Black Man / Thirteen

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

“I am different.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah, I’m smarter.”

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

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

Fucking idiot.

“So he went down fighting?”

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

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

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

“Okay, not someone like me.”

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

She clenched her teeth.

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

She had to swallow.

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

“He was a cop?”

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

“Apart from faking his ID, presumably.”

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

“Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.”

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

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

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

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

She sca

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

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

“And I was six months’ pregnant.”

CHAPTER 23

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It wasn’t fucking pla

“You knew what he was?”

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