The Peripheral (6 page)

MOURNING JET

A
sh, flesh white as paper, was pulling down the lower lid of Netherton’s left eye. Her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision. He knew who she was, but not where he was.

She was leaning over him, peering close. He lay on something flat, very hard, cold. Her neck was wrapped in black lace, a black that ate light, fixed with a cameo death’s head.

“Why are you in Zubov’s grandfather’s land-yacht?” Her gray eyes had dual pupils, one above the other, little black figure eights, affectation of the sort he most detested.

“Stealing Mr. Zubov’s oldest whiskey,” said Ossian, behind her, “which I’d myself secured against oxidation, with an inert gas.” Netherton quite distinctly heard Ossian’s knuckles crack. “A pint of plain’s your only man, Mr. Netherton. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” This was indeed something the Irishman sometimes said, though at the moment Netherton was entirely unclear as to what it might mean.

Thuggishly butler-like, Ossian had very large thighs and upper arms, black hair braided at the nape and blackly ribboned. Like Ash, a technical. They were partners, but not a couple. They minded Lev’s hobbies for him, kept his polt-world sorted. They’d know about Daedra then, and Aelita.

Ossian was right, about the whiskey. The congeners, in brown liquors. Trace amounts only, but their effects could be terrible. Were, now.

Her thumb withdrew, brusquely, releasing his lower lid. The drawings of animals, startled, fled up her arm, over a pale shoulder, gone. Her thumbnail, he saw, was painted a childish crayon green, chipped at the edges. She said something to Ossian, in a momentary tongue sounding vaguely Italian. Ossian replied in kind.

“That’s rude,” Netherton protested.

“Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said. It altered constantly, their encryption, something sounding Spanish morphing into a faux German in the course of a simple statement, perhaps by way of something more like birdsong than speech. The birdsong was Netherton’s least favorite. Whatever randomly synthetic language the one spoke, the other understood. Never the one thing long enough to provide a sufficient sample for decryption.

The ceiling was pale wood, sealed beneath glassy varnish. Where was he? Rolling his head to the side, he saw he lay on polished black marble, thickly veined with gold. This began to rise now, beneath him, taking him with it, then stopped. Ossian’s hard hands seized his shoulders, lifting him to an approximate sitting position on what seemed to have become the edge of a low table. “Hold yourself upright, man,” the Irishman ordered. “Flop and you’ll crack your skull.”

Netherton blinked, still not recognizing the place. Was he in Notting Hill? He hadn’t known Lev’s house to have a room this small, and particularly not in its basements. The walls were the color of the ceiling, blond veneer. Ash took something from her reticule, a triangular lozenge of plastic, pale green, translucent, frosted like driftglass. Like all of her things, it looked slightly grubby. She slapped its softness against the inside of his right wrist. He frowned as he felt it move, bloodlessly settling incomprehensibly thin tendrils between the cells of his skin. He watched her doubled pupils flick, reading data only she could see. “It’s giving you something,” she said. “But you mustn’t drink on top of that, not at all. You mustn’t take liquor from the vehicles again, either.”

Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which
resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. Or rather was observing his vision sharpen, brighten, as the Medici had its increasingly welcome way with him.

“Mr. Zubov,” said Ossian, meaning Lev’s father, and coughed once, into a fist, “may at any time require his father’s land-yacht.” Not inclined to let Netherton off, but really what was the problem? Lev wouldn’t be concerned with a single bottle, regardless of its age.

Ash’s Medici released his wrist. She tucked it into her reticule, which he saw was worked with beads of mourning jet.

Netherton stood, briskly, his surroundings now making perfect sense. A Mercedes land-yacht, something Lev’s grandfather had commissioned for a tour of Mongolian deserts. There was no place for it, at the house in Richmond Hill, so Lev’s father kept it here. The empty bottle, he now remembered, was in a toilet, somewhere to the right. But they obviously knew that. Perhaps he should look into getting one of these things, these hangover alleviators.

“Don’t even think about it,” Ash said, gravely, as if reading his mind. “You’d be dead in a month, two at most.”

“You’re awfully grim,” he said to her. Then smiled, because, really, she was. Elaborately so. Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, the layered skirts below it like a longer, darker version of the boss patcher’s tutu. And now the line drawing of a lone albatross, slowly and as if in distant flight, circling her white neck.

He looked back at the table he’d slept on, when it had been retracted, flush, into a recess in the floor. Now it was ready to serve as breakfast nook or gaming table, or a place to spread one’s maps of Mongolia. He wondered if Lev’s grandfather had ever made the journey. He remembered laughing at the vulgarity of what Lev called
the Gobiwagen, the one time he’d been shown through, but he’d noted the bar, with its very handsome stock of liquor.

“Keeping it locked from now on,” said Ossian, demonstrating his own degree of telepathy.

“Where were you two?” He looked from Ossian to Ash, as if implying some impropriety. “I came down to find you.”

Ossian raised his eyebrows. “Did you expect to find us here?”

“I was exhausted,” Netherton said, “in need of refreshment.”

“Tired,” said Ossian, “emotional.”

Lev’s sigil appeared. “I thought sixteen hours was long enough for you to be unconscious,” he said. “Come to the kitchen. Now.” The sigil disappeared.

Ash and Ossian, who’d heard nothing Lev had said, were staring at him, unpleasantly.

“Thanks for the pick-me-up,” he said to Ash, and left, down the gangway. Into the submarine squidlight of the garage’s broad shallow arches, receding down a line of vehicles. Sensing his movement, living tissue coating the arch directly above him brightened. He looked back, and up, at the vehicle’s bulging flank. Ossian was watching, from an observation bay, smugly.

As he walked to the distant elevator, past one vehicle after another, light followed him, the skin of one arch dimming as the next fluoresced.

ANYTHING NICE

L
eon, the Halloween before, carved a pumpkin to look like President Gonzales. Flynne hadn’t thought it looked like her, but that it wasn’t racist either, so she left it out on the porch. Second day it was out there, she saw something had nibbled the inside of it, and pooped in it a little. She figured either a rat or a squirrel. Meant to take it around to the garden compost then, but forgot, and next day she found the president’s face caved in, pumpkin flesh behind it all eaten away, leaving the orange skin sagging, wrinkled. Plus there was fresh poop inside. She got the rubber gloves she wore for plumbing chores and carried it out back to the compost, where the wrinkled orange face gradually got uglier until it was gone.

She wasn’t thinking of that as she hung in the cradle of the gyros, watching the gray thing breathe.

It wasn’t gray now, but bronze-black. It had made itself straight, flat, with sharp right angles, but everything else on the face of the fifty-seventh floor, those flat squares and rectangles, was misted, sweating, running with condensation. The thing was perfectly dry, standing out a hand’s breadth from the surface behind it. The twisty legs had become brackets. Centered above the floor of the fold-out balcony directly beneath her.

It was breathing.

Sweat broke from her hairline, in the hot dark of the trailer. She wiped it with the back of her forearm, but some ran into her eyes, stung.

She nudged the copter closer. Saw the thing bulge, then flatten.

She had only a vague idea of what she was flying. A quadcopter, but were the four rotors caged, or exposed? If she’d seen herself reflected in a window, she’d know, but she hadn’t. She wanted to get closer, see if she could trigger an image, the way proximity had done when she’d dropped on that bug. But if her rotors were exposed, and she touched the thing with one, she’d go down.

It swelled again, along a central vertical line, paler than the rest.

Below her, they were at the railing, the woman’s hands on the rod along the top, the man behind her, close, maybe holding her waist.

It flattened. She nudged herself a little closer.

It opened, narrowly, along that vertical line, paler edges curling slightly back, and something small arced out, vanishing. Something scored the forward-cam then, a fuzzy gray comma. Again. Like a gnat with a microscopic chainsaw, or a diamond scribe. Three, four more scratches, insect-quick, flicking like a scorpion’s tail. Trying to blind her.

She pulled herself back, fast, then up, whatever it was still slashing at her forward-cam. Found the pull-down and dead-dropped, tumbling three floors before she let the gyros catch and cup her.

It seemed to be gone. Cam damaged but still functional.

Fast, left.

Up, fast. Passing fifty-six, with the cam on her right she saw him take the woman’s hands, place them over her eyes. From fifty-seven, she saw him kiss her ear, say something. Surprise, she imagined him saying, as she saw him step back, turn.

“No,” she said, as the thing split open. A blur, around the slit. More of them. He glanced up, found it there. Expecting it. Never paused, never looked back. He was about to step back inside.

She went for his head.

She was half up out of the chair, as he saw the copter, ducked, catching himself on his hands.

He must have made a sound then, the woman turning, lowering her hands, opening her mouth. Something flew into her mouth. She froze. Like seeing Burton glitched by the haptics.

He came up off his hands, a track star off blocks. Through the opening, the door in the window, which simply vanished as soon as he was inside, became a smooth sheet of glass, then polarized.

The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.

She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black.

She pulled up before the twentieth, remembering the voices. Hung there in the gyros’ slack, full of sorrow and disgust.

“Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears.

She took it back up, then, feeling blank, miserable. Watching dark bronze sweep past, not bothering to try to see the city. Fuck it. Just fuck it.

When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.

“That’s why we can’t have anything nice,” she heard herself say, in the trailer.

LEGO

F
ifteen minutes,” said Lev, scrambling eggs on the kitchen’s vast French stove, bigger than either of the ATVs slung from davits on the stern of his grandfather’s Mercedes. “Most of that is reading their terms-of-service agreement. They’re in Putney.”

Netherton at the table, exactly where he’d been earlier. The windows looking onto the garden were dark. “You can’t be serious,” he said.

“Anton had it done.”

The scarier of Lev’s two older brothers. “Good for him.”

“He had no choice,” Lev said. “Our father organized the intervention.”

“Never thought of Anton as having a drinking problem,” Netherton said, as if this were something he was quite accustomed to being objective about. He was watching two Lego pieces, one red, one yellow, as they morphed into two small spheres, between the Starck pepper grinder and a bowl of oranges.

“He no longer does.” Lev transferred scrambled eggs, flecked with chives, to two white plates, each with its half of a broiled tomato, which had been warming on the stovetop. “It wasn’t only for drinking. He had an anger management problem. Aggravated by the disinhibition.”

“But haven’t I seen him drinking,” Netherton asked, “here, and recently?” He was fairly certain that he had, in spite of having a firm policy of flight if either brother appeared. Fully spherical now, the two Legos began to roll slowly toward him, across worn pine.

“Of course,” said Lev, adjusting the presentation of the eggs with a
clean steel spatula. “We’re not in the dark ages. But never to excess. Never to the point of intoxication. The laminates see to that. They metabolize it differently. Between that and the cognitive therapy module, he’s doing very well.” He came to the table, a white plate in either hand. “Ash’s Medici says you’re not doing well, Wilf. Not at all.” He put one plate in front of Netherton, the other opposite, and took a seat.

“Dominika,” Netherton said, reflexively trying to change the subject. “She’s not joining us?” The two Legos had stopped moving. Still spherical, side by side, they were directly in front of his plate.

“My father would have disowned Anton, if he’d refused treatment,” Lev said, ignoring the question. “He made that absolutely clear.”

“Gordon wants in,” Netherton said, having just noticed the thylacine at the glass door, darkness behind it.

“Tyenna,” corrected Lev, glancing at the animal. “She’s not allowed in the kitchen when we’re eating.”

Netherton quickly flicked the red Lego off the table. He heard it click against something, roll. “Hyena?”

“Medici doesn’t like the look of your liver.”

“Eggs look wonderful—”

“Laminates,” Lev said, evenly, looking Netherton in the eye, the heavy black frames of his glasses accentuating his seriousness, “and a cognitive therapy module. Otherwise, I’m afraid this will have to be your last visit.”

Fucking Dominika. This was about her. Had to be. Lev had never been like this. The yellow Lego was brick-shaped again. Pretending innocence.

Lev looked up, then, and to the side. “Excuse me,” he said, to Wilf. “I have to take this. Yes?” He gestured at Netherton’s eggs: eat. He asked something, briefly, in Russian.

Netherton unrolled his knife and fork from the cool heavy napkin. He would eat the eggs and tomato in exactly the way a healthy,
relaxed, responsible individual would eat them. He had never felt less like eating eggs, or broiled tomato.

Lev was frowning now. He spoke again in Russian. At the end of it, “Aelita.” Had he really said her name, or only something in Russian that had sounded like it? Then a question, also in Russian, which, yes, definitely culminated in her name. “Yes,” he said, “it is. Very.” His hand came up, to scratch the skin just above his left nostril with the nail of his index finger, something Netherton knew he did when he was concentrating. Another question in Russian. Netherton dutifully tried the eggs. Tasteless. The thylacine was gone now. You almost never saw them leaving.

“That’s odd,” said Lev.

“Who was it?”

“My secretary, with one of our security modules.”

“What about?” Please, Netherton begged the uncaring universe, let Lev be more interested in this, now, than in any behavioral modification in Putney.

“Aelita West’s secretary just canceled lunch. Tomorrow, in the Strand. I’d reservations for Indian. She’d wanted to know more about her polt. Your gift.”

Netherton forced himself to take another half-fork of eggs.

“The Met was listening in, when her secretary spoke with mine. We were surveilled.”

“The police? Seriously? How did it know?”

“She didn’t,” said Lev, annoyingly personalizing a program. “The security module did, though.”

Klept as established as the Zubov family’s, Netherton assumed, was layered in byzantine tediousness. He refrained from saying so.

“The security module interpreted it as being related to a very recent event,” Lev said, adjusting his black frames to peer at Netherton.

“How could it know that?”

“Any listener necessarily assumes a particular stance, informed by
intention. Our module’s more sophisticated than that which was listening. The shape of their listening suggested what they were listening for.”

So unexpectedly welcome was this distraction that Netherton had scarcely been paying attention, but now he realized that it fell to him to keep the conversation going, and as far away from Putney as possible. “What would that be, then?”

“Serious crime, it assumed. Abduction, possibly. Even homicide.”

“Aelita?” It struck Netherton as absurd.

“Nothing so clear as that. We’re having a look. She held a reception, just this evening. While you were sleeping it off.”

“You’ve been watching her?”

“The security module’s done a retrospective, since her secretary’s call.”

“What sort of reception?”

“Cultural. Semigovernmental. It would originally have been about your project, in fact. One would assume celebratory, if Daedra hadn’t killed your man and had the cavalry in. Rather than cancel, it seems, Aelita reframed it. No idea what as. Security was excellent.”

“Where was it held?”

“Her residence. Edenmere Mansions.” Lev’s pupils moved as he read something. “She has the fifty-fifth through fifty-seventh floors. Daedra attended.”

“She did? Did you have someone there?”

“No,” said Lev, “but our modules tend to be a bit sharper than theirs. Eat.” His fork, neatly loaded with both eggs and tomato now, was almost to his mouth when he stopped, frowned. “Yes?” He lowered the fork. “Well,” he said, “it isn’t as though there hasn’t been the odd rumor that it’s possible. I’ll be down shortly.”

“Secretary?” Netherton asked.

“Ash,” Lev said. “She says that someone else is accessing our stub. Seems as though it has to do with your polt.”

“Who?”

“No idea. We’ll go down and see.” He began to eat his eggs and tomato.

Netherton did the same, finding that with the distancing of Putney and liver lamination, and possibly the aftereffects of Ash’s Medici, they’d acquired flavor.

The red Lego, spherical, now rolled slowly from behind the bowl of oranges, to join, becoming rectilinear again, with the tiniest of clicks, its yellow companion. He wondered what shape it had taken to get back up the table leg.