Marsalis came back from a prowl of the environs. She supposed in her grandfather’s time, he’d have gotten more looks for his skin, but now he stood out no more than the half a dozen Africans waiting around the dock as passengers and the two who stood in coveralls on the deck of the ferry beyond the shutters. No one gave him more than a glance, and that mostly for his bulk and the bright orange lettering on the inmate jacket he still wore.
“Do you have to keep wearing that?” she asked irritably.
He shrugged. “It’s cold.”
“I said at the airport I’d buy you something else.”
“Thanks. I like to buy my own clothes.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
Klaxons groaned in the girdered space over their heads. An LCLS arrow on a movable barrow lit up pointing to the cranked-back shutters, destinations inscribed: HAYDARPASA, kadiköy. The two men on the ferry rolled out gangplanks, and a slow drift of humanity began moving toward the boat.
Impelled by memories of childhood visits, Sevgi moved along the starboard rail and seated herself on the outward-facing bench near the stern, propping herself there with her booted feet on the rail’s bottom rung. Thrum of the ship’s motors through the metal at her back. The mingled reek of engine oil and damp mooring ropes carried her back in time. Murat’s hand ruffling her hair as she stood beside him at the rail, barely tall enough to see over the top rung. The soft, chuntered rhythms of Turkish pushing out the English in her head. The impact of a whole world she’d previously seen only in the photos, a city that wasn’t New York, a place that was not her home but meant something vital—she sensed it in the way they looked around, exclaimed to each other, clutched each other’s hands at her eye level—to her parents. Istanbul had shocked her to her four-year-old core, and each time she went back, it did it again.
Marsalis dropped into the seat beside her, copied her stance. The rail clanked dully as it took the weight of his legs.
“Now I’m really going to need this jacket,” he said cheerfully. “See.”
The engine thrum deepened, became a roar, and the stern of the ferry rose in a mound of seething water. Shouts from the crew, ropes thrown, and a rapidly widening angle of space opened between the ferry and the dock. The boat thrashed about and picked up a vector out across the darkened water. Karaköy fell away, became a festooned knot of lights in the night. A chilly sea breeze came slapping at Sevgi’s face and hair. The city opened out around her, color-lit bridges and long low piles of skyline, all floating on a liquid black dotted with the running lights of other ships. She breathed in deep, held on to the illusory sense of departure.
Marsalis leaned toward her, pitching his voice to beat the engines and the wind of their passage. “Last time I came here, there was a delay at the suborb terminal, some kind of security scare. But I only found out about it after I’d checked out of my hotel. I had a couple of hours to kill before I needed to get out to the airport.” He grinned. “I spent the whole two hours doing this, just riding the ferries back and forth till it was time to go. Nearly missed my fucking flight. Out here, looking at all this, you know. Felt like some kind of escape.”
She stared at him, touched to shivering by the echo of her own feelings in his words.
His brow creased. “What’s the matter? You getting seasick?”
She shook her head. Threw something into the gap. “Why’d you come back, Marsalis? Back to Earth?”
“Hey.” Another grin. “I won the lottery. Would have been pretty ungracious not to take the prize.”
“I’m serious.” Fiercely, into the wind between them. “I know it’s grim out there, but every thirteen I ever heard talk about it loved the whole idea of Mars. Escape to a new frontier, a place you can carve out something of your own.”
“It isn’t like that.”
“I know. But that doesn’t stop anyone believing it.” She looked out across the water. “It’s where they’re all heading, isn’t it. The ones you hunt down. They’re heading for the camps and a one-way ticket to the Martian dream. Somewhere they’ve been told they’ll be wanted, valued for their strengths. Not rounded up and kept on fenced ground like livestock.”
“Most of them try for the camps, yeah.”
“You ever ask yourself why UNGLA doesn’t just let them run, let them hitch a cryocap ride out of everyone’s hair?”
He shrugged. “Well, primarily because the Accords say they can’t. The Agency exists to make sure every genetic variant on Earth is filed and monitored appropriate to their level of risk to society, and in the case of variant thirteens that means internment. If we start turning a blind eye to fence-breakers just because we think they’re going to skip for Mars, pretty soon some of them aren’t going to skip for Mars, they’re just going to hole up somewhere here on Earth and maybe start breeding. And that puts the whole fucking human race back to pre-Munich levels of panic.”
“You talk as if they weren’t like you,” she said, accusation rising in her voice. “As if you were different.”
“I am different.”
Just like Ethan, just fucking like him. Her own despair guttered upward on its wick. Her voice sounded dull in her own ears. “It doesn’t matter to you that they’re treated this way?”
Another shrug. “They’re living the choices they made, Ertekin. They could have gone to Mars when COLIN opened the gates at Munich. They chose to stay. They could get on with their lives on the reservations. They choose to break out. And when I come for them, they’ve got the option to surrender.”
Jagged memory of Ethan’s bullet-ripped corpse on the slab. Called to make the identification, trembling and cold with the shock.
“Choices, yes,” she snarled. “Every choice a fucking humiliation. Give up your freedom, roll over and do as you’re told. You know full fucking well what kind of choice that is for a thirteen.”
“It’s a choice I made,” he said mildly.
“Yeah.” She looked away again, disgustedly. “You’re right. You are different.”
“Yeah, I’m smarter.”
Another ferry passed them a hundred meters off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug toward the little island of lights and windowed warmth, the vaguely glimpsed figures moving about within. Then the stupidity of the situation came and slapped at her like the sea wind. Right behind her, pressing into her shoulders, were the window rims of an identical haven of lit and heated space, and she’d turned her back on it.
Yeah, much better that way, Sev. Turn away. Stay out in the cold and stare across the water at the fucking unattainable as it sails away from you.
Fucking idiot.
“So he went down fighting?”
She snapped around to face him again. “Who did?”
“The thirteen you were having a relationship with.” The same mild calm in his voice. “You told me he’s dead, you’re angry about what I do for a living. Makes a certain kind of sense this guy got taken down by someone like me.”
“No,” she said tightly. “Not someone like you.”
“Okay, not someone like me.”
He waited, let it sit between them like the darkness and the noise of their passage through it.
She clenched her teeth.
“They sent the SWATs,” she said finally. “A fucking dozen of them. More. Body armor and automatic weapons, against one man in his own home. They—”
She had to swallow.
“I wasn’t there, it was morning and I’d already gone to work. He was off duty, just off a stack of night work. Someone in the department tipped him off they were coming, they found a call on the phone later, downtown number. He—”
“He was a cop?”
“Yeah, he was a cop.” She gestured helplessly, hand a claw. “He was a good cop. Tough, clean, reliable. Made detective in record time. He never did anything fucking wrong.”