“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.
Going back to Jimmy’s was a bad idea. Knew it soon as she’d walked into the dark and the dancing, the smell of beer and state weed and homegrown tobacco. The bull was leaning out of the mirror, eyeing a girl who might have been fourteen. The LEDs were pulsing to a song Flynne had never heard before and wouldn’t have wanted to again, and she was the oldest living thing in the building. Still wearing her improv security guard outfit. And she hadn’t even found Macon, over on the side of the lot where mostly black kids hung, where he did his funny business. She’d come because she still needed to ask him what Homes might have thought of the phone he’d made for her, but maybe she’d really just been hoping for someone to talk to. She hadn’t felt like the sandwich she’d made to eat after the shift, and she didn’t feel like she’d ever be hungry.
That shit in the game. She hated that shit. Hated games. Why did they all have to be so fucking ugly?
She got a beer, her phone dinging as Jimmy’s ran a tab. Took the bottle to a little round corner table, unwiped but mercifully empty, sat down, tried to look like the meanest old lady she could. Girl who’d passed her the beer had a Viz, like Macon and Edward had, a tangle like silver cobweb filling one eye socket, but you could still see the eye behind it, watching whatever the little units strung in the tangle were projecting. Hefty Mart had to scan your socket before they fabbed you one, so it would fit, and there weren’t any funny ones yet. Looked better on a black face, she thought, but most every kid here had one and it made her feel old, and more so that she thought they looked kind of stupid. It was something every year.
“Look like you’ve come up short on the number of fucks you need to not give,” Janice said, appearing out of the crowd with a beer of her own.
“Short a few,” Flynne agreed, but no longer the oldest thing in Jimmy’s. She’d always liked Janice. She automatically looked around, because Janice and Madison weren’t usually very far apart. He was at a table with two boys, each one with a silver-tangled eye. He looked like Teddy Roosevelt, Madison, and most of what she knew about Teddy Roosevelt was that Madison looked like him. He had a mustache he trimmed but never shaved off, round titanium-wire glasses, and a moth-eaten wool cruiser vest, olive green, complicated breast pockets bristling with pens and little flashlights.
“Want some company with it?”
“Long as it’s you,” Flynne said.
Janice sat down. She and Madison had that thing going, that some married people did, where they’d started to look like each other. Janice had the same round glasses but no mustache. They could have swapped outfits without attracting any attention. She was wearing cammies that were probably his. “You really don’t look too happy.”
“I’m not. Worried about Burton. Homes had him for going up to Davisville and beating on Luke 4:5. No charges, just a public safety detention.”
“I know,” Janice said. “Leon told Madison.”
“He’s doing something on the side,” Flynne said, glad of the music, looking around, knowing Janice would understand about the disability money. “I filled in for him.”
Janice raised an eyebrow. “You don’t give the impression you liked it much.”
“Beta testing some kind of creepy-ass game. Serial killers or something.”
“You played anything, since that time at our place?” Janice was watching her.
“Just this. Twice.” Flynne felt differently uncomfortable. “You seen Macon?”
“He was here. Madison was talking to him.”
“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.
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.