“Came out of the hatch in the van, same deal, straight up. Past twenty, those voices were gone, like before. Then I spotted it, climbing.”
“Climbing?”
“Somersaulting, like backflips. Moving right along. Passed it, lost track. Thirty-seventh, it caught up with me, passed me. Lost it again. Got to fifty-six, got control of the copter, there’s no bugs. Did the perimeter, no paparazzi, no sign of the gray thing. Then the window defrosted.”
“Depolarized.”
“What I thought,” she said. “Saw the woman I saw before the party. Party’s over, different furniture, she’s in pj’s. Somebody else there, but I couldn’t see. Saw her make eye contact, laugh. Did another perimeter. They were at the window, when I got back.”
“Who?”
“The woman,” she said. “Guy beside her, early thirties maybe, dark hair, some beard. Kind of racially nonspecific. Brown bathrobe.” Her expression had changed. She was looking in his direction, or in the direction of his image on her phone, but she was seeing something else. “She couldn’t see the look on his face, because she was beside him, had his arm around her. He knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That it was about to kill her.”
“What was?”
“Backpack. I knew they’d see the copter. A door was opening, in the glass. A kind of railing was rolling up, for the balcony. They were going to step out. I had to move. I went like I was making another perimeter, but I stopped around the corner. Took it up to fifty-seven, doubled back.”
“Why?”
“Look on his face. Just wrong.” Her face still, utterly serious. “It was over the window, on the front of fifty-seven. Morphed so it looked like the rest of the shit on the building, same kind of shape, same color, but everything else was wet. It was dry. Sort of breathing.”
“Breathing?”
“Swelling, going flat, swelling. Just a little.”
“You were above them?”
“They were at the railing, looking out. Toward the river. I wanted to get an image, didn’t know how. I’d managed it by accident, with a bug, first shift. Figured there was a proximity trigger, but I didn’t know exactly what I was flying. When I got a little closer, it spit something. Fast, too small to see. Started hitting the camera I had on it. Taking a bite out each time. I killed the props before it could spit any more, dropped about three floors, caught myself. Biter’s gone, I took it left, then straight up. He was behind her. Putting her hands over her eyes. Kissing her fucking ear. Whispering something. ‘Surprise.’ I bet he said ‘surprise.’ He was stepping back, turning, headed in. And those things are coming out of it, lots of them. Saw him look up. He knew. Knew it would be there.” She looked down, as if at her hands. Back up at him. “I tried to ram his head. But he was fast. Went down on his knees. Then they were inside her, eating her. And he was up and in and the door was gone and the window went gray. I think the first one killed her. Hope it did.”
“This is horrible,” said Ash.
“Hush,” ordered Lev.
“She was leaning back against the railing,” she said, “and it started to roll down, retract. She went over. Fell. I followed her down. They ate her up. Almost to the ground. Just what she was wearing. That was all that was left.”
“Is this the woman you saw?” asked Netherton, raising Ash’s matte print of a headshot from Aelita’s site.
She looked at it, from seventy-some years before, in a past that was no longer quite the one that had produced his world, and nodded.
23
She lay in bed, the curtains closed, not sure what she felt. Sick sad shit in the game that looked like London, Conner and his Tarantula in the parking lot at Jimmy’s, Burton telling her about Coldiron, about somebody taking a contract out on him because of what she’d seen, then getting home with him to his posse of other vets.
And finally telling her story to Wilf Netherton, who’d looked like a low-key infomercial for an unnamed product. Burton hadn’t been around, when that was finished, so she’d walked up the hill alone, wondering why, if the thing she’d been in was a game of some kind, somebody would want to kill Burton, thinking he’d been there instead of her. For having seen a kill in a game? When she’d asked Netherton about that, he’d said he didn’t know, like he didn’t know why there was no capture, wasn’t anxious to know, and that she shouldn’t be either. Which had felt to her like when he was realest.
Her mother, up early, had been making coffee in the kitchen, in her bathrobe older than Flynne was, with the oxygen tube under her nose. Flynne had kissed her, declined coffee, been asked where she’d been, said Jimmy’s. “Older than dirt, Jimmy’s,” her mother had said.
She’d taken a banana and a glass of filtered water upstairs. Saved some of the water for brushing her teeth. Noticed, as she always did when she brushed them, that the brass fittings on the sink had once been plated, but now there were only little flecks of chrome left, mostly near the porcelain.
She’d gone back into her room, closed the door, taken off her debadged Coffee Jones shirt, her bra and jeans, put on a big USMC sweatshirt of Burton’s and gotten into bed.
To sort of vibrate, exhausted but far from sleep. Then she remembered that she had an app for Burton and Leon’s drone games on her old phone, and that Macon would have moved it to her new one along with the rest of her stuff. She got the phone from beneath the pillow and checked. There it was. She launched it, selected a top-down view, and saw a low satellite image of their property, the roof she lay under a gray rectangle, while above it moved, in a complicated dance, the twenty drones, each one shown as a point of light, weaving something she knew to call, if only from tattoos, a Celtic knot. Each one to be replaced by one of the twenty spares, then recharged, in rotation.
Burton won a lot of drone games, was really good at them, Haptic Recon 1 having been about them, so many ways. Even, she’d heard someone say, that Burton himself had been a sort of drone, or partially one, when he’d still had the tattoos.
Watching the drones weave their knot above her house seemed to help. Soon she thought she might be able to sleep. She closed the app, shoved her phone under the pillow, closed her eyes.
But just before she did sleep, she saw the woman’s t-shirt and striped pajama pants, fluttering and turning, down into the street.
Fuckers.
24
The thylacine preceded Lev into the Mercedes, its claws ticking dryly on pale wood. It regarded Netherton beadily and yawned, dropping a jaw of quite noticeably undoglike length, like a small crocodile’s but opening in the opposite direction.
“Hyena,” Netherton greeted it unenthusiastically. He’d spent the night in the master cabin, which made the gold-veined desk seem austere.
Lev frowned, Ash behind him.
Ash wore what he’d come to think of as her sincerity suit, a long-sleeved one-piece cut from dull gray felt, an antique aluminum zip running from crotch to throat. It was covered with a multitude of patch pockets, some of them stapled on. Wearing it, he’d noted before, seemed to dampen her more florid gestural tendencies, as well as hiding her animals. It signified, he assumed, that she wished to be taken more seriously.
“So you’ve slept on it,” Lev said, absently bending to stroke Tyenna’s flanks.
“Have you brought coffee?”
“The bar will make you whatever you like.”
“It’s locked.”
“What would you like?”
“An Americano, black.”
Lev went to the bar, applied his thumb to the oval. It opened instantly. “An Americano, black,” he said. It produced one, almost silently. Lev brought it to him, steaming. “What did you make of her story?” Passing him the cup and saucer.
“Assuming she told me the truth,” Netherton said, watching as Tyenna closed her mouth and swallowed, “and if that was Aelita she saw. .” He caught Lev’s eye. “Not an abduction.” He sipped his coffee, which was painfully hot but quite good.