“That’s rude,” Netherton protested.
“Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said. It altered constantly, their encryption, something sounding Spanish morphing into a faux German in the course of a simple statement, perhaps by way of something more like birdsong than speech. The birdsong was Netherton’s least favorite. Whatever randomly synthetic language the one spoke, the other understood. Never the one thing long enough to provide a sufficient sample for decryption.
The ceiling was pale wood, sealed beneath glassy varnish. Where was he? Rolling his head to the side, he saw he lay on polished black marble, thickly veined with gold. This began to rise now, beneath him, taking him with it, then stopped. Ossian’s hard hands seized his shoulders, lifting him to an approximate sitting position on what seemed to have become the edge of a low table. “Hold yourself upright, man,” the Irishman ordered. “Flop and you’ll crack your skull.”
Netherton blinked, still not recognizing the place. Was he in Notting Hill? He hadn’t known Lev’s house to have a room this small, and particularly not in its basements. The walls were the color of the ceiling, blond veneer. Ash took something from her reticule, a triangular lozenge of plastic, pale green, translucent, frosted like driftglass. Like all of her things, it looked slightly grubby. She slapped its softness against the inside of his right wrist. He frowned as he felt it move, bloodlessly settling incomprehensibly thin tendrils between the cells of his skin. He watched her doubled pupils flick, reading data only she could see. “It’s giving you something,” she said. “But you mustn’t drink on top of that, not at all. You mustn’t take liquor from the vehicles again, either.”
Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. Or rather was observing his vision sharpen, brighten, as the Medici had its increasingly welcome way with him.
“Mr. Zubov,” said Ossian, meaning Lev’s father, and coughed once, into a fist, “may at any time require his father’s land-yacht.” Not inclined to let Netherton off, but really what was the problem? Lev wouldn’t be concerned with a single bottle, regardless of its age.
Ash’s Medici released his wrist. She tucked it into her reticule, which he saw was worked with beads of mourning jet.
Netherton stood, briskly, his surroundings now making perfect sense. A Mercedes land-yacht, something Lev’s grandfather had commissioned for a tour of Mongolian deserts. There was no place for it, at the house in Richmond Hill, so Lev’s father kept it here. The empty bottle, he now remembered, was in a toilet, somewhere to the right. But they obviously knew that. Perhaps he should look into getting one of these things, these hangover alleviators.
“Don’t even think about it,” Ash said, gravely, as if reading his mind. “You’d be dead in a month, two at most.”
“You’re awfully grim,” he said to her. Then smiled, because, really, she was. Elaborately so. Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, the layered skirts below it like a longer, darker version of the boss patcher’s tutu. And now the line drawing of a lone albatross, slowly and as if in distant flight, circling her white neck.
He looked back at the table he’d slept on, when it had been retracted, flush, into a recess in the floor. Now it was ready to serve as breakfast nook or gaming table, or a place to spread one’s maps of Mongolia. He wondered if Lev’s grandfather had ever made the journey. He remembered laughing at the vulgarity of what Lev called the Gobiwagen, the one time he’d been shown through, but he’d noted the bar, with its very handsome stock of liquor.
“Keeping it locked from now on,” said Ossian, demonstrating his own degree of telepathy.
“Where were you two?” He looked from Ossian to Ash, as if implying some impropriety. “I came down to find you.”
Ossian raised his eyebrows. “Did you expect to find us here?”
“I was exhausted,” Netherton said, “in need of refreshment.”
“Tired,” said Ossian, “emotional.”
Lev’s sigil appeared. “I thought sixteen hours was long enough for you to be unconscious,” he said. “Come to the kitchen. Now.” The sigil disappeared.
Ash and Ossian, who’d heard nothing Lev had said, were staring at him, unpleasantly.
“Thanks for the pick-me-up,” he said to Ash, and left, down the gangway. Into the submarine squidlight of the garage’s broad shallow arches, receding down a line of vehicles. Sensing his movement, living tissue coating the arch directly above him brightened. He looked back, and up, at the vehicle’s bulging flank. Ossian was watching, from an observation bay, smugly.
As he walked to the distant elevator, past one vehicle after another, light followed him, the skin of one arch dimming as the next fluoresced.
15
Leon, the Halloween before, carved a pumpkin to look like President Gonzales. Flynne hadn’t thought it looked like her, but that it wasn’t racist either, so she left it out on the porch. Second day it was out there, she saw something had nibbled the inside of it, and pooped in it a little. She figured either a rat or a squirrel. Meant to take it around to the garden compost then, but forgot, and next day she found the president’s face caved in, pumpkin flesh behind it all eaten away, leaving the orange skin sagging, wrinkled. Plus there was fresh poop inside. She got the rubber gloves she wore for plumbing chores and carried it out back to the compost, where the wrinkled orange face gradually got uglier until it was gone.
She wasn’t thinking of that as she hung in the cradle of the gyros, watching the gray thing breathe.
It wasn’t gray now, but bronze-black. It had made itself straight, flat, with sharp right angles, but everything else on the face of the fifty-seventh floor, those flat squares and rectangles, was misted, sweating, running with condensation. The thing was perfectly dry, standing out a hand’s breadth from the surface behind it. The twisty legs had become brackets. Centered above the floor of the fold-out balcony directly beneath her.
It was breathing.
Sweat broke from her hairline, in the hot dark of the trailer. She wiped it with the back of her forearm, but some ran into her eyes, stung.
She nudged the copter closer. Saw the thing bulge, then flatten.
She had only a vague idea of what she was flying. A quadcopter, but were the four rotors caged, or exposed? If she’d seen herself reflected in a window, she’d know, but she hadn’t. She wanted to get closer, see if she could trigger an image, the way proximity had done when she’d dropped on that bug. But if her rotors were exposed, and she touched the thing with one, she’d go down.
It swelled again, along a central vertical line, paler than the rest.
Below her, they were at the railing, the woman’s hands on the rod along the top, the man behind her, close, maybe holding her waist.
It flattened. She nudged herself a little closer.
It opened, narrowly, along that vertical line, paler edges curling slightly back, and something small arced out, vanishing. Something scored the forward-cam then, a fuzzy gray comma. Again. Like a gnat with a microscopic chainsaw, or a diamond scribe. Three, four more scratches, insect-quick, flicking like a scorpion’s tail. Trying to blind her.
She pulled herself back, fast, then up, whatever it was still slashing at her forward-cam. Found the pull-down and dead-dropped, tumbling three floors before she let the gyros catch and cup her.
It seemed to be gone. Cam damaged but still functional.
Fast, left.
Up, fast. Passing fifty-six, with the cam on her right she saw him take the woman’s hands, place them over her eyes. From fifty-seven, she saw him kiss her ear, say something. Surprise, she imagined him saying, as she saw him step back, turn.