Time to go.
“I’m not going to go on like this for another month,” she husked. “I’m bored, I’m sick, and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?”
Carl nodded.
“Well, it isn’t rushing anymore. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I have to go, and it looks like fucking kilometers of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game anymore.”
“Sev, are you—” Norton stalled out.
She smiled for him. “Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realize I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.”
She turned to Carl again.
“Have you got it?”
He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so fucking weary.
“Baba.” Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. “Is this going to hurt me?”
Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.
“No, canim. It’ll be like.” He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. “Like going to sleep.”
“That’s good,” she whispered breathlessly. “I could use some decent sleep.”
She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions—she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.
“Tom,” she said gently. “Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come ’round here. Don’t cry, Baba. Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt anymore.”
She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.
“You just tell me when,” he said.
She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool, and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper-dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.
Waited for what came next.
Sunlight outside.
She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets anymore. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens, crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock, and of course there’s Murat in pajamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalized and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it, and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room, yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back, and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut.
“Better get some sleep, Sevgi.”
Still aching as she stumbles into bed, still half dressed. Curtains not properly drawn, sunlight slanting in, but no fucking way that’s going to stop her sleeping, the way she feels now. No fucking way…
Sunlight outside.
Aches and pains forgotten. The long, warming slide into not worrying about anything at all.
And the room and all that was in it went away gently, like Murat closing her bedroom door.
When it was done, when her eyes slid finally closed and her breathing stopped, when Murat Ertekin bent over her, sobbing uncontrollably, and checked the pulse in her neck and nodded, when it was over and there was, finally, no more left for him to do, Carl walked away.
He left Murat Ertekin sitting with his daughter. He left Norton standing trembling like a bodyguard running a high fever but still on duty. He left and headed down the corridor alone. It felt as if he were wading in thigh-deep water. Humans brushed past, moving aside for him, cued in by the blank face and the forced gait. There was no panic, no buzz of activity in his wake—Murat knew how to bypass the machines so they wouldn’t scream for help when Sevgi’s vital signs sank to the bottom.
They would know soon enough. Norton had promised to deal with it. That was his end—Carl had done what he did best.
He walked away.
The memories scurried after him, anxious not to be left behind.
“Don’t know what’s next,” she says, smiling as the drug takes hold. “But if it feels anything like this, it’ll do.”
And then, as her eyelids begin to sag, “I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.”
“Yeah, with all that fruit and the stream running under the trees there,” he tells her, through lips that seem to have gone numb. Voice suddenly hoarse. He’s the only one talking to her now. Norton is silent and rigid at his side, no use to anyone. Murat Ertekin has sunk to his knees beside the bed, face pressed into his daughter’s hand, holding back tears with an effort that shakes him visibly as he breathes. He summons strength to keep speaking. Squeezes her hand. “Remember that, Sevgi. All that sunlight through the trees.”
She squeezes back, barely. She sniggers, a gentle rupturing of air out through her lips, barely any actual sound. “And the virgins. Don’t forget them.”
He swallows hard.
“Yeah, well you save me one of those. I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up. We all will.”
“Fucking virgins,” she murmurs sleepily. “Who needs ’em? Gotta teach ’em every fucking thing…”
And then, finally, just before the breathing stops.
“Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.”
He smashed back the doors out of the ward, along the corridors people got out of his way. He found the stairs, plunged downward, looking for a way out.
Knowing there wasn’t one.
CHAPTER 48
A fterward, the COLIN exec came to find him in the garden. Carl hadn’t said he was going there, but it wouldn’t have taken a detective to work it out. The benches around the fountain had become a standard haunt for all of them over the past few days, familiar with habitual use. It was where they went when the weight of the hospital pressed down on them, when the antiseptic-scented, nano-cleansed air grew too hard and arid to breathe. Norton slumped onto the bench beside him like someone getting home to a shared house and hitting the sofa. He stared into the sunlit splash of the fountain and said nothing at all. He’d cleaned up, but his face still looked feverish from the crying.
“Any trouble?” Carl asked him.
> Norton shook his head numbly. His voice came out mechanical. “They’re making some noise. The COLIN mandate should cover it. Ertekin’s talking to them.”
“So we’re free to go.”
“Free to…?” The exec’s brow furrowed, uncomprehending. “You’ve always been free to go, Marsalis.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
Norton swallowed. “Listen, there’s the funeral. Arrangements. I don’t know if—”
“I’m not interested in what they do with her corpse. I’m going to find Onbekend. Are you going to help me?”
“Marsalis, listen—”
“It’s a simple question, Norton. You watched her die in there. What are you going to do about it?”
The COLIN exec drew a shuddering breath. “You think killing Onbekend is going to make things better? You think that’ll bring her back?”
Carl stared at him. “I’m going to assume that’s rhetorical.”
“Haven’t you had enough yet?”
“Enough of what?”
“Enough of killing whatever you can get your fucking hands on.” Norton came off the bench, stood over him. The words hissed out like vented poison gas. “You just took Sevgi’s life in there, and all you can think of to do is go look for someone else to kill? Is that all you fucking know how to do?”
Across the gardens, heads turned.
“Sit down,” Carl said grimly. “Before I break your fucking neck for you.”
Norton grinned hard. He sank onto his haunches, brought his face level with Carl’s.
“You want to break my fucking neck.” He gestured up. “Here it is, my friend. Right fucking here.”
He meant it. Carl closed his eyes and sighed. Opened them and looked at Norton again, nodded slowly.
“All right.” He cleared his throat. “There are two ways to look at this, my friend. See, we can do the civilized, feminized, constructive thing and work a long by-the-book investigation that may or may not lead us eventually back to Manco Bambarén and the altiplano and Onbekend. Or we can take your COLIN authorization and a little hardware, and we can fly down there and set fire to Manco’s machine.”
Norton levered himself upright again. He shook his head. “And you think that’s going to make him cave in? Just like that?”
“Onbekend is a thirteen.” Carl wondered fleetingly if he shouldn’t try harder with Norton, lever his voice up out of the dead tone he could hear in it. “Manco Bambarén may have hired him, or he may just be doing business with the people who did, but whatever the connection is, it’s not blood the way it was with Merrin. Manco’s going to see Onbekend and me as two of a kind, monsters he can play off against each other for whatever best result there is. He gave me Nevant three years ago to get me off his back, and he’ll give me Onbekend for the same reason. In the end, he’s a businessman, and he’ll do what’s good for business. If we make it bad enough for business to hold out, then he’ll cave in.”
“We?”
“Slip of the tongue. I’m going anyway. You can come with me or not, as your nonvariant conscience sees fit. Be easier for me if you did, but if you don’t, well.” Carl shrugged. “I promised Gutierrez I’d go back to Mars to kill him, and I meant it. The altiplano’s a lot easier gig than that.”
“I could stop you.”
“No, you couldn’t. First sign of trouble from you, I’m on an UNGLA bounce out of here. They practically tried to drag me onto the shuttle last week. They’ll jump at the chance if I call them. Then I’ll just double back to Peru on my own ticket.”
“COLIN could still make your life very tough down there.”
“Yeah, they usually do. Occupational hazard. It never stopped me before.”
“Hard man, huh?”
“Thirteen.” Carl looked at him levelly. “Norton, this is what’s wired into me, it’s what my body chemistry’s good for. I am going to build a memorial to Sevgi Ertekin out of Onbekend’s blood, and I will cut down anyone who gets in my way. Including you, if you make me.”
Norton sank back onto the bench.
“You think that’s just you?” he muttered. “You think we don’t all feel that way right now?”
“I wouldn’t know. But feeling and doing are two very different things. In fact, there’s a guy back on Mars called Sutherland who tells me humans have built their entire civilization in the gap between the two. I wouldn’t know about that, either. What I do know is that an hour ago in there”—Carl gestured toward the hospital—“Murat Ertekin felt he wanted to put his daughter out of her misery. But he couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. I won’t judge him for that, just like I won’t judge you for not coming with me, if that’s the choice you make. Maybe this stuff just isn’t wired into you people as deep. That’s what they told us at Osprey, anyway. That we were special because we were able to do what the society that created us no longer had the stomach for.”
“Right,” Norton said bitterly. “Believe everything the recruiting poster says, why don’t you.”
“I didn’t say I did, I said that’s what they told us. I don’t necessarily think they were right. This much is true—it certainly didn’t work out well, not for us or for you people.” Carl sighed. “Look, I don’t know, Norton. Maybe the fact that you don’t have the stomach for single-minded slaughter anymore, the fact that you’re forgetting how to do it—maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it makes you a better human being than me, a better member of society, a better man even. I wouldn’t know, and I don’t care because for me it isn’t relevant. I am going to destroy Onbekend, I am going to destroy anyone who stands in my way. Now, are you coming with me or not?”
In the hotel, he found mundane things to do. The last four days of Sevgi’s life had frozen his own existence in its tracks; he’d done nothing awake but sit by her and wait. He’d been in the same set of clothes since the night she was shot, and even the Marstech fabrics were starting to look shabby. He bundled them up and sent them for cleaning. Ordered something similar from the hotel catalog and wore it out into the street when he went looking for a phone. He supposed that he could have gotten phones easily enough from the hotel along with the clothing, but a habitual caution stopped him. And besides, he needed to walk. Away from or toward what, he wasn’t quite sure, but the need sat in the pit of his empty stomach like tiny bubbles, like frustration rising.
“Bambarén’s cousin’s a bust,” Norton had told him on their way back into town. The COLIN exec slumped in the back of the autocab as if broken at the joints. “So if you’re looking for a way in, that isn’t it. We got a name, Suerte Ferrer, street hook Maldición, string of small-time stuff on the fringes of the Jesusland familias. Did his three years in South Florida for gang-related, but he’s out right now and he’s dropped right off the scope.”
“The n-djinns can’t find him?”
“He’s gone to ground somewhere in the Republic, and I can’t get an n-djinn search in there without causing a major diplomatic incident. We’re not exactly flavor of the month since we sprung you from South Florida State.”
“You don’t think you can get local PD to cooperate?”
“Which local PD?” Norton stared emptily out of the window. “As far as our information goes, Ferrer could be in any of about a dozen different states. And besides, Jesusland PD don’t have the budget to run their own n-djinns.”
“So they hire one out of the Rim.”
“Yeah, they do that. But you’re talking about major expenditure, and half these departments are struggling just to make payroll and keep their tactical equipment up to date. You’re looking at decades of slash-and-burn tax cuts in public services across the board. There is no way, in that climate, I can start ringing up senior detectives across the Republic and asking them to buy n-djinn time to track down some minor-league gangbanger they’ve never heard of with no warrant out and no suspicion of anything other than being related to someone we don’t like.”
Carl nodded. Since leaving the hospital, he’d found himself thi
nking with a faintly adrenalized clarity that was like a synadrive hit. Sevgi was gone now, shelved in some space he could access later when he’d need the rage, and in her absence he was serene with vectored purpose. He looked back down the chain of association to Ferrer and saw the angle he needed.
“Norton.”
The COLIN exec grunted.
“How easy would it be for you to get access to unreleased Marstech?”
On the northern fringes of Chinatown, more or less at random, he found an unassuming frontage with the simple words clean phone picked out on the glass in green LCLS lozenges. He went inside and bought a pack of one-shot audio-phones, walked out again and found himself standing in the cold evening air, abruptly alone. In the time he’d been in the shop, everyone else seemed to have suddenly found pressing reasons to get off the street. He suffered an overpowering sense of unreality, and a sudden urge of his own to go back into the shop and see if the woman who’d served him had also disappeared, or had maybe ceded her place behind the counter to a grinning Elena Aguirre.
He grimaced and glanced around, picked out Telegraph Hill and the blunt finger of the Coit Tower on the skyline. He started walking toward it. The smoky evening light darkened, and lights began to glimmer on across the vistas of the city. He reached Columbus Avenue, and it was as if the city had suddenly jerked back to life around him. Teardrops zipped past in both directions, the muted chunter of their motors filling his ears. He joined other human beings at the crosswalk, waited with them for a space in the traffic flow, hurried with them when it came, across to Washington Square. More life here, more lives being lived. There was a softball match just packing up in the center of the grass, people headed home from under the spread of the trees. A tall, gaunt man dressed in ragged black stopped him and held out a begging bowl in hands that spasmed and shook. There was a sign in Chinese characters pinned to his shirt. Carl shot him a standard-issue get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way look, but it didn’t work.
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