“Can I fly it?”
“Let us show you the sights,” said Lev. He smiled.
She looked from Lev to Ash, then to Netherton. “Okay,” she said, and sat.
Ash took the other chair. Netherton joined Lev on the edge of the desk, glad to not be behind it, so less associated with its psychological functions of hierarchy and intimidation. “It wasn’t such a shock for you, this time,” he said to Flynne.
“I couldn’t wait to get back here,” she said. “But I’m not necessarily going to believe you about any of this, okay?”
“Of course,” said Lev.
Netherton was suddenly aware of smiling in a particularly stupid fashion, while Ash smirked at him, her gray eyes doubly gimleted. But then she turned, and spoke to Flynne. “You’re seeing my sigil now,” she said, and Flynne nodded, Netherton seeing it too. Now Lev’s was there, and Flynne’s, which was featureless. “Now I’ll open a feed,” Ash said, “full binocular.”
The room vanished, replaced by a foggy midmorning aerial vista of London, the angular uprights of the shards set regularly out across the city’s compacted intricacy, a density relieved by greenways he’d hiked as a child, by systematic erasures of alleged mediocrities, by new forests grown thick and deep. The glass roofing some of the cleansed and excavated rivers dully reflected what sun there was, and in the Thames he saw the floating islands, rearranged yet again, the revolving blades beneath them better positioned to gather the river’s strength.
“Damn,” said Flynne, evidently impressed.
Ash piloted them toward Hampstead, where Netherton’s parents had taken him to a schoolmate’s party, when he was ten, to spend the afternoon within a length of clay drainpipe, buried under a cast-iron bench, a space strung with tiny colored lanterns, where costumed mice had sung and danced and staged mock duels. The hands of his homunculus had been crude and translucent, not unlike those of the patchers. As he remembered this, Ash was telling Flynne of the waterwheels turned by the rescued rivers, but nothing of any preceding history, times prior, darkness.
He crossed the roof of his mouth with his tongue tip, blanking the feed, returning to the Gobiwagen, preferring to watch Flynne’s face.
“But where is everybody?” she asked. “There’s no people.”
“That’s complicated,” said Ash, evenly, “but at this altitude you wouldn’t notice anyone.”
“Hardly any traffic, either,” Flynne said. “Noticed that before.”
“We’re almost in the City now,” said Ash. “Cheapside. Here’s your crowd.”
But those aren’t people, thought Netherton, watching Flynne’s expression as she took it all in.
“Cosplay zone,” said Lev, “Eighteen sixty-seven. We’d be fined for the helicopter, if it didn’t have cloaking, or if it made a sound.”
Netherton tapped the requisite quadrant of palate, returning to Ash’s feed, to find them stationary over morning traffic, already so thick as to be almost unmoving. Cabs, carts, drays, all drawn by horses. Lev’s father and grandfather owned actual horses, apparently. Were said to sometimes ride them, though certainly never in Cheapside. His mother had shown him the shops here as a child. Silver-plated tableware, perfumes, fringed shawls, implements for ingesting tobacco, fat watches cased in silver or gold, men’s hats. He’d been amazed at how copiously the horses shat in the street, their droppings swept up by darting children, younger than he was, who he’d understood were no more real than the horses, but who seemed as real, entirely real, and terrifying in the desperation of their employment, cursing vividly as they dodged with crude short brooms between the legs of the animals, as men his mother said were bankers, solicitors, merchants, brokers, or rather their simulacra, hurried along beneath tall hats, past handpainted signs for boots, china, lace, insurance, plate glass. He’d loved those signs, had captured as many as he could while holding his mother’s hand, uncomfortable in his stiff and requisite clothing. He’d kept a lookout for fierce-eyed boys hurtling handcarts along, or running, shouting, back into dark courts stinking, he supposed, as realistically as the green dung of the horses. His mother had worn broad dark skirts for such visits, swelling from a narrow waist to brush the pavement, below a very fitted sort of matching jacket, some unlikely hat perched on the side of her head. She hadn’t cared for any of it. Had brought him here because she felt she should, and perhaps he’d elaborated on that, later, developing his own sharp distaste for anything of the sort.
“Look at it,” Flynne said.
“It isn’t real,” he said. “Worked up from period media. Scarcely anyone you see is human, and those who are, are tourists, or schoolchildren being taught history. Better at night, the illusion.” Less annoying, in any case.
“The horses aren’t real?” Flynne asked.
“No,” said Ash, “horses are rare now. We’ve generally done better, with domestic animals.”
Please, thought Netherton, don’t start. Lev might have thought the same thing, because now he said, “We’ve brought you here to meet someone. Just to say hello, this time.”
They began to descend.
Netherton saw Lowbeer then, looking up, in skirts and a jacket very like the ones his mother had worn.
47
In the middle of a walking forest of black hats stood a white-haired woman with bright blue eyes. The men seemed no more to see her than they saw whatever Ash was flying, which Lev said they couldn’t, though they felt the turbulence, each one reaching up to hold his hat as he walked through it. They walked around the woman as she stood there, looking up at what they couldn’t see, one gray-gloved hand holding a little hat against the downdraft.
There was a new badge, beside Lev’s, Ash’s, Wilf’s. A sort of simple crown, in profile, gold on cream. The others dimmed now. “We’re in privacy mode,” the woman said. “The others can’t hear us. I am Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, of the Metropolitan Police.” Her voice in Flynne’s head, sounds of crowd and traffic muted.
“Flynne Fisher,” Flynne said. “Are you why I’m here?”
“You yourself are why you’re here. If you hadn’t chosen to stand in for your brother, you wouldn’t have witnessed the crime I’m investigating.”
“Sorry,” said Flynne.
“I’m not sorry at all,” the woman said. “Without you, I’d have nothing. An annoyingly seamless absence. Are you frightened?”
“Sometimes.”
“Normal under the circumstances, insofar as they can be said to be normal. Are you satisfied with your peri?”
“My what?”
“Your peripheral. I chose it myself, I’m afraid on very short notice. I felt it had a certain poetry.”
“Why do you want to talk to me?”
“You witnessed a peculiarly unpleasant homicide. Saw the face of someone who may be either the perpetrator or an accomplice.”
“I thought that might be why.”
“Some person or persons unknown have since attempted to have you murdered, in your native continuum, presumably because they know you to be a witness. Shockingly, in my view, I’m told that arranging your death would in no way constitute a crime here, as you are, according to current best legal opinion, not considered to be real.”
“I’m as real as you are.”
“You are indeed,” said the woman, “but persons of the sort pursuing you now would have no hesitation whatever in killing you, or anyone else, here, now, or elsewhere. Such persons are my concern, of course.” Bright blue, her eyes, and cold. “But you are my concern as well. My responsibility, in a different way.”
“Why?”
“For my sins, perhaps.” She smiled, but not in any way Flynne found comforting. “Zubov, you should understand, will pervert the economy of your world.”