Read Online Black Man by Richard K. Morgan - Free Book Online Page B

the waif-like look. She sat up, and the sheet slipped off improbably thrusting breasts. From the way they moved, it was a subcute muscle web, not implants, that was pulling the trick. Pricey work for someone that young. Sevgi made her for someone’s trophy date, the whole fake-bonobo thing, but was too hungover to rack her head for faces from the party. Maybe whoever brought her had gotten too wasted to remember all his accessories when he went home.
    “Who told you you could sleep in here?”
    The girl blinked again. “You did.”
    “Oh.” Sevgi’s anger crumpled. She rode out another wave of nausea and swallowed. “Well, get your stuff together and go home. Party’s over.”
    She headed back to the bathroom, closed the door carefully, and then, as if to emphasize her own last words, hooked over and vomited into the toilet.
    When she was sure she could hold them down, she took the k37 slugs with a glass of water and then propped herself under the warm drizzle of the shower while she waited for the effects to kick in. It didn’t take long. The tweaked chemistry in the drug made for rapid uptake as well as retained clarity, and the lack of anything else in her stomach sped the process even more. The throbbing in her head began to subside. She got off the tiled wall and groped for the gel, started gingerly on her scalp with it. The soaked and matted mass of her hair collapsed into silky submission, and the foam from the gel ran down her body in clumped suds. It was like shedding five-day-old clothes. She felt new strength and focus stealing through her like a fresh skeleton. When she stepped dripping out of the shower ten minutes later, the pain was wrapped away in chemical gauze and a spiky, clear-sighted brilliance had taken its place.
    Which was a mixed blessing. Drying herself in the mirror, she saw the weight that was gathering on her haunches and grimaced. She hadn’t been inside a gym in months, and her home-based Cassie Rogers AstroTone— as used by real MarsTrip personnel!! —program was settling into oblivion like a deflating circus tent. The incriminating evidence of the neglect was right there. And you couldn’t take milissue slugs to make it go away like you could with pain. The ludicrously perfect flanks of the girl in her bed flitted through her mind. The jutting designer chest. She looked at the swell of her own breasts, gathered low on her ribs and tilting away to the sides.
    Ah fuck it, you’re in your thirties now, Sevgi. Not trying to impress the boys at Bosphorus Bridge anymore, are we. Give it a rest. Anyway, you’re due, that always makes it worse .
    Her hair was already settling back into its habitually untidy black bell as it dried out. She took a couple of swipes at it with a brush, then gave up in exasperation. In the mirror, her largely Arab ancestry glowered back at her: cheekbones high and wide, face hawk-nosed and full-lipped, set with heavy-lidded amber flake eyes. Ethan had once said there was something tigerish in her face, but Sevgi, sharp from the syn and not yet made up, suspected that today she looked more like a disgruntled crow. The idea dragged a grin to the surface and she made cawing noises at herself in the mirror. Dumped the towel and went to get dressed. Discovered a desire for coffee.
    The kitchen, predictably, looked like a war zone. Every available counter was piled with used dishes.
    Sevgi tracked the party dishes through the debris—dark green remnants like tiny rags where the plates had held stuffed vine leaves, brittle fragments of sigara börek pastry, eggplant and tomato in oil gone cold, half a lahmacun left upside down so that it looked like a stiffly dried-out washcloth. In the sink, a small turret of stacked pans reared drunkenly out at her like some robot jack-in-the-box. Efes Export bottles were gathered in squat, orderly rows along one wall on the floor. Their slightly sour breath rose up to fill the kitchen space.
    Good party.
    A few of her departing