The blood is not yours.
[21:08:47.332 | IST-TAKSIM-CAM-17C | PEDESTRIAN-PASS | ASSET 4709-VX | CONF 0.92]
The weight on your shoulder is not yours either. It is Yelena. She is mostly conscious. The hand on your waist is shaking.
You are walking down Kumbaracı Yokuşu. Kumbaracı Yokuşu goes down. The weight on your shoulder needs down.
Keep your face still.
The street tilts. Your heel slips on a tram rail painted with rain. You steady. Yelena does not.
"Left at the next," she says.
"You said left three streets ago."
"Left again."
The alley opens on a shop window with mannequins wearing wedding dresses from nineteen-eighty-nine. A cat on the windowsill inside. The cat is watching you through glass.
[21:09:12.001 | MERIDIAN-ORBIT-7F | IMAGE-CAPTURE | FOV 24M² | ASSET 4709-VX | CONF 0.87]
The cat. Not the satellite. You did not feel the satellite.
Yelena's blood is on your jacket. Your left side, under the armpit, where she is pressing herself into you to keep walking. The blood is warm. The blood is still warm. This means the heart is still moving it.
Ten minutes.
That is what you are working with.
The stairs of Kumbaracı Yokuşu are crumbling. They were laid in the 1870s for mules. You take them sideways. Yelena takes them on one leg.
"Stop."
"No."
"Vera."
"No."
She laughs. It is the wrong laugh. It is a laugh from after the bar closes, from a life she was living last Tuesday.
"You are good at this."
"Shut up."
"You are."
[21:10:34.118 | TT-CELL-7F-3A | HANDOFF 5G → 4G | IMSI 286-03-***-**** | VEL 0.4M/S]
The phone in your pocket is not yours. You swapped it two days ago. The IMEI matches a woman in Kadıköy who is dead. The dead woman's phone is telling the network you are moving slow now, heading east, and the network is telling four other things you do not know about.
You move.
At the bottom of the stairs, a kebab shop is closed. The owner is behind the counter eating. He is eating because he has eaten through every evening for years and will eat through this one. He does not look up.
You cross under his television. A Turkish singer you know from Yelena's kitchen is finishing a song.
Yelena says a name.
The name is not Nina's. The name is not the name of the man you are trying to reach. It is a name you have not heard before.
"Who."
"Jana."
"Who is Jana."
"Later."
"Yelena —"
"Later, Vera."
[21:11:02.556 | IST-GUVENLIK-FRN-33 | FACE-MATCH | TARGET ASSET 4709-VX | 2 MATCHES LAST 180S | CONF 0.94]
Two matches. The Turkish security service has matched your face to two camera locations in the last three minutes. The system is doing what it does. It does not know who you are. It knows that it has seen you twice, and two is the number at which its protocols begin to stitch.
You do not know the system is doing this.
You turn right onto a street you do not know the name of.
Yelena says the name.
"Kallavi Sokak. The café with the green awning."
"How far."
"Three minutes."
"Two."
"I cannot do two."
"Two."
The café on Kallavi Sokak is shuttered. Not closed — shuttered. Metal grate down to the pavement. A handwritten sign in Turkish taped to the grate that you cannot read.
"The door beside it."
The door beside it is unmarked.
You put your fist on the door. Not a knock. Three blows. Pause. One blow. Pause. Three.
[21:14:38.907 | BGP-AS213003 | ROUTE-FLAP | PREFIX 185.110.208.0/24 | ORIGIN: IRAN → UNKNOWN]
A subroutine flags the location — not you, the building whose network egress just rerouted — and queues it.
You do not know.
You are asking Yelena to stay conscious for fifteen more seconds.
"Yelena."
"Here."
"Yelena, the door."
"Knock again."
The door opens three inches. An eye you do not know.
Yelena says a word. The word is a word you have heard twice this week and never understood. It is not a password. It is the name of a woman who is not in this alley and not in this country and not, possibly, alive.
The door opens the rest of the way.
Inside is a kitchen. Inside the kitchen is a woman in her sixties holding a knife the wrong way — the wrong way for cutting vegetables, the right way for one thing.
She sees Yelena.
She lowers the knife.
"On the table."
You carry Yelena to the table. The table has on it: an onion, half-peeled. A glass of tea. A phone, face-down, vibrating with a call no one is answering.
You put Yelena on the table.
The woman is already lifting Yelena's shirt.
"Out."
"I will wait —"
"Out. You are in the way. You are also in the hallway camera. Out. Through the yellow door."
"Yellow door —"
"Through the yellow door, girl."
[21:16:22.440 | TT-CAMERA-BODEGA-12 | PERSON-EXITS | HEADING WEST | ASSET 4709-VX | CONF 0.96]
You go through the yellow door.
The yellow door opens into a courtyard. The courtyard has a fig tree. The fig tree is older than the building. The fig tree has a metal cradle of supports because the fig tree has been dying for forty years and will die in forty more.
You stand under the fig tree.
You look at your hands.
The blood on your hands. The left hand has a cut across the palm you do not remember. The cut is not deep but it is open and the blood is yours and you register this now, at 21:18, standing under a fig tree in a courtyard in Beyoğlu, with your friend on a table behind a yellow door and a woman with a knife cutting into her to save her life.
I am in a city I have been in for five days.
I am holding my hand closed.
I am twenty-three.
Your phone — the dead woman's phone — buzzes once. You look at the screen. It is not a message. It is a notification from an app you did not install.
The notification says, in English:
It is safer to go east.
You do not know what app. You do not know who sent it. You do not know if it is a warning or a trap.
You look up.
The fig tree's leaves move in a wind you cannot feel.
You go east.
The cut on your left cheek opens when you pull the scarf up around your face. You did not know there was a cut on your left cheek. You did not feel it get there.
Keep your face still.
East is a street called Lüleci Hendek. Lüleci Hendek goes down toward the water. Down is where Yelena cannot follow.
You go down.
Behind you, in a kitchen you will return to before the night is over, the woman with the knife is saying bu kız yaşar, bu kız yaşar — this girl will live — into Yelena's ear, and Yelena is hearing it because Yelena is still here.
You do not know Yelena is still here.
You go east.
You do not stop until you are in a doorway you do not recognize on a street you cannot name, and the phone in your pocket has gone still, and the city has opened underneath you like water.
[21:31:08.772 | ENDPOINT-UNRESOLVED | LAST-KNOWN-VECTOR | ASSET 4709-VX | CONF 0.31]
The system loses you.
The system does not know this is what happened.
The system will look again in six minutes.
You will not be where it looks.