And it’s raining.
She looked up, and a sudden, raw anger took hold as she traced the low hissing to its real source. In one corner of the living room, the ancient JVC entertainment deck was still on. Whatever chip was in had played to its conclusion, and the temperamental default system had failed to return to bluescreen. The monitor showed a snowdance of static instead and the gentle hiss of it filled up the base of hearing, below the sounds of the city outside. Filled up everything like–
Her mouth tightened. She knew what chip she’d been watching. She couldn’t remember, but she knew.
It’s not fucking raining, all right.
She lurched to her feet and stabbed the deck to silence. For a moment then she stood in her apartment as if it wasn’t her own, as if she’d broken in to steal something. She felt the steady flog of her pulse in her throat and she knew she was going to cry.
She shook her head instead, violently, trading the tears for an intense, sonar-pulsing pain. Stumbled through the bedroom to the en suite, fingers pressing to the ache. There was a plastic bottle of generic headache pills on the shelf there and beside it a foil of syn. Or more precisely, k37 synadrive – military-issue superfunction capsules, her share of a black-market trickle into NYPD way back when and several times the strength of anything the street liked to call syn. She’d used the caps a handful of times before and found them scarily effective – they stimulated synaptic response and physical co-ordination, sidelined pretty much everything else, and they did it fast. Sevgi wavered for a moment, realised she had things to do today, even if she couldn’t remember right now exactly what they were.
Whole fucking city self medicates these days anyway, Sev. Get over it.
She pressed a couple of the milissue capsules out of the foil and was about to dry-swallow them when a fragment of peripheral vision caught up with her.
She strode back into the bedroom.
‘Hey.’
The girl in the bed couldn’t have been much more than eighteen or nineteen. Blinking awake, she seemed even younger, but the body beneath the single sheet was too full for the waif-like look. She sat up and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had got too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.
‘Who told you you could sleep in here?’
The girl blinked again. ‘You did.’
‘Oh.’ Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. ‘Well get your stuff together, and go home. Party’s over.’
She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully and then, as if to emphasise her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.
When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.
Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone – as used by real MarsTrip personnel!! – programme was settling into oblivion like a deflating circus tent. The incriminating evidence of the neglect was right there. And you couldn’t take milissue slugs to make it go away like you could with pain. The ludicrously perfect flanks of the girl in her bed flitted through her mind. The jutting designer chest. She looked at the swell of her own breasts, gathered low on her ribs and tilting away to the sides.
Ah fuck it, you’re in your thirties now Sevgi. Not trying to impress the boys at Bosphorus Bridge any more, are we? Give it a rest. Anyway, you’re due, that always makes it worse.
Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her; cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.
The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war-zone. Every available worksurface was piled with used crockery. Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris – dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of sigara borek pastry, aubergine and tomato in oil gone cold, half a lamacun left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.
Good party.
A few of her departing guests had burbled it at her as she let them out. An abrupt avalanche of memory confirmed it, a tangle of friends throughout the apartment, sprawled on sofas and beanbags, food and drink and gesturing with mouths full, comfortable hilarity. It had been a good party.
Yeah – pity you had to murder that bottle of Irish afterwards.
Why was that, Sev?
She felt how her face twitched and knew her eyes had gone flat and hard with the feeling as it rolled across her.
You know why.
The syn came on behind the thought, spiky and bright. She had a sudden insight into how easy it would be to kill someone in this state of mind.
The phone spoke, soft and reasonable, like biting into cotton wool.
‘I have registered contact Tom Norton on the line. Will you accept the call?’
Recollection of what she had to do that day fell on her like a brick.
She groaned and went to fetch the rest of the painkillers.
The first wrong thing was the car.
Norton usually ran a ludicrous half acre of antique Cadillac soft-top with a front grille like a sneer and a hood you could have sun-bathed on. He was grin-proud of the fucking thing too, which was odd, given its history. Built in some Alabama sweatshop before Norton was born, it was a vehicle he’d have been summarily arrested for driving in New York if he hadn’t paid almost double the auction price to have the original IC engine ripped out and replaced with the magdrive from a discontinued line of Japanese powerboats. He’d blown yet another month’s wages on having it polymered from snout to tail, immortalising the catalogue of scrapes and dents it had collected during its previous life out in Jesusland. Sevgi couldn’t get him to see that it was practically a metaphor for the idiocies of the past it came from.