’s week had been shaping up for shit ever since it started, and tonight didn’t look any better. He was three games down to Valdez already, stalking the angles of the table, pumping violent, crack-bang shots to take his mind off it all. The technique—if you want to call it that, he fumed—mostly just rattled the balls in the jaws, and they sat out more often than he sank them. He knew his anger was the exact reason he was losing, but he couldn’t shake it loose. There was too much else gone to shit around him.

Wundawari’s shipment never made it through MTC in Jakarta; Wundawari herself was now banged up in an Indonesian jail on trumped-up holding charges until some scummy Seattle-based rights lawyer she used could wire across and get her out. The money was gone. Write it off, the Seattle guy advised drily down the line, what you maybe claw back from the Maritime Transit guys in compensation, you’re going to be paying me in fees. Dougie might have called him on that one, but Wundawari wouldn’t do the time, and both he and Seattle knew it. She was too soft, came from Kuala Lumpur money and a whole crèche of spoiled-brat connections down in the Freeport. She’d pay whatever Seattle wanted.

On the street, things were no better. Alcatraz station were coming down hard and heavy all over the fucking place, big-ass RimSec interventions at levels those guys mostly didn’t bother with. He still couldn’t find out why. Some shit about a factory raft bust last night and the fallout, but none of his few bought-and-paid-for touches inside the RimSec machine ranked high enough to know any more than that. More importantly, they were too fucking scared of Alcatraz to risk sniffing around any closer. End result was, he couldn’t move shit anywhere north of Selby or west of the Boulevard, and even in the yards at Hunter Point, he was getting heat he didn’t need. And the border had been sticky for fucking months now, none of the gangs he knew could get more than the odd fence-bunny across, mostly straitlaced white girls out of the Dakotas who took fucking forever to break in and even then didn’t play too well to popular demand.

Mama was still coughing. Still wouldn’t take her fucking pills.

Now Valdez was lining up in the wake of another too-hard-too-fast fuckup, two spots floating nice and loose over open pockets, clean backup angles everywhere, and then the eight-ball doubled into the side, one of Valdez’s favorite cheap trick shots, he’d do it with his fucking eyes closed if he wanted. Another fifty bucks. He’d—

But Valdez frowned instead and lifted his chin off the cue. Got up and came around the table to Dougie, eyes narrowed.

“Hey, pengo mio. You say Elvira wasn’t working tonight?” He nodded across the gloom to the bar. “Because if that ain’t work, then you got a problem.”

So Dougie slanted a glance across the gloom to where Valdez was looking, and like the rest of it wasn’t fucking enough, here’s Elvie on her stool with her back to the bar, elbows down and tits cranked out in that red top he bought her back in May, legs making all kinds of slit-skirt angles on the frame of the stool, and all for this big black guy draped over the next stool and just looking her over like she’s fruit on some Meade Avenue street stall.

Too fucking much.

He hefted the cue up one-handed through his own grip, half a meter down from the tip where it thickened, reversed his hold, and carried it low at his side across to the bar. Elvira saw him coming, made that dumb fucking face of hers, and stopped gabbing. Dougie let the silence work for him, came on a couple more steps and locked to a halt a meter and a half off the black guy’s shoulder.

“That’s a mistake you’re making, pal,” he said, breathing hard. Anger slurred through his tone like smeared paint on a cheap logo. “See, Elvira here isn’t working tonight. You want some cheap fucking pussy, you’d better come around and see her another fucking day. Got that?”

“We’re just talking.” The black guy’s tone was low and reasonable, almost bored. Weird fucking accent as well. He didn’t even look at Dougie. “If Elvira’s not working, I guess she’s free to do that, right?”

Dougie felt the weight of the day come down on him like demolition.

“I don’t think you’re paying attention,” he told the guy tightly.

And then the black guy did look at him, a sudden switch so his eyes collected Dougie’s stare like third base snapping up a low ball out at Monster Park.

“No, I am,” he said.

It stopped Dougie dead in his tracks, knocked him back and kept the cue at his side, because at some level he couldn’t quite nail he knew this guy was actively looking for what came next. It felt like a skid, like ice under his wheels when he least expected it. He knew he had to keep going, no one much in the place tonight but Valdez was watching, so were the barkeep and a couple of others, whatever went down, street feed would have it out to everyone by morning, he had to fuck this guy up, but the ground under his feet had shifted, was no longer safe, he couldn’t fucking read this guy or what he’d do.

He tightened his grip on the cue.

“Try to hit me with that thing,” said the black man softly. “I will kill you.”

Dougie’s heart kicked in his chest. He felt the rage flicker, overstoked, held too long, suddenly unreliable. Tiny, rain-drip voice of caution in the gap. He drew breath, forced the knowledge down.

“Door’s over there,” he said. “Just walk the fuck away.”

“My feet are tired.”

So Dougie just swung that fucking cue like he’d always known deep down he’d have to. Lips peeled back off a snarl and the shaky lift of the held-too-long adrenal surge.

Situation like that, what else was he going to fucking do?

Even as the fight bloomed, Carl could feel the small seep of disappointment at the back of it all. This swaggering low-grade gangster in front of him, a little more spine than most pimps maybe, but in the end no competition, no real threat.

Yeah, like you expected anything else out here, black-walled bunker bar in a derelict neighborhood on the edge of an all but fully automated navy yard. Not like he hadn’t discussed it carefully enough with the autocab, walked the deserted streets for long enough looking. Face it, soak, this is exactly what you’ve been prowling for. This is what you wanted. Enjoy.

The fight was so mapped out in his head, it was almost preordained. He already had his weight braced off the stool he’d been using, some in the forearm where he leaned on the bar, more in his legs than he showed. He saw the intention tremor down the other guy’s arm, grabbed a leg of the stool and yanked the whole thing savagely upward. The leg ends hit and gouged, face and chest. Swing momentum on the seat end hooked the thing around and blocked out the cue completely—the strike never made it above waist height. He let go, stepped in as the pimp reeled back, hand up to the rip in his face. The stool tumbled away. Carl threw a long chop, hard as he could make it, into the unguarded side of the throat. The pimp hit the floor, dead as far as he could tell. Elvira shrieked.

At the pool table, the pimp’s shaven-headed friend stood shocked and motionless, cue held defensively across his body in both hands. Carl stalked forward a couple of steps, proximity sense peeled for the rest of the room.

“Well?” he rasped.

It was half a dozen meters at most; if the skinhead had a gun, he wasn’t going to have time to clear it before Carl was on him. Carl saw in his face that he knew it.

Peripheral vision, left. The barkeep, fumbling for something, phone or weapon. Carl threw out an arm, finger raised.

“Don’t.”

On the floor, the pimp moaned and shifted. Carl checked every face in the room, calibrated probable responses, then kicked the downed man in the head. The moaning stopped.

“What’s his name?” he asked of the room.

“Uh, it’s Dougie.” The barkeep. “Dougie Kwang.”

“Right. Well anyone here who’s a big friend of Dougie Kwang’s, maybe wants to stay and discuss this with me, you can. Anyone else had better leave.”

Hasty shuffle of feet, graunch of chair legs jammed back in a hurry. The thin crowd, scrabbling to leave. The door swung open for them. He felt the cold it let in touch the back of his neck. The barkeep snatched the opportunity, went too. Left him with Elvira, who’d started grubbing about on the floor next to Dougie in tears, and the skinhead, whom Carl guessed just didn’t trust getting safe passage to the door. He gave him a cold smile.

“You really want to make something of this?”

“No, he doesn’t. Look at his face. Stop being an asshole and let him go.”

Control and the mesh stopped him whipping around at the voice, the cool amusement and the iron certainty beneath. He already knew from the tone that there was a gun pointing at him. That he wasn’t on the floor next to Dougie, shot dead or dying, was the only part that didn’t make sense.

He shelved the wonder, stepped aside with ironic courtesy, and gestured the skinhead to pass him. Momentary flashback to the chapel in South Florida State, the sneering white supremacist walking past him up the aisle. Suddenly he was sick of it all, the cheap postures and moves, the use of stares, the whole fucking mechanistic predictability of the man-dance.

“Go on,” he said flatly. “Looks like you get a free pass. Better take Elvira there with you.”

He watched Dougie Kwang’s friend drop the pool cue he was clutching and come forward a hesitant step at a time. He couldn’t work out what was going on, either. His eyes flickered from Carl to whoever the new arrival was and back. A numb failure to catch up was stamped across his face like a bootprint. He knelt beside the off-duty whore and tried to manhandle her to her feet. She wriggled and wept, refused to get up, hands still plastered on Dougie’s motionless form, long dark-curling hair shrouding his eyes-wide, frozen face. She keened and sobbed, half-comprehensible fragments, some Sino-Spanish street mix Carl couldn’t follow well.

Enjoying our handiwork here, are we?

He wondered momentarily if, when the time came, there’d be a woman, any woman, to weep like this for him.

“We don’t have all night,” said the voice behind him.

Carl turned slowly, fear of the bullet prickling at the base of his neck. Time to see what the fuck had gone wrong.

Right. Like you don’t already know.

There was a tall man at the door.

A couple of others, too, neither of them small, but it was this one who drew attention the way you vectored in on color in a drab landscape. Carl’s mesh-sharpened senses fixed on the heavy silver revolver in the raised and black-gloved hand, the bizarre, consciously antiquated statement it made, but it wasn’t that. Wasn’t the oily, slicked-back dark hair or the slight sheen on the tanned and creased white features, telltale marks of cell-fix facial and hair gel for an assassin who had no intention of leaving genetic trace material at the scene of his crime. Carl saw all this and set it aside for what really mattered.

It was the way the man stood, the way he looked into the room as if it were a stage set purely for his benefit. It was the way his dark clothes were wrapped on his body as if blown there by a storm, as if he didn’t much care whether he wore them or not. The way his tanned face had some vague familiarity to it, some sense that you must have met this person before somewhere, and that he had meant something to you back then.

Thirteen.

Had to be. Paranoia confirmed. Merrin’s back-office crew, come for payback. It wasn’t over.

Beside Carl, the pool player spoke urgently to Elvira, finally succeeded in getting her to her feet, and shepherded her past Carl with an arm around her shaking shoulders. The same dazed mix of shock and incomprehension on his face as before. Carl nodded him past, then turned slowly to watch him half carry Elvira to the door. The new arrivals stood aside to let the couple out, and one of them closed the door firmly afterward. All the time, the silver gun never shifted from its focus.

Carl gave its owner a sardonic smile and moved a few casual steps forward. The other man watched him come closer, but he didn’t move or make any objection. Carl breathed. He wasn’t going to get shot just yet, it appeared.

But it’s coming.

He took the bright flicker of fear, broke it, and folded it away. The mesh and a sustained will to do damage pulsed brighter.

Push it, see how far it goes.

It went almost to touching distance.

The tall man let him come on that far, even gave him a gentle, encouraging smile, like an indulgent adult watching a child in his charge do something daring. Close enough that Carl’s assessment of the situation began to flake apart, to leave him abruptly uncertain of how to play this. But then, a couple of meters off the muzzle of the revolver, the tall man’s smile shifted on his face, never quite left it, settled into something hard and careful.

“That’ll do,” he said softly. “I’m not that careless.”

Carl nodded. “You don’t look it. Do I know you from somewhere?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Onbekend.”

“Marsalis.”

“Yes, I know.” The tall man nodded toward a nearby table. “Sit down. We’ve got a little time.”

So. Cool gust of confirmation down the back of his neck, down the muscles of his forearms.

“You sit down. I’m fine right here.”

The revolver’s hammer clicked back. “Sit down or I’ll kill you.”

Carl looked in the eyes and saw no space there, not even for the snappy one-liner—Looks like you’re going to do that anyway. This man would put him down right here and now. He shrugged and stepped across to the table, lowered himself into one of the abandoned chairs. It was still warm from its previous occupant. He leaned back and set his feet apart, as far off the table edge as he thought he could get away with. Onbekend glanced at one of his shadows, nodded at the door. The man slipped quietly outside.

The remaining backup stood immobile, fixed Carl with a cold stare, and folded his arms. Onbekend checked him with another glance and then moved across and seated himself opposite Carl at the table.

“You’re the lottery guy, aren’t you?” he said.

Carl sighed. It wasn’t entirely faked. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“The one who woke up halfway home?”

“Yeah. You looking for an autograph?”

He got a thin smile. “I’m curious. What was it like, being stuck out there all that time, waiting?”

“It was a riot. You should try it sometime.”

Onbekend didn’t react any more than a stone. The sense of familiarity grew—Carl was certain it was specific. He knew this face, or one very like it, from somewhere.

“Did you feel abandoned? Like when you were fourteen all over again?”

Fourteen?

Carl grinned. The tiny piece of advantage felt adrenal in his veins. He cocked his head, elaborately casual.

“So you were a Lawman, huh? Fortress America’s final set of southern-fried chickens coming home to roost.”

Just there, just as tiny, but there nonetheless, there in the corners of Onbekend’s eyes. Loss of poise, siphoned sip of anger. For just that moment, Carl had him backed up.

“You think you know me? You don’t fucking know me, my friend.”

“I’m not your fucking friend, either,” Carl told him mildly. “So there you go. We all make these mistakes. What do you want from me, exactly?”

For a moment so brief it was gone before he even registered it, Carl thought he was dead. The barrel of the revolver didn’t shift, but it seemed to glimmer with intent in the lower field of his vision. Onbekend’s mouth smeared a little tighter, his eyes hated a little more.

“You could start by telling me how it feels to hunt down other variant thirteens for the cudlips at the UN.”

“Remunerative.” Carl stared blandly back into the other thirteen’s narrowed eyes. One of them was going to die in this bar. “It feels remunerative. What are you doing for a living these days?”

“Surviving.”

“Oh.” He nodded, mock-understanding. “Playing the outlaw, are we?”

“I’m not working for the cudlips, if that’s what you mean.”

“Sure you are.” Carl yawned—sudden, tension-driven demand for oxygen, out of nowhere, but it played so fucking well he could have crowed. “We’re all working for the cudlips, one way or another.”

Onbekend set his jaw. Tipped his head a little, like a wolf or a dog listening for something faint. “You talk very easily about other men’s compromises. Like I said, you don’t fucking know me at all.”

“I know you bought food today. I know you traveled here in some kind of manufactured vehicle, on city streets built and paid for in some shape or form by the local citizenry. I know you’re holding a gun you didn’t build from raw metal in your spare time.”

“This?” Onbekend raised the gun slightly, took the muzzle fractionally out of line. He seemed amused. Carl forced himself not to tense, not to watch the wavering weapon. “I took this gun from a man I killed.”

“Oh, well there’s a sustainable model of exchange. Did you kill the guy who served you breakfast this morning as well, so you wouldn’t have to pay for that, either? Going to murder the guy who sold or rented you your transport option, and the guy who runs the place you sleep tonight? Got plans for the people who employ them, too, the ones who run the means of production, the managers and the owners, and the people who sell for them and the people who buy from them?” Carl leaned forward, grinning hard against the cool proximity of death. It felt like biting down. “Don’t you fucking get it? They’re all around us, the cudlips. You can’t escape them. You can’t cut loose of them. Every time you consume, you’re working for them. Every time you travel. On Mars, every time you fucking breathe you’re part of it.”

“Well.” Onbekend put together another small smile of his own. “You’ve learned your lesson well. But I guess if you whip a dog often enough, it always will.”

“Oh please. You know what? You want to pretend there’s some other way? You want to escape into some mythical pre-virilicide golden age—go live in Jesusland, where they still believe in that shit. I was there last week, they love guys like us. They’d burn us both at the stake as soon as look at us. Don’t you understand? There is no place for what we are anymore.” Sutherland’s words seemed to rise in him, Sutherland’s quiet, amused, bass-timbre voice like thunder, like strength. “They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy. They won, Onbekend, and you want to know why? They won because it worked. Group cooperation and bowing down to some thug with a beard worked better than standing alone as a thirteen was ever going to. They ran us ragged, Onbekend, with their mobs and leaders and their fucking strength in numbers. They hunted us down, they exterminated us, and they got the future as a prize. And now here we are, standing in the roof garden of the cudlip success story, and you’re telling me no, no, you didn’t take the elevator or the stairs, you just fucking flew up here all on your own, all with your own two fucking wings. You are full of shit.”

Onbekend leaned forward, mirroring, eyes flaring. It was instinctive, anger-driven. The revolver shifted fractionally in his hand to allow the shift in posture. Angled minutely to one side. Carl saw, and held down the surge of the mesh. Not yet, not yet. He met the other man’s eyes, saw his own death there, and didn’t much care. There was a rage rising in him he barely understood. The words kept him alive, warmed him as long as he could spit them out.

“They built us, Onbekend, they fucking built us. They brought us back from the fucking dead for the one thing we’re good at. Violence. Slaughter. You, me.” He gestured, slashing, open-handed disgust. “All of us, every fucking one. We’re dinosaurs. Monsters summoned up from the deep dark violent past to safeguard the bright lights and shopping privileges of Western civilization. And we did it for them, just like they wanted. You want to talk about cudlips, how they bow and fold to authority, how they let the group dictate? Tell me how we were different. Project fucking Lawman? What does that sound like to you?”

“Yeah, because they fucking trained us.” For the first time, Onbekend’s voice rose almost to a shout, was almost pain. He flattened it again, instantly, got it down to a cold, even-tempered anger. “They locked us up from fucking childhood, Marsalis. Beat us down with the conditioning. You know that, Osprey must have been the same. How were we supposed to—”

“We did, as we, were told!” Carl spaced his words, leaned on them like crowbars going into brickwork. “Just like them, just like the cudlips. We failed, just like we failed twenty thousand years ago.”

“That was then,” Onbekend snapped. “And this is now. And some of us aren’t on that path anymore.”

“Oh don’t make me fucking laugh. I already told you, everything about you is part of the cudlip world. If you can’t come to some kind of accommodation with that, you might as well fucking shoot yourself—”

A ghost grin came up across Onbekend’s face. “It was your suicide I was sent to arrange, Marsalis. Not mine.”

“Sent?” Carl jeered it, leered across the scant space between them. “Sent? Oh, I rest my fucking case.”

“Thirteens have had an unfortunate propensity for death by their own hand.” The other man’s voice came out raised, words rushed, trampling at Carl’s scorn, trying to drive home a winning point he hadn’t embedded quite as well as he’d hoped. “Violent suicide, in the tracts and reservations. And a thirteen carrying as much guilt as you—”

“Guilt? Give me a fucking break. Now you’re talking just like them. Variant thirteen doesn’t do guilt, that’s a cudlip thing.”

“Yes, all the ones you’ve hunted down, murdered, or taken back to a living death in the tracts.” But Onbekend was calmer now, voice dropping back to even. “It stands to reason you couldn’t live with it forever.”

“Try me.”

A bleak smile. “Happily, I don’t have to. And as for the suicide, you’ve made it easy for me.”

“Really?” Carl looked elaborately around him. “This doesn’t look much like a suicide scene to me.”

But under the drawl, he already saw the angle and something very like panic started to ice through him. He’d played all his cards, and Onbekend just hadn’t loosened enough. The other thirteen was watching him minutely again, back to the cold control he’d walked in with. Awareness of the place they were in congealed around him—ancient grimy fittings, the long arm of the bartop, scars and spill stains gleaming in the low light and the piled-up glassware and bottles behind. The worn pool tables in their puddles of light from the overheads. Dougie Kwang faceup on the floor, head rolled to one side, eyes staring open across the room at him. Waiting for company, for someone to join him down there in the dust and sticky stains.

“Suicide would be hard to fake here,” Onbekend agreed. “Would have been harder to fake wherever we did it. But you’ve been kind enough to let your drives get the better of you and so here we are, a mindless bar brawl in a low-grade neighborhood with low-grade criminals to match, and it seems Carl Marsalis just miscalled the odds. Pretty fucking stupid way to die, but hey.” A shrug. Onbekend’s voice tinged suddenly with contempt. “They’ll believe it of you. You’ve given them no reason not to.”

The oblique accusation stung. In the back of his head, Sutherland concurred. If we are ruled by our limbic wiring, then every bigoted, hate-driven fear they have of us becomes a truth.

Ertekin might not buy it.

Yeah, but she might. You don’t always get a clean wrap, Marsalis. Remember that? Life is messy, and so is crime.

Kwang seemed to wink at him from the floor.

Could be this’ll be just messy enough for her, soak.

As if he didn’t have enough with his own thoughts beating him up, Onbekend was still going strong.

“They’ll believe you were too stupid to beat your own programming,” he said matter-of-factly, as if he’d been there for Sutherland’s musings, too. “Because you are. They’ll believe you went looking for trouble, because you did exactly that, and they’ll believe you found a little too much of it down here to handle alone. So they’ll do a little light investigating, they’ll talk to some people, and in the end they’ll decide you got shot at close range with a nondescript gun that’ll never be found, in the hand of some nameless street thug who’ll also never be found, and they’ll walk away, Marsalis, they’ll walk away because it’ll fit right in with this idiocy you’ve spontaneously generated for us. I couldn’t have arranged it better myself.”

Carl gestured. “That’s hardly a nondescript gun.”

“This?” Onbekend lifted the revolver again, weighed it in his hand. “This is—”

Now.

It wasn’t much—the fractionally lowered reflexive response in the other man, neurochemical sparks lulled and damped down by Carl’s previous open-handed gestures and the descending calm after all the shouting. Then the fractional shift of the revolver’s muzzle, the few degrees off and the brief lack of tension on the trigger. Then Onbekend’s standard-issue thirteen sense of superiority, the curious need he seemed to have to lecture. It wasn’t much.

Not much at all.

Carl exploded out of the chair, hands to the table edge, flipping it up and over. Onbekend got one shot off, wide, and then he was staggering back, trying to get out of the chair and on his feet. The shadow by the door yelled and moved. Carl was across the empty space where the table had been, into Onbekend, palm heel and hooking elbow, turning, try for the gun, lock in close, too close to shoot at. He had the other thirteen’s arm in both hands now, twisted the revolver up and around, looking for the man by the door. Tried for the trigger. Onbekend got his finger out, blocked the attempt, but it didn’t matter. The other man yelled again, dodged away from the slug he thought was coming. The door flew inward on its hinges, the other half of Onbekend’s human backup burst into the room. Carl yanked at the revolver, couldn’t get it free. The new arrival didn’t make the same mistake as his companion. He stepped in, grinning.

“Just hold him there, Onbee.”

Desperate, Carl hacked sideways with one foot, tried to get the fight on the ground and jar the revolver out of Onbekend’s stubborn grip. The other thirteen locked ankles with him, stood firm, and Carl tumbled instead, pulled off balance by his own weight and a tanindo move that hadn’t worked. Onbekend timed it just right, stepped wide and shrugged him off like a heavy backpack. He went down, clutching for the revolver, didn’t get it. Onbekend kicked him in the groin. He convulsed around the blow, tried frantically to roll, to get up—

Onbekend leveled the revolver.

The world seemed to stop, to lean in and watch.

In the small unreal stillness, he knew the impact before it came, and the knowledge was terrifying because it felt like freedom. He felt himself open to it, like spreading wings, like snarling. His eyes locked with Onbekend’s. He grinned and spat out a final defiance.

“You sad, deluded little fuck.”

And then the gunblasts, the final violence through the quiet, again—again—again, like the repeated slamming of a door in a storm.

CHAPTER 42

The Beretta Marstech had a burst function that allowed three shots for every trigger pull. Sevgi Ertekin came through the door with it enabled, gun raised and cupped in both hands, and she squeezed the trigger twice for each figure in her sights. No time for niceties: she’d seen through the window what was about to go down. The expansion slugs made a flat, undramatic crackling sound as they launched, but they tore down her targets like cardboard.

Bodies jerked and hurled aside. Two down.

The third one was turning, tiger-swift, the first burst missed him altogether. A big, heavy silver revolver tracking around in his hand. She squeezed again and he flipped over backward like a circus trick.

Marsalis flopped about on the ground, struggled to sit up. She couldn’t see if he was hit. She advanced into the room, gun swinging to cover angles in approved fashion. Peering down at the men she’d just hit, no, wait—

—she took in staring eyes and crumpled, awkward postures, one of them slumped almost comically in the arms of a chair, legs slid out from under him, one on the floor in a sprawl of limbs like some tantrum-prone child’s doll—

—the men she’d just killed. The Marstech gun and its load, unequivocal in its sentencing as a Jesusland judge.

The third one hit her from the side. Flash glimpse of a bloodied face, distorted with rage. She hit the floor, arms splayed back to break the fall, lost the fucking Beretta with the impact. For a moment the third man lurched above her, growling through lips skinned back off his teeth, empty hands crooked like talons. The look in the eyes was savage, stripped of anything human. She felt the terror thrust up like wings in her stomach and chest.

He saw the fallen gun. Stepped past her to get it.

“Onbekend!”

Her attacker twisted around, bent halfway over to the Beretta, saw the same as her—Carl Marsalis, propped up off the floor with the big revolver in his hand.

Onbekend wheeled around and the shot went wide. Deep bellow of the heavy caliber across the room. Marsalis snarled something, swung and fired again. The door slammed shut on the other man.

Sevgi grabbed up her gun.

“You okay?”

Grim nod. He was getting unsteadily to his feet. She gave him a tight grin and went to the door. Pushed it open a crack and peered out. The teardrop she’d taxi-trailed from the hotel was still there on the other side of the deserted, dilapidated street. The injured third man fumbled at its door, got it open. No time. She ran through and took up her firing stance again on the sidewalk. A thousand memories from the streets and back alleys of Queens and Manhattan, eleven years of pursuits and arrests—it pulsed through her, anchored her, steadied her hands.

“Police officer! Put your hands on your head, get down on the ground!”

He seemed to kneel at the opened door of the car. She trod closer.

“I said get your hands—”

He spun, yanked a weapon clear from somewhere. Came up firing. She shot back. Clutch of three—saw him punched back on the teardrop’s high-sheen flank, but knew at the same time she’d gone too high. Felt something kick her in the left shoulder, staggered with it and fell back against the wall of the bar. One leg shot out from under her, she flailed not to go all the way down. She braced herself on the wall, saw him reel off the car, leave smears of blood on the shiny bodywork of the teardrop, stagger and collapse inside the vehicle. She fought to get upright again, watched him lean out to haul the door closed after him, knew she was going to be too late. She threw up the Beretta one-handed and snapped off a shot. The three-slug burst was too powerful to hold down; the bullets pinged off the teardrop, nowhere near. The door hinged and snapped shut with a clunk she heard clear across the street. The engine whined into instant life. She stumbled forward, tried to straighten up, tried against the numbness in her shoulder to get a clean bead on the teardrop as it took off.

Three times, she came down on the trigger. Nine shots, solid pulsing kick each time into the wounded shoulder from the two-handed firing stance she held. The teardrop slewed side to side, then straightened up, reached a corner and took it at speed, disappeared from view on a screech of abused tires. She let her arms drop, blew out a disgusted breath, and just stood there for a moment.

“Fuck it,” she said finally. Her voice sounded loud in the suddenly silent street. “Two out of three, anyone got a problem with that?”

Apparently no one did.

She walked back to the bar, pushed open the door, and leaned there in the doorway, surveying the mess. Marsalis had gotten himself upright in the midst of it, had the revolver in his hand. He jolted as she came in, then just stood there looking at her. A faint smile twitched at her lips.

“I take it there’s no one back there in the restroom.”

“You take it right.”

“Good. I’m tired.” She put the Beretta away in its shoulder holster, wincing a little at the pain the movement caused her.

“You okay?”

She looked down at her left shoulder, where the slug had torn through. Blood leaked slowly down the arm of her ruined jacket. The numbness was fading out now to a solid, thumping ache. She flexed her left hand, lifted it and grimaced a little at the pain.

“Yeah, he tagged me. Flesh wound. I’ll live.”

“You want me to take a look at it?”

“No, I don’t fucking want you to take a look at it.” She hesitated, gestured what might have been apology. Her voice softened. “RimSec are on their way. It’ll wait.”

“I heard the car. Did he get away?”

She grimaced. “Yeah. Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.”

“Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers you know.”

And then the breath seemed to come out of Marsalis as if he’d been punctured. He went to the bar, got behind it, and laid the revolver carefully down on the scarred wood.

“Thank Christ that’s over,” he said feelingly. “You need a drink.”

“No, I don’t need a fucking drink. He got away.”

Marsalis turned to survey the piled assortment of bottles behind him. His eyes found her in the mirror.

“Yeah, but look on the bright side. We’re neither of us dead, which is a big fucking improvement on what I was expecting ten minutes ago.”

She shivered a little. Shook it off. Marsalis picked out a bottle from the multitude and a couple of shot glasses from below the bar. He set the glasses up on the bartop and drizzled amber-colored liquor into them.

“Look, humor me. Least I owe you for saving my life back there is a couple of stolen whiskeys. And you look like you could use them.”

“Oh hey, thanks a lot. I save your fucking life, you tell me I look like shit?”

He made a wobbling plane of his hand, tilted it back and forth. “Bit pale, let’s say.”

“Fuck you.” She picked up the glass.

He matched her, clinked the glasses together very gently. Said very quietly, “I owe you, Sevgi.”

She sipped and swallowed. “Call it quits for the skaters. You don’t owe me a thing.”

“Oh but I do. Those guys in New York were trying to kill me as well as you. That was self-defense. This is different. Cheers.”

They both drained their glasses. Sevgi leaned on the bar opposite him and felt the warmth work its way down into her belly. He lifted the bottle, querying. She shook her head.

“Like I said, RimSec should be here any minute,” she said. “I called them back around the time your friends made their entrance. Would have stormed in a little earlier but I was hoping for some backup.”

“Well.” He looked at his hands and she saw they were trembling a little. It did something to the pit of her stomach to see that. He looked up again, grinned. “Pretty good timing anyway. How the hell did you wind up here?”

“I saw you walk out of the hotel. I was just arriving.” She nodded at the corpses on the floor between them. “Saw the teardrop with these guys pull out and go after your taxi. Took me a few seconds to flag one down myself. Then when I got down here, I saw them sit outside the bar and wait. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, what you’d be doing all the way out of town like this, if these guys were with you or not. Only called it in when I heard shots and then headed on over. Which reminds me, what the fuck were you doing down here?”

He looked away from her, into a corner. “Just looking for a fight.”

“Yeah? Looks like you found a good one.”

He said nothing.

“So who were they?”

“I don’t know.”

“You called him something.” A sudden cop sharpness spiked in her mind, ruined the moment with its objections. “Back when he went for the gun. I heard you. On-something.”

“Onbekend, yeah. It’s his name. He introduced himself while he was getting ready to kill me.” Marsalis frowned to himself. “He was a thirteen.”

“He told you that?”

“It came up in the conversation, yeah.”

She shivered again. “Bit of a coincidence.”

“Isn’t it. Speaking of which, what were you doing back at the hotel watching me?”

“Oh yeah. That.” She nodded, let the satisfaction of being right warm her into a faint smile of her own. “Came to tell you. NYPD tracked down the third skater and brought him in. He says their target was Ortiz all along. Not you.”

Marsalis blinked. “Ortiz?”

“Yeah. Seems you and me just got caught in the crossfire. Sort of puts Norton in the clear, doesn’t it. Paranoia aside, I mean.”

“Are you sure about this? I mean, did NYPD check if—”

“Marsalis, just fucking drop it.” Her weariness seemed to be building. Or maybe the whiskey had been a bad idea. Either way, her eyes were starting to ache. “Better yet, just think about apologizing, if you know how that’s done. You were fucking wrong. End of fucking story.”

“Don’t gloat, Ertekin. It’s not attractive, remember.”

And she had to laugh then, even through the crushing weight of the tiredness. In the distance, she heard a RimSec siren approaching.

“And I’m not looking to get laid,” she said.

“Yeah, you are.”

She chuckled. “No, I’m fucking not.”

“You are.”

“Am fucking not, you—”

She coughed hard, caught off guard by the abrupt violence of it. Shook her head and found her eyes flooded with sudden tears. She heard Marsalis produce a chuckle of his own.

“Well, maybe not, then. I wouldn’t want to—”

Another shiver ripped through her, stronger. In the wake of the coughing, her head was suddenly aching. She frowned and put a hand to the side of her brow.

“Sevgi?”

She looked up, gave him a puzzled smile. The shivering was still there; she hadn’t shaken it at all. The siren was louder now, but it seemed to get stuck inside her head and the noise it made there scraped. “I don’t feel too good.”

His face went mask-like with shock.

“What did he shoot you with, Sevgi?”

“I don’t—”

“Did you see the gun he shot you with?” He was around the bar, at her side as she shook her head sleepily.

“No. He got away. Like I said.”

He turned her, put his hands on either side of her face. His voice was tight and urgent. “Listen to me, Sevgi. You have to stay awake. You’re going to start feeling very tired in the next—”

“Going to?” She giggled. “Fuck, Marsalis, I could sleep for a month right here on this fucking floor.”

“No, you stay awake.” He shook her head. “Listen, they’re coming, they’ll be here. We’ll get you to the hospital. Just don’t fucking flake on me.”

“What are you talking about? I’m not going to—”

She stopped because she noticed groggily that his eyes were tear-sheened like her own. She frowned, and the skin on her face felt hot and thick and stiff, she had to force expression into it like pushing a hand into a tight new glove. She made a small, amused sound.

“Hey, Marsalis,” she slurred, trying not to. “What’s the matter? You feeling bad as well?”

The RimSec medical team took her out in a stretcher, got her in the helicopter. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened; one minute Marsalis was cradling her in the corpse-strewn shithole bar, the next they were out in the chilly air and she was looking straight up at the shrouded stars. Awareness was a flapping cloth behind her eyes, there then gone, gone then back again. She tried to crane her neck and see what was going on around her, but it was all a blur of shouts and lights and hurrying busy figures. The clatter of the helicopter rotors just added to what was now a splitting headache.

“Sevgi?”

Oh, Marsalis. There he was.

“It’s okay, sir. We’ll take it from here.”

“You tell them it’s a Haag slug.” She couldn’t work out why he was shouting, unless it was the racket of the rotor blades. Nothing seemed to connect up the way it should. She thought maybe she’d lost a lot of blood after all. “You tell them they’ve got to get the smartest antivirals they have into her, right now.”

“We know that, sir. We’ve called ahead.”

She squinted in the glare from the helicopter’s landing lights. It hurt to do it. She just about made out Marsalis’s bulk. He had one of the paramedics by the shoulders, was shaking him.

“Don’t you fucking let her die,” he was yelling. “I will kill you and everyone you care for if you let her die.”

Scuffling. The helicopter shifted about, lifted, and wheeled away. Studded lights all over the hills of the city, the rise and fall of it, the tilting horizon. As if she weren’t fucking dizzy enough already.

And she seemed to have been hanging on forever. Not just this shit, whatever it was, the whole Horkan’s Pride case. The whole fucking thing with Marsalis, the wrecked attempt to make something of it. The repeated calls to her father, the stilted, carefully polite conversations and the barrier she could no longer break through. The memories of Ethan, the battle for custody and reimplantation of Murat-to-be, the serried ranks of lawyers and their fucking waiting rooms. The struggle to hold on to faith, to go back to the mosque and find whatever it was that welled up out of Rabia’s poetry and Nazli Valipour’s writing, and Meltem’s kindly smiling patience. The search for reasons to go on that didn’t come in bottles or foil wafers.

It marched through her mind in tawdry procession, and she was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the effort. Better to just watch the sway and twinkle of the city lights below, go where the ride was taking her, listen to the motors hammering out their white-noise refrain, like lying next to a waterfall that smelled ever so slightly of oil and hot metal. The tilting night sky, sense of the sea, flat and black beyond. Not so bad, when you thought about it, not really. Not so hard.

She gave up holding on not long after that, just let go and slid away down the gradient of her own immense tiredness.