“Would your friend care for something, sir?” the Michikoid asked, from beyond the curtain.
“No,” he said, as there was no point in putting good liquor into a peripheral. Not that this place had any.
“He’s my uncle,” she said, loudly, “really.”
“You suggested we meet this way,” Netherton reminded her. He took a sip of their least expensive whiskey, identical to their most expensive, which he’d sampled while waiting for her.
“Shit,” she said, small hand gesturing to encompass their situation. “Lots of it. Now. Hitting many fans. Large ones.”
Rainey was employed, as he understood it, by the Canadian government, though they were no doubt hermetically walled off from any responsibility for her actions. He considered this to be an arrangement of quite startlingly naked simplicity, in that she probably did know, at least approximately, who her superiors were. “Can you be more specific?” he asked her.
“Saudis are out,” she said.
He’d been expecting it.
“Singapore’s out,” she continued. “Our half-dozen largest NGOs.”
“Out?”
The child’s head nodded. “France, Denmark—”
“Who’s left?”
“The United States,” she said. “And a faction in the government of New Zealand.”
He sipped the whiskey. Its small tongue of fire on his.
She tilted her head. “Considered to have been an assassination.”
“That’s absurd.”
“What we hear.”
“We who?”
“Don’t ask.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Wilf,” said the child, leaning forward, “that was a hit. Someone used us to help kill him, not to mention his entourage.”
“Daedra had a significant percentage in any successful outcome. Aside from that, what’s happened can’t be good for her.”
“Self-defense, Wilf. Easiest spin on earth. You and I know that she wanted to provoke them. She needed an excuse, to make it self-defense.”
“But she was always going to be the contact figure, wasn’t she? She was already part of the package when you signed on. Wasn’t she?”
She nodded.
“Then you hired me. Who brought her in in the first place?”
“These questions,” she said, the child’s diction growing more precise, “suggest that you don’t understand our situation. Neither of us can afford any interest in the answers to questions like those. We’re going to take a hit on this one, Wilf, professionally. But that—” She left it unfinished.
He looked into the rental’s still eyes. “Is better than being the object of another one?”
“We neither know,” the child said, firmly, “nor desire to know.”
He looked at the whiskey. “They had her covered with a hypersonic weapons-delivery system, didn’t they? Something orbital, ready to drop in.”
“But they would, her government. It’s what they do. But we shouldn’t even be discussing this now. It’s over. We both need it to be over. Now.”
He looked at her.
“It could be worse,” she said.
“It could?”
“You’re still sitting here,” the child said. “I’m home, all warm in my jammies. We’re alive. And about to be looking for work, I imagine. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
He nodded.
“This would probably be a little less complicated if you hadn’t had a sexual relationship with her. But that was brief. And is over. It is over, isn’t it, Wilf?”
“Of course”
“No loose ends?” she asked. “Didn’t leave your shaving kit? Because we need it over, Wilf. Really. We need there to be no reason at all that you ever have to communicate with her again.”
And then he remembered.
But he could fix it. No need to tell Rainey.
He reached for the whiskey.
11.
TARANTULA
Locked her bike in the alley and used her phone to let herself into the back of Forever Fab, smelling pancakes and the shrimp rice bowl special from Sushi Barn. Pancakes meant they were printing with that plastic you could compost. Shrimp special was Shaylene’s midnight snack.
Edward was on a stool in the middle of the room, monitoring. He wore sunglasses against the flashes of UV, with his Viz behind the glasses, on one side. In the low light the glasses looked the same color as his face, but shinier. “Seen Macon?” she asked.
“No Macon.” Near comatose with boredom and the hour.
“You want a break, Edward?”
“I’m okay.”
She glanced at the long worktable, stacked with jobs needing removal of afterbirth, smoothing, assembly. She’d spent a lot of hours at that table. Shaylene was a solid source of casual employment, if you got along with her and were quick with your hands. Looked like they were printing toys tonight, or maybe decorations for the Fourth.
She went into the front, found Shaylene watching the news: ugly-spirited sign-carriers. Shaylene looked up. “Hear from Burton?”
“No,” Flynne lied. “What’s happening?” Didn’t want to have the Burton conversation. Odds of avoiding it were zero.
“Homeland took some vets away. I’m worried about him. Got Edward to sub for you.”
“Saw him,” Flynne said. “Breakfast?”
“You’re up early.”
“Haven’t slept.” She hadn’t said what it was she’d needed to do, wouldn’t now. “Seen Macon?”
Shaylene flicked through the display with a fancy resin nail, Luke 4:5 tumbling back into the green of some imaginary savannah. “Wasn’t that kind of night.” Meaning she’d pitched the all-nighter because there was excess work to be done, not because Macon needed peace and quiet to fab his funnies. Flynne wasn’t sure how much of Fab’s income was funny, but assumed a good part of it was. There was a Fabbit franchise a mile down the highway, with bigger printers, more kinds, but you didn’t do anything funny at Fabbit. “I’m dieting,” Shaylene said. Flamingoes rose from the savannah.
“That the purple?”
“Burton,” Shaylene said, standing, slipping in a finger to tug at the waist of her jeans.
“Burton can take care of himself.”
“VA aren’t doing shit, to help him recover.”
What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.
Shaylene sighed, that Flynne didn’t get it, how her brother was. Shaylene had big hair without actually having it, Flynne’s mother had once said. Something that came up through any remake, like marker ink through latex paint. Flynne liked her, except for the Burton thing.
“You see Macon, ask him to get in touch with me. Need some help with my phone.” Starting to turn to go.
“Sorry I’m a bitch,” Shaylene said.
Flynne squeezed her shoulder. “Let you know as soon as I hear from him.”
Let herself out the back, with a nod to Edward.
Conner Penske blew past on his Tarantula, as she was turning out of the alley behind Fab, what was left of him a jagged black scrawl behind the two front wheels. Janet sewed him these multizippered socklike things, out of black Polartec. They looked, as Janet worked on them, like fitted cases for something you couldn’t imagine, which Flynne guessed they were. Town’s only other HaptRec vet, he’d come back in one of the ways she’d been scared Burton would: minus a leg, the foot of the other one, the arm on the opposite side, and the thumb and two fingers of the remaining hand. Handsome face unscarred, which made it weirder. She smelled recycled fried chicken fat hanging in the trike’s exhaust trail, as the single huge rear slick vanished down Baker Way. Rode at night, mostly county roads, this county and the next two or three over, steering with a servo rig the VA paid for. She figured he got loose, that way. Basically didn’t stop until the fuel was running out, hooked up to a Texas catheter and high on something wakey. Slept all day if he
could. Burton helped him out at home, sometimes. He made her sad. A sweet boy in high school, for all he’d been that good-looking. Neither he nor Burton ever said anything to anyone, that she knew of, about what had happened to him.
She rode to Jimmy’s, letting the hub do most of the work. Went in and sat at the counter, ordered eggs and bacon and toast, no coffee. In the Red Bull mirror behind the counter, the cartoon bull noticed her, winked. She dodged eye contact. She hated it when they spoke to you, called you by your name.
That mirror was the newest thing in Jimmy’s, a place that had been old when her mother had gone to high school. Everything old in Jimmy’s had at some point been painted in one or another generation of dark shiny brown, including the floor. The onions were starting to sizzle for the lunch dogs. Stung her eyes. She’d have the smell in her hair.
Hefty Mart would be open. She’d walk up and down the aisles, while forklifts brought in shrink-wrapped pallets. She liked it in there, early. She’d spend one of the shiny new fives on two bags of groceries, things that would keep in the cupboard. The neighbors had all grown more vegetables than they knew what to do with, out of a random stretch of rain. Then she’d go by Pharma Jon and put another five against her mother’s prescriptions. Then ride home, get the panniers unloaded, contents into the pantry, lucky if she didn’t wake anybody but the cat.
The edge of the counter was trimmed with LEDs like the ones in Burton’s trailer, under a sloppier application of polymer. She’d never seen them on, but it had been at least a year since she’d been in here with the place in bar mode. She pressed the polymer with her thumb, feeling it give.
Burton and Leon, before they enlisted, learned you could use a syringe to inject this same stuff, still liquid, into the part of a shotgun shell that held the shot, then quickly epoxy over the hole you’d made. The polymer stayed wet in there, most of the time anyway, between the little lead balls, so it didn’t expand. When you fired one, it solidified as the shot left the barrel, producing a weird, potato-shaped lump of polymer and lead, so slow that you could almost see it tumble out of the barrel. Heavy, elastic, they’d bounce these off the concrete walls and ceilings, in the county storm shelter, trying to hit things around corners. Leon had gotten keys to the place. Looked weird when you weren’t in there with everybody else, hiding from a tornado. Burton, after a while, actually could hit things around corners, but the sound of the Mossberg hurt her ears, even with earplugs.
Burton had been different then. Not just thinner, gangly, which seemed impossible now, but messy. She’d noticed, the night before, how everything she hadn’t touched, in the trailer, was perfectly squared up with the edge of something else. Leon said the Corps had turned Burton into a neatfreak, but she hadn’t really thought about it before. She reminded herself to take that empty Red Bull can out to the recyc bin, spend some time straightening things up.
Girl brought her eggs.
She heard Conner’s trike pass again, out beyond the parking lot. Nothing else on the road sounded like that. Police pretty much gave him a pass, because he ran mostly late at night.
She hoped he was on his way home.
12.
THYLACINE
He’d wanted to impress her, and what better way than to offer her something money couldn’t buy? Something that had felt to him like a ghost story, when Lev had first explained it.
He’d told her about it in bed. “And they’re dead?” she’d asked.
“Probably.”
“A long time ago?”
“Before the jackpot.”
“But alive, in the past?”
“Not the past. When the initial connection’s made, that didn’t happen, in our past. It all forks, there. They’re no longer headed for this, so nothing changes, here.”
“My bed?” She spread her arms and legs, smiled.
“Our world. History. Everything.”
“And he hires them?”
“Yes.”
“What does he pay them with?”
“Money. Coin of their realm.”
“How does he get it? Does he go there?”
“You can’t go there. Nobody can. But information can be exchanged, so money can be made there.”
“Who did you say this is?”
“Lev Zubov. We were at school together.”
“Russian.”
“Family’s old klept. Lev’s the youngest. Man-child of leisure. Has hobbies, Lev. This is his latest.”
“Why haven’t I heard of it before?”
“It’s new. It’s quiet. Lev looks for new things, things his family might invest in. He thinks this one may be out of Shanghai. Something to do with quantum tunneling.”
“How far back can they go?”
“Twenty twenty-three, earliest. He thinks something changed, then; reached a certain level of complexity. Something nobody there had any reason to notice.”
“Remind me of it later.” She reached for him.
On the walls, the framed flayed hides of three of her most recent selves. Her newest skin beneath him, unwritten.
Ten at night now, in the kitchen of Lev’s father’s Notting Hill house, his house of art.
Netherton knew there was a house of love as well, in Kensington Gore, several houses of business, plus the family home in Richmond Hill. The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going. It reeked of the connections allowing it to quietly decay. There were no cleaners here, no assemblers, no cams, nothing controlled from outside. You couldn’t buy permission for that. Lev’s father simply had it, and likely Lev would too, though his two brothers, whom Netherton avoided if at all possible, seemed better suited to exercise the muscular connectedness needed to retain it.
He was watching one of Lev’s two thylacine analogs through the kitchen window, as it did its stiff-tailed business beside an illuminated bed of hostas. He wondered what its droppings might be worth. There were competing schools of thylacinery, warring genomes, another of Lev’s hobbies. Now it turned, in its uncanine fashion, its vertically striped flank quite heraldic, and seemed to stare at him. The regard of a mammalian predator neither canid nor felid was a peculiar thing, Lev had said. Or perhaps Dominika had a feed from its eyes. She didn’t like him. Had disappeared when he’d arrived, upstairs, or perhaps down into the traditionally deep iceberg of oligarchic subbasements.
“It’s not that simple,” Lev said now, placing a bright red mug of coffee on the scarred pine table in front of Netherton, beside a yellow bit of his son’s Lego. “Sugar?” He was tall, brownly bearded, archaically bespectacled, ostentatiously unkempt.
“It is,” Netherton said. “Tell her it stopped working.” He looked up at Lev. “You told me it might.”
“I told you that none of us have any idea when or why it started, whose server it might be, let alone how long it might continue to be available.”
“Then tell her it stopped. Is there any brandy?”
“No,” said Lev. “You need coffee. Have you met her sister, Aelita?” He took a seat opposite Netherton.
“No. I was going to. Before. They didn’t seem to be that close.”
“Close enough. Daedra didn’t want it. Neither would I, frankly. We don’t do that sort of thing, if we’re serious about continua.”
“Didn’t want it?”
“Had me give it to Aelita.”
“To her sister?”
“He’s part of Aelita’s security now. A very minor part, but she knows he’s there.”
“Fire him. End it.”
“Sorry, Wilf. She finds it interesting. We’re having lunch on Thursday, and I hope to explain that polts aren’t really what continua are about. I think she may get it. Seems bright.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you had your hands full. And frankly you weren’t making a great deal of sense, at that point. Daedra rang, told me you were sweet, that she didn’t want to hurt your
feelings, but why didn’t I give it to her sister, who likes odd things. It didn’t feel to me as if you were slated to be a very permanent part of her life, so I didn’t think it would matter. And then Aelita rang, and she seemed genuinely curious, so I gave it to her.”
Netherton raised the coffee with both hands, drank, considered. Decided that what Lev had just told him actually solved the problem. He no longer had a connection with Daedra. He’d indirectly introduced a friend to the sister of someone he’d been involved with. He didn’t know that much about Aelita, other than that she was named after a Soviet silent film. There hadn’t been much mention of her in Rainey’s briefing material, and he’d been distracted. “What does she do? Some sort of honorary diplomatic position?”
“Their father was ambassador-at-large for crisis resolution. I think she inherited a sliver of that, though some might say Daedra’s more the contemporary version.”
“Thumbnails and all?”
Lev wrinkled his nose. “Are you sacked?”
“Apparently. Not formally, yet.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Fail forward. Now that you’ve explained things, I see no reason for Daedra’s sister not to keep her polt.” He drank more coffee. “Why do you call them that?”
“Ghosts that move things, I suppose. Hello, Gordon. Pretty boy.”
Following Lev’s gaze, Netherton found the thylacine, upright on its hind legs on the small patio, gazing in at them. He really badly wanted a drink, and now he remembered where he thought he might likely find one. Just the one, though. “I need to think,” he said, standing. “Mind if I go and stroll the collection?”
“You don’t like cars.”
“I like history,” Netherton said. “I don’t fancy walking the streets of Notting Hill.”
“Would you like company?”
“No,” Netherton said, “I need to ponder.”
“You know where the elevator is,” said Lev, getting up to let the thylacine in.
13.
EASY ICE
Unstuck her in time, day-sleeping in her bedroom. How old was she? Seven, seventeen, twenty-seven? Dusk or dawn? Couldn’t tell by the light outside. Checked her phone. Evening. The house silent, her mother probably asleep. Out through the smell of her grandfather’s fifty years of National Geographic, shelved in the hall. Downstairs, she found lukewarm coffee in the pot on the stove, then went out back for a shower, in the fading light. Sun had warmed the water just right. Came out of the stall wrapped in Burton’s old bathrobe, rubbing her hair with a towel, ready to dress for the job.