“And imagine—that is what you wanted to use as a weapon.”

“Wanted?” She took an alarmed step away from him. And in that second, she knew. “Wait. You are making a mistake. It’s a monster—”

Rustem felt the wind of it on his face as it swung down.

It was a research drone. It had been a simple enough mechanism to crack, just a platform designed for long-distance flight—for counting migratory birds and logging weather patterns, pollution levels, geopositions, ambient noise, and birdcalls. The most sophisticated element of it was its cloaking device, designed to keep it from disturbing the birds it studied. It was imperfect, of course. The outline of the craft could be seen as a flicker, a deformation of the air.

It slammed into her.

Rustem had expected blood. He had prepared himself for the scene: the ferry’s alarm, a witness or two on the deck, even at this early hour. But there was none of that. The angle of impact carried her over the side. There was a thump and the snap of bone breaking as one of her legs hit the upper bar of the railing. A moment later she struck the water, the sound of her impact inaudible over the thrum of the ferry’s engines.

The drone was traveling at three hundred kilometers an hour when it hit her. She was probably dead before she hit the water. If not, the water would take care of the rest.

The damaged drone splashed down moments later, a few hundred meters away, skipping off the surface once and sinking. A hazy smear against the chop, then gone.

Rustem glanced up at the ferry’s wheelhouse. Many of the ferries were now AI-piloted, but with the sun reflecting off the glass he could not see if there was a person inside the wheelhouse or not.

Could it all be over? Just like that? The ferry continued on its way without stopping, as if nothing at all had happened. Rustem heard a small sound, like a coin dropping.

There, on the deck. Something glinting in the sun. He bent down and looked closer at the thing—at its array of light receptors that mimicked a fly’s compound eyes. At the long, glinting needle where a mouth would be. He remembered how, in Aynur’s bedroom, it had tilted its head, rubbed its forelimbs together, and stared at him.

Now it was still.

It was his death. Hovering over him, waiting for the moment he turned the terminal over to her.

He nudged it with his shoe. It lay like a beetle, insect legs up in the air. He crushed it carefully, then pushed it overboard, into the water of the Bosporus.

Gone. Gone with the rest of it.

Am I free now? For a while, maybe. But they would come for him, in time. That was certain.