CHAPTER 54

The painkillers came on fast, left him with slight nausea and then a vague sense of well-being he could probably have done without. He prowled the lodge’s downstairs space, measuring angles of fire and thinking halfheartedly about defensibility. He toyed with the piled-up weaponry on the breakfast bar, couldn’t work up much interest there, either. Something was in the way.

He found a place where he could sit and look along the canyon to the jumbled rise of mountains it lay among. Sunlight knifed down over the ridges, turned the air luminous and slightly unreal. As if it was what she’d been waiting for all along, Sevgi Ertekin stepped into his thoughts.

It was the same feeling, the way he’d felt her as he watched the light die away over the hills of Marin County, and again as he left the canyons of Manhattan by way of the Queensboro Bridge. He sat and let the sensation rinse through him, and with it he felt a creeping sense of comprehension, conscious thought catching up with the undefined the way he’d caught up with Gray. Maybe it was the codeine, tripping a synaptic switch somewhere, letting the understanding through. Sevgi was gone, his brain was wired to process that much successfully. But not that she was dead. For the ancient Central African ancestor genes, that one just wouldn’t compute. People don’t just cease to exist, they don’t just vanish into thin fucking air. When people are gone, some deeply programmed part of his consciousness was insisting, it’s because they’re somewhere else, right? So Sevgi’s gone. Fine. So where’s she gone, let’s find that out, because then we can fucking go there and find her, be with her, and finally get rid of this fucking ache.

So.

Those hills dying into darkness on the other side of the bay—think she might be over there? Or in among all that glass and steel over there on the other side of the bridge, maybe? Or, okay, up this fucking canyon maybe, and over the other side of those mountains there. Maybe she’s there. Up past the luminous unreal light, up in the thin air, waiting there for you.

For the first time in his life, he saw why the cudlips might find it hard not to believe in an afterlife, in some other place you go when you’re gone from here.

And then, as he beat his own wiring, as the comprehension settled in, the feeling it had come to explain melted away, and left him nothing in its place but the raw pain in his chest and the stinging salve of the hate.

And out of thin air, as if in answer, the helicopters came.

         

There were two of them, nondescript commercial machines, bumping down through the brilliant canyon air with the ungainly caution of crane flies. They quartered noisily back and forth, dipped about for a while, angled rotor blur shimmering in the sun, and then they held position over the river opposite the lodge. Carl watched bleakly from the shattered picture window. Enough carrying capacity in the two aircraft for a dozen men at least. He stayed back out of view, let the scattered corpses on the ground around the lodge door paint the picture he wanted. The helicopters dithered and dipped. Finally, he picked up one of the Steyr assault rifles and loosed a quick burst out the window in their general direction. The response was immediate—both machines reared up and fled downriver, presumably in search of a safe place to land.

The path ran on that way, he knew, grooving back down toward the water, building another rock wall on its landward side. They’d be able to come back that way, upriver, and stay hidden right to the edge of the cleared ground outside the lodge, mirror-imaging the approach he’d made a couple of hours ago from the other side. He frowned a little, cuddled the folding frame stock of the Steyr into his shoulder, squinted along the sight, and panned experimentally across the cleared ground. He was pretty sure he could knock down anyone coming for the house before they’d made a couple of meters in the open. They might try a rush assault but it wasn’t likely—they didn’t know how many were in the house, or what they might have done with Greta Jurgens, whether she was alive or dead, safe in her womb or dragged downstairs ready to be held up ragdoll-limp as a shield.

And the lodge was a tough nut to crack. Ferrer had been clear about that much. Bitch got a fucking fortress there, man. Right into the fucking rock, no way you can come down from above, smooth sides so you can’t sneak up. I mean. He sat back, hands in the pockets of his clean new chinos, smirking and confident now he’d done his deal. Who the fuck she expecting, man, the fucking army? And all so she can fucking sleep? Man, I don’t know what hold that bitch got on Manco’s balls, but it’s gotta be something pretty fucking major, get him doing all this. Gotta give the mother of all blow jobs or something.

Like Stefan Nevant before him, Suerte saw the results and jumped to the obvious wrong conclusion. Onbekend stayed in the shadows. If you didn’t know he was there already, you looked for other, more visible explanations.

Like unhuman monsters, home from Mars.

It was the dynamic Ortiz had built his whole cover-up effort around. A monster stalks us! All hands to the palisades and the torches! Don’t ask, don’t ever ask who’s really making all this happen.

A head poked up from down near the river. Carl let him have a good look around, then fired off another burst. Stone chips and dust leapt in the air; the head jerked back down.

Just so they’re clear on the situation.

“Marsalis?”

Manco Bambarén’s voice. Carl got his back to the side of the window space, stayed in the shadows, and edged an eye around. Steep early-afternoon sunlight flooded down into the canyon. If you crouched and peered upward, you could just see the rich angled fall of it past the rim, and a restful blue gloom beneath where the higher parts of the valley wall were cast in shadow. It was very quiet now that the helicopters were gone—the whirring scrape of crickets, and the buzzing of flies on the bodies outside.

“Black man, is that you?”

“Good guess,” he shouted back, dumping Bambarén’s Spanish for Quechua. “What do you want?”

Brief hesitation. Carl wondered if Onbekend maybe couldn’t follow a conversation in Quechua—there was no guarantee he’d have learned it in his time living hidden up on the altiplano. He’d get by easily enough with Spanish and English. And as Bambarén’s pet pistaco, he’d have no need to integrate with the locals. Standard thirteen isolation would work like a dream.

Sure enough, Bambarén stayed in Spanish. “It’s really about what you want, Marsalis. Can we talk?”

“Sure. Come on in.”

“You guarantee not to shoot me before you’ve heard what I have to say?”

Carl grinned. “I don’t know, you going to take the word of a twist on that?”

“Yes. I will.”

“Then come on across. No weapons, no body armor, hands where I can see them.” Carl paused. “Oh yeah, and bring your brother with you.”

Long, long silence. The crickets scraped in the heated air outside.

“What’s the matter, Manco? You not been watching the feeds? It’s all burned down now, didn’t you know? Ortiz is gone, COLIN are cleaning house. We know all about Onbekend. So let’s see both of you.”

It took a couple of minutes, but then the two figures emerged from the cover down by the path and walked steadily up toward the lodge, hands clasped over their heads. Carl watched them over the Steyr’s sight. Onbekend was holding one arm lopsided, as if it hurt to lift. Carl remembered Sevgi in the Bayview bar—Hit him a couple of times, but not enough to put him down. Thirteens, huh.

Yeah, we’re tough motherfuckers.

He lined up on Onbekend’s face, flexed his trigger finger a couple of times, took up the tension. Then let it go, put the gun aside impatiently. He picked up a handgun, another Glock, from the pile on the floor, checked the load, and snapped the slide. As Bambarén and Onbekend reached the doorway, he stepped back, mindful of sniping angles through the picture window, and wagged the pistol at them.

“Come on in.”

Onbekend stared at him, spat out English. “Where is she, Marsalis?”

“Not so hasty. Back there to the table in the alcove, both of you. Hands on your head at all times. I’m not going to mess about patting you down, so if either of you do move a hand anywhere near your body without my permission, I’ll just make the assumption and kill you. Got that?”

Bambarén pivoted back and forth slightly, eyes sweeping the open-plan space inside the lodge. Understanding widened his eyes.

“You came here alone?”

“Go to the table. Sit down in the two chairs I’ve pulled out. Keep your hands on your heads until you’re seated, and then put them on the table in front of you. No sudden moves. Sudden movement will get you dead.”

He tugged the door closed, pulled it until the latch whined over into lock.

“Marsalis, I have fifteen men out there.” Bambarén’s voice was low and conversational as he walked to the table. He’d shifted into English as well. “You’re sealed in. Let’s talk about this.”

“We’re going to talk about it. But you’re going to be sitting down when we do. Hands where I can see them, and then flat on the table in front of you.”

They seated themselves, awkward with the need to keep their hands lifted. Bambarén took the head of the table, Onbekend the seat adjacent. This far back in the open-plan space, the lodge made inroads into the cliff face and it was cool and dim, so the two men looked like part of some arcane spiritualist gathering, stiff-backed in the chairs, palms down on the wood, expressions taut. Carl pulled out a chair opposite Onbekend and sat in it, well back from the edge of the table. He floated the Glock on his knee.

“And now what?” the other thirteen asked evenly.

“Now we talk about why I shouldn’t kill you both. Any ideas?”

“Are you so anxious to die, black man?” Bambarén asked.

Carl gave him a faint smile. “Well, fifteen-to-one is long odds, it’s true. But then again, eight-to-one didn’t look good, either, and there they all are, out there for the flies.”

“Have you learned nothing?” Onbekend was looking at him with the same contempt he’d given off in the Bayview bar. “Are you still nothing better than a soldier for the cudlips?”

Bambarén stiffened. Carl put a small smile together.

“Want to be careful who you use that word around, brother. It’s not Manco here’s fault he didn’t get an upgraded limbic system and a beefed-up area thirteen out of Isabela’s raw materials.”

Onbekend barely flickered a glance at Bambarén. “I’m not talking about Manco, and he knows it. I’m talking about the men at the UN you sold your soul to.”

“I’m not here for them.”

Onbekend’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did you come?”

“Because you killed a friend of mine.”

“If you have friends, hired man, then I don’t know them. Who have I killed?”

“You shot a woman called Sevgi Ertekin, a police officer, when she chased you out into the street in Bayview. You shot her with a Haag pistol, and she died.”

“Were you fucking her?”

“Yeah, we were fucking each other. Rather like you and Jurgens.”

Onbekend’s face whitened as he saw the corollary. He cleared his throat.

“It was a firefight,” he said quietly. “Not personal. You would have done the same in my place.”

Carl thought of Garrod Horkan camp and Gaby. The Haag shells knocking her down.

“That’s not the issue.”

“Then what is?”

Carl stared at the other thirteen. “Payment.”

“Listen to me, Marsalis.” Manco Bambarén, misunderstanding what he’d heard. “Whatever you think you’re owed, we can come to an agreement.”

“Manco, shut up.” The tayta looked at Onbekend as if the thirteen had slapped him. Onbekend ignored him, maybe didn’t even notice. His eyes had never left Carl’s face. “You want me to buy Greta’s life with my own?”

“Why not? It’s the same deal you offered Toni Montes in the Freeport, isn’t it? Her life for her children.”

Onbekend looked down at his hands. “If you knew what Toni Montes had done with her life before she acquired that name, had done with other children before she acquired her own, you would perhaps not judge me so harshly.”

“I don’t judge you at all. I just want you dead.”

“If you kill him, black man, you’ll have to kill me as well.” There was a quiet determination in Bambarén’s voice. “And then my men will cut you down like a rabid dog.”

Carl threw him a glance. He smiled, shook his head a little.

“You’re really enjoying having a younger brother all over again, aren’t you, Manco. Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. But do you want to know something about this brother of yours?” He nodded at Onbekend. “This brother of yours is a twin. You’ve actually got two younger brothers by way of your mother’s rather desperate attempts to stay afloat in Peru’s new corporate dream. The other one’s called Allen Merrin. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Do you want to know why?”

Bambarén looked back and forth between the two thirteens.

“He’s dead because you killed him, Marsalis,” Onbekend said casually. “That’s what I heard.”

“He’s dead because his twin brother, Onbekend here, had him brought back from Mars as a sacrificial gene set. Sold him to the people he’s been working for. Would have used him to explain away—”

“But you did kill him, didn’t you?”

The tayta stared at Onbekend. “What is this? What’s he talking about?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Don’t tell me it’s nothing, Onbee.” There was a gathering tightness in Bambarén’s voice now. The same thing Carl had seen on his face when Onbekend used the word cudlip. “What is he talking about?”

“I’m talking about Isabela’s other modified son.” Carl kept the pistol raised in Onbekend’s direction. “The egg your mother sold to the gringos sub-divided a few days in, Manco, and Project Lawman ended up with two identical thirteens for the price of one. That’s very handy when it comes to crime scene genetic trace. While your brother here went about slaughtering inconvenient colleagues from his past, he also arranged for his twin to take the fall for it.”

“Don’t listen to him, Manco. This is—”

“Is he lying?” The look on the tayta’s face marked it as rhetorical. His voice sank almost to a whisper. “You did this? You used your own blood to cover yourself?”

“Manco, there really wasn’t much option. I told you the situation Ortiz put me in, I told you the danger it—”

“You did not tell me this!”

And now Bambarén was trembling, still staring at the thirteen whose genes he shared. His face twitched with suppressed rage.

“A brother?” he asked hoarsely. “A twin? You sold your twin brother? After you came to me and I gave you—”

“It’s not important, Manco. I never knew him, we never even met—”

“He was your blood!” Bambarén started to get up. Carl wagged the Glock at him and he sank back, sat like something coiled. “He was your mother’s blood! I told you when you came to me, blood is everything. The corporations have stolen our souls, they shatter the bonds that make us strong, turn us into uniform strangers living out our lives alone in polymered boxes. Family is all we have.”

“Not if you’re a thirteen,” Carl told him somberly.

There was a long pause.

“Manco, listen to me,” Onbekend said. “I did this to protect—”

“Did you ever even tell our mother?” Bambarén’s face had gone cold and hard as the stones out at Sacsayhuamán, and his voice had grown quiet as the wind. “Did you ever tell Isabela that she had another son somewhere?”

Onbekend’s temper snapped across. “For fuck’s sake, Manco, there would have been no point!”

“No?”

“No. He was on Mars!”

The quiet swept in after the words like a tide, like a breath snuffing candle flames out. They sat in silence in the dim light.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to know how your other brother was persuaded to come home from Mars, would you, Manco?”

Onbekend tensed. His voice grated. “Marsalis, I’m warning you.”

“Don’t even think about it,” Carl told him. “I’ll put you down before your arse comes off the chair.”

He shifted slightly toward Bambarén. Kept the Glock leveled on the thirteen. The tayta stared back at him.

“See, Manco, your unexpected brother here did a deal with Mars. I’m guessing you didn’t know about that?”

“It was not a deal,” Onbekend growled. “It was a strategy, a deception.”

“Okay, he organized a deception, in your name. Your other brother was supposed to be coming back as an assassin for the Martian chapters. Some story about clearing out the Lima familias by way of reparation, laying the whole afrenta Marciana to rest so you could all do business with Mars again. That about right, Onbekend?”

“You did this?” Manco Bambarén whispered. “Even this?”

“Come on, Manco, we’ve talked about it often enough.” Onbekend gestured impatiently. “It wasn’t for real anyway, but—”

“You used my name?”

“By association, yeah. Marsalis, you fuck, listen to me—”

Bambarén lunged across the table at Onbekend. The thirteen jumped, blindsided, fended him off. Carl raised the Glock.

“Gentlemen,” he said warningly.

Bambarén appeared not to hear. He braced his arms on the table, still staring down into the face of the man he’d made into his brother. Rage brought up his accent, bruised the English he used.

“You used my fucking name?”

“Sit down, Manco,” Carl told him. “I won’t tell you again.”

But the familia chief did not sit. Instead he turned himself deliberately to face Carl and the Glock. He drew a deep breath.

“I wish to leave now,” he said stiffly. “I have no further interest in this matter. I withdraw my protection from Greta Jurgens.”

“Oh, Manco, you can’t fucking—”

“Don’t tell me what I can do, twist.” Manco pushed himself off the table with his hands. He looked at Carl. “Well? Is our business concluded, black man?”

“Sure.” Carl hadn’t expected it to work nearly this well, but he wasn’t about to miss the sudden bonus. “Walk to the door, hands on your head. Let yourself out and shut it behind you. And I’d better hear those helicopters leaving inside ten minutes.”

Bambarén stood up and laced his hands together over his head. He and Onbekend looked at each other for a long moment.

“Don’t do this,” Onbekend said tightly. “I’m your brother, Manco. Fourteen years, I’m your fucking brother.”

“No.” Bambarén’s voice was as cold now as the chill coming off the alcove rock. “You are not my brother, you are a mistake. My mistake, my mother’s mistake, and the mistake of gringos without souls. You are a twisted fucking thing, a thing that crept into my family and used me, a thing that cut the living fat from my bones to feed itself. I should have listened to the others when you came.”

“You used me, too, you fuck!”

“Yes. I used you for what you are.” Bambarén spat on the table in front of the thirteen. “Twist! Pistaco! You are nothing to me.”

Onbekend stared down at the spittle. Then, abruptly, he swayed to his feet.

“That’s it, Onbekend.” Carl rapped on the tabletop, gestured with the Glock. “Sit the fuck down.”

There was a grim smile stamped onto Onbekend’s mouth. “I don’t think so.”

Carl came to his feet like whiplash. The chair went over behind him, the Glock leveled on Onbekend’s face.

“I said—”

And then Bambarén was on him like an opsdog.

Later, he never knew why the tayta jumped. Maybe the rage, rage at Onbekend but sloshing generally to include all thirteens, maybe all variants, maybe just anybody within reach. Maybe rage at the unaccustomed powerlessness of sitting at the table under another man’s gun. Or maybe—he hated the thought—not rage at all, maybe the two of them, Bambarén and Onbekend, the two unlikely brothers, maybe in the end they just played Carl, improvised, used the angle, and it worked.

Bambarén slapped a hand into the Glock, swept it wide, and came around the edge of the table yelling. The gun went off, once, nowhere useful. Carl twisted, took the other man’s momentum, and dumped it over his hip. Most of him was still trying to work out where Onbekend had gone. Bambarén clung on with street-fighter savagery, fingers digging for eyes, knee to groin. Carl dropped the gun. They both went down, thrashing to get the upper position.

Tanindo and the mesh won out. Bambarén had an antique street-honed savagery to call on, but it was blurred with age and years of rank. Carl broke his holds, took the punches through the padding of the weblar jacket, teeth gritted tight as pain flared across his cracked ribs and through the codeine veil. He vented a snarl, smothered a knee jab to his groin, and then smashed an elbow into the tayta’s face. The other man reeled off him. Carl stabbed stiffened fingers in under the chin. Bambarén gagged and—

Behind him, the recently familiar chatter of a Steyr assault rifle erupted across the living room space. Short, controlled burst.

He flailed loose of Bambarén, rolled for the cover of the table and the chairs around it. The tayta yelled something, and then another brief storm of automatic fire swept over them both and the shout choked off. The tabletop was ripped into splinters, the assault rifle slugs punching through as if it were cardboard. He heard impacts off the rock behind him. Something slammed into his back, ricochet he knew fleetingly. The Glock, the fucking Glock—

—was gone. From his position on the floor, he saw Onbekend’s legs moving forward, cautious, bent-kneed stance, edging around for a clear shot. He did the only thing left, stormed to his feet, mesh-fed speed and raging strength, hurled the chewed-up table off two legs and forward like a shield. Onbekend snapped off more fire, the table toppled like a tossed playing card, impossibly slow, he dodged sideways. The Steyr chattered, impacts caught him, the impact jacket squeezed and warmed as it worked, the shots twisted and slammed him backward into the alcove wall…

And the firing stopped.

It was almost comical. Onbekend stood with the suddenly silent weapon in his hands. Faint ping of the load alert, into the quiet like a dripping tap. His gaze dropped from Carl’s face to the Steyr, saw the blinking red light. He’d had no time to check the magazine, must have grabbed the first decent weapon he saw off the pile on the breakfast bar, and he’d come away with one almost fully discharged.

Carl came off the wall with a yell.

Onbekend threw the emptied Steyr at him. He batted it aside. The other thirteen tried to grapple, he punched and stamped the attempt apart, drove Onbekend back across the space in a flurry of tanindo technique. The thirteen blocked and covered, launched jabbing counters, but all the time Carl read out the damage Sevgi’s slugs had done in the way the other man moved. He felt a snarl peel his lips, savage satisfaction, the heart-deep anticipation of damage. He closed, broke up a defense, lanced a high blow through, and caught Onbekend across the jaw. The other thirteen staggered, his back almost to the shattered picture window now. Blood and translucent light behind—Carl caught it out of the corner of his eye, dull red smears on the jagged lower line of the remaining glass, glint of the sun’s rays on the sawtoothed edges. He closed with Onbekend again—

And there was a crouched figure beyond the glass.

Carl had time to register the shocked, frightened face, the raised shotgun. His attack momentum was already committed, all he could do was let it carry him stumbling across the living room, trying to get out of the way. The shotgun went off, fresh glass smashed off the ruined window, and Onbekend bellowed. Carl fetched up against the breakfast bar, clawed down a clatter of weapons, and hit the floor. He grabbed at random, found himself with another of the assault rifles, dragged it around—safety off—and triggered it just as the door blew inward.

There were a pair of Bambarén’s men gathered there. They’d shot out the lock and burst in, one high, one low. Carl was sitting on the floor, back to the breakfast bar, nowhere near where they’d expected. He held down the trigger on the Steyr and sprayed. The hammering fire kicked both men backward, limbs waving as if they were trying to fend the bullets off. One of them flew back through the entryway and landed in a puffed cloud of dust outside; the other caught an ankle on the doorjamb and went down tangled where he was. Carl skidded back upright, got cover at the edge of the picture window, and then hooked around and hosed the shotgunner off his feet.

Sporadic fire from farther off. No more bodies. In the sudden quiet, the Steyr pinged insistently for more ammunition. The weapon’s previous owner had doubled magazines, taped two back-to-back and inverted. Carl unlocked the gun, swapped the ends, and snicked the fresh magazine into place.

Somewhere on the floor, Onbekend groaned.

Carl peered out and saw crouched figures backing hastily off, slithering back to their cover by the path. He chased them with a quick burst from the Steyr, drew a deep breath, went back to the doorway, shoved the body on the threshold out of the way with his boot so he could get the door closed. Halfway through, he realized the man was still alive, breathing shallowly and rapidly, eyes closed. Carl shot him in the head with the Steyr, kicked him the rest of the way out, and shut the door. Then he dragged an armchair across the floor and pushed it hard up against the handle. Vague realization of pain as he worked—he stopped and looked down at the impact jacket, saw the shiny bulges where the gene-tweaked weblar had stopped the slugs and melted closed around them. But blood trickled down past the lower hem of the garment. He pulled it up and saw an ugly gouge in the flesh above his hip. Angled fire from someone as he jumped or twisted or fell sometime in the last minute and a half. Could have been Onbekend or the guys in the door, maybe even a stray long shot from outside.

With the sight, the pain rolled in. He sagged onto the arm of the wedging chair.

“That’s fucking ironic,” Onbekend coughed wetly from the floor. “I come that close to taking you down and one of Manco’s fucking goons takes me out instead.”

Carl shot him a tired look. “You were nowhere near.”

“Yeah? Well, fuck you.” Onbekend propped himself up. “Manco?”

No reply.

“Manco?”

Carl watched the other thirteen’s face curiously from across the room. Onbekend’s features contorted with effort as he tried to get himself into a sitting position. His chest was drenched with blood from the shotgun blast. He growled through gritted teeth, pushed with both hands, couldn’t do it. He fell back.

“I’ll go look,” Carl told him.

Manco Bambarén was flat on his back in a pool of his own blood, gazing blankly up at the ceiling. It looked to have been instant—Onbekend’s shots must have nailed him across the chest as he was trying to get up. Carl looked down at the familia chief for a moment, then headed back.

“He’s dead,” Onbekend said. Blood in his throat turned his voice deep and muddy. “Right?”

“Yeah, he’s dead. Nice shooting.”

A bubbling laugh. “I was trying for you.”

“Yeah? Try harder next time.” Carl felt spreading wet warmth, glanced down at his leg, saw blood soaking through the material of his trousers at the belt and thigh. Even through the painkillers, his chest ached as if he’d been crushed in a vise. He wondered if the weblar had failed, let something through somewhere else as well—it could happen with multiple impacts in the same region of the jacket, he’d seen it before. Or maybe someone out there, some fucking gun fetishist, had an armor-piercing load he liked to show off. Power enough to bring down a coked-up black man, just like in Rovayo’s history books; power enough to bring down the thirteen. Power to stop the beast in its tracks.

“Ah. Not a complete waste, then.”

Onbekend had seen the blood as well.

Carl sank onto the floor, put his back against the armchair he had blocking the door, and pulled his feet in so his knees went up. He propped the Steyr on his legs and checked the load. Filtering sunlight slanted in past him, missed his shoulder by half a meter, made him shiver unreasonably in the contrasting shade.

“How many are there out there really?” he asked Onbekend.

The other thirteen turned his head and grinned across the short expanse of stone-tiled floor that separated them. His teeth were bloody.

“More than you’re in any state to deal with, I’d say.” He swallowed liquidly. “Tell me something, Marsalis. Tell me the truth. You didn’t hurt Greta, did you?”

Carl looked at him for a while. “No,” he said finally. “She’s fine, she’s sleeping. I didn’t come here for her.”

“That’s good.” A spasm of pain passed across Onbekend’s face. “Just came for me, huh? Sorry you got beaten to the draw, brother.”

“I’m not your fucking brother.”

Quiet, apart from the sound of Onbekend’s wet rasping breath. Something had happened to the angle of the light outside. Carl and Onbekend were both in pools of shadow, but between them bright sunlight fell in on the dark tiles, seemed to burn back up off them in a blurry dust-moted haze. Carl reached over with a little jagged effort and dipped his hand in the glow, brushed the tips of his fingers over the warmth in the tiles.

Definitely blood trickling somewhere inside the strictures of the weblar jacket. He tipped back his head and sighed.

So.

He wondered, suddenly, what Fat Men Are Harder to Kidnap would sound like when they took the Mars Memorial Hall stage in Blythe next week. If they’d be any good.

“Fifteen.”

He looked across at Onbekend. “What?”

“Fifteen men. Manco was telling you the truth. Plus two pilots, but they don’t count as guns.”

“Fifteen, huh?”

“Yeah. But you downed a couple just now in the doorway, right?”

“Three.” Carl raised his eyebrows at the gallery rail. He thought for just a moment he saw Elena Aguirre leaning there, watching. “Including the guy that got you. Leaves an even dozen. How’d you rate them?”

Onbekend coughed up more laughter, and some blood with it. “Pretty fucking poor. I mean, they’re good by gangster standards. But up against Osprey training? Against a thirteen? A dozen shit-scared cudlips? No contest.”

Carl grimaced. “Just want me to get out there and leave you alone with Greta, right?”

“Nah, stay awhile. Gives us time to talk.”

Carl shot the other thirteen a strange look. “We’ve got something to talk about?”

“Sure we do.” Onbekend held his eye for a moment, then his head rolled back to face the ceiling. He sighed, blood burbling through it. “You still don’t get it, do you. Even now, the two of us in here, all of them out there. You still don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“What we are.” The other thirteen swallowed hard, and his voice lost some of its pipey hydraulic sound. “Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power-grubbing men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.”

The words wiped out in throaty panting. Carl nodded and stared at the gray matte surface of the weapon in his hands.

“But not us, right?”

“Fucking right, not us.” Onbekend spasmed with coughing. Carl saw flecks of blood in the slanting flood of sunlight just past where the other thirteen lay. He waited while the spasm passed and Onbekend got his breath back. “Fucking right, not us. You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did with wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how you get that?”

Carl said nothing. He’d read about this stuff, a long time ago. Back when there’d been that long gulf of time in the early nineties, while Osprey was mothballed and they all sat around waiting to see what Jacobsen would mean to them. He’d read but he’d let it wash over him at the time, didn’t recall much now. But he remembered talking to Sutherland about the origin mythology, remembered the big man dismissing it with a grunt. Got to live here and now, soak, he rumbled. You’re on Mars now.

But let Onbekend talk his way out.

“Tell you how you get that,” the dying thirteen rasped. “How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out twenty thousand years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis—we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists.” More coughing, and now the voice was turning hollow and bubbling again. “Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cutoffs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?”

“Yeah, so did we,” Carl said somberly. “Remember.”

“They tried to contain us.” Onbekend shifted over onto his side, looked desperately across at Carl. He spat out more blood in the gloom, cleared his throat for what seemed like forever. “But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to rescue them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.”

“If you say so.” Carl watched the creep of the sun across the tiles. It seemed to be moving toward Onbekend, like the walking edge of fire on a piece of paper burning up.

“Yeah, I do fucking say so.” The other thirteen grinned weakly at him across the light, head drooping. He moved a hand, pressed it flat on the sun-touched tiles and tried to push down. The hand slid instead; the arm was limp behind it. “We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means.”

“You aren’t,” Carl pointed out.

Twist of lips, bloodied teeth. “No, but you can.”

“I’m injured, Onbekend. There are twelve of them out there.”

“Hey, you’re the lottery guy.” Onbekend was gasping now. “Telling me you don’t feel lucky?”

“I cheated the lottery. I fixed it.”

Laughter, like tiny hands beating a slow rhythm on a thin tin oil drum a long, long way off. “There you go. That’s pure thirteen, brother. Don’t play their fucking games, find a way to fuck them all instead. Marsalis, you’re it. You’ll do fine out there.”

He rolled over onto his back again. Stared up at the ceiling. The creeping edge of sunlight came and licked at his hand.

“You’ll show them,” he bubbled.

The sun crept on. It began to cover his body in the same burnishing, dusty glow. He didn’t speak again.

Outside, Carl could hear Bambarén’s men talking. Nerving each other up.

I’ll see you all in the garden, I guess.

It was almost as if she were there, speaking in his ear. Or maybe that was Elena Aguirre again. He remembered squeezing her hand in the hospital, the dry weightlessness of it. Telling her all that sunlight through the trees.

He pulled the full magazine from the Steyr and looked at the soft gleam of the top shell. Snicked it back into the gun.

I’ll be along, Sevgi. I’ll catch you up.

We all will.

Onbekend’s breathing had stopped. The sunlight covered him. Carl shivered in the gloom on his side of the window. He thought he could hear stealthy movement somewhere outside.

He sighed and pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he’d expected. He edged across to the weapons that had fallen from the bar, took a Glock, and tucked it into his belt for later. Lifted another Steyr, checked the magazines, and then slung it around his neck, adjusting the strap carefully. He’d grab it when he threw away the one in his hands, when that was emptied. It was extra weight, but it couldn’t be any worse than lugging the sharkpunch all the way down here had been.

A dozen shit-scared cudlips. Good odds for the lottery guy.

You’ll show them.

“Yeah, right,” he muttered.

Drag the armchair aside, crack the door, and peer out. He couldn’t see anybody, hadn’t expected to really. But they’d come in sooner or later, to check on the man who gave them their orders, told them what to do, kept them fed.

I’ll see you in the garden.

The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the gloom. This time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Carl nodded and reached back with his left hand, cupped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked one more time at Onbekend’s incandescent corpse, checked his weapons one more time, nodded to himself again.

Deep breath.

Then he went out into the sun.