“Big bad Martian monsters, huh?”

“I didn’t say it made any sense.” He stared out at the bridge. The southern tower was almost lost in the encroaching fog bank now, wrapped and shrouded to the top. Tendrils crept through under the main span. “They say it’s the gravity and the perceived horizon that does it. Triggers a survival anxiety. Maybe they’re right.”

“You think you handled it better?” She made an embarrassed gesture. “Because. You know, because of what you are?”

He frowned. “What do you want to hear from me, Rovayo? What’s this really about?”

“Hey, just making conversation. You want to be alone, say the word. I can take a hint if you hit me upside the head with it.”

Carl felt a faint smile touch the corners of his mouth.

“You work at it, you can reach a balance,” he said. “The fear tips over into exhilaration. The weakness turns into strength, fuels you up to face whatever it is your survival anxiety thinks it’s warning you about. Starts to feel good instead of bad.” He looked down at the backs of his hands where they rested on the rail. “Kind of addictive after a while.”

“You think that’s why they’re happy to have you on Mars?”

“Rovayo, they’re happy to have anyone on Mars. The qualpro guys mostly go home as soon as their stint’s up—to be fair to your cousin, he’s a tough motherfucker if he stayed even for a second tour—and you’ve got a high rate of mental health problems in the permanent settlers, that’s the grunts and the ex-grunts who’ve upskilled, doesn’t seem to make much difference either way. End result—there’s never enough labor to go around, never enough skilled personnel or reliable raw human material to learn the skills. So yeah, they can put up with the fact you’re a born-and-bred twist sociopath if they think you’ll be able to punch above your weight.” A thin smile. “Which we mostly can.”

The Rim cop nodded, as if convincing herself of something.

“They say the Chinese are breeding a new variant for Mars. Against the Charter. You believe that?”

“I’d believe pretty much anything of those shitheads in Beijing. You don’t keep a grip on the world’s largest economy the way they have without stamping on a few human rights.”

“You see any evidence? When you were there, I mean?”

Carl shook his head. “You don’t see much of the Chinese at all on Mars. They’re mostly based down in Hellas or around the Utopia spread. Long way from Bradbury or Wells, unless you’ve got some specific reason to go there.”

They both watched the silvered chop of the water for a while.

“I did think about going,” Rovayo said finally. “I was younger when Enrique came back with all his stories, still in my teens. I was going to get some studies, sign up for a three stint.”

“So what happened?”

She laughed. “Life happened, man. Just one of those dreams the logistics stacked up against, you know.”

“You probably didn’t miss much.”

“Hey, you went.”

“Yeah. I went because the alternative was internment.” A brief memory of Nevant’s jeering slipped across his mind. “And I came back as soon as I got the chance. You don’t want to believe all your cousin’s war stories. That stuff always looks better in the rearview mirror. A lot of the time, Mars is just this cold, hardscrabble place you won’t ever belong to no matter how hard you scrabble at trying.”

Rovayo shrugged.

“Yeah, well.” A hard little smile came and went across her mouth, but her voice was quiet and cop-wisdom calm. “You think it’s any different here on Earth, Marsalis? You think down here they’re ever going to let you belong?”

And for that, he had no answer. He just stood and watched the disappearing bridge until Rovayo propped herself upright off the rail and touched his arm.

“C’mon,” she said companionably. “Let’s get back to work.”

They were working the Horkan’s Pride case out of a closed suite in the lower levels of the Alcatraz station. Shielding in the superstructure above them ensured a leak-tight data environment, the transmission systems in and out ran Marstech-standard encryption, and all the equipment in the suite was jacked together with python-thick coils of black actual cable. It gave the offices a period feel that sat well with the raw, sandblasted stone walls and the subterranean cool that soaked off them. Sevgi sat in a commandeered desk chair and stared at a rough-hewn corner, keeping her eyes off Marsalis and furious with herself for the feeling that had snaked across her belly when Rovayo came back with the black man in tow.

“Coyle and Norton went to talk to Tsai,” she told them. “Going to book some n-djinn time, run a fresh linkage model on Ward and the victims, soon as we can get on the machine.”

Rovayo nodded and went to her desk, where she stood prodding through a pile of hardcopy with limited enthusiasm. Sevgi turned to Marsalis.

“There’s a Mars datafile you might want to take a look at here. Seems Norton got on to Colony while we were in Istanbul, had them pull Gutierrez in. You want to screen it?”

She thought she saw a subtle tightening go through him. But he only shrugged. “Think it’s worth looking at?”

“I don’t know,” she said acidly. “I haven’t seen it yet.”

“The chances Colony got anything useful out of an old familia hand like Gutierrez are pretty thin.”

“Not really the main point,” said Rovayo absently from across the room without looking up from her paperwork. “Cop’ll tell you it’s what the guy doesn’t say as often as not gives you the angle.”

“Uh, exactly,” said Sevgi, startled.

Marsalis shuttled a sour look between the two women.

“All right,” he said ungraciously. “So let’s all watch the fucking thing, shall we.”

But in the screening chamber, she saw how the quick-flaring irritation damped down to an intent stare that might have passed for boredom if she hadn’t seen him looking the same way after the third skater in New York, the man he’d failed to kill. She had no way of knowing where exactly Marsalis’s attention fell—the file was a standard split-screen interrogation tape, six or seven facets slotted together on the LCLS display, frontal on Gutierrez, face and body from the tabletop up, vital signs in longitudinal display below, minimized footage of the whole interview room from two or three different angles, voice profiles in dropdown to the left. Cop custom had her skimming detail from the whole thing in random snatches. But if she’d had to guess, she’d say the thirteen at her side was riveted on the slightly gaunt, sun-blasted features of the familia datahawk as he sat unimpressed and smoking his way through the interrogation.

“They let him take fucking cigarettes in there?” asked Rovayo, outraged.

“It’s not a cigarette as such,” Sevgi told her patiently. She’d been a little shocked the first time she saw it, too. “That’s a gill. You know, like in the settler flicks. Chemical ember, gives off oxygen instead of burning it. Like a lung supercharger.”

Rovayo snapped her fingers. “O-kay. Like, Kwame Oviedo’s always got one stuck in the corner of his mouth, practically every scene in that Upland Heroes trilogy.”

Sevgi nodded. “Yeah, same with Marisa Mansour. Even in Marineris Queen, which when you think about it, is pretty—”

“Weren’t we supposed to be watching this,” said Marsalis loudly.

Sevgi cocked an expressive eyebrow at the Rim cop, and they turned back toward the screen. Gutierrez was settling comfortably into his role of career criminal cool. Upland-dialect Quechua drawled out of him—the language monitor tagged it in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, provided a machine-speed simultaneous subtitle in Amanglic, but for the original interrogators it would have been hard work. They’d have some street Quechua, Sevgi supposed, you’d have to have, be a decent cop out there, but you could see they were uncomfortable with it. Instead, they fell back repeatedly on Amanglic or Spanish—both of which the file said Gutierrez spoke well—and listened constantly to their sleek black earplug whisperers. The datahawk smirked through it.