“Okay,” said Marsalis, very softly.

Sevgi thought he’d finished. She opened her mouth, but the black man went on speaking.

“A couple of things.” Still soft, like the touch of cotton-wool wadding on fingertips. “First, if you think you’ll bring Allen Merrin down in any condition other than dead, then you’re not living in the real world. None of you are. And second, Roy, if you ever speak to me like that again, in the real world, I’ll put you in intensive care.”

The Rim cop flared up. “Hey, you want to fucking step outside with me?”

“Very much, yes.” But Sevgi had the curious sensation that Marsalis was imperceptibly shaking his head as he said it. “But it isn’t going to happen. I want you to remember a name, Roy. Sutherland. Isaac Sutherland. He saved your life today.”

Then he was gone.

Scribbled out in a flicker of virtual light as he left them to the empty virtual apartment, Merrin’s viewpatch freeze-frame portrait walking away, and the hundred red glow traces of his forensic passing.

Oddly enough, it was Rovayo who came looking for him. By the time she tracked him down, he’d stopped prowling angrily about the Alcatraz station and drifted instead to an irritable halt on an outside gallery at the western end of the complex. She found him leaning on the rail, staring across the silver-glinting chop of the sea toward the mouth of the bay and the rust-colored suspension span that bridged it. There was a towering bank of fog rolling in against the blue of the sky, like a pale cotton-candy wave about to break.

“Enough water for you?” she asked.

Carl shot her a curious glance. “I’ve been back a long time.”

“Yeah, I know.” Rovayo joined him at the rail. “I got this cousin down in the Freeport, he did six years on Mars when he was younger. Soil engineer. Two three-year qualpro stints back-to-back. He told me you never get used to the size of the water again, doesn’t matter how long ago you went.”

“Well, that’s him. Everyone handles it differently.”

“You ever miss it?”

He looked at her again. “What do you want, Rovayo?”

“Says he misses the sky,” she went on neutrally, as if Carl hadn’t spoken. “Sky at night, you know. All that landscape on that tiny horizon, says it looks like furniture crammed into a storeroom that’s too small for everything to fit. And all the stars. He says it was like you were all camping out together, like you were all part of the same army or something. You and every other human being you knew was on the planet with you, all with the same reason for being there, like you were all doing something that mattered.”

Carl grunted.

“You ever feel like that?” she asked.

“No.”

It came out more abrupt than he’d meant. He sighed and opened his hands where they rested on the rail. “I’m a thirteen, remember. We don’t suffer from this need to feel useful that you people have. We’re not wired for group harmony.”

“Yeah, but you don’t always let your wiring tell you what to do, right?”

“Maybe not, but I’d say it pays to listen to it from time to time. If you plan on ever being happy, that is.”

Rovayo rolled over on the railing, put her arched spine to it, and hooked her elbows back for support. “I seem to remember reading somewhere we’re none of us wired for that one. Being happy. Just a chemical by-product of function, a trick to get you where your genes want you to go.”

His gaze slipped sideways, drawn by the lithe twist she’d used to reverse her position on the rail. He caught her profile, lean high-breasted body and long thighs, the dark flaring facets of her face. The wind off the bay fingered through the curls in her hair, flattened it forward around her head.

“You don’t want to worry too much about Coyle,” she said, not looking at him.

“I’m not.”

She smiled. “Okay. It’s just. See, we don’t get a whole lot of thirteens out here on the Rim. They crop up occasionally, we just bust ’em and ship ’em out. Dump them in Cimarron or Tanana. Jesusland’s always a good place to export the stuff you don’t want in your own backyard. Nuclear nondegradables, nanotech test runs, cutting-edge crop research. The Republic takes it all at a fraction what it’d cost us to do the processing ourselves.”

“I know.”

“Yeah, you worked a couple of Cimarron breaks, right?”

“Six.” He considered. “Seven if you count Eric Sundersen last year. He escaped en route, never actually got to Cimarron itself.”

“Oh yeah, I remember that one. The guy who shorted out the autocopter, right?”

“Right.”

“You the one who brought him in?”

“No,” he said shortly. Eric Sundersen had died in a hail of assault rifle fire on the streets of Minneapolis. Standard police ordnance and tactics; apparently he’d been mistaken for a local drug dealer. Carl was chasing false leads down in Juarez at the time. He went home with day-rate expenses and minor lacerations from a razor fight triggered by one too many questions in the wrong bar. “I missed out on that one.”

“Yeah?” Rovayo hitched herself up on the rail. “Well, anyway, like I said. Having guys like you around isn’t something any of us are used to. Coyle’s got a pretty standard Rim mentality about what a good thing that is. And with the mess Merrin made on that ship…well, Coyle’s a cop, he just doesn’t want to see any more blood in the streets.”

“You trying to apologize for him? That what this is about?”

She grimaced. “I’m just trying to make sure you two don’t kill each other before we get the job done.”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “I can guarantee you Coyle won’t kill me.”

“Yeah.” She nodded and her mouth tightened. “Well, just so you know, he’s my partner. It’s not a fight I’ll stay out of if it cuts loose.”

He let it sit for a while, waiting to see if she was finished, if she’d leave him alone with the threat. When she didn’t, he sighed again.

“Okay, Rovayo, you win. Go back and tell your good, honest, compassionate cop partner that if he can keep the word twist hedged a little tighter behind his teeth next time, I’ll cut him some slack.”

“I know. I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be. You’re not the one who said it.”

She hesitated. “I don’t like that word any more than you do. It’s just, like I said, we don’t get—”

“Yeah, I know. You don’t get many like me in the Rim, so Coyle gets to throw the words around without repercussions. Don’t worry, it’s not much different anywhere else I’ve been.”

“Apart from Mars?”

He hunched around to look at her properly.

“Mars, huh? This cousin of yours really planted some seeds, didn’t he? What’s the deal, you thinking about going yourself?”

She didn’t meet his gaze. “Nothing like that. Just Enrique, my cousin, he talked a lot about how no one had a problem with the thirteens there. Like they had this kind of minor celebrity status.”

Carls snorted. “Pretty fucking minor, I’d say. Sounds to me like your cousin Enrique’s having a bad attack of qualpro nostalgia. That’s pretty common once you get safely back, but you notice most of these guys don’t sign up for another tour. I mean, he didn’t, right?”

She shook her head. “I think part of him wanted to, part of him would have stayed out there longer, maybe not come back at all. But he got scared. He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you could pick it up from what he said, you know.”

“Well, it’s an easy place to get scared,” Carl admitted grudgingly.

“Even for a thirteen?”

He shrugged. “We’re not that good at fear, it’s true. But this is something deeper, it’s not an actual fear of anything. It’s something that comes up from inside. No warning, no trigger you can work out. Just a feeling.”

“Feeling of what?”

Carl grimaced, remembering. “A feeling that you don’t belong. That you shouldn’t be there. Like being in someone else’s home without them knowing, and you know they might be coming home any minute.”