Finally, Rovayo’s phone wittered for attention. She grimaced, hauled it out and held it to her ear, audio only.
‘Yeah, what?’ She listened, grimaced again. ‘On my way home, why?’
A male voice rinsed tinnily out of the phone, distant and indistinct.
‘Roy, I haven’t been home in thirty, no wait,’ she checked her watch, ‘thirty-five hours. I haven’t slept in twelve, and that was ninety minutes on the couch in operations…’
Crackled dispute. Rovayo glowered.
‘… No, it fucking wasn’t…’
Coyle crackled some more. She cut him off.
‘Look, don’t try to tell me how much sleep I’ve had, Roy. You don’t…’
Spit, spit, crack.
‘Yeah, you’re right, we are all tired, and when you’re this fucking tired, Roy, you know what you do? You get some sleep. I’m not going to pull another macho all-nighter just so you can play at old-school cop with Tsai. Outside of all those pre-mil period flicks you love so much, nobody cracks a case like that. You guys want to act like the New Math never fucking happened, be my guest. I’m going home.’
A more muted crackling. Rovayo glanced across at Carl and raised an eyebrow.
‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Haven’t seen him. Doesn’t he have a phone? No? Well, try his hotel, maybe. See you in the morning.’
She killed the call.
‘People are looking for you,’ she said.
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah. You want to be found?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘What I thought.’ She drained what was left in her glass, and gave him the speculative look again. ‘Well, I’d say your hotel is a bust right now. Want another drink at my place?’
He gave her back the look. ‘Is that a trick question?’
Alcatraz station ran smart chopper shuttles for its staff, twenty-four-seven to both sides of the bay. The Oakland service dropped off at a couple of points within easy walk of Rovayo’s apartment. They walked, easily, Pisco sours and the shared sense of truancy, laughing in the early evening air. She asked him how come he spoke Spanish, he told her a little about Marisol, a little more about Mars and the Upland projects. As before, she seemed hungry for the detail. They touched, far more than her Hispanic background could write off as a cultural norm. Signals coming through clear and tight. They got up the stairs and in the door of her second-floor apartment a couple of grins short of the clinch.
The door swung shut behind them with a solid snap and the burble of electronic security engaging.
Their restraint shattered in hungry pieces on the floor.
‘So what do you want to do now?’
Still standing in front of him, hip shot, wide grin. Despite everything, he felt his sore and shrunken prick twitch at the sight.
‘I thought you were tired.’
She shrugged. ‘So did I. Cyclical, I guess. Give me another couple of hours, I probably will be again.’
‘You’re not Xtrasomeing on me, are you?’
‘No, I’m not fucking Xtrasomeing on you.’ Suddenly there was a real edge in her voice. ‘Do I look like I come from that kind of money? You think if my parents had the finance for built-in, I’d be working for RimSec?’
He blinked. Held up his hands, palms out. ‘Okay, okay. It was just a thought. Rim States have got a reputation for that stuff, you know.’
She wasn’t listening. She gestured at herself with one splayed hand, motion robbed of any sensuality by the look on her face. ‘What I’ve got, I was either born with or I fucking worked to build. I came up through the ranks, it’s taken me eight years to make detective, and I didn’t take any fucking genetic shortcuts along the way. I didn’t have—’
‘I said okay, detective.’
It stopped her. She sank back onto the sofa, sat hunched at the edge with her arms resting on her thighs, hands dangling into the space between. She lifted her head to look at him, and there was something hunted in her expression.
‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘We’re all just a little fucking tired of the Asia Badawis and the Meredith Changs around here.’
‘Badawi’s New York Sudanese,’ he pointed out.
‘Yeah? You want to see the house she’s got down the coast. Lot of fucking acreage for a foreigner. Anyway, that’s not what I meant.’
‘No?’ Suddenly, the post-coital intimacy was too tight, like binding on his limbs and a masking film across his face. Rovayo was abruptly the stranger she’d always been, but naked and in too close. He felt an unlooked-for visceral surge of nostalgia for sex with Sevgi Ertekin. ‘So you’re not a big fan of Enhancement generally, then?’
She snorted. ‘You think anyone’s a big fan of Xtrasomes that doesn’t have them?’
‘I am.’ But he knew at base he was trying to provoke her. ‘You think I’d be in this fucking mess if they’d had working artificial chromosome technology for humans forty years back? You think we’d be running around looking for some superannuated supersoldier turned cannibal fucking survivalist, if thirteen tendency could be platform-loaded and switched on and off at need? Take a good look at me, Rovayo. I’m the walking fucking embodiment of last century’s pre-Xtrasome jump-the-gun genetics.’
‘I know.’
‘I seriously doubt that.’ Carl lifted fingertips to his face, brushed at his cheekbones. ‘You see this? When you’re a variant, people don’t look at this. They go right through the skin, and all they see is what’s written into your double helix.’
The Rim cop shrugged. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer them to stop at the skin. What I hear about the old days, we’re both the wrong colour for that to be a better option. Would you really prefer it the way things were? A dose of good old-fashioned skin hate?’
‘I already had my dose of that. I was banged up in a Jesusland jail for the best part of four months, remember.’
She widened her eyes. It made her look frighteningly young. Ertekin, he thought, would have just raised one quizzical eyebrow.
‘You did four months in there? I thought—’
‘Yeah, long story. Point is, you talk too easily about this shit, Rovayo. Until you’ve lived inside a locked and modified gene code, you can’t know what it’s like. You can’t know how happy you’d be to have an Xtrasome on/off switch to fall back on.’
‘You don’t think?’ Rovayo bent and swooped an arm to the floor beside the sofa, hooked up her discarded shirt and shouldered her way into it. Her eyes never left his face, the whole time. It made him feel suddenly untrustworthy, an intruder into her home. She thumb-pressed the garment’s static seam halfway closed, enough to pull it over her breasts and hide them. ‘What do you really know about me, Marsalis? I mean, really know?’
He tasted the smart-mouth retorts on his tongue, swallowed them unspoken. Maybe she saw.
‘Yeah, I know we’ve fucked. Please tell me you don’t think that means anything.’
He gestured. ‘Well, I wasn’t planning to propose.’
It got him a thin, unamused smile. ‘Yeah. Thing is, Marsalis.’ She sat back in the sofa. ‘I’m a bonobo.’
He stared. ‘No, you’re fucking not.’
‘No? What did you think, we’re all sari-wrapped housewives or geisha bunnies? Or maybe you were expecting the giggly slut model, like that stupid fucking whore ranch they got down in Texas?’