‘Sevgi?’
Oh, Marsalis. There he was.
‘It’s okay, sir. We’ll take it from here.’
‘You tell them it’s a Haag slug.’ She couldn’t work out why he was shouting, unless it was the racket of the rotor blades. Nothing seemed to connect up the way it should. She thought maybe she’d lost a lot of blood, after all. ‘You tell them they’ve got to get the smartest anti-virals they have into her, right now.’
‘We know that, sir. We’ve called ahead.’
She squinted in the glare from the helicopter’s landing lights. It hurt to do. She just about made out Marsalis’s bulk. He had one of the paramedics by the shoulders, was shaking him.
‘Don’t you fucking let her die,’ he was yelling. ‘I will kill you and everyone you care for, if you let her die.’
Scuffling. The helicopter shifted about, lifted and wheeled away. Studded lights all over the hills of the city, the rise and fall of it, the tilting horizon. As if she wasn’t fucking dizzy enough already.
And she seemed to have been hanging on for ever. Not just this shit, whatever it was, the whole Horkan’s Pride case. The whole fucking thing with Marsalis, the wrecked attempt to make something of it. The repeated calls to her father, the stilted, carefully polite conversations and the barrier she could no longer break through. The memories of Ethan, the battle for custody and re-implantation of Murat-to-be, the serried ranks of lawyers and their fucking waiting rooms. The struggle to hold onto faith, to go back to the mosque and find whatever it was that welled up out of Rabiah’s poetry and Nazli Vapour’s writing, and Meltem’s kindly smiling patience. The search for reasons to go on that didn’t come in bottles or foil wafers.
It marched through her mind in tawdry procession, and she was suddenly sick of it all, sick of the effort. Better to just watch the sway and twinkle of the city lights below, go where the ride was taking her, listen to the motors hammering out their white noise refrain, like lying next to a waterfall that smelled ever so slightly of oil and hot metal. The tilting night sky, sense of the sea, flat and black beyond. Not so bad, when you thought about it, not really. Not so hard.
She gave up holding on not long after that, just let go and slid away down the gradient of her own immense tiredness.
PART V
Home to Roost
‘The problems we address here are general to humanity. No amount of privileged withdrawal, segregation or hierarchical exclusion will serve to insulate any of us from a process of fallout that has already begun. If we are arrogant, if we fail to acknowledge this generality and to act on it while there is still time – then the price that we pay for our failure will be horrific, and it will be levied on us all.’
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Dawn crept up on the Stanford campus like a cautious painter, mixing colour into the monochrome gloom overhead so it faded through shades of grey towards a clean morning blue, layering beige back onto the sandstone angles of the hospital buildings one pale coat at a time, working from the top down. In the gardens, the hedges and trees got back their green and people started to come through on the gravel paths in ones and twos. A few of them glanced at the black man seated alone on the bench, but none stopped. There was a curious immobility to him that drove off any impulse to human contact, and stilled conversational voices as they approached. Those whose work was in the acute wards at the medical centre knew at a glance what it meant. This was a man undergoing surgery without anaesthetic – the slow, saw-toothed severing of himself from another human being somewhere inside the hospital.
Out on Highway 101, the occasional brushing sound of night-time traffic was building to a steady background murmur. Birdsong made self-important, twittering aural counterpoint, like handfuls of brightly coloured pebbles tossed continually onto a broad grey conveyor belt. Human voices splashed between with increasing strength and frequency, feet crunched in gravel like a grave being dug. Day stormed the walls Carl had built around himself in the cold hours, smashed and battered down the simplicity of his vigil with human detail. He looked up out of the wreckage with a quiet and implacable hatred for everything he could see and hear.
‘Happy now?’
Norton stood in front of him, not in reach. He’d slept in his clothes somewhere, even the Marstech jeans were creased.
He seemed to be genuinely waiting for an answer.
‘No. You?’
There was a stone bench on the other side of the path, twin to the one Carl was using. Norton lowered himself onto it.
‘You’re not going to get away with this,’ he said woodenly. ‘I’m going to have you sent back to South Florida State. I’m going to have you sent to Cimarron or Tanana for the rest of your fucking life.’
By the look of him, he’d been crying. Carl felt a brief stab of envy.
‘How is she?’ he asked.
‘You’re joking, of course. You fuck.’
The mesh pounded up out of his desolation. He lifted a shaky, loose fingered hand, pointed it. ‘Don’t push me, Norton. I could do with killing something right now, and it might as well be you.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’ Norton stared down at his own hands, as if assessing their suitability for the task. ‘But that isn’t going to help Sevgi.’
‘Nothing’s going to help Sevgi, you fucking prick!’ There was a brutal pleasure somewhere in the snapped words, like biting down on a mouth ulcer until it split and bled. ‘Didn’t they tell you? It’s a Haag slug.’
‘Yes, they told me. They also tell me Stanford has the best immune systems repair clinic on the West Coast. Cutting-edge techniques.’
‘It won’t matter. It’s Falwell. Nothing short of death stops that motherfucker.’
‘That’s right, give up why don’t you? Very fucking British.’
Carl stared at him for a couple of seconds, made a disgusted spitting noise and looked away. A young woman went by pushing a bike. The small black backpack she wore had a smiley face pinned to it, winking a merciless yellow in the fresh morning light. Whatever you are, a tinselly patch above the badge suggested brightly, be a good one.
‘Norton,’ he said quietly. ‘How is she?’
The COLIN executive shook his head. ‘They’ve stabilised her. That’s all I know. They’ve got an n-djinn mapping the viral shift.’
Carl nodded. Sat in silence.
Finally, Norton asked him, ‘How long has she got?’
‘I don’t know.’ Carl drew breath. Let it out by shuddering increments. ‘Not long.’
More quiet. More people went past, talking intimate irrelevancies. Living their lives.
‘Marsalis, how the fuck did this guy get hold of a Haag gun in the first place?’ There was a high, desperate note in Norton’s voice now, like a child protesting an unfair punishment. ‘They’re illegal everywhere I know, incredibly expensive to get hold of on the black market. Lethally dangerous in the wrong hands. There can’t be more than a couple of hundred people on the planet with a Haag carry permit.’