Then the cardoor was open and the robot girls were getting them out, making sure they didn’t try to run.
Nobody to meet them. Just her, Wilf, Daedra, balcony man, and the two robot girls, their white faces flecked with the peripheral’s blood, like a robot skin disease. She had a robot girl’s white hand around her upper arm, guiding her from behind. The other one had Wilf.
In through a gate that reminded her of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot.
Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Iron-barred doors, painted white but rust still coming through. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. Little windows, looking like they didn’t go anywhere. Up a narrow stone stairway, where they had to go one at a time. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died, or maybe just where the feng shui was so totally fucked that it sucked in bad vibes like a black hole. But she’d probably have to go with suffered and died, by the look of it.
When they got to the top of the stairway, she looked back at her robot girl, saw that it had sprouted extra eyes on that side of its face, just to keep better track of her. Neither Daedra nor the balcony man were saying anything at all. Daedra was looking around like she was bored. Now they crossed a court, open to the cloudy glow of sky, and entered something like a narrow, prehistoric Hefty Inn atrium, four floors of what looked to be cells, up to a glass roof, little panes set in dark metal. Lights flickered on, thin bright strips beneath the railings on the floors of cells. She guessed that wouldn’t have been original. The robot girls marched them to a pair of whitewashed stone chairs, really simple, like a kid would build from blocks of wood, but much bigger, and sat them both down, side by side and about six feet apart. Something rough moved, against each of her wrists, and she looked down to see that she was fastened to the tops of the slabs that formed the chair’s arms, her wrists in thick rusted cuffs of iron, polished brown with use, like they’d been there a hundred years. It made her expect Pickett might walk in, and for all she knew, given the way things were going, she felt like he might.
The stone seat was cold, through the fabric of her dress.
“We’re waiting for someone.” Balcony man was talking to her. He seemed to have gotten over what Conner had tried to do to him, physically anyway.
“Why?” she asked him, like he’d tell her.
“He wants to be here when you die,” he said, watching her. “Not your peripheral. You. And you will, where you really are, in your own body, in a drone attack. Your headquarters is surrounded by government security forces. It’s about to be leveled.”
“So who is it?” All she could think to say.
“The City Remembrancer,” said Daedra. “He had to stay to hear my appreciation.”
“Of what?”
“Of Aelita,” Daedra said. Flynne remembered the peripheral, the embarrassed actress. “You didn’t manage to ruin our celebration, if that was what you had in mind.”
“We just wanted to meet you.”
“Really?” Daedra took a step closer.
Flynne looked at the man instead. He looked back, hard, and then it was like she was up by the fifty-seventh floor again, seeing him kiss the woman’s ear. Surprise, he’d said. She fucking knew he’d said that. And she saw the SS officer’s head pop, the red mist blown with the horizontal snow. But those had just been pixels, and it wasn’t really France. The man from the balcony was looking back at her like there was nothing else in his entire world, right then, and he wasn’t some accountant in Florida.
“Be calm,” said the scratchy thing, not words so much as wind across some cold dry ridge, making her flinch.
He smiled, thinking he’d caused that.
She looked at Wilf, not knowing what to say, but then she looked back at the man from the balcony. “You don’t have to kill everybody,” she said.
“Really? No?” He thought that was funny.
“It’s about me. It’s because I saw you lock her out on the balcony.”
“You did,” he said.
“Nobody else did.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Say I go back. Say I go outside. In the parking lot. Then you don’t need to kill everybody.”
He looked surprised. Frowned. Then like he was considering it. He raised his eyebrows. Smiled. “No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because we have you. Here, and there. Shortly you’ll be dead, there, and that very expensive toy you’re wearing will become my souvenir of this ridiculous episode.”
“You’re a horrible piece of shit,” said Wilf, not sounding angry, but like he’d just come to that conclusion, and was still a little surprised by it.
“You,” the man said to Wilf, cheerfully, “forget that you aren’t present virtually. So you, unlike your friend, can die right here. And will. I’ll leave you with these units, instructing them to beat you very nearly to death, restore you with their Medicis, then beat you again. Rinse. Repeat. For as long as that lasts.”
And she saw how Wilf couldn’t help but look at the robot girls then, and how they both grew extra sets of spider-eyes, looking back at him.
Netherton moved his wrists slightly in the metal cuffs, having decided that looking at the Michikoids wasn’t a good idea. The restraints appeared to have been embedded in the chair’s granite arm for several centuries, but he assumed that assemblers had made them, and that his wrists were in them now because assemblers had made them temporarily flexible, and had briefly animated them. But they were, at the moment, solid.
The bearded man had just promised to have him repeatedly beaten almost to death by Michikoids, he noted, and he was thinking about assemblers, about faux antiques. Perhaps he was finding his own dissociative state. Or perhaps he was about to start screaming. He looked at Daedra. She looked back, without seeming to see him, then up, apparently at the glass roof, four floors above. And yawned. He didn’t think the yawn was for his benefit. He looked up at the roof himself. It reminded him of a dress Ash had worn, it seemed years ago. Ash seemed so utterly normal, from this vantage, this moment. The girl next door.
“I do hope you have this quite entirely sorted out, Hamed,” said a mellow but rather tired voice.
Netherton, lowering his gaze, saw a tall, very sturdy-looking older man, in perfect Cheapside cosplay, his coat long and caped, a top hat in his hands.
“New Zealand looked slightly pushy, I thought,” the bearded man said, as the other crossed from the top of the stairway.
“Good evening, Daedra,” the stranger said. “You gave a most moving testimony to your late sister’s many sterling qualities, I thought.”
“Thank you, Sir Henry,” Daedra said.
“Sir Henry Fishbourne,” Netherton said, remembering the City Remembrancer’s name, and immediately regretted having said it.
The Remembrancer peered at him.
“I won’t introduce you,” said the bearded man.
“Quite,” said the Remembrancer, and turned to look at Flynne. “And this is the young lady in question, albeit virtually physical?”
“It is,” said the man.
“She looks rather the worse for wear, Hamed,” said the Remembrancer. “It’s been a long day for us all. I should be getting along. I need to be able to confirm the successful result to our investors.”
“You’re al-Habib,” Netherton said to the bearded man, not quite believing it. “You’re the boss patcher.”
The Remembrancer looked at him. “I don’t like this one at all. Can’t say you seem very organized tonight, Hamed.”
“I’m killing him as well.”
The Remembrancer sighed. “Forgive my impatience. I’m quite tired.” He turned to Daedra. “A very nice chat with your father, earlier. Always a pleasure.”
“If you can look like the boss patcher, and then look like that,” said Netherton, to the bearded man, “why didn’t you simply change your appearance again, after you realized that you’d been seen?”
“Branding,” said the bearded man. “Investment in persona. I represent the product. I’m known to the investors.” He smiled.
“What product?”
“The monetization, variously, of the island I created.”
“Doesn’t it belong to the patchers as well?”
“They have endemic health issues,” said Hamed al-Habib, bright-eyed, smiling, “of which they aren’t yet aware.”
Sir Henry’s involvement surprises me,” said Lowbeer’s bone-static, like a full-body migraine that could talk. “He must have suffered some well-concealed setback in his affairs. That’s usually the way.”
“What way?” she asked, forgetting they weren’t alone, and that even when she was, tonight, she wasn’t supposed to speak to Lowbeer.
“Way?” asked al-Habib, sharply.
Faint warmth at her wrists. She looked down, seeing the iron cuffs crumble, collapse, like they’d only been pressed from dry, rust-brown talc. Beneath her right hand, the granite was going to talc too, spurting up between her fingers, drifting like smoke. And up from within what had been the chair arm’s surface rose something hard and smooth. The candy-cane gun, its parrot-head handle pressing back against the base of her thumb, like it was alive, eager.
“Finish it,” the balcony man said to the man with the hat, as if he sensed something, and she knew he meant the Homes drones hitting Coldiron. “Tell your people. Now.”
“Surprise,” Flynne said, and she was back on Janice’s couch, full of the wakey Burton had given her, but now she was standing up, raising the gun, and the white bump that was the trigger didn’t even seem to move. Not a sound. Nothing happened.
Then the balcony man’s head fell off, having somehow become a skull, perfectly dry and brown, like you’d see in almost any issue of National Geographic, and then the top of his body caved in, inside his clothes, collapsed with a dry clatter of bone, every bit of softer tissue gone, as his knees gave way, so that the last parts of him in her field of vision, just for a second, were his hands, untouched by whatever had happened. She looked at the gun, its barrel slick as candy a kid had just licked, then down at the brown skull, on the stone floor in front of what was left of him, his legs and lower torso. It must seal the blood in, she thought, remembering the gloss of sliced red brick, like raw sliced liver, in the shadows of the Oxford Street greenway. A brown bone was poking out of the front of his black suit, like a dry stick. “Just as well,” said the static, “that you don’t legally exist here. Death by misadventure.”
The robot girls started for her, then, but the whitewashed stone wall to her right was smoking, a big square of it falling down, dust, and out of the black hole shot this big red block. Cube, cuboid, thing. A nursery red. Cheerful. She heard the ceramic-looking shells of the robot girls shatter, between it and the far wall. Just hung, shivering, a few feet off the ground, like it was glued there, making a faint revving sound, like internal combustion motorcycles but really far away. Then it flipped, up and off the wall, the robots dropping to the stone floor in pieces, and came down on one of its eight corners without making a sound. And just stayed there, balanced, red, impossible.
“Security,” said the man with the black hat, softly. “Red. Red.”
Was he warning someone about the red thing?
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wilf, who must have discovered that his cuffs had crumbled too, starting to stand up too. “Sit the fuck down, Wilf,” she said. He did.
“Hey, Henry,” said a smoothly upbeat male voice, from the head of the stairwell, “sorry I broke your car.” The exoskeleton stepped through the arch, the homunculus on its massive shoulders, under the bell jar. It stopped, seemed to look at the man in the hat, except it didn’t have any eyes you could see.
“Red,” said the man, softly.
“Sorry I killed your driver and your security detail,” said the infomercial voice, like it was apologizing for not having 2-percent milk.
The cube rotated slightly, on the corner it was balanced on. Lowbeer appeared, on a square panel covering most of the nearest face. “You’ll be unhappy to learn, Sir Henry,” Lowbeer said, but not in that bone-static voice, “that your successor is your longtime rival and chief thorn-in-side, Marchmont-Sememov. It’s an inherently awkward position, City Remembrancer, but I’d thought, until this, that you’d done rather well, considering.”
The tall man said nothing.
“A real estate and development scheme, with resource extraction?” Lowbeer said. “And for that you’d see fit to deal with someone on the order of al-Habib?”
The tall man was silent.
Lowbeer sighed. “Burton,” she said, and nodded.
The exoskeleton raised both its arms. The creepily tanned hands were gone, or else in black robotic gloves, both of them in fists now. A little hatch flipped open, on top of the exoskeleton’s right wrist, and the other candy-cane gun popped out. From a second, slightly larger hatch, on the left wrist, emerged Lowbeer’s tipstaff, gilt and fluted ivory. Burton had a better idea of how to aim it, because the tall man just blinked to bone entirely, his empty clothes falling straight down, with a rattle, and his tall hat rolling in a circle on the floor.
“So who do I have to kill,” Flynne said, showing them she still had her own candy-cane gun, “to get somebody to fucking do something, back in the stub, about stopping fucking Homes from killing us all with drones, like right fucking now? Please?”
“Sir Henry’s death has deprived your competitor of the sort of advantage that Lev and I afford you now. I took the liberty of effecting that immediately, upon Sir Henry’s arrival here, this evening, assuming he would prove guilty. Which has resulted in a shift of influence, allowing for Homeland Security’s withdrawal, their orders rescinded.”
“Shit,” said Flynne, lowering the gun, “what did we have to buy to do that?”
“A sufficient share of Hefty Mart’s parent corporation, I gather,” said Lowbeer, “though I haven’t had the details yet.”
“We bought Hefty?”
“Some considerable share of it, yes.”
“How can you buy Hefty?” It was like buying the moon.
“May I stand up?” Wilf asked.
“I want to go home now,” said Daedra.
“I imagine you do,” said Lowbeer.
“My father’s going to be very angry with you.”
“Your father and I,” said Lowbeer, “have known one another for a long time, I’m sad to say.”
Now Ash was in the doorway, in her chauffeur outfit, Ossian behind her, in a black leather coat, the wooden pistol-box under his arm. He crossed to Flynne, eyes on the candy-cane barrel, keeping out of its way. He put the box down on the arm of her chair, where the iron cuff had been, lifted its lid, carefully took the gun from her hand, placed it in its felted recess, and closed the box.