“Apart from faking his ID, presumably.”
“Yeah. He got himself Rim States citizenship back before the internments started. Said he saw it coming way ahead of time. He bought a whole new identity in the Angeline Freeport, lived up and down the West Coast for a couple of years building it up, then put in for official immigration to the Union. They still weren’t testing for variant thirteen then, and once he was in he had the Cross Act to protect him, the whole right-to-genetic-privacy thing.”
“Sounds like the perfect vanishing act.”
“Yeah?” She gave him a smile smeared with pain. “That your professional opinion?”
“For what it’s worth. I guess he was smart.”
“Yeah, well. Like Jacobsen says—sociopathic tendency allied with dangerous levels of raw intelligence. That’s why we’re locking thirteens up, right?”
“No. We’re locking thirteens up because the rest of the human race is scared of them. And a society of scared humans is a very dangerous thing to have on your hands. Well worth a bit of internment to avoid.”
She scanned his face for the irony. Couldn’t tell.
“His name was Ethan,” she said at last. “Ethan Conrad. He was thirty-six years old when they killed him.”
The other ferry was almost gone now, fading amid the other flecks of traffic and the lights of the European side. She drew a deep breath.
“And I was six months’ pregnant.”
CHAPTER 23
On the Asian side, with Europe reduced to glimmering lights across the water, she got drunk and told him the rest.
He wasn’t sure why—it might have been a by-product of the alcohol, or a desired result. Either way, it wasn’t what he’d been expecting. He’d watched the way her mouth clamped shut behind the sudden admission of loss, and he recognized damage that wouldn’t be healing anytime soon. They got off the ferry in Kadiköy without speaking, carrying a personal silence between them that deadened the clank and clatter of disembarkation. The same bubble of quiet stayed with them as they trudged the half a dozen rising blocks up from the waterfront, following the street-finder holo in the keytab, until they reached the winding thoroughfare of Moda Caddesi and the low-rise apartment tower that COLIN owned there. It was a residential neighborhood, long since put to bed, and they saw no one along the way.
There was a strange, secretive feeling of release and refuge in it all. Quietly, quietly, up and away from the lights of the ferry terminal, past the shuttered frontages of a market and the curtained windows of the sleeping world, the glimmering map in the hollow of Ertekin’s palm and the pale bluish light it cast up into her face. When they arrived, she opened the door in from the street with exaggerated care, and they took the stairs rather than wake the machinery of the elevators. In the apartment—air infused with the slightly musty chill of no recent occupancy—they fetched up together in the kitchen, still without speaking, and found an open but barely touched bottle of Altinbaş raki on the counter.
“You’d better pour me some of that,” she told him grimly.
He searched for the appropriate long slim glasses, found them in a cabinet, while Ertekin filled a jug with water from the tap. He poured each glass half full with the oily transparent weight of the raki and watched as she topped the measures off from the jug. Milky, downward-tumbling avalanche cloud of white as the water hit. She grabbed up a glass and drank it off without drawing breath. Set it down again and looked expectantly at him. He poured again, watched her top up. This one she sipped at and carried through to the abandoned chill of the living room. He took bottle and jug and his own glass, and followed her.
They were on the top floor, a broad picture-window vantage opening out over the rooftops of Kadiköy at a couple of stories’ advantage. With the lounge lighting dimmed back, they had a clear view all the way to the Sea of Marmara and the minaret-spiked skyline of Sultanahmet back on the European side. Staring at it, Carl had the sudden, hallucinatory sensation of leaving something behind, as if the two shores were somehow drifting apart. They sat in squashy mock-leather armchairs facing the window, not each other, and they drank. Out on the Sea of Marmara, big ships sat at anchor, queuing for entry to the Bosphorus Straits. Their riding lights winked and shifted.
They’d killed well over half the bottle by the time she started talking again.
“It wasn’t fucking planned, I can tell you that much.”
“You knew what he was?”
“By then, yes.” She sighed, but it got caught somewhere in her throat. There was no real relief in the noise it made. “You’d think we’d have terminated it, right? Knowing the risks. Looking back, I’m still not really sure why we didn’t. I guess…I guess we’d both started thinking we were invulnerable. Ethan had that from the start, that whole thirteen thing. He always acted like bullets would have bounced off him. You could see it in him across a crowded room.”
Her tone shifted, gusts of obscure anger rinsing through her voice.
“And once you are pregnant, well then the biology’s there in you as well, ticking and trickling away inside, telling you this is good, this is right, this is what’s supposed to be. You don’t worry about how you’ll manage, you just figure you will. You stop cursing yourself for that last inoculation you forgot to get, or for not forcing the guy to spray on before you fuck, for being weak and stupid enough to let your own biology get the better of you, because that same fucking biology is telling now it’s going to be okay, and your critical faculties just take a walk out the air lock. You tell yourself the genetic-privacy laws are stronger in the Union than in any other place on Earth, and that the legislation’s going to keep moving in the right direction. You tell yourself by the time it matters to the child in your belly, things will have changed, there’ll be no more panic about race dilution and genetically modified monsters, no more Accords and witch hunts. And every now and then, when all that fails you and a doubt creeps in, you face it down by telling yourself hey, you’re both cops, you’re both NYPD. You’re the ones who enforce the law around here, so who’s going to come knocking on your door? You figure you belong to this massive family that’s always going to look out for you.”
“You met Ethan through the force?”
It got him a sour smile. “How else? When you’re a cop, you don’t socialize much with civilians. I mean, why would you? Half the time they hate your fucking guts, the rest of the time they can’t fucking live without you. Who wants to buy drinks for a personality disorder like that? So you stick by your big adoptive family, and mostly that’s enough.” She shrugged. “I guess that was always part of the attraction for Ethan. He was looking to seal himself off from his past, and NYPD can be a cozy little self-contained world if you want it to be. Just like going to Mars.”
“Not quite. You can always leave the police force.”
She gestured with her drink, spilled a little. “You can always win the Ticket Home lottery.”
“Yeah.”
“Anyway, Ethan. I met him at a retirement party for my squad commander. He’d just made detective, he was celebrating. Big guy, and you could see from across the room how impressed he was with himself. The kind of thing you look at and want to tear down, see what’s behind all that male control. So I went to have a look.”
“And did you? Tear it all down?”
“You mean, did we fuck?”
“Actually, no. But—”
“Yeah, we fucked. It was an instant thing, we just clicked. Like that.” She snapped her fingers loosely, to no real effect. Frowned and did it again. Snac. “Like that. Two weeks in, we were leaving overnight stuff at each other’s places. He’d been seeing this cheerleader blond bitch worked Datacrime somewhere downtown, I had something going on with a guy who ran a bar out in Queens. I was still living out there, never managed to organize a move across the river when I made Midtown Homicide. Just an old neighborhood girl, see. So, anyway, I dumped my bar guy, he dumped the cheerleader.” Another frown. “Bit of static with that, but anyway, a month later he moved in.”