“No,” she said, as the thing split open. A blur, around the slit. More of them. He glanced up, found it there. Expecting it. Never paused, never looked back. He was about to step back inside.
She went for his head.
She was half up out of the chair, as he saw the copter, ducked, catching himself on his hands.
He must have made a sound then, the woman turning, lowering her hands, opening her mouth. Something flew into her mouth. She froze. Like seeing Burton glitched by the haptics.
He came up off his hands, a track star off blocks. Through the opening, the door in the window, which simply vanished as soon as he was inside, became a smooth sheet of glass, then polarized.
The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.
She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black.
She pulled up before the twentieth, remembering the voices. Hung there in the gyros’ slack, full of sorrow and disgust.
“Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears.
She took it back up, then, feeling blank, miserable. Watching dark bronze sweep past, not bothering to try to see the city. Fuck it. Just fuck it.
When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.
“That’s why we can’t have anything nice,” she heard herself say, in the trailer.
16
Fifteen minutes,” said Lev, scrambling eggs on the kitchen’s vast French stove, bigger than either of the ATVs slung from davits on the stern of his grandfather’s Mercedes. “Most of that is reading their terms-of-service agreement. They’re in Putney.”
Netherton at the table, exactly where he’d been earlier. The windows looking onto the garden were dark. “You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Anton had it done.”
The scarier of Lev’s two older brothers. “Good for him.”
“He had no choice,” Lev said. “Our father organized the intervention.”
“Never thought of Anton as having a drinking problem,” Netherton said, as if this were something he was quite accustomed to being objective about. He was watching two Lego pieces, one red, one yellow, as they morphed into two small spheres, between the Starck pepper grinder and a bowl of oranges.
“He no longer does.” Lev transferred scrambled eggs, flecked with chives, to two white plates, each with its half of a broiled tomato, which had been warming on the stovetop. “It wasn’t only for drinking. He had an anger management problem. Aggravated by the disinhibition.”
“But haven’t I seen him drinking,” Netherton asked, “here, and recently?” He was fairly certain that he had, in spite of having a firm policy of flight if either brother appeared. Fully spherical now, the two Legos began to roll slowly toward him, across worn pine.
“Of course,” said Lev, adjusting the presentation of the eggs with a clean steel spatula. “We’re not in the dark ages. But never to excess. Never to the point of intoxication. The laminates see to that. They metabolize it differently. Between that and the cognitive therapy module, he’s doing very well.” He came to the table, a white plate in either hand. “Ash’s Medici says you’re not doing well, Wilf. Not at all.” He put one plate in front of Netherton, the other opposite, and took a seat.
“Dominika,” Netherton said, reflexively trying to change the subject. “She’s not joining us?” The two Legos had stopped moving. Still spherical, side by side, they were directly in front of his plate.
“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?”