The last word grated in his mouth, like braking on gravel. Sevgi felt her expression congeal. ‘Why not?’
‘Because this is bullshit. We are being led around by the dick here, and it’s got nothing to do with what may or may not have happened back on Mars. We are looking in the wrong places.’
‘I am not going back to Arequipa.’
‘Well then, let’s start closer to home. Like maybe looking a little harder at your pal Norton.’
Quiet dripped into the room. Sevgi folded her arms and leaned against the back of a chair.
‘And what the fuck is that supposed to mean?’
He shrugged. ‘Work it out for yourself. Who else knew where I was sleeping in New York the morning the skaters jumped us? Who called you the same time we were getting hijacked on the way to Arequipa? Who dragged us all the way back here to look at a fucking four-month-drowned lead when we were just about to start getting somewhere?’
‘Oh.’ She gestured helplessly. ‘Fuck off Marsalis. Coyle was right, this is pure thirteen paranoia.’
‘Is it?’ Marsalis came to his feet with a jolt. He stalked towards her. ‘Think about it, Ertekin. Your n-djinn searches have failed. They didn’t find the link between Ward and Merrin, they didn’t find Gutierrez. Everything we’ve found since I started shaking the tree points to a cover-up, and Norton is ideally placed to pull it off. He’s fucking perfect for it.’
‘You shut the fuck up, Marsalis.’ Sudden rage. ‘You know nothing about Tom Norton. Nothing!’
‘I know men like him.’ He was in her face, body so close she seemed to feel the warmth coming off it. ‘They were all over the Osprey project from as young as I can remember. They dress well and they talk soft and they smile like they’re doing it for the society pages. And when the time comes, they’ll order the torture and slaughter of women and children without blinking because at core they do not give a shit about anything but their own agenda. And you, you people hand control over to them every fucking time, because in the end you’re just a bunch of fucking sheep looking for an owner.’
‘Yeah, well.’ The anger shifted, sluggish in her guts. Intuitive reflex, maybe the years with Ethan, told her how to use it, kept her voice nailed-down, detached. ‘If they ran Osprey, then I’d say you people handed over control to them pretty smartly too.’
It was like pulling a plug.
You can feel a good shot, an NYPD firearms instructor told her once, early on in training. Like you and the target and the gun and the slug are all part of this one mechanism. Shoot like that, you’ll know you’ve hit the guy before you even see him go down.
Like that. The anger drained almost visibly out of Marsalis. Though he didn’t move at all, somehow he seemed to step away.
‘I was eleven,’ he said quietly.
And then he did walk away, without looking back, and closed the door and left her alone with the dead LCLS screen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
‘She’s not your mother,’ the pale-eyed uncle in the suit tells him.
‘Yes,’ he says, pointing through the chainlink at Marisol. ‘That one.’
‘No.’ The uncle places himself in Carl’s line of sight, leans back against the fence so that it sags, makes a springy, shivery sound as it takes his weight. There’s a careless, hard-buffet wind coming in off the sea, and the uncle pitches his voice to beat it. ‘None of them are mothers, Carl. They just work here, looking after you. They’re just aunts.’
Carl looks up at him angrily. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘I know you don’t,’ the uncle says, and there seems to be something in his face, as if he’s not feeling very well. ‘But you will. This is a big day for you, Carl. Climbing that mountain was just the start of it.’
‘Have we got to go up there again?’ He tries to ask the question casually, but there’s a tremor in his voice. The mountain was scary in a way none of the uncles’ games so far have been. It wasn’t just that there were parts where you could easily fall and kill yourself, and that this time they had no ropes; it was the feeling he had that the uncles were watching him closely when it came to those parts, and that they weren’t watching to see if he was okay, that they didn’t really care if he was okay, they only wanted to know if he was scared or not. And that was even more scary because he didn’t know whether he should be scared or not, didn’t know if they’d want him to be scared or not (though he didn’t think that was likely). And besides, now it’s getting late and while Carl’s pretty confident he can do the climb again, he doesn’t think he could do it in the dark.
The uncle forces a smile. ‘No. Not today. But there are some other things we have to do. So you’ve got to come back inside with the others now.’
On the other side of the chainlink and the multiple razorwire coils beyond, Marisol has moved across the helicopter landing apron so he can see her past the uncle’s obstructing bulk. She’s staring at him, but she doesn’t raise her hand or call out. She stood and kissed him that morning, he recalls, before the uncles came to collect him, held his head between her hands and looked into his face intently, the way she sometimes did when he’d got cuts and scrapes from fighting. Then, hurriedly, she let him go and turned away. She made a soft sound in her throat, reached up and fiddled with the way she’d fixed her hair, as if was coming loose, and then of course it was coming loose because she’d fiddled with it and now she really did have to fix it again the way she always…
He recognised the signals. But he just couldn’t see how he’d made her cry this time. He hadn’t been in a fight with any of the other kids for at least a week. He hadn’t mouthed off to an uncle for even longer. His room was tidy, his schoolwork was gold-starred in everything except maths and blade weapons, and both Uncle David and Mr Sessions said he was improving even in those. He’d helped in the kitchen most evenings that week, and when he burnt himself on the edge of a pan the day before, he’d shrugged it off with one of the control techniques they were working through in Aunt Chitra’s pain management class, and he could see in Marisol’s eyes how proud she was of that.
So why?
He racked his brains on the way out to the mountain, but couldn’t find an answer. Marisol didn’t cry often, and she didn’t cry without reason at all, except that once, he would have been about five or six, when he came home from school with a raft of questions about money, how did some people end up with more than others, did uncles get more than aunts, did you have to have it, and would you ever do something you really, really didn’t like to get some. That time she cried out of nowhere, suddenly, still talking to him at first as the tears rushed up out of her, before she could turn away and hide them.
He knows, knew then as well, that the other mothers cried like this sometimes, for reasons no one could work out, and of course Rod Gordon’s mother had to go away in the end because she kept doing it. But he’d always been vaguely sure that Marisol wasn’t like that, that she was different, the same way he was absently proud of how dark her skin was, how her teeth glowed white in her face when she smiled, the way she sang in Spanish about the house. Marisol is something special, he knows. Discovers it, in fact, for the first time now, wisps of knowledge, taken for granted, taken on trust, coalescing suddenly into a solid chunk of understanding that sits in his chest like damage. She jumps into sudden focus in his mind. He sees her across the chainlink and razor wire, as if for the first time.