“I read a lot of history,” said the black woman. “Way I see it, you don’t know anything about the past, you got no future.”
They aspirate her lungs, try to bring her breathing back up. She just lies there while they do it, before, during, and after, puddled on the bed in her own lack of strength. The whole process feels like the kicks of a midterm pregnancy, but higher up and much more frequent, as if in tiny, hysterical rage.
Memory brings tears, but they leak out of her eyes so slowly she runs out of actual feeling before they stop. She doesn’t have a lot of fluid to spare.
Her mouth is parched. Her skin is papery dry.
Her hands and feet feel swollen and increasingly numb.
When the endorphins they give her wear thin, she can track the passage of her urine by the tiny scraping pains it makes on its way to the catheter.
Her stomach aches from emptiness. She feels sick to its pit.
When the endorphins come on, it feels like going back to the garden, or the nighttime ride of the ferries across the Bosphorus to the Asian side. Black water and merry city lights. She hallucinates once, very clearly, coming into the dock at Kadiköy and seeing Marsalis waiting for her there. Dark and quiet under the LCLS overheads.
Reaching out his hand.
Surfacing from the dosage is pain, dragging her back like rusty wires, and sudden, sick-making fear as she remembers where she is. Lying drained, and seeping slowly in and out of bags. Stale sheets and the gaunt sentinels of the machines around her. And through it all, a racking, overarching, frustrated fury with the body she’s still wired and tied and bedded down into.
He tried to work.
Sevgi was out on the swells of endorphin a lot of the time, drifting there in something that approximated peace. He found he could step out and leave her in these periods, and he conversed with Norton in low tones, sitting in waiting rooms, or leaned against walls in the night-quiet hospital corridors.
“I remembered something this afternoon,” he told the COLIN exec. “Sitting in there, shit going through my head. When Sevgi and I went to talk to Manco Bambarén, he recognized this jacket.”
Norton peered at the arm Carl held out to him, the orange chevrons flashing along the sleeve.
“Yeah? Standard Republican jail wear, I guess any criminal in the Western Hemisphere’s got to know what that looks like.”
“It’s not quite standard.” Carl twisted to show Norton the lettering on the back. The COLIN exec shrugged.
“Sigma. Right. You know how many prison contracts those guys have in Jesusland? They’ve got to be the second or third biggest corporate player the incarceration industry has. They’re even bidding on stuff out here on the coast these days.”
“Yeah, but Manco told me he had a cousin who did time specifically in South Florida State. Now, maybe we can’t hack the datafog around Isabela Gayoso so easily, but we ought to be able to chase prison records and maybe dig this guy up. Maybe he’ll tell us something we can use.”
Norton nodded and rubbed at his eyes. “All right, we can look. God knows I could use the distraction right now. You get a name?”
“No. Bambarén, maybe, but I doubt it. The way Manco was talking, this wasn’t anyone that close to home.”
“And we don’t know when he did time?”
“No, but I’d guess recently. Sigma haven’t held the SFS contract more than five or six years max. Sigma jacket, you’ve got to be looking at that time frame.”
“Or Bambarén misremembered, and his cousin did time in some other Sigma joint, somewhere else in the Republic.”
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Manco Bambarén’s memory. Those guys aren’t big on forgive and forget, especially not when it’s down to family.”
“All right, leave it with me.” Norton glanced back down the corridor toward Sevgi’s room. “Listen, I’ve been up since yesterday morning. I’ve got to get some sleep. Can you stay with her?”
“Sure. That’s why I’m here.”
Norton’s gaze tightened on his face. “You call me if anything—”
“Yeah. I’ll call you. Go get some rest.”
For just a moment, something indefinable passed between the two of them in the dimly lit width of the corridor. Then Norton nodded, clamped his mouth tight, and headed away down the corridor.
Carl watched him go with folded arms.
Later, sitting by her bed in the bluish gloom of the night-lights, flanked by the quiet machines, he thought he felt Elena Aguirre slip silently into the room behind him. He didn’t turn around. He went on watching Sevgi’s sallow, washed-out face on the pillow, the barely perceptible rise and fall of her breathing beneath the sheet. Now he thought Aguirre was probably close enough to put a cool hand on the back of his neck.
“Wondered when you’d show up,” he said quietly.
Sevgi washed awake, alone, left beached by the receding tide of the endorphins, and she knew with an odd clarity that it was time. The once vertiginous terror was gone, had collapsed in on itself for lack of energy to sustain it. She was, finally, more weary, more miserably angry, and more in pain than she was scared.
It was what she’d been waiting for.
Time to go.
Outside the window of her room, morning was trying to get in. Soft slant of sunlight through the gap in the quaint hand-pull curtains. Waiting between endorphin surges for night to drag itself out the door had seemed like an aching, gritty forever. She lay there for a while longer, watching the hot patch of light creep onto the bed at her feet and thinking, because she wanted to be sure.
When the door opened and Carl Marsalis stepped into the room, the decision was as solid in her head as it had been when she woke.
“Hi there,” he said softly. “Just been up the hall for a shower.”
“Lucky fucking bastard,” she said throatily, and was dismayed at how deep, how bitter her envy of that simple pleasure really was. It made her feelings over Rovayo look trivial by comparison.
Time to go.
He smiled at her, maybe hadn’t caught the edge in her voice, maybe had and let it go.
“Can I get you anything?” he asked.
The same question he asked every time. She held his gaze and mustered a firm nod.
“Yeah, you can. Call my father and Tom in here, will you?”
The smile flickered and blew out on his face. He stood absolutely still for a moment, looking down at her. Then he nodded and slipped out.
As soon as he was gone, her pulse began to pound, up through her throat and in her temples. It felt like the first couple of times she ever had to draw her weapon as a patrol officer, the sudden, tilting comprehension that came with a street situation about to go bad. The terror of the last decaying seconds, the taste of irrevocable commitment.
But by the time he came back with the other two, she had it locked down.
“I’ve had enough,” she told them, voice a dried-up whisper scarcely louder in the room than it was in her own head. “This is it.”
None of them spoke. It wasn’t like this was a surprise.
“Baba, I know you’d do this for me if you could. Tom, I know you would, too. I chose Carl because he can, that’s all.”
She swallowed painfully. Waited for the ache it made to subside. Hiss-click of the machines around her across the silence. Outside in the corridor, the hospital’s working day was just getting under way.
“They’ve told me they can keep me going like this for at least another month. Baba, is that true?”
Murat bowed his head. He made a trapped sound, somewhere between throat and chest. He jerked a nod. Tears fell off his eyes onto the sheets. She found suddenly, oddly, that she felt worse for him than she did for herself. Abruptly, she realized that the fear in her was almost gone, squeezed out of the frame with pain and tiredness and straightforward irritation with it all.
Time to go.