They sat in silence for a while. She groped for his hand. He gave it to her.
“Why’d you come back, Carl?” she asked him softly.
He made a crooked grin in the gloom. “Listen to what the Earth First people are telling you, Sevgi. Mars is a shithole.”
“But you were free there.” She let go of his hand, gestured weakly. “You must have known there was a risk you’d be interned when you got back. It’s pure luck they didn’t put you straight into the tracts.”
“Not quite. I bought some machine time before all this went down, before I put the Delaney sting together. I asked the n-djinn to look at the way lottery winners were treated when they got back, then extrapolate for a thirteen. The machine gave me a seventy—thirty chance they’d work some kind of special exemption in view of my celebrity status.” He shrugged. “Pretty good odds.”
“And what if the n-djinn got it wrong?” She craned forward in the bed, halfway to sitting up. The pale gold light fell on her face. Eyes intense and burning into his. “What if they just went ahead and interned your ass?”
Another shrug, another crooked grin. “Then I guess I would have had to break out and run. Just like all the other saps.”
She lay back, puffing a little from the effort.
“I don’t believe you,” she said when she’d gotten her breath back. “All that risk, just because Mars is a shithole? No way. You could have had the cash instead. Milked Delaney for pretty much anything you wanted out there. Set yourself up. Come on, Carl. Why’d you really come back?”
He hesitated. “It’s not that important, Sevgi.”
“It is to me.”
Footsteps down the corridor outside. A murmur of voices, receding. He sighed.
“Sutherland,” he said.
“Your sensei.”
“Yeah.” He lifted his hands on his lap, trying to frame it for himself. “See, there’s a point you get to with tanindo. A level where it stops being about how to do it, becomes all about why. Why you’re practicing, why you’re learning. Why you’re living. And I couldn’t get there.”
“You didn’t know why?” She puffed a breathless laugh. “Hey, welcome to the club. You think any of us know why we’re doing this shit?”
Carl let an echo of her amusement trace itself onto his lips, but absently. He stared across the shadowed bed and her form beneath the sheet as if it were a landscape.
“Sutherland says it’s easier for basic humans,” he said distantly. “You people build better metaphors, believe in them more deeply. He said I’d have to find something else. And until I did, I was blocked.”
“Sutherland’s a thirteen, too, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So how come he managed it?”
Carl nodded. “Exactly. He gave me a path. A functional substitute for belief.”
“And that was?”
“He told me to make a list, keep it to myself, and focus on it. Eleven things I wanted to do at some point in what was left of my life. Things it was important for me to do, things that mattered.”
“You didn’t go for the round dozen?”
“The number’s not important. Eleven, twelve, nine, doesn’t matter. Best not to make too long a list, it defeats the point of the exercise, but otherwise you just pick a number and make your list. I chose eleven.” He hesitated again, looked at her almost apologetically. “Nine of those, I realized I needed to be on Earth to do.”
The hospital quiet closed in again. He saw in the gloom how she turned to look out the window.
“Have you done them all yet?” she asked quietly.
“No. Not yet.” He cleared his throat, frowned. “But I’m getting through them. And it does work. Sutherland was right.”
For a few moments, she seemed not to be listening, seemed to have lost herself in the darkness outside the glass. Then, dry slide of her hair on the pillow, her head switched around to face him again.
“You want to hear a secret of mine?”
“Sure.”
“Three years ago, I planned to have someone murdered.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, I know. Everyone thinks about killing someone every now and then. But this was for real. I sat down and I mapped it out. I knew people back then, cops and ex-cops who owed me. There was this accidental-killing incident back when I was a patrol officer, only a couple of years in, all wide-eyed and innocent.” She coughed a little. “Ah, it’s a long story, not going to bore you with the details. Just this interrogation that went over the line one time. I was there, saw it go down. Guess you’d say I was complicit. Internal Affairs were certainly looking to paint it that way. Pressure came down, they wanted me to roll over in return for immunity. But they couldn’t prove I was in the room, and I didn’t leak. Stuck at that, half their case collapsed. So nine years later, that’s three years ago like I was telling you, there were guys walking around New York with a badge they owed me for. Other guys who didn’t go to jail when they should have. I could have done it, Carl. I could have set it in motion.”
She started coughing again. He lifted her, held a tissue to her lips until she cleared the shit that was sitting in her lungs, cleaned her mouth after. He fed her sips of water, laid her gently back down. Wiped the sweat of effort from her brow with another tissue, waited while her breathing stabilized again.
He leaned in closer. “So who’d you want to kill?”
“Amy fucking Westhoff,” she said bitterly. “Fucking bitch who killed Ethan.”
“You told me the SWATs took Ethan down.”
“Yeah. But someone had to leak this shit, someone had to find out what Ethan was and notify UNGLA liaison up at City Hall. You remember I told you in Istanbul, Ethan was seeing this cheerleader blonde in Datacrime?”
“Vaguely.”
“That was Westhoff. She showed up in the corridor outside my office the week Ethan moved in with me, screaming abuse, telling me I didn’t know what I was getting into. Saying she’d fuck with my life and Ethan’s if I didn’t back off.”
“You think she knew what he was?”
“I don’t know. Not then, I don’t think. If she’d known, I think she would have used it on him when he tried to move out.”
“Maybe she did, and he didn’t tell you.”
That stopped her, pinned her to a long pause while she thought about it. He tilted his head, trying to work a kink out of his neck.
“I don’t believe she knew back then,” Sevgi said finally. “Maybe she had her suspicions on and off. I think I did, too, if I’m honest about it, even before Keegan showed up and blew the whole thing. You know, if you’re a woman, it’s one of those things you can’t help thinking about sometimes. I mean, there’s so much scare stuff out there. All the warnings, all the sexy panic every time someone gets out of Cimarron or Tanana. The Truth About Thirteens, how to recognize one, what you guys are supposed to be like, how you’d act that’s different from a regular guy. Warning signs, free phone snitch numbers, public information postings, and then the fucking media aftermath every time. You know, I saw a woman’s magazine article once while I was waiting to see my lawyer. ‘Are You Sleeping with a Thirteen—Thirteen Telltale Signs That Let You Know.’ Fucking bullshit like that.”
She twitched about in the bed with the force of her frustration. Her breath came hoarse and agitated. Voice impatient.
“Anyway, whether she knew then or not, I know damn well she was keeping tabs on Ethan. And then, when we fucked up, when we got complacent after Keegan, she had her chance.”
“She knew about the pregnancy?”
“Yeah, well, we weren’t hiding that. I started showing seriously at three months, went on reduced duties at four. Of course she knew, everybody knew by then.” Sevgi stopped, waited until her breathing evened out again. “That wasn’t it. When we got pregnant, something in Ethan shifted. That was when he started trying to track down his genetic mother. He’d always talked about doing it, all this stuff about wanting to know who his real mother was, but with the baby—”