Abruptly, there was a light tripping pulse in her throat. She tried for irony. “What, you going to miss me?”
He turned to look at her now.
“This isn’t over, Sevgi.”
“It isn’t?” She felt a little crime scene macabre creep into her tone. “Well, you could have fooled me. I mean, you did just kill them all. Osborne and the other guy are all over the walls and floor up there. Merrin, you just brained. I’d say we’re pretty much done, wouldn’t you?”
“And Ren?”
Sevgi gestured, throwaway. “Pick up her up, sooner or later.”
“Yeah? Like you did after she split from Ward BioSupply?”
“Marsalis, you’re fucking up the victory parade here. Ren’s aftermath, she’s a detail at most. Merrin’s dead, that’s what counts.”
“Yeah. Suppose we should be celebrating, right?”
“That’s right, we should.”
He nodded and reached into his inmate jacket. Produced a well-made blunt and held it up for her approval.
“Want some?”
“What is it?”
“Don’t know. Someone gave it to me. In case I needed to celebrate.” He put the blunt in his mouth and crunched the ember end to life. Drew in smoke, coughed a little. “Here, try. Not bad.”
She took it and drew her own toke. The smoke went down sweet and silty, enhanced dope and an edge of something else on it. She held it in, let it go. Felt the cool languor of the hit come stealing along her limbs. All sorts of knots seemed to loosen in her head. She drew again, let it up quicker this time, and handed the blunt back to him.
“So tell me why you’re not happy,” she said.
“Because I don’t like being played, and this whole fucking thing was a setup from the start.” He smoked in gloomy quiet for a while, then held the blunt up and examined the burning end. “Fucking monster myths.”
“Eh?”
“Monsters,” he said bitterly. “Superterrorists, serial killers, criminal masterminds. It’s always the same fucking lie. Might as well be talking about werewolves and vampires, for all the difference it makes. We are the good, the civilized people. Huddled here in our cozy ring of firelight, our cities and our homes, and out there”—a wide gesture, warming to his theme now—“out in the dark, the monster prowls. The Big Evil, the Threat to the Tribe. Kill the beast and all will be well. Never mind the—”
“You going to smoke that, or not?”
He blinked. “Yeah, sorry. Here.”
“So you don’t think we’ve killed the beast?”
“Sure. We’ve killed it. So what? That doesn’t give us any answers. We still don’t know why Merrin came back from Mars, or what the point of all these deaths was.”
“Should have asked him.”
“Yeah, well. Slipped my mind at the time, you know.”
She stared at the toes of her boots. Frowned. “Look, maybe you’re right. Maybe we don’t have the answers yet. But the fact we don’t know what this was about doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be happy we’ve stopped it.”
“We didn’t stop it. I already told you, this whole thing was set up.”
“Oh come on. Set up how? Rovayo says you took Daskeen Azul totally by surprise. They weren’t expecting this to happen.”
“We were early.”
“What?”
He took the blunt from her. “We were early. They didn’t expect me to push so hard, they were maybe going to let this play out sometime next week.”
“Let what play out next week?” Exasperation slightly blurred by whatever they were smoking. “You think Merrin planned to let you kill him?”
“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “He certainly didn’t fight as hard as I expected him to. I mean, I got lucky in the end, but the whole thing felt, I don’t know. Slack. Anyway, that’s not the main point. Ren could have come in at any point and tipped the balance. She wasn’t injured; all I did was knock her on her back.”
“So? She just cut her losses, got out while she could.”
“After partnering this guy for the last four months? I don’t think so. Ren was a pro, it was stamped right through her. The way she moved, the way she stood. The way she looked at you. Someone like that doesn’t panic. Doesn’t mistake one unarmed man for a RimSec invasion.”
“Did you tell her you were a thirteen?”
He gave her a tired look.
“Well? Did you?”
“Yeah, I did, but—”
“There you are then.” She bent one knee, eased around to face him more. “That’s what panicked her. Look, Marsalis, I’ve been around you when the fighting starts, and it scares me. And I know what a thirteen really is.”
“So did she. She’d been caretaking one for the last four months, remember.”
“That’s not the same as facing one in combat. She’d have a standard human response to that, a standard—”
“Not this woman.”
“Oh, you think you’re an expert on women, do you?”
“I’m an expert on soldiers, Sevgi. And that’s what Ren was. She was someone’s soldier, the same someone who hired Merrin out of Mars. And whoever that someone was, for whatever reasons, they were getting ready to sell him out. Maybe because he’d served his purpose, maybe because we were getting too close to the truth down in Cuzco. Either way, this”—he nodded back toward the CSI buzz on the slope above them—“all this was a planned outcome. COLIN with its boot on the corpse of the beast, big smiles for the camera, congratulations all around. Fade out to a happy ending.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad to me,” she muttered.
“Really?” He plumed smoke up at the nanofiber vault. “And there I was thinking you were a cop.”
“Ex-cop. You’re confusing me with Rovayo. You really ought to try and keep the women you fuck separate in your head.”
She took the blunt from him, brusquely. He watched her smoke for a couple of moments in silence. She pretended not to notice.
“Sevgi,” he said finally. “You can’t tell me you’re happy to walk away, knowing we’ve been played.”
“Can’t I?” She met his eyes. Exploded a lungful of smoke at him. “You’re wrong, Marsalis. I can walk away from this happy, because the fucked-up psycho who cut Helena Larsen into pieces and ate her is dead. I guess for that, at least, I should thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Yeah. And maybe we don’t know why Merrin came back, and maybe we’ll never know. But I can live with that, just like I lived with more unsolved cases than you’ll ever know when I worked Homicide. You don’t always get a clean wrap. Life is messy, and so is crime. Sometimes you just got to be happy you got the bad guy, and call time on the rest.”
He turned away to look at the sea. “Well, that must be a human thing.”
“Yeah. Must be.”
“Norton’ll be pleased.”
She rolled her head sideways, blew smoke, nailed him through it with another look. “We’re not going to talk about Tom Norton.”
“Fine. We’re not going to talk about Norton, we’re not going to talk about Ren. We’re not going to talk about anything inconvenient, because you’ve got your monster and that’s all that matters. Christ, no wonder you people are in such a mess.”
Anger ignited behind her eyes.
“Us people? Fuck you, Marsalis. You know what? Us people are running a more peaceful planet now than the human race has ever fucking seen. There’s prosperity, tolerance, justice—”
“Not in Florida, that I noticed.”
“Oh, what do you want? That’s Jesusland. Globally, things are getting better. There’s no fighting in the Middle East—”
“For the time being.”
“—no starving in Africa, no war with China—”
“Only because no one has the guts to take them on.”
“No. Because we have learned that taking them on is a losing game. No one wins a war anymore. Change is slow, it has to come from within.”
“Tell that to the black lab refugees.”
“Oh, spare me the fucking pseudo-empathy. You could give a shit about some Chinese escapee you never met. I know you, Marsalis. Injustice is personal for guys like you—if it didn’t happen to you or someone you think belongs to you, then it doesn’t touch you at all. You don’t—”