She coughed hard, caught off guard by the abrupt violence of it. Shook her head and found her eyes flooded with sudden tears. She heard Marsalis produce a chuckle of his own.
“Well, maybe not, then. I wouldn’t want to—”
Another shiver ripped through her, stronger. In the wake of the coughing, her head was suddenly aching. She frowned and put a hand to the side of her brow.
“Sevgi?”
She looked up, gave him a puzzled smile. The shivering was still there; she hadn’t shaken it at all. The siren was louder now, but it seemed to get stuck inside her head and the noise it made there scraped. “I don’t feel too good.”
His face went mask-like with shock.
“What did he shoot you with, Sevgi?”
“I don’t—”
“Did you see the gun he shot you with?” He was around the bar, at her side as she shook her head sleepily.
“No. He got away. Like I said.”
He turned her, put his hands on either side of her face. His voice was tight and urgent. “Listen to me, Sevgi. You have to stay awake. You’re going to start feeling very tired in the next—”
“Going to?” She giggled. “Fuck, Marsalis, I could sleep for a month right here on this fucking floor.”
“No, you stay awake.” He shook her head. “Listen, they’re coming, they’ll be here. We’ll get you to the hospital. Just don’t fucking flake on me.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not going to—”
She stopped because she noticed groggily that his eyes were tear-sheened like her own. She frowned, and the skin on her face felt hot and thick and stiff, she had to force expression into it like pushing a hand into a tight new glove. She made a small, amused sound.
“Hey, Marsalis,” she slurred, trying not to. “What’s the matter? You feeling bad as well?”
The RimSec medical team took her out in a stretcher, got her in the helicopter. She wasn’t quite sure how that had happened; one minute Marsalis was cradling her in the corpse-strewn shithole bar, the next they were out in the chilly air and she was looking straight up at the shrouded stars. Awareness was a flapping cloth behind her eyes, there then gone, gone then back again. She tried to crane her neck and see what was going on around her, but it was all a blur of shouts and lights and hurrying busy figures. The clatter of the helicopter rotors just added to what was now a splitting headache.
“Sevgi?”
Oh, Marsalis. There he was.
“It’s okay, sir. We’ll take it from here.”
“You tell them it’s a Haag slug.” She couldn’t work out why he was shouting, unless it was the racket of the rotor blades. Nothing seemed to connect up the way it should. She thought maybe she’d lost a lot of blood after all. “You tell them they’ve got to get the smartest antivirals they have into her, right now.”
“We know that, sir. We’ve called ahead.”
She squinted in the glare from the helicopter’s landing lights. It hurt to do it. She just about made out Marsalis’s bulk. He had one of the paramedics by the shoulders, was shaking him.
“Don’t you fucking let her die,” he was yelling. “I will kill you and everyone you care for if you let her die.”
Scuffling. The helicopter shifted about, lifted, and wheeled away. Studded lights all over the hills of the city, the rise and fall of it, the tilting horizon. As if she weren’t fucking dizzy enough already.
And she seemed to have been hanging on forever. Not just this shit, whatever it was, the whole Horkan’s Pride case. The whole fucking thing with Marsalis, the wrecked attempt to make something of it. The repeated calls to her father, the stilted, carefully polite conversations and the barrier she could no longer break through. The memories of Ethan, the battle for custody and reimplantation of Murat-to-be, the serried ranks of lawyers and their fucking waiting rooms. The struggle to hold on to faith, to go back to the mosque and find whatever it was that welled up out of Rabia’s poetry and Nazli Valipour’s writing, and Meltem’s kindly smiling patience. The search for reasons to go on that didn’t come in bottles or foil wafers.
It marched through her mind in tawdry procession, and she was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the effort. Better to just watch the sway and twinkle of the city lights below, go where the ride was taking her, listen to the motors hammering out their white-noise refrain, like lying next to a waterfall that smelled ever so slightly of oil and hot metal. The tilting night sky, sense of the sea, flat and black beyond. Not so bad, when you thought about it, not really. Not so hard.
She gave up holding on not long after that, just let go and slid away down the gradient of her own immense tiredness.
part V. HOME TO ROOST
The problems we address here are general to humanity. No amount of privileged withdrawal, segregation, or hierarchical exclusion will serve to insulate any of us from a process of fallout that has already begun. If we are arrogant, if we fail to acknowledge this generality and to act on it while there is still time—then the price that we pay for our failure will be horrific, and it will be levied on us all.
CHAPTER 43
Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing color into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of gray toward a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the black man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse for human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical center knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anesthetic—the slow, sawtoothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.
Out on Highway 101, the occasional brushing sound of nighttime traffic was building to a steady background murmur. Birdsong made self-important, twittering aural counterpoint, like handfuls of brightly colored pebbles tossed continually onto a broad gray conveyor belt. Human voices splashed between with increasing strength and frequency, feet crunched in gravel like a grave being dug. Day stormed the walls Carl had built around himself in the cold hours, smashed and battered down the simplicity of his vigil with human detail. He looked up out of the wreckage with a quiet and implacable hatred for everything he could see and hear.
“Happy now?”
Norton stood in front of him, not in reach. He’d slept in his clothes somewhere; even the Marstech jeans were creased.
He seemed to be genuinely waiting for an answer.
“No. You?”
There was a stone bench on the other side of the path, twin to the one Carl was using. Norton lowered himself onto it.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” he said woodenly. “I’m going to have you sent back to South Florida State. I’m going to have you sent to Cimarron or Tanana for the rest of your fucking life.”
By the look of him, he’d been crying. Carl felt a brief stab of envy.
“How is she?” he asked.
“You’re joking, of course. You fuck.”
The mesh pounded up out of his desolation. He lifted a shaky, loose-fingered hand, pointed it. “Don’t push me, Norton. I could do with killing something right now, and it might as well be you.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.” Norton stared down at his own hands as if assessing their suitability for the task. “But that isn’t going to help Sevgi.”
“Nothing’s going to help Sevgi, you fucking prick!” There was a brutal pleasure somewhere in the snapped words, like biting down on a mouth ulcer until it split and bled. “Didn’t they tell you? It’s a Haag slug.”