“I’m not going to go on like this for another month,” she husked. “I’m bored, I’m sick, and I’m tired. Carl, I told you this felt like a wall rushing at me?”
Carl nodded.
“Well, it isn’t rushing anymore. It’s all slowed down to sludge. I’m sitting here looking at where I have to go, and it looks like fucking kilometers of hard ground to crawl on my hands and fucking knees. I won’t do that. I don’t want to play this fucking game anymore.”
“Sev, are you—” Norton stalled out.
She smiled for him. “Yeah, I’m sure. Been thinking it through for long enough. I’m tired, Tom. I’m tired of spending half my time stoned, and the other half waking up in pain to realize I’m still not fucking dead, that I’ve still got that part to go. It’s time to just get on with it, just get it done.”
She turned to Carl again.
“Have you got it?”
He took out the slippery white packet and held it out to her. Light from the brightening morning outside came in and glimmered on the slick plastic covering. Letting go of the light was going to be the hardest thing. Sunlight broke in and danced about the room when they pulled the curtains each morning, and it was almost worth not quite being dead each morning because of it. It was what she clung to as she rode the long troughs and swells of dreaming and back-to-real every night. She’d hung on this long because of it. Might even have hung on a little longer, a few more mornings, if she wasn’t so fucking weary.
“Baba.” Her voice was tiny, she had to struggle to keep it even. “Is this going to hurt me?”
Murat cleared his throat wetly. He shook his head.
“No, canim. It’ll be like.” He gritted his teeth to keep from sobbing. “Like going to sleep.”
“That’s good,” she whispered breathlessly. “I could use some decent sleep.”
She found Carl with her eyes. She nodded, and watched him tear open the package. His hands moved efficiently, laying out the component parts of the kit. He barely seemed aware of the actions—she guessed he’d done similar on enough battlefields in the past. She glanced across to Tom Norton, found him weeping.
“Tom,” she said gently. “Come here and hold my hand. Baba, you come ’round here. Don’t cry, Baba. Please don’t cry, any of you. You’ve got to be happy I’m not going to hurt anymore.”
She looked at Carl. No tears. His face was black stone as he prepped the spike, held it up one-handed to the light, while his other hand touched warm and callus-fingered on the crook of her arm. He met her eyes and nodded.
“You just tell me when,” he said.
She looked around at their faces once more. Made them a smile each, squeezed their hands. Then she found his face again, and clung to it.
“I’m ready,” she whispered.
He bent over her. Tiny, cold spike into her arm, held there a moment by the overlaying warmth of his fingers, and then gone. He swabbed, applied something cool, and pressed down. She arched her neck to get closer to him, brushed her paper-dry lips across the rasp of his unshaven cheek. Breathed in his scent and lay back as the beautiful, aching warmth spread through her body, inking out the pain.
Waited for what came next.
Sunlight outside.
She wanted to look sideways at the slanting angle it made, but she was just too sleepy now to make the effort. Like her eyes just wouldn’t move in their sockets anymore. It felt like a weekend from her youth in Queens, crawling into bed Sunday morning just past dawn, weary from the long night out clubbing across the river. Taxi home, girlish hilarity leaching out to a reflective comedown quiet as they cruised through silent streets, dropping off along the way. Creeping up to the house, scrape of the recog fob across the lock, and of course there’s Murat in pajamas, already up and in the kitchen, trying to look scandalized and failing dismally. She grins her impish grin, steals white cheese crumbs and an olive off his plate, a sip of tea from his glass. His hand cuffs through her hair, tousles it, and tugs her head gently into an embrace. Bear-hug squeeze, and his smell, the rasp of his stubble across her cheek. Then, climbing the stairs to her room, yawning cavernously, almost tripping over her own feet. She pauses at the top, looks back, and he’s standing there at the foot of the stairs, watching her go with so much pride and love in his face that out of nowhere it shunts aside the comedown weariness and makes her heart ache like a fresh cut.
“Better get some sleep, Sevgi.”
Still aching as she stumbles into bed, still half dressed. Curtains not properly drawn, sunlight slanting in, but no fucking way that’s going to stop her sleeping, the way she feels now. No fucking way…
Sunlight outside.
Aches and pains forgotten. The long, warming slide into not worrying about anything at all.
And the room and all that was in it went away gently, like Murat closing her bedroom door.
When it was done, when her eyes slid finally closed and her breathing stopped, when Murat Ertekin bent over her, sobbing uncontrollably, and checked the pulse in her neck and nodded, when it was over and there was, finally, no more left for him to do, Carl walked away.
He left Murat Ertekin sitting with his daughter. He left Norton standing trembling like a bodyguard running a high fever but still on duty. He left and headed down the corridor alone. It felt as if he were wading in thigh-deep water. Humans brushed past, moving aside for him, cued in by the blank face and the forced gait. There was no panic, no buzz of activity in his wake—Murat knew how to bypass the machines so they wouldn’t scream for help when Sevgi’s vital signs sank to the bottom.
They would know soon enough. Norton had promised to deal with it. That was his end—Carl had done what he did best.
He walked away.
The memories scurried after him, anxious not to be left behind.
“Don’t know what’s next,” she says, smiling as the drug takes hold. “But if it feels anything like this, it’ll do.”
And then, as her eyelids begin to sag, “I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.”
“Yeah, with all that fruit and the stream running under the trees there,” he tells her, through lips that seem to have gone numb. Voice suddenly hoarse. He’s the only one talking to her now. Norton is silent and rigid at his side, no use to anyone. Murat Ertekin has sunk to his knees beside the bed, face pressed into his daughter’s hand, holding back tears with an effort that shakes him visibly as he breathes. He summons strength to keep speaking. Squeezes her hand. “Remember that, Sevgi. All that sunlight through the trees.”
She squeezes back, barely. She sniggers, a gentle rupturing of air out through her lips, barely any actual sound. “And the virgins. Don’t forget them.”
He swallows hard.
“Yeah, well you save me one of those. I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up. We all will.”
“Fucking virgins,” she murmurs sleepily. “Who needs ’em? Gotta teach ’em every fucking thing…”
And then, finally, just before the breathing stops.
“Baba, he’s a good man. He’s clean.”
He smashed back the doors out of the ward, along the corridors people got out of his way. He found the stairs, plunged downward, looking for a way out.
Knowing there wasn’t one.
CHAPTER 48
Afterward, the COLIN exec came to find him in the garden. Carl hadn’t said he was going there, but it wouldn’t have taken a detective to work it out. The benches around the fountain had become a standard haunt for all of them over the past few days, familiar with habitual use. It was where they went when the weight of the hospital pressed down on them, when the antiseptic-scented, nano-cleansed air grew too hard and arid to breathe. Norton slumped onto the bench beside him like someone getting home to a shared house and hitting the sofa. He stared into the sunlit splash of the fountain and said nothing at all. He’d cleaned up, but his face still looked feverish from the crying.