Black Man / Thirteen

CHAPTER 4

Sevgi Ertekin awoke to the curious conviction that it was raining in dirty gray sheets all over the city.

In June?

She blinked. Somewhere outside the open window of the apartment, she heard a siren calling her. Intimate and nostalgic as the sound of the ezan she still missed from the old neighborhood, but freighted with an adrenaline significance the prayer call would never match. Rusted professional reflex surfaced in her, then rolled over and sank as memory came aboard. Not her call anymore. In any case, the melancholy caught-breath cry of the cop car, wherever it was, was distant. Noises of commerce from the street market six floors below almost drowned it out. There was shouting, mostly good-humored, and music from stall-mounted sound systems, frenetic neo-arabesque that she was in no mood for currently. The day had started without her.

Against her own better judgment, she turned over to face the window. Glare from the sun hit her in the face and drove her to squinting. The varipolara drapes billowed in the breeze from outside, incandescent with morning light. It appeared she’d forgotten to remote them down to opaque again. An empty bottle of Jameson’s was partly hidden where the curtain hem brushed the floor, someone—someone, yeah, right, Sev, who would that be?—had rolled it away across the polished wooden boards of the living room when it had nothing left to offer. The same living room where she’d apparently slept fully clothed on the couch. A moment’s groggy reflection brought in corroborative memory. She’d sat there after the party broke up, and she’d killed the rest of the bottle. Vague recollection of talking quietly to herself, the smoky warmth of the whiskey as it went down. She’d been thinking all the time, she’d just have one more, she’d just have one more, then she’d get up and—

She hadn’t gotten up. She’d passed out.

This is new, Sev. Usually, you make it to a bed.

She made a convulsive effort and heaved herself fully into a sitting position, then wished she hadn’t moved quite so rapidly. The contents of her head seemed to shift on some kind of internal stalk. A long wave of nausea rolled through her, and her clothing felt suddenly like restraints. She’d lost her boots at some point—they were keeled over on opposite sides of the room, about as far apart as the dimensions allowed—but shirt and pants remained. She had a vague memory of rolling hilariously about on her back after everyone was gone, trying to tug off the boots and then the socks. In this at least, it seemed she’d succeeded, but obviously the rest had defeated her.

And now the shirt was rucked up and bunched under her arms, and her profiler cups had peeled and worked loose from her breasts as she tossed and turned. One seemed to have ended up in her armpit; the other was gone altogether. Some way below her waist, her pants had somehow twisted about until they were no longer loose; her guts were similarly tight. Her bladder was uncomfortably full, and her head was settling to a steady throb.

And it’s raining.

She looked up, and a sudden, raw anger took hold as she traced the low hissing to its real source. In one corner of the room, the ancient JVC entertainment deck was still on. Whatever chip was in had played to its conclusion, and the temperamental default system had failed to return to bluescreen. The monitor showed a snowdance of static instead and the gentle hiss of it filled up the base of hearing, below the sounds of the city outside. Filled up everything like—

Her mouth tightened. She knew what chip she’d been watching. She couldn’t remember, but she knew.

It’s not fucking raining, all right.

She lurched to her feet and stabbed the deck to silence. For a moment then she stood in her apartment as if it weren’t her own, as if she’d broken in to steal something. She felt the steady flog of her pulse in her throat and she knew she was going to cry.

She shook her head instead, violently, trading the tears for an intense, sonar-pulsing pain. Stumbled through the bedroom to the en suite, fingers pressing to the ache. There was a plastic bottle of generic headache pills on the shelf there, and beside it a foil of syn. Or more precisely, k37 synadrive—military-issue superfunction capsules, her share of a black-market trickle into NYPD way back when and several times the strength of anything the street liked to call syn. She’d used the caps a handful of times before and found them scarily effective—they stimulated synaptic response and physical coordination, sidelined pretty much everything else, and they did it fast. Sevgi wavered for a moment, realized she had things to do today, even if she couldn’t remember right now exactly what they were.

Whole fucking city self-medicates these days anyway, Sev. Get over it.

She pressed a couple of the milissue capsules out of the foil and was about to dry-swallow them when a fragment of peripheral vision caught up with her.

She strode back into the bedroom.

“Hey.”

The girl in the bed couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen. Blinking awake, she seemed even younger, but the body beneath the single sheet was too full for the waif-like look. She sat up, and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had gotten too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.

“Who told you you could sleep in here?”

The girl blinked again. “You did.”

“Oh.” Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. “Well, get your stuff together and go home. Party’s over.”

She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully, and then, as if to emphasize her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.

When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission, and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day-old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.

Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone—as used by real MarsTrip perso