The Peripheral (35 page)

DISANTHROPOMORPHIZED

A
s he left the rear cabin, the Wheelie window vanished, taking the sigil of the emulation software with it. She’d gone to phone about her mother, and perhaps to sleep. He’d heard it in her voice, that she needed that. The attack, her brother’s wound, the business with the party time. But still she had that way of simply going forward.

He pictured the peripheral’s upturned face, eyes closed. It wasn’t sleeping, but where was it, within itself? But then it didn’t, as he understood it, possess a self to be within. Not sentient, yet as Lowbeer had pointed out, effortlessly anthropomorphized. An anthropomorph, really, to be disanthropomorphized. Though when she was present in it, or perhaps through it, was it not some version of her?

He saw the two glasses on the desk before he realized that the bar was still open. Enrobed in a sudden ponderous nonchalance, he moved to pick them up, returning as casually to the open bar, a glass in either hand. As he put them down, the bar’s door slid down. Lev’s sigil appeared. He fought the urge to block the door with his arms, palms flat on the gold-veined marble, fingers spread. Surely it wouldn’t crush his hands.

“What are you doing?” asked Lev, as Netherton heard the door’s lock click.

“I was with Flynne,” he said, “in that toy peripheral. But she had to phone her mother.” He pressed both hands against pale glassy veneer, feeling the German solidity, the complete lack of movement.

“I’m grilling sandwiches,” Lev said. “Sardines on Italian bread, pickled jalapeño. Looking tasty.”

“Is Lowbeer there?”

“She suggested the sardines.”

“I’ll be right up.”

As he was going out the door, he remembered that he was still wearing the headband, with its vaguely Egyptianate, milkily translucent giant sperm of a cam. He took it off and put it in his jacket pocket.

When he’d crossed the garage, taken the bronze elevator, and made his way to the kitchen, he saw through the mullioned doors that Conner was in the garden, on hands and knees, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna. The peripheral’s features lent themselves terrifyingly to this, seeming to expose more teeth than the two creatures possessed between them, in spite of their peculiarly long jaws. They were facing him, side by side, as if ready to spring, their musculature looking even less canine than usual, their stiff tails in particular. Carnivorous kangaroos, in wolf outfits with Cubist stripes. Netherton felt an oddly intense gratitude, just then, for their not having, as the drop bears had, hands.

The kitchen smelled smokily of grilled sardines. “What’s he doing out there?” Netherton asked.

“I don’t know,” said Lev, at the stove, “but they love it.”

Now the two creatures lunged at Conner simultaneously. He fell between them, flailing, wrestling with them. They were making a high-pitched, repetitious coughing sound.

“Dominika’s gone to Richmond Hill, with the children,” Lev said, checking flattened panini in a sandwich press.

“How is she?” Netherton asked, as unable as ever to read the domestic temperature of Chez Lev.

“Rather annoyed with the time I’ve been devoting to all of this, but her taking the children there was my idea. And Lowbeer’s.” He nodded in her direction.

“Lev’s father’s house,” Lowbeer said, seated at the pine table, “is literally untouchable. Should we earn the enmity of anyone of genuine
consequence, in the next forty-eight hours or so, Lev’s family will be secure.”

“Whom would you expect to anger?” Netherton asked.

“Americans, primarily, though I wouldn’t be so worried about them. They are likely, though, to currently have allies in the City. It’s beginning to look as though my assumption was correct, that the motive in Aelita’s death will prove to have been sadly quotidian.”

“Why is that?”

“The aunties, continually mulling it over. A process akin to repetitious dreaming, or the protracted spinning of a given fiction. Not that they’re invariably correct, but over a sufficient course they do tend to find the likely suspects.”

Conner was on his feet now, walking toward them, Gordon and Tyenna hopping in unison after him on their hind legs. He entered, closing the door behind him. Outside, still upright, they followed him with their eyes.

“Infatuated with you,” said Lev, taking the first of the sandwiches from the press.

“Like you crossed possums with coyotes,” Conner said. “Smell a little like possums. They get TB?”

“Get what?” Lev asked.

“Tuberculosis,” Lowbeer said.

“No,” Lev said, looking up from the press. “Why should they?”

“Possums mostly do,” said Conner. “Not many left. People like ’em even less, they get TB. Sandwich smells good. Why don’t you build these things so they can eat?”

“We do,” Lev said, “but it’s much more expensive. Unnecessary in a martial arts instructor.”

“Sit with us,” said Lowbeer. “You do rather loom.”

Conner pulled out the chair opposite her, reversed it, and sat, forearms crossed atop its back.

“Is Flynne sleeping now?” Netherton asked, taking the chair beside
Conner. To be seated with Lowbeer and not face her, he thought, wouldn’t have occurred to him.

“She is,” said Lowbeer, “after speaking with her mother’s caregiver. She’ll visit, tomorrow. There’s an increasing risk involved, but we want her able to give her full attention to her evening with you and Daedra. And whoever else may be present.” Lev placed a white plate with her sandwich in front of her. “That looks absolutely delicious, Lev. Thank you.”

CONVOY

T
he inside of the truck they took her home in was like the Hummer limo her class had all chipped in on for the senior prom, but no stink of air freshener and the seats were nicer. The outside had been made to look like shit, but she didn’t think it really worked that well, because if anybody in town had an American car that new, they’d wash it. And the dirt looked sprayed on. It was an American-looking truck, but not quite any particular make or model. Carlos loved that about it, said it was “gray man,” what he called things he’d’ve called tactical otherwise, except for it having been styled down to not attract attention. But he wouldn’t have liked it, she guessed, if it hadn’t been no make in particular, had a brutal profile, and been armored all to shit. The red-haired girl was driving, in her same bad jeans and Wildcats tank top, but now she had one of the soft-armor jackets on over that. Her name was Tacoma.

Griff and Tommy wouldn’t let Flynne just take a car out to the house. Had to be this whole procession. First, a little remote-control three-quarter-scale SUV rigged to set off mines and roadside bombs, that Leon, to her amazement, was actually piloting, from the front seat of the SUV in front of the gray man truck. Loving it, apparently. No figuring Leon, sometimes, what he’d really like. They’d even gotten him to put on one of the black jackets, over his jean jacket, a weirdly businesslike look for him, except that he was also wearing a headscarf in old-fashioned deer-hunter camo, like a life-sized photograph of tree bark, and he wasn’t somebody who should ever wear that, if anybody was. He was in the SUV with five of Burton’s boys,
all with bullpups and soft armor. Four more in a second SUV taking up the rear, plus some unspecified number of drones, recharging themselves off a pack on the top of the second SUV. She supposed the drones all still had a piece of aquamarine duct tape on them, because she could see a two-foot length of it across the rear bumper of the front SUV. Burton’s aquamarine army, and him hors de combat, in the back of Coldiron’s tarp maze. If he was conscious now, he must think that that really sucked.

But he probably wouldn’t have gotten a look yet at how much dress-up was going on, or maybe dress-down. While she’d slept, it seemed, all the Klein Cruz Vermette people had started competing to look like a stylist’s idea of county, a few even sporting tattoos she hoped were fake, or anyway the kind that faded to nothing after a year or so. Way too into it. Tommy, this morning, had said that was because they weren’t just getting paid shitloads of money, but potential shares in Coldiron too. Said that even the ones who weren’t very qualified were getting some of the highest salaries in the state, period, right then, and it made them giddy and determined and paranoid all at once, not to mention way too nice to her. Tacoma wasn’t, though, because she wasn’t just KCV. Griff had said she was with him, when Flynne had asked him, but that was all he’d say. It looked to Tommy, though, like Clovis and Tacoma were both “acronym,” but no telling which agency. Too smart to be Homes, he said, and not asshole enough for the really big ones. Where that fit with Griff being English, Flynne didn’t know.

Tommy and Griff were both needed in town today. They were only letting her go out alone because Griff still wanted her to talk her mother into the safe house in Virginia. Clovis would stay with Burton, and to do the helmet thing for the surgeons in D.C. Macon and Edward were sleeping, after their run on government wakey. She’d seen them curled up together on a foam, under a sleeping bag, Macon snoring, Edward in his arms. She guessed that not having to dose
Luke 4:5 with party time, or what Griff would have thought was party time, had cut the two of them some much-needed slack.

So here she was, just her and the Wheelie Boy, in the back of this stealth-limo truck, two rows of seats behind the front seats, then the back window, then the pickup bed with a flat hardshell cover. For all she knew, they might have a rocket launcher under there.

“Air con good?” Tacoma asked her.

“Fine,” she said. Tacoma had told her the truck could drive under water if it had to, popping up a breather tube for the engine. There weren’t any bodies of water around to seriously do that in, that Flynne knew of, and just as well. She looked up now and saw the cow-drone, more or less where she’d last seen it, but pretending to graze. She’d seen bullet streaks on the concrete wall back of Coldiron and Fab, thinking how lucky it was that Burton had been the only one to catch a ricochet. The way they’d gone out to the truck this morning, they’d been out of Luke 4:5’s sight, at least until they got on Porter, and by then they were far enough away that it didn’t matter. And anyway Luke were mostly still sleeping, in identical black pup tents they’d pitched in the lot opposite the mall, in tight rows, like insect eggs, Leon said, or slime mold. Now she knew that they hadn’t really been targeted with a drug that turned you into a homicidal sex maniac, she found herself feeling less kindly disposed toward them. Like why couldn’t Griff and Tommy, between them, figure out some relatively low-impact, legally nonatrocious way to get them the fuck out of town? Made a mental note to ask about that. “Any chance we could get the breakfast burrito and some coffee, at Jimmy’s?” she asked Tacoma.

“Pretty serious dog and pony with security here,” Tacoma said, “but say I call them, they bring it out to you?”

“Fine by me.”

“Well, not to you directly. Lead car, up front. Then we get it droned back to us, don’t have to stop.”

“Complicated.”

“Protocol. Jimmy’s brings it directly to us, I’ve got to stop, unseal, even if it’s just the window.”

“Unseal?”

“Vehicle’s hermetic, except for filtered intakes.”

“Lot of trouble, for a burrito.”

“They’re spending as much money as they can on keeping your ass intact and present. You’ve already been kidnapped once. Those shooters last night could’ve been more interested in you than your brother.”

Flynne hadn’t thought of that. “You as good with a gun as Clovis?”

“No,” said Tacoma. “Better.”

“Am I alone back here to reduce the chance of one of Burton’s boys trying to do what Reece did?”

“Or worse. What kind of burrito? Want milk and sugar in your coffee?”

“They just have the one burrito. Milk and sugar.” She looked over at the Wheelie Boy, on the seat beside her, and wondered where Wilf was. She’d fallen asleep on the foam, after phoning Janice at the house.

Tacoma was talking to someone on her earbud. She slowed, Jimmy’s parking lot up ahead, and Flynne saw a boy in a white t-shirt come running out across the gravel, something in his hands. He passed it, through an open window, to someone in the SUV, which had almost but not quite stopped. The SUV pulled out again. Tacoma sped up, matching its speed, maintaining a fixed distance.

When Jimmy’s was out of sight, Flynne saw something lift out of the SUV, headed back toward them. It became a small quadcopter, toting a fabbed cornstarch travel tray with a silver-foil bundle and a paper cup clipped in it.

“Watch this with the bed,” Tacoma said, without looking back.

Flynne turned in time to see a rectangular hatch in the bed cover sliding open. The drone matched their speed, then lowered itself through the opening. Then came right back up, minus the tray with
the burrito and coffee, climbing out of sight as the hatch closed beneath it. “How do we get it?”

“Doing an airlock thing now,” Tacoma said.

A hatch slid up, in the back of the passenger cab. Flynne undid her seatbelt, got down on hands and knees and crawled back. With her head through the opening, she saw the tray, pulled it out. The foil was warm. They kept their breakfast burritos ready to go, at Jimmy’s, under a heat lamp.

She managed to get back into the seat with the tray on her lap, hearing the hatch close behind her, refastened her seatbelt, and peeled the foil off one end of the burrito. “Thanks.”

“We aim to please.”

Jimmy’s breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions. Exactly what she wanted right now.

“Good morning,” said Netherton, from the Wheelie.

She had her mouth full of burrito. Nodded.

“I hope you had a good night’s sleep,” he said. The Wheelie’s tablet whined, turning, then tilted back, so he could see out the window. Nothing but sky, unless there were drones there.

She swallowed, drank some coffee. “Slept okay. You?”

“I slept in the Gobiwagen’s jacuzzi,” he said.

“Were you wet?”

“When it’s not a bath, it’s an observation cupola. Conner’s peripheral has the master bedroom. He was here peripherally, earlier. He played with Lev’s analogs in the garden. Watched us have sandwiches, in Lev’s kitchen. Then I came back down with him. He put his peri to bed, off for more of whatever it is she has him training on. Where are we going?”

“My house.”

The tablet straightened up, panned left to right, back again.

“This is kind of a limo, disguised as a truck,” Flynne said. “Bombproof. That’s Tacoma.”

“Hey,” said Tacoma, keeping her eyes on the road.

“Hello,” said Netherton.

“Tacoma works for Griff,” Flynne said. “Or with him.”

“Or for you, if it comes to that,” Tacoma said.

“I still don’t get that.”

“Look at it this way,” Tacoma said. “Everything you can see outside of this vehicle, except for the sky and the road, you own. Bought it all in the meantime. Everything, a good twenty miles back, from either side of the road.”

“You’re shitting me,” Flynne said.

“Coldiron owns most of the county now,” Tacoma said, “hard as it might be to prove it in court. KCV’s gone full matryoshka on that.”

“What’s that?” Flynne asked.

“Know those Russian dolls, nest inside each other? Matryoshka. Shells within shells. So it isn’t that obvious that you own all this land.”

“Not me. Coldiron.”

“You and your brother,” Tacoma said, “own the majority of Coldiron between you.”

“Why do they?” asked Netherton.

“And who exactly is this talking head on the toy?” asked Tacoma, and Flynne realized that she was watching them, as she drove, on cams Flynne hadn’t known were there.

“Wilf Netherton,” said Flynne. “He’s Coldiron, from London.”

“You’re on the list, then, Mr. Netherton,” Tacoma said. “Sorry. Had to ask. Tacoma Raeburn.”

“Raeburn?” Flynne asked. “You her sister?”

“Yep.”

“And you’re named Tacoma because—”

“Didn’t want me called Snoqualmie. You from the future, Mr. Netherton?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “I’m in the future that would result from my not being there. But since I am, it isn’t your future. Here.”

“What do you do, in the future, Mr. Netherton, if you don’t mind my asking? What do people do there generally?”

“Wilf,” he said. “Publicity.”

“That’s what people do?”

“That would be one way of looking at it,” he said, after a pause, which seemed to satisfy Tacoma, or maybe she just didn’t want to be too pushy.

Flynne finished her burrito. When they passed the spot where Conner had killed the men in the stolen cardboard, it felt more like a story than something that had happened at that particular place, and she was okay with that.