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 among 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.”
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.
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.
Ash had placed the call, speaking with the polt first. No attempt to present herself as anything other than an elective freak with four pupils. Demanding to know what he’d seen on his most recent shift. The polt had been evasive, and Ash, after a nod from Lev, had put Lev on. Lev, without introducing himself, had gotten right to it. The polt was about to be terminated, no pay for his two previous shifts, unless he could explain himself. The polt, then, had promptly admitted to having hired his sister, who he described as “qualified and reliable,” to substitute for him, his cousin Luke having been critically injured in a fight. “I had to get up there. They didn’t think he was going to make it.”
“What does he do, your cousin?” Lev had asked.
“He’s religious,” the polt had said. Netherton had thought he’d heard a laugh, just then, and the polt had quickly taken one of his hands off the wheel.
The polt had said that he was on his way home now, from visiting his injured cousin, and hadn’t spoken with his sister. Lev had advised him not to, until he could speak with her in person. And then he’d told the polt about the ad.
At which point Netherton had decided that Lev, whatever small degree of klepty cultural essence he might possess, was out of his depth here. The polt hadn’t needed to know that. It would have been less wise to tell the polt that they were phoning from a future that wasn’t his, one in which he was part of a wealthy obsessive’s hobby set, but hardly more unnecessary. Netherton had been about to type Lev a note, his phone’s keyboard appearing unevenly on the table’s carved top, but then he’d considered the dynamics of his own relationship with Lev. Better to sit and listen, watching as the polt carved himself a new and potentially more lucrative position. The polt had tactical skills, Netherton saw, ones that Lev, bright as he was and in spite of familial predisposition, had never had cause to fully develop.
The polt had told Lev that he was not, as it happened, a particularly easy target for a hired assassin. That he had resources to draw on, in a situation of that sort, but that his sister being potentially a target was “unacceptable.” The word had fallen on the air in Ash’s narrow tent with a surprising weight. And what, the polt had asked, did Lev intend to do about that?
“We’ll give you money,” Lev had said. “You’ll be able to hire protection.”
Netherton had been aware of Ash trying to catch his eye. He’d known that she got it, that the polt was on top now, Lev outmaneuvered. He’d met her eye, but neutrally, without giving her what she wanted.
Lev had told the polt that he needed to speak with the polt’s sister, but the polt had wanted to hear a figure, a specific sum of money. Lev had offered ten million, a bit more than the fee for the supposed murder contract. The polt had said that that was too much for his cousin to receive by something called Hefty Pal.
Lev had explained that they could arrange for the cousin to win that amount in their state’s next lottery. The payment would be entirely legitimate. At that, Netherton had been unable to resist looking at Ash again.