The Peripheral (32 page)

THE ANTIDOTE FOR PARTY TIME

C
lovis Raeburn had beautiful skin. When Flynne opened her eyes, Clovis was right there, up close, like she was looking at Flynne’s autonomic cutout, or its cable. Easiest transition yet, from sitting on a bench beside a path in that Hyde Park to propped on pillows in a brand-new hospital bed. Like somersaulting backward, but not in a bad way. “Hey,” Clovis said, straightening up as she saw Flynne’s eyes were open.

“What’s going on?”

Clovis was pulling the two halves of something apart, packaging of some kind. “Griff says the competition’s hired Luke to make us look bad. I say anybody they protest just looks better.”

“Macon said Burton’s on his way back from Pickett’s.”

“In a deputized car,” said Clovis. “Been an orgy of car deputizing, over there. Pickett’s employees, the ones still being shoveled out of the pile, had their cars on the lot there.” She extracted something small from the packaging: circular, flat, bright pink. She peeled its backing off, reached under the hem of Flynne’s t-shirt, and pressed the adhesive down, just left of Flynne’s navel.

“What’s that?” Flynne asked, raising her head off the pillow, against the weight of the crown, trying to see it. Clovis hiked up the bottom of her own combat shirt. On abs you could do laundry on, the pink dot, with two sharp red lines crossing in the center.

“The antidote for party time,” Clovis said, “but I’ll let Griff explain that. Just you keep yours on.” She lifted the crown from Flynne’s head
and put it carefully down on what looked like an open disposable diaper, on the table to the left of the bed.

Flynne looked from the crown to Conner, in the next bed, under his own crown.

“Better he’s still up there,” said Clovis, “considering the situation. He does have a proven potential to make things crazier.”

Flynne sat up. A hospital bed made you feel like you needed someone’s permission to do that. Then Hong walked into her line of sight, a plastic sack of takeout dangling from either hand. He wore a Viz and a dark green t-shirt with
COLDIRON USA
on it in white, the logo she’d seen on the envelope in Burton’s trailer, that first night. She realized he’d come in through a narrow vertical gap, in the wall of shingles, to the left of her bed. “Hey,” he said.

“There’s a secret passage from Sushi Barn, now?” she asked.

“Part of the deal for the antennas. Weren’t those e-mails from you?”

“Guess I’ve got secretaries and shit.”

“Have to be able to get food over here,” Clovis said. “Always have a few of Burton’s boys sitting in there, watching out.”

“Getting fat,” said Hong, grinning, and went out, past a blue tarp.

“Food’s for Burton and whoever,” Clovis said. “You hungry?”

“Might be,” Flynne said, picking up her Wheelie Boy from the chair where she’d left it.

“I’m here with sleeping beauty, you need me,” Clovis said. “True that you’ve got your own whole other body, up there?”

“More or less. Somebody built it, but you couldn’t tell.”

“Look like you?”

“No,” Flynne said, “prettier and tittier.”

“Go on,” Clovis said, “pull the other one.”

Flynne followed the smell of Sushi Barn. The bags were on the card table, the one she’d signed the contracts on, which was now back behind the blue tarp of what Macon had said was their legal department, but Hong wasn’t there.

“You’re Flynne,” the man said. Brown hair, gray eyes, pale, cheeks
pink. Another Englishman, by his accent, but here in what she was starting to try not to think of as the past. “I’m Griff,” putting out his hand over the foam containers and three bottles of Hefty water, “Holdsworth.” She shook it. Broad shouldered but light framed, maybe not quite as old as she was, he had on a beat-up, waxy-looking jacket, the color of fresh horse poop.

“Sounds American,” she said, but really it sounded more like a character in a kids’ anime.

“It’s Gryffyd, actually,” he said, then spelled it for her, watching like he wanted to see exactly when she’d laugh.

“You Homes, Griff?”

“Not even slightly.”

“Madison thought you came in a Homes copter, that first time.”

“I did. I’d access to one.”

“Hear you’ve got a lot. Access.”

“He does,” Burton said, moving the tarp aside with an index finger. He looked tired, and like he needed a shower. His cammies and black t-shirt were dusty. “Handy for fixing things.” He stepped in.

“Sheriff Tommy been wearing you out?” she asked him.

He put his tomahawk down on the card table, its edges clipped into orthopedic Kydex.

“Punishment detail, but he won’t admit it. Doesn’t like what we did over there. Way of rubbing my nose in it. Not that it wasn’t more than we intended, Jackman aside. Wouldn’t have minded finding a little bit of Pickett while I was at it, though. Then I heard Luke’s bringing us the Lord’s own sweet judgement, here.” He looked at her. “Thought you were in London.”

“Lowbeer got me back,” she said. “Whoever wants us dead has Luke down here to psych you out. Get you to fuck up, like you tend to do when they protest shit.”

“You seen the animations on those signs?”

“Looks delicious,” said Griff, who’d opened the foam boxes. “Where is Hong from?”

“Philadelphia,” Flynne said.

“I’ll wash up,” said Burton, picking up his tomahawk.

“Now you’ve got me feeling like following him,” she said to Griff, when Burton was out of earshot.

“Carlos is on the front entrance, to discourage him leaving,” he said, unscrewing the caps on the three bottles of water. “Clovis on the rear and the inside route to Hong’s.” He began to transfer the food to the three compostable plates Hong had brought with it, using two pairs of plastic chopsticks like a fork. Then he used a single pair to quickly reposition everything, so that it suddenly looked better than she would’ve guessed it was possible for Hong’s food to ever look. If she’d done it, she knew, she’d have wound up with three approximately same-sized messes of noodles and rolls. Watching him use the chopsticks to redistribute those little salty fake fish eggs, she remembered the robot girls prepping the snacks for the dead woman’s party. “Consider ignoring the placards our rent-a-zealots are displaying,” he said. “They were designed by an agency that specializes in political attack ads, and are specifically intended to upset you personally, while turning the community against you.”

“The other guys put them up to it?”

“Luke 4:5 are as much a business as a cult. As tends to be the case.”

“You’re from the Chef Channel or something?”

“Only with authentic Philadelphian cuisine,” he said. He tilted his head. “Give me the best northern Italian and I’ll have it looking like rubbish.”

“Let’s eat,” said Burton, coming back in and putting his tomahawk down on the table again, beside one of the plates. Seeing it, this time, Flynne remembered stumbling over the dog-leash man in Pickett’s basement.

She put the Wheelie Boy in the middle of the table, like it was flowers or something, then sat down on one of the folding chairs.

“What’s that?” Burton asked, looking at the Wheelie Boy.

“Wheelie Boy,” she said.

Griff put the empty boxes in one of the plastic bags, then put that in the other plastic bag, put it on the floor, seemed to consider the way the table was set, then sat. She almost wondered if he was about to say grace, but then he picked up his plastic chopsticks and gestured. “Please,” he said.

The going back and forth between her body and the peripheral was confusing. Was she hungry or not? She’d had a banana and coffee, but she felt like the walk through the greenway had been real. Which it had, but her body hadn’t done it. Smell of the food made her miss the week before, when none of this had happened, plus there was how Griff had made the plates look. “What’s party time?” she asked him.

“Where’d you hear that?” Burton asked.

“Clovis gave me the antidote,” she said.

“Party time around here?” Burton was looking at Griff, hard.

“Let’s discuss it after we eat,” Griff said.

“What is it, Burton?”

“On a war crimes dial stops at ten? About a twelve.” Burton put a slice of roll in his mouth, chewed, looking at Griff.

PARLIAMENT OF BIRDS

A
sh’s tepee smelled of dust, though nothing there seemed actually to be dusty. Perhaps there was a candle for that, he thought, taking a seat. The peripheral regarded him levelly, from around the ostentatious intricacy of Ash’s faux-antique display, then lowered its eyes, as if tracing the patterns carved in the tabletop. Ash was to his left, nearer the peripheral. She’d unpinned her threatening little hat, which resembled a black leather toad, and placed it before her on the table. “You’re being given a ticket for the parliament of birds,” she’d said to him, and when he’d started to ask what that might mean, she’d touched a finger to her black lips, silencing him.

Now he saw the jet-and-sterling spider from her chatelaine, untethered, crawl down from her left jacket cuff, to pick its rapid, needle-footed way across the carving, toward him, rhinestone eyes glinting.

It climbed onto the back of his left hand. Entirely painlessly. Indeed, he couldn’t feel it there. He thought of the Medici, dropping tendrils imperceptibly between the cells of his skin.

Ash spoke at length then, in birdsong, and he understood.

“Don’t do that,” he said, horrified, when she’d stopped, but what he actually produced was birdsong, shrill and urgent. But then he realized that what she’d told him was that the “ticket,” which they could only use here, and the one time, admitted him to their morphing encryption, hers and Ossian’s, which was as impenetrable as anything in the world, so that even Lowbeer and her omnipotent aunties were unlikely to learn what was said. And then she began to tell him more.

That Lowbeer (and he did his best to ignore birdsong gradually becoming something characterized by harsh glottal clicks) had become very interested in continua and their enthusiasts. There were, for instance, Ash said, continua enthusiasts who’d been at it for several years longer than Lev, some of whom had conducted deliberate experiments on multiple continua, testing them sometimes to destruction, insofar as their human populations were concerned. One of these early enthusiasts, in Berlin, known to the community only as “Vespasian,” was a weapons fetishist, famously sadistic in his treatment of the inhabitants of his continua, whom he set against one another in grinding, interminable, essentially pointless combat, harvesting the weaponry evolved, though some too specialized to be of use outside whatever baroque scenario had produced it.

Netherton glanced at the peripheral, which could have understood none of this in any language, but was watching Ash as she said that Lowbeer had obtained from this Vespasian plans and specifications for something that Conner Penske was being trained to operate.

“What?” Netherton asked, hearing the query emerge instead as two mewling, long-voweled syllables.

She’d no idea, Ash said, her own vowels lengthening, but given Vespasian’s fetishism and Conner’s evident delight in his first lesson, it was most certainly a weapon of some kind. Lowbeer, she pointed out, would have resources for having things rapidly and secretly fabricated.

But why, Netherton asked, their shared tongue growing more Germanic, was Ash telling him this now? He didn’t tell her that he found it increased his anxiety, or that this costume jewelry perched on the back of his hand made him want to scream, but he wished that those feelings could somehow be inadvertently conveyed through whatever mutant Low Dutch he might momentarily be mouthing.

Because, Ash said (swinging off into something that reminded him of no language whatever, nor birdsong), Lowbeer had herself, virtually overnight, become a continua enthusiast. And because she, Ash, had
come to see, while facilitating Lowbeer’s strategies in Lev’s stub, that Lowbeer was playing a longer game there than made sense for her to play. And because, and here her eyes narrowed to a single pupil per, having delivered the plans for whatever system or device to Lowbeer, Vespasian had gone uncharacteristically off to Rotterdam and died there, on Friday, suddenly and unexpectedly, but of apparently natural causes, a circumstance in which Lowbeer, in Ash’s opinion, had seemed remarkably uninterested.

And this had all occurred since they’d met Lowbeer, she continued, so really rather a busy week. But now, she said, the period of Netherton’s ticket, necessarily quite brief, was nearing its end. Once it ended, she expected Netherton not to mention these things at all. She had been motivated in sharing, she said, out of a degree of self-concern, but also by concern for him, and for Lev, and for Flynne and her family as well, whom she viewed as relative innocents, inadvertently abroad.

But what, Netherton asked, only now managing to ignore the constant unfamiliarity of his own verbal production, had she hoped thereby to accomplish?

She didn’t know, he understood her to say, but had felt she had to do something. And Lowbeer’s means of knowing who said what, via the aunties of the klept, were inestimable. And here it ended, with the spider springing from his hand and scrambling back to her.

Then the three of them sat there for a long moment, Netherton taking the peripheral’s hand beneath the table, and wondering how a sadistic continua enthusiast might die unexpectedly but seemingly naturally, in Rotterdam, and how he himself might best remember not to ask Lowbeer that, as he wasn’t supposed to know. But then, he thought, what if she’d heard them conversing in birdsong and gibberish? What wouldn’t she make of that?

STROBE

G
riff had made her put on armor for the ride, a black-magic cotton candy jacket. Burton wore one too, and in a way that was what nearly killed him, how the lining flash-hardened with the energy of the bullet. Fired into the concrete between Burton’s feet, by a man who was probably already dead when his finger pulled the trigger, the bullet had ricocheted up, hit the jacket’s sleeve around Burton’s left wrist. The bullet had disintegrated then, something about the physics of the cotton candy tending to cause that, and one fragment headed back down, into Burton’s right thigh, nicking the femoral artery.

It all seemed to happen at once, making no more sense than Tommy said any gunfight ever did, when you were in it. She’d been walking a little behind Burton, to his left, Clovis on her right, and afterward she remembered having sensed Clovis go up a notch, when they’d stepped out into the alley. They were going to get into Tommy’s car, to go and see her mother and try to talk her into letting them move her. Griff hadn’t mentioned the party time yet, whatever it might be, but if he didn’t, she was going to bring it up on the ride out. Mainly he’d talked about her mother, who refused to hear of moving. He wanted to move her to northern Virginia, where he said he had a safe house. Lithonia had agreed to go with her. Sweet as her mother was on Lithonia, she still wasn’t having any. Then Tommy had arrived to drive them, so she’d been looking forward to seeing her mother, even though she didn’t have much hope for her buying the idea of any safe house, and to sitting beside Tommy, if the way things were didn’t
mean Carlos had to be sitting there instead, with his bullpup between his knees.

It had been so quiet outside, in spite of the forty-seven protesters the drones had been able to count, over on the far side of the building, across the street in front of the parking lot. But Burton must’ve had his tomahawk head in his right hand, arm down at his side, the handle straight up, against the inside of his arm, and when he’d seen whatever gave the man in the squidsuit away, he’d popped the Kydex sheath off and dropped the tomahawk’s head, because she’d distinctly heard the sheath hit the concrete, just by where she’d locked her bike so many times. He’d caught the handle by its very end, how he did, before the head could hit the concrete, and wrist-snapped it, somehow, smack up into the man’s still-invisible head, making a sound like whacking an unripe pumpkin, and that had been the last thing she heard for a while, because then the guns were too loud to understand as sound at all.

It seemed like separate gifs to her now. The front of Clovis’s paramedic crotch pack open like a clamshell. The fat plastic pistol clipped in it, same color as the pack. Clovis, who’d shoved her to the side so hard that it really hurt, the pistol in both her hands, arms out shoulder-high, leaning into recoil, the muzzle flash continual, until the magazine was empty, and no more expression on her face than if she’d just been driving, paying serious attention to the road. Another was ejected brass, from Carlos’s rifle, weightless cartridges, floating, like they were frozen by a strobe, but one bounced off the back of her hand, burning her. Another was the thing the squidsuits did as bullets hit them, how whatever stolen color and texture flared, whited out, died, as whoever wore it fell. And Burton on the ground, eyes open, blank, nothing moving but the blood pumping from his thigh with every heartbeat.

Her ears ringing, so bad she never expected them to stop. Tommy holding her back, as Clovis, the reloaded pistol in its open clamshell
now, pulled things from pockets behind it. Homes blue latex gloves. A flat white ceramic hook. Crouched beside Burton, she used the hook to slit his cammies back in blood-soaked flaps, exposing his right thigh. Pushed the full length of her bright blue index finger straight into the spurting hole, frowned, moved it a little. The spurting stopped. She looked up. “Walter fucking Reed,” she demanded, “stat.”