Black Man / Thirteen

He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.

“Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.”

She shook her head. “Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humor. They would have just defaced it.”

“And you?”

“It’s not my country,” she said flatly.

At a second-story balcony ahead, an old man leaned amid pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.

“So did you get anything useful out of Nevant?” He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.

“I’m not sure,” he said carefully. “I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambarén.”

“In Peru?”

“Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.”

“It’s your ground, too, isn’t it?” He thought she smiled. “Pla

“If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it awhile ago.”

“I know,” she said. “I was joking.”

“Oh.”

They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred meters farther on, the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.

“That cuff,” she said as they spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. “You knew Nevant was wearing it.”

“Never really thought about it.” He thought about it. “Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.”

“It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.”

“Well, those things are slow acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have gotten my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stefan would have buried that knife in my spine.” He paused, reviewing the fight. “Or my eye.”

“That’s not what I mean.” There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.

“Well, what do you mean then?”

“I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her Are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the pavement along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.

“Look,” he said experimentally. “First of all, Stefan Nevant wasn’t pla

“But that’s fucking stupid,” she flared.

“Is it?” This time he stopped on the pavement, turned toward her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-soled boots she wore them with. “I put Nevant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or an UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometers, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot—which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment—you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.”

“Worth dying for?”

“You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.”

“I meant you might have killed him.”

Carl shrugged. “I might. You’re also forgetting that Nevant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.”

She locked her gaze on his.

“Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t gotten there first?”

He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand molded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment house entryway.

It was like the mesh, a rising tide in blood and muscle. He tore at her clothing, unseamed the canvas jeans and forced them down to her knees, got his hand inside the slip of lace cotton she wore beneath. She gasped at the touch, already moist. With his other hand, he pushed up the sweater, forced it over the swell of the breasts, and fingered loose one of the profiler cups. The breast sagged into his hand. He buried his face in the flesh, as if drinking water out of his cupped palm. His mouth slurped up the nipple, sucked it to the roof of his mouth. In the tight trap of her cotton panties and i

Four months in Florida jails, nothing female you could touch. He felt himself sliding down the long hard slope of it, made his mouth unfasten from her breast with an effort of will, left the fingers of his other hand where they were and squatted, trying to pull one of her boots off. She saw what he was trying to do, laughed again, shook her leg impatiently up and down, stamping the air, angling her foot to get it loose. No luck—the boot stayed on. He caught a glancing blow from her knee in the side of his face. Grunted and shook his head.

“Oh shit, I’m sorry.” She stopped, bent toward him. His fingers slipped loose, damp. “Look, stop, wait.”

She twisted away, something that was almost judo, pushed him upright and against the wall in her place. She tore her jacket off arm by arm, stowed it in a wad at his feet, and dropped to her knees on it. Wide, split-mouth grin up at him, and then she bent over the head of his prick and sucked it in. Her curled fingers slipped up and down the shaft. Her mouth moved. His hands slapped flat on the shadowed wall at his sides, crooked as if he could claw into the evercrete with his nails. He thought then that was it, grabbed the moment, but something had hitched up inside him, would not let go. The orgasm subsided, rocked away, just out of reach.