So they went back to the apartment, and there was a kind of gathering potential in that, a sense that they’d left something back there that needed to be collected. They walked, because it was not really cold outside nor very late, and maybe because they both needed the time and the sky. They got lost, but neither minded much, and rather than use the streetfinder holo in the keytab, they navigated vaguely for the waterfront, followed it as closely as was feasible until they wound up at the far end of Moda caddesi and a slight but steady slope back down towards the COLIN-owned block. The glue along Carl’s wound itched in the cool air.
At one point, Ertekin asked him the obvious question.
‘When did you know he was going to try for you?’
He shrugged. ‘When he told me. Couple of minutes after you and Battal left us alone.’
‘And that didn’t bother you enough to call us back?’
‘If I’d done that, he would have kicked off there and then. Without telling me anything.’
They walked in silence for a while. The apartment blocks of Fenerbahce loomed over them, balconies trailing foliage, some of it still dripping stealthily from recent watering. One blank-sided wall bore a massive artist’s impression of Ataturk, sharp-eyed, clean-browed and commanding, head haloed with the proclamation he’d seen enough times in other visits to know the meaning of. Ne Mutlu Turkum Diyene – What joy to say I am a Turk. Someone else had climbed up, probably using gecko gloves, and drawn a speech bubble filled with jagged black spray-can Turkish he couldn’t read.
‘What’s that say?’ he asked her.
She groped after a translation. ‘Uhm, male pattern baldness – it’s a bigger problem than you think.’
He stared up at the national hero’s receding hairline and chuckled.
‘Not bad. I was expecting something Islamic.’
She shook her head. ‘Fundamentalists don’t have much of a sense of humour. They would have just defaced it.’
‘And you?’
‘It’s not my country,’ she said flatly.
At a second-storey balcony ahead, an old man leaned amidst pipe smoke and watched the street. Carl met his eye as they passed underneath, and the old man nodded an unforced greeting. But it was clear his eyes were mostly for the woman at Carl’s side. Carl glanced sideways, caught the line of Ertekin’s nose and jaw, the messy hair. Gaze tipping downward to the unapologetic swell of her breasts, where they pushed aside the edges of the jacket she wore.
‘So did you get anything useful out of Névant?’ He wasn’t sure if she’d caught him looking, but there was haste in the tone of her voice. He went back to watching the pavement ahead.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said carefully. ‘I think we need to go and talk to Manco Bambaren.’
‘In Peru?’
‘Well, I don’t see him taking up an invitation to New York in a hurry. So yeah, we’d have to go there. Apart from anything else, it’ll suit his sense of things. It’s his ground.’
‘It’s your ground too, isn’t it?’ He thought she smiled. ‘Planning to disappear into the altiplano on me?’
‘If I was going to disappear on you, Ertekin, I would have done it a while ago.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was joking.’
‘Oh.’
They reached the end of the block, took a left turn in unison to beat an obvious cul-de-sac. He wasn’t sure if he’d followed her lead, or vice versa. A hundred metres further on the street ended at a steep bare slope set with dirty white evercrete steps and a cryptic sign inscribed with the single word Moda. They climbed in hard-breathing silence.
‘That cuff,’ she said as they’d spilled out at the top, then had to grab her breath back before she went on. ‘You knew Névant was wearing it.’
‘Never really thought about it.’ He thought about it. ‘Yeah, I guess I knew it’d be there. It’s standard tract procedure.’
‘It didn’t stop him trying to kill you.’
‘Well, those things are slow-acting. Probably take the best part of twenty minutes to sever his foot completely. Sure, I might have got my hands on it in the tumble, tried to trigger it, but while I was wasting my time doing that, old Stéphane would have buried that knife in my spine.’ He paused, reviewing the fight. ‘Or my eye.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’ There was a hot exasperation in the way she came back at him, an edge of tone that tugged in the base of his belly and dripped a slow, pooling tumescence into the length of his prick.
‘Well, what do you mean then?’
‘I mean he knew there was a risk he’d lose a foot, not to mention bleed to death trying to get away. And he still tried to kill you.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her are you sure you dated a thirteen, I mean a real one? He bit it back, walked on. Modest gene-stunted cottonwood trees sprouted at intervals from squares cut out of the paving along this end of Moda. Their branches broke the streetlighting as it fell, formed a soft mosaic of light and dark underfoot.
‘Look,’ he said experimentally. ‘First of all, Stéphane Névant wasn’t planning on getting away anywhere. He came to kill me, that’s all. Us genetic warriors are pretty focused about these things. If he had managed to ice me, he would have stood up afterward as quiet as a Jesusland housewife while you and Battal restrained him, and he would have gone back out to the tract a happy man.’
‘But that’s fucking stupid,’ she flared.
‘Is it?’ This time he stopped on the pavement, turned towards her. He could feel his own control coming unmoored, feel it seep into his voice, but he couldn’t tell how much was this, how much was the mouth-itching display of her standing there wrapped in streetlight and shadow, tumbled hair and long mobile mouth, jut and swell of breasts under the dark sweater, tilt of hips, long-legged in the canvas jeans despite the flat-sole boots she wore them with. ‘I put Névant in the tract. He was out and I brought him back, to a place he’ll never leave except hobbled the way he was today. He’ll never breed, or have sex with anyone who isn’t a paid tract whore or a UNGLA employee cruising for twist thrills. He knows, to within a couple of thousand square kilometres, exactly where he’ll die. You think about that, and then you ask yourself whether it might not be worth the risk of losing a foot – which he’d get a biocarbon prosthetic for anyway, under the rules of internment – you ask yourself whether that might not be a price worth paying to put out the light in the eyes of the man who fenced him in.’
‘Worth dying for?’
‘You forget: there’s no death penalty in Europe, even for thirteens.’
‘I meant you might have killed him.’
Carl shrugged. ‘I might. You’re also forgetting that Névant was a soldier. Kill or be killed is pretty much the job description.’
She locked her gaze on his.
‘Would you have killed him? If we hadn’t got there first?’
He stared at her for a moment, then, swift as the fight, he stepped in and hooked an arm to her waist. Her feet shifted on the pavement, she leaned back and lifted one long-fingered hand. For fragments of a second he thought she would strike him, then the fingers clenched in the collar of his jacket and dragged his face close. She bit into his mouth, thrust in a coffee-tasting tongue. Made a deep, soft sound as his free hand moulded to her breast, and dragged him back into the shadows of an apartment block entryway.