“Had he told you what he was?”
“Not then, no. I mean—” She gestured again, more carefully this time. “—not like he lied to me about anything. He just didn’t say, and who’d think to ask? Thirteens are all locked away, right? In the reservations, or on Mars. They’re not walking the city streets like you and me. They’re certainly not walking around with a palmful of gold shield, are they?”
“Not generally, no.”
“No.” She nursed her drink for a while. “I don’t know if he would ever have told me. But one night this other thirteen showed up, asking for Ethan by another name, and he sure as fuck filled me in.”
“What did he want?”
Her lip curled. “He wanted money. Apparently, he was part of the same Lawman unit as Ethan when they deployed in some godforsaken corner of Central Asia back in the eighties. Bobby something, but he was calling himself Keegan. He was still aboveground when internment started, and he didn’t rate Mars as an option, so they sent him to Cimarron. He went over the wire, hid out in Jesusland for a while till he found some gang to smuggle him into the Union. He’d been in the city for a couple of years when he showed up at our place, been making a living at this and that. Sheer bad luck he spotted Ethan coming out of a Korean noodle place in Flushing, followed him home.”
“He recognized him? I’d have thought—”
“Yeah, Ethan got some facial surgery in the Rim states, but it wasn’t deep, and this guy Keegan saw through the changes. Kept going on about how it wasn’t the face, it was the whole package, how Ethan moved, how he talked. Anyway, he found out Ethan was a cop, figured it must be some kind of scam he was working. Blackmailing the right people. He couldn’t.” She clenched a fist in the low light. “He wouldn’t believe Ethan had made NYPD detective the hard way. That’s not the way we do things, he kept saying. You’re thirteen, man. You’re not a fucking cudlip.”
A darted look. “That’s what you call us, isn’t it. Cudlips. Cattle.”
“It’s been known.”
“Yeah, well this Keegan had a hard time believing Ethan might have joined the cattle. But once he got his head around it, it just made things worse. Way he saw it, there were two possibilities now. Either Ethan had some scam going in the force, in which case he wanted in on it. Or Ethan had given up his thirteen self and settled for the herd life, in which case—” She shrugged. “Hey, fuck him like any other cudlip, right? Get what you can out of him. Squeeze him dry.”
Quiet seeped into the room. She drank. Out at sea, the big ships sat at anchor, waiting patiently.
“So what happened?” he asked finally.
She looked away. “I think you know.”
“Ethan solved the problem.”
“Keegan started showing up regularly at the house.” Her voice was a mechanical thing, less expression than a cheap machine. “Acting like he owned the place. Acting like a fucking caricature thirteen out of some Jesusland psychomonster flick. Acting like he owned me, when Ethan wasn’t around.”
“Did you tell Ethan about it?”
“I didn’t need to. He knew what was going on. Anyway, you know what, Marsalis? I can pretty much take care of myself. I stopped that fucker dead in his tracks every time.”
She paused. Picking words.
“But it wasn’t stopping with Keegan, you know. It was just backing up. Like throwing stones at a biting dog. You throw a stone, dog backs up. Soon as you stop throwing, he’s back showing you his teeth. There’s only one way to really stop a thirteen, right?”
He shrugged. “So the psychomonster flicks would have us believe.”
“Yeah. And we couldn’t afford to risk the attention. Officer-involved death, Internal Affairs come poking around. There’s an autopsy, maybe gene tests that turn up the thirteen variant. Big investigation. Keegan knew that, and he played off it. Like I said, one way or another he was going to squeeze us dry.”
“Until.”
She nodded. “Until I came home and found Ethan burning clothes in the yard. After that, we never saw Keegan again. We never talked about it, we didn’t need to. Ethan had bruising all along the edge of his left palm. Skinned knuckles, finger gouges in his throat.” A faint, weary smile. “And the house was cleaner than I’d seen it in months. Washed floors everywhere, bathroom like a screen ad, everything nanodusted. You could still hear the stuff working if you put your ear up close to the tub. He never cleaned up like that again in the whole time we were together.”
More silence. She drained her glass and reached down to the floor for the raki bottle. Offered it to him.
“You want?”
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
He watched as, a little unsteadily, she built herself a new drink. When she was done, she held the glass without drinking from it and stared out at the ships.
“It seemed like we held our breath all summer,” she said quietly. “Waiting to see. I knew a lot of cops in Queens from before I moved to Midtown, I started hanging out with them again, on and off, to see if there was a missing persons filed, or if a body had turned up. We checked the NYPD links to UNGLA’s most wanted all the time for news. Keegan never made it onto the list. Ethan reckoned you guys had him down as such a fuckup he wasn’t worth chasing, he’d dig his own grave soon enough if you’d just give him some time.”
Carl shook his head. “No, we like the stupid ones. They’re easy to track down, and that makes the Agency look good. If your guy wasn’t listed, the most likely thing is whoever helped him over the wire at Cimarron found some way to keep it quiet. Or whoever had the contract to run the place at the time just hushed the whole thing up to keep the statistics sweet. Oversight provision for Cimarron is pretty fucking weak, even by Jesusland standards, and if the contract was up for a renewal bid, well.” He spread his hands. “Every lag on that reservation knows the best time to plan an escape is just before tender. They know the operating corporation is going to try like crazy to squeeze maximum efficiency out of badly paid staff and end up with riot-level tension instead, and they know that if they do make it over the wire, there’s going to be no public nationwide manhunt, because the contract holders can’t afford the publicity. It’s how half these guys keep getting away so easily.”
“Fucking Jesusland,” she slurred.
He gestured lazily. “Hey, I’m not complaining. It’s the sort of thing keeps me in work. Come to that, Jesusland isn’t the only place I’ve seen weak oversight.”
“No. Only place they’re fucking proud of it, though.” She peered morosely into her drink. “Still can’t fucking believe it sometimes, you know?”
“Believe what?”
“Secession. What America did to itself. I mean.” She made an upward-groping gesture with her free hand. “We fucking invented the modern world, Marsalis. We modeled it, on a continental scale, got it working, sold it to the rest of the world. Credit cards, popular air travel, global dataflow. Spaceflight. Nanotech. We put all that in place, you know? And then we let a bunch of fucking Neanderthal Bible-thumping lunatics tear it all to pieces? What the fuck is that, Marsalis?”
“Don’t ask me. Little before my time.”
“I mean.” She wasn’t listening to him, didn’t look at him. Her hand went on clenching and unclenching, making loose, gentle fists in the air one after the other. “If the Chinese or maybe the Indians had come and just chased us out of the driver’s seat, you know I could maybe handle that. Every culture has to give way to something in the end. Someone fresher and sharper always comes along. But we fucking did this to ourselves. We let the grasping, hating, fearing idiot dregs of our own society tip us right over the fucking precipice.”