Black Man / Thirteen

“You want?”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

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

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

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

“Fucking Jesusland,” she slurred.

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

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

“Believe what?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sorry,” she muttered after a while.

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

“Yeah, well.” She sipped her drink. “Nothing much to tell. We never heard anything. Come September, we started relaxing again. I think maybe that was how we ended up pregnant, you know. I mean, not there and then, but that was the begi

“And they took it away from you.”

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

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

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

“Don’t look at me. I’m freelance.”

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

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

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

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

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

Someone like me would have done his killing himself.

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

Hey, Marsalis. How you been?

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

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