On the waters of the strait, massive autofreighters glided past, their engines nearly silent, giants among the smaller boats—the ferries municipal and private, the grizzled fishing vessels, the white triangles of sailboats so bright in the sun they left a trace on the retina long after you moved your eyes away.

Their table was near the water. Rustem could look down into it at the drifting jellyfish, the seaweed on the submerged cement and stone. Gulls hovered over the black-painted railing or dropped down and walked around the tables on webbed feet, staring down the café’s customers.

Deniz was late to the meeting. For a while it was only Rustem and the shifting presence of the abglanz across from him. The unsettling non-face shimmered and glitched in the sun, her platinum-stained fingers settling on the pear-shaped glass of tea or plucking a chunk of lokum from the decorative tray.

Rustem had been several hours with her in a drone quadcopter, which dropped them on the deck of a self-propelled landing pad on the strait. The landing pad then sailed to a dock no more than a few hundred steps from here.

Rustem was in a haze of travel. He had the anxious feeling that anything could happen, could be done to him or anyone else by this non-person sharing the small table with him.

People glanced at them, and then away. An abglanz was a rare sight in the republic. Anyone using one in public, in broad daylight, was either rich and connected enough to be untouchable or was a part of the republic’s istihbarat teşkilatı, and there was even more reason to ignore intelligence agents at their work.

When Deniz showed up, he was in an old cable-knit sweater, patched with corduroy at the elbows and frayed at the sleeves. He wore jeans and a pair of shapeless, unpolished leather shoes. He looked every bit the scientist or academic: easygoing, absentminded. He saw the abglanz swirling, blinked at it in mild surprise, pulled his chair out, and folded his tall, lanky frame into it.

The world doesn’t touch this kind of person. They find a place at one research institution or another and live a happy life there in their laboratories, drifting out an existence in the liquid medium of data. Rustem found himself thinking of the jellyfish.

“Tea?” Rustem asked.

“Coffee.” Deniz ordered from a waiter who recognized him. No sugar.

“You come here often?” the altered voice said from inside its iridescing cloud.

“When I’m up in the daylight,” Deniz said. He leaned back, yawned, stretched. “Sorry. Can’t wake up all the way. Hope the coffee will help. I’ve been using it instead of blood. Now—sorry? What was it you wanted to see me about? Is this a police matter?”