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. Karakoy 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, colour-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 onto the illusory sense of departure.
Marsalis leaned towards her. He pitched 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 ’til 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 metres off, heading the other way. She felt an irrational tug towards 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 armour 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.’
‘Apart from fake 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.’