“In here much, you and Madison?”
“Do we look like it?”
“So fucking young.”
“It was young when we were here before, remember? You were, anyway. Burton’s kid sister.” She smiled, looked around.
As the song ended, there was a blast of deep-throated exhaust from out in the parking lot.
“Conner,” said Janice. “Not good. Fucking with those boys.”
Flynne, feeling like they were back in high school, followed Janice’s gaze. Five big boys with bleached hair, at a table covered with beer bottles. They’d be on the football team. Too thick for basketball. None wore a Viz. Two of them stood, each taking an empty green beer bottle in either hand, by the neck, and headed out to the porch.
“He was here about an hour ago,” Janice said. “Drinking in the lot. Not good when he drinks, on top of the other. One of them said something. Madison backed ’em off. Conner left.”
Flynne heard the sound of an impact, glass breaking. The next song started. She got up and went out onto the porch, thinking as she did that she liked this song even less than the last one.
The two football players were there, and she saw how drunk they were. Conner’s Tarantula, in the center of the gravel, bathed in harsh light from tall poles, was shaking with its exhaust, scenting the lot with recycled fat. His shaven head was propped up at the front, at that painful angle, one of his eyes behind a sort of monocle.
“Fuck you, Penske!” bellowed one of the football players, drunk enough to sound half cheerful, and flung his remaining bottle, hard. It caught the front of the trike, shattering, but off to the side, away from Conner’s head.
Conner smiled. Moved his head a little, and Flynne saw something move with it, above the Tarantula and what was left of his body, higher than the three big tires.
She marched past the football players then, down the steps, and out across the gravel, the kids on the porch falling silent behind her. She was older than they were, nobody knew her, and she was all in black. Conner saw her coming. Moved his head again. She could hear her sneakers in the gravel, and she could hear the bugs ticking against the lights, up on their poles, but with Conner’s engine throttled down low, drumming, how could she?
Stopped before she was close enough that he’d have had to crane to see her face. “Flynne, Conner. Burton’s sister.”
Looked up at her, through the monocle. Smiled. “Cute sister.”
She raised her eyes and saw, above him, the skinny, spinal-looking scorpion-tail thing the monocle controlled. Looked like he’d daubed black paint on it, to make it harder to see. She couldn’t make out what was on its tip. Something small. “Conner, this is some bad bullshit here. You need to go home.”
He did something with his chin, on a control surface. The monocle popped up, like a little trapdoor. “You going to get out of my way, Burton’s cute sister?”
“Nope.”
He twisted around, to rub his eyes with what was left of the one hand. “I’m a tiresome asshole, huh?”
“It’s a tiresome asshole town. Least you got an excuse. Go home. Burton’s on his way back from Davisville. He’ll come see you.” And it was like she could see herself there, on the gray gravel in front of Jimmy’s, and the tall old cottonwoods on either side of the lot, trees older than her mother, older than anybody, and she was talking to a boy who was half a machine, like a centaur made out of a motorcycle, and maybe he’d been just about to kill another boy, or a few of them, and maybe he still would. She looked back and saw Madison was on the porch, bracing the football player who’d thrown the bottles, titanium glasses up against the boy’s eyeballs, boy backing to keep from being poked in the chest with the rows of pens and flashlights in Madison’s Teddy Roosevelt vest. She turned back to Conner. “Not worth it, Conner. You go home.”
“Fuck-all ever is,” he said, and grinned, then punched something with his chin. The Tarantula revved, wheeled around, and took off, but he’d been careful not to spray her with gravel.
A drunken cheer went up from Jimmy’s porch.
She dropped her beer on the gravel and walked to where she’d locked her bike, not looking back.
18.
THE GOD CLUB
Netherton was fully as annoyed with the bohemian nonsense of Ash’s workspace as he would have expected to be. It wasn’t that it was pointlessly tiny, Ash having used scaffolding and tarps to wall off the furthest, smallest possible triangular corner of Lev’s grandfather’s garage, or that she’d decorated it to resemble some more eccentric version of the Maenads’ Crush, but that her display went to such pains not to resemble any other display, though whatever she was about to show them could as easily have been viewed as a feed.
Polished spheres of variously occluded crystal, agate perhaps, were supported in corroded chemistry apparatus she boasted of having bought from the mudlarks who’d pulled it from the Thames. And she’d prepared exceptionally horrible tea, in eggshell-thin china cups, without handles, cups that had cruelly suggested the possible offer of some wormwood-based liqueur, but no. It was like meeting in an antique phone box in which a psychic had set up shop, crammed in beside Lev at the ridiculously ornate little table.
Now she was selecting rings from a black suede pouch: interface devices, the sort of thing a less precious person would have permanently and invisibly buried in her fingertips. But here were Ash’s, gotten up like the rusty magic iron of imaginary kings, set with dull pebbles that lit and died as her white fingers brushed them.
The tea tasted burnt. Not as if anything in particular had burned, but like the ghost of the taste of something burnt. The walls, such as they were, were heavy curtains, like the ones in the Maenads’ Crush, but stained with tallow drippings, distressed to reveal bald fabric. The floor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.
A drawing of a gecko whirled excitedly on the back of Ash’s left hand, as she seated an angular brown lump around the index finger of her right. Her animals weren’t to scale, or rather they appeared as if rendered at various distances. He didn’t think you’d see a gecko and an elephant at the same time, for reasons of scale. She had, evidently, no direct control over them.
Having donned four rings and two tarnished silver thimbles, she interlaced her fingers, causing the gecko to flee. “They put up a want ad, as soon as they came in,” she said.
“Who did?” Netherton asked, not bothering to suppress his irritation.
“I’ve no idea.” She made a steeple of her index fingers. “The server is the platonic black box. In the visualization, they appear to emerge directly beside us, but that’s oversimplification.”
Netherton was relieved that she hadn’t yet called the display a shewstone.
“Wanting what?” asked Lev, beside Netherton.
“To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence. The board where they chose to place their ad is on a darknet, hence a market for criminal services. We have access to everything, in all of their nets, given the slower processing speeds. They offered eight million, so murder’s assumed.”
“Is that a reasonable amount?” Lev asked.
“Ossian thinks it is,” Ash said. “Not too much to be unusual in terms of the economy of this particular board, or to attract the attention of informers, or of their various governments’ agents, who no doubt are present. Not too little, either, to avoid attracting amateurs. They had an applicant almost immediately. Then the ad was taken down.”
“Someone answered an ad, to murder a stranger?” He saw Lev and Ash exchange a look. “If it’s all so transparent to you,” he asked, “why don’t we know more?”
“Some very traditional modes of encryption remain highly effective,” Lev said. “My family’s security could probably manage it, but they know nothing of any of this. We’ll keep it that way.”
Ash unlaced her fingers, flicked her rings and thimbles a
mong the spheres, exactly the sort of pantomime Netherton had expected. The spheres glowed, expanded, grew transparent. Two hair-thin arcs of lightning shot down, through miniature nebulae of darker stuff, froze. “Here, you see. We’re blue, they’re red.” A fine jagged line of blue had emerged, as from a cloud of ink, a scarlet jag beside it, following one another down into a jumble of less dynamic-looking clouds, faintly luminous.
“Perhaps it’s all just the Chinese having a bit of fun at your expense, with superior processing,” Netherton said, which had in fact been Daedra’s immediate supposition.
“Not unfeasible,” said Lev, “but that sort of humor doesn’t suit them.”
“You’ve heard,” Netherton asked, “of this happening before? Stubs being infiltrated?”
“Rumors,” said Lev. “Since we don’t know where the server is, or what it is, let alone whose it might be, that’s been a minor mystery by comparison.”
“All word of mouth,” said Ash. “Gossip among enthusiasts.”
“How did you get involved in this?” Netherton asked.
“A relative,” said Lev. “In Los Angeles. It’s by invitation, to the extent that you need someone to tell you about it, explain how it works.”
“Why don’t more people know about it?”
“Once you’re in,” Lev said, “you don’t want just anyone involved.”
“Why?” asked Netherton.
“The God club,” Ash said, meeting Netherton’s eye with her figure-eight pupils.
Lev frowned, but said nothing.
“In each instance in which we interact with the stub,” Ash said, “we ultimately change all of it, the long outcomes.” A still image swam into focus, within one of the spheres of her display, steadied. A dark-haired young man, against what Netherton took to be a metric grid. “Burton Fisher.”
“Who is he?” Netherton asked.
“Your polt,” said Lev.
“Our visitors have hired someone to find him,” Ash said. “To kill him, Ossian assumes.”
Lev scratched his nose. “He was on duty, during that reception of Aelita’s.”
“No,” she said. “After. Your module estimates the event, whatever it may have been, to have occurred the evening after the reception. He would have gone on duty afterward.”
“They want to kill a dead man in a past that effectively doesn’t exist?” Netherton asked. “Why? You’ve always said that nothing that happens there can affect us.”
“Information,” Lev said, “flows both ways. Someone must believe he knows something. Which, were it available here, would pose a danger to them.”
Netherton looked at Lev, in that moment seeing the klept in him, the klept within the dilettante youngest son, within the loving father, the keeper of thylacine analogs. Something hard and clear as glass. As simple. Though in truth, he sensed, there wasn’t much of it.
“A witness, perhaps,” Ash said. “I’ve tried phoning him, but he isn’t picking up.”
“You’ve tried phoning him?” Netherton asked.
“Messaging as well,” Ash said, looking at her rings and thimbles. “He hasn’t responded.”
19.
AQUAMARINE DUCT TAPE
The drone, the size of a robin, had a single rotor. As it matched her speed, under a streetlight on that level stretch of Porter Road, she’d spotted a one-inch square of aquamarine duct tape on its side.
Leon came home from a swap meet with a big roll of the stuff, about the time Burton moved into the trailer, a shade none of them had seen before in duct tape. He and Burton used it as a sort of team badge for their toys, when they played drone games. She didn’t think they were playing one now, but they seemed to be seeing her home from Jimmy’s, which meant they were back from Davisville.
She had a headache, but getting Conner Penske out of Jimmy’s parking lot seemed to have lightened her shitty mood. She wouldn’t fill in for Burton on the game anymore; she’d help Shaylene fab things, or find something else to do.
Burton was going to have to find out what that was that Conner had mounted on the back of the Tarantula, though. That wasn’t good. She hoped it was just a laser, but she doubted it.
She was pedaling fast, helping the hub build up the battery, but also because she wanted to tire herself out, get a good night’s sleep. Looked up, under the next light, and saw the drone again. Not that much bigger than the paparazzi in the game, but probably printed at Fab.
She swung into the curving downhill stretch of Porter, and there was Burton, and Leon, under the next light, waiting beside a cardboard Chinese car they must have rented for the trip to Davisville. Burton in his white t-shirt and Leon in an old jean jacket most people wouldn’t wear to mow the lawn. Leon wasn’t a believer in Burton’s idea of getting dressed for work, or for anything else. She saw him reach up, plucking the drone out of the air, as she braked in front of them.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey yourself,” said Burton. “Get in. Leon’ll bring your bike.”
“Why? He won’t pedal. I need the juice.”
“It’s serious,” said Burton.
“Not Mom—”
“She’s fine. Sleeping. We need to talk.”
“I’ll pedal some,” Leon promised.
She got off the bike, Leon holding it up with one hand on the bars.
“Tell you in the car,” Burton said. “Come on.”
She got into the two-seater their mother would have called an egg box, its paper shell nanoproofed against water and oil. It smelled of buttered popcorn. The floor on the passenger side was littered with food wrappers.
“What happened?” Burton asked, as soon as he’d closed his door.
“At Jimmy’s?” Leon had mounted her bike, was wobbling, the drone in one hand, then finding his balance.
“On the goddamn job, Flynne. They called me.”
“Who?”
“Coldiron. What happened?”
“What happened is it’s just another shitty game. Saw somebody murder a woman. Some kind of nanotech chainsaw fantasy. You can have it, Burton. I’m done.”
He was looking at her. “Somebody killed?”
“Eaten alive. From inside out.”
“You saw who did it?”
“Burton, it’s a game.”
“Leon doesn’t know,” he said.
“Doesn’t know what? You said he was getting the Hefty Pal for you.”
“Doesn’t know what it is, exactly. Just that I’m making some money.”
“Why’d they call?”
“Because they want to know what happened, on the shift. But I didn’t know.”
“Why don’t they know? Don’t they capture it all?”
“Don’t seem to, do they?” He drummed his fingers on the wheel. “I had to tell them about you.”
“They going to fire you?”
“They say somebody took out a hit on me tonight, on a snuff board, out of Memphis. Eight million.”
“Bullshit. Who?”
“Say they don’t know.”
“Why?”
“Somebody thinks I saw whatever you saw. You see who did it? Who did you see, Flynne?”
“How would I know? Some asshole, Burton. In a game. Set her up for it. He knew.”
“The money’s real.”
“What money?”
“Ten million. In Leon’s Hefty Pal.”
“If Leon has ten million dollars in his Hefty Pal, he’s going to hear from the IRS tomorrow.”
“Doesn’t have it yet. He’ll win a state lottery, next draw. Has to buy a ticket, then I give them the number.”
“I don’t know what Homes did to you, but I know you’re crazy now.”
“They need to talk to you,” he said, starting the car.
“Homes?” And now she was frightened, not just confused.
“Coldiron. It’s all set up.” And they were headed down Porter, Burton driving with the headlights off, his big shoulders hunched over the fragile-looking wheel.
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20.
POLT
It was Ash who’d suggested using Lev’s grandfather’s land-yacht as the set for the office. She knew that the table Netherton had slept on also converted to a very pretentious desk. Then Lev had pointed out that the vehicle’s camera system would lend a vintage, or from the polt’s sister’s point of view, a somewhat contemporary look. How Netherton himself had been selected to play the human resources officer was somewhat mysterious to him.
The grandfather’s displays, which Ossian had located in storage on some lower level, then brought up on an electric cart, were rectangular black mirrors, framed in matte titanium. Netherton knew the look from media of the period, but imagined they’d be unconvincing. Of course they hadn’t looked like that when they were in use. Ash, whose enthusiasm for theater came as no surprise, had taped a single blue LED to the one he’d be facing, just for that bit of infill on his face, to disguise the fact of the dead screen.
He checked his reflection in that one now. He was wearing his suit, the one he’d slept in, though Ossian had hung it in the bathroom while Netherton showered, which had taken out most of the wrinkles, and a black turtleneck, Ossian’s, too large in the shoulders and upper arms. Netherton’s shirt had acquired what he supposed were Scotch stains, and was being laundered. He regretted Ash’s having refused to reacquaint him with her Medici. He would have looked better, with a bit of that. Waiting, he tapped his fingertips on Lev’s grandfather’s multipurpose slab of gold-flecked black marble.
He was about to present himself as an executive of Milagros Coldiron, SA, of Medellín, Colombia, a largely imaginary company in a country he knew little about. Lev had registered Milagros Coldiron in both the Colombia and Panama of his stub; shell corporations, consisting of a few documents and several bank accounts each, both of them managed through a Panama City law firm.
Actually seeing the polt had been surprisingly interesting. That was a lot of why he was here now. It had been a bit too interesting. The tedium of Ash’s workspace had probably contributed to that: a matter of heightened contrast. But there the polt had been, driving, eyes on whatever motorway, seventy-some years earlier, on the far side of the jackpot, his phone something clamped to the dashboard of his car. The polt had had a very broad chest, in a thin white singlet, and was, or so it had struck Netherton in the moment, entirely human. Gloriously pre-posthuman. In a state of nature. And hustling, Netherton had soon seen, eye on the money. Improvising, and with utterly unfamiliar material.