“What do you think?”
“You know she thinks it all sucks, up there?”
“She say that?”
“No, but you can feel it. That she does. Can’t you?”
She nodded.
64
The bar was locked. He pressed his thumb against the oval of brushed steel again. Nothing happened.
But this seemed inconsequential, he noted, as he lowered his hand. Perhaps how it would feel to have had the laminates installed, in Putney. Sufficiently uncharacteristic a thought that he glanced around, as if to be sure that no one had seen him entertain it. He was, he judged, in some complex bio-pharmacological state, the Medici having toyed with his dopamine levels, receptor sites, something. Enjoy it, he advised himself, though perhaps it wasn’t quite that simple.
From Ash, he’d understood that he’d fallen immediately and deeply asleep, on stretching out upstairs, before waking to Burton’s arrival. The Medici, she’d said, had emulated the effect of much more REM sleep than he’d actually gotten, and done other things as well. But after he’d helped her get Ossian into the chair, to have his shoulder repaired, she’d insisted that Netherton go back to sleep. Which he had, after a second application of the Medici. Having just seen it do something very unpleasant looking to Ossian, not to mention bloody, this had seemed less than fastidious, though he knew that at its nanoscale of operation it was constantly sterile.
He’d awakened again, and descended the cheese-grater stairs, alone except for the peripherals in their respective cabins. Flynne’s friend Conner had left his on Lev’s grandfather’s baronial bed, arms spread cruciform, ankles primly together.
Lowbeer’s sigil appeared now, with its coronet, pulsing. He happened to be looking in the direction of the desk, its thronelike chair behind it, so that the sigil momentarily suggested the crown of some ghost executive of Milagros Coldiron, itself a sort of ghost corporation.
“Yes?”
It stopped pulsing. “You’ve slept,” Lowbeer said.
“Flynne’s brother arrived,” he said, “unexpectedly.”
“He was rigorously selected by the military,” she said, “for an unusual integration of objective calculation and sheer impulsivity.”
Netherton moved his head slightly, placing the sigil over the window, but then it looked as if a coronet-headed figure were outside, looking in. “I suppose,” he said, “that he does seem more balanced than the other one.”
“He wasn’t, initially,” she said. “Their service records have survived here, from before Lev touched their world. Both were damaged, to various extents.”
Netherton moved to the window, thinking he’d seen a pulse of squidlight. “I didn’t like him using her peripheral.” Another arch pulsed and he saw Ossian, walking toward the Gobiwagen in a peculiar way, arms at his sides and slightly bent, hands held forward at the waist. “Ossian looks as though he’s pushing something that isn’t there,” he said.
“A Russian pram. I’m having a technical in Lev’s stub take it apart.”
“A pram?” Then he remembered the cloaked buggy, in the entranceway.
“We make it very difficult to secure prohibited weapons. The ones extracted from that pram will be entirely sterile.”
“Sterile?” Thinking of the Medici.
“Devoid of identification.”
“Why would you want them?”
“Have you eaten?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“No.” He realized that he was actually hungry.
“Best wait, then,” said Lowbeer.
“Wait?”
But her sigil was gone.
65
Fab was one end of the strip mall, the end nearest town, Sushi Barn the other, three empty stores in between. The one next to Fab had done pretty well when those little paintball robots were hot. One next to that had been nails and hair extensions. She couldn’t remember the one between that and Sushi Barn ever having been anything but vacant.
Burton pulled the rental into the lot, parked in front of the former mini-paintball place, windows pasted over on the inside with sticky gray plastic, starting to peel at the corners. “This is ours now,” he said.
“What is?”
“This.” Pointing straight ahead.
“Rented it?”
“Bought it.”
“Who did?”
“Coldiron.”
“They bought that?”
“Bought the mall,” he said. “Closed on it this morning.”
“What’s that mean, ‘closed’?”
“Ours. Papers are going through right now.”
She didn’t know whether it was harder to imagine having the money to buy this place, or to imagine wanting to. “What for?”
“Macon needs a place to keep his printers, we need a place to work out of. Shaylene’s back room won’t cut it. She’s already sold the business to Coldiron-”
“She has?”
“That meeting she had with you, then what she saw Macon fabbing. Got herself right in. We can’t be running our end out of a trailer down by the creek. So we centralize here. Gets the heat away from Mom, too.”
“Guess it does that, anyway,” she said.
“We’ve got drones over here, more on the way. Carlos is on that. It’ll cut us out of that dumbfuck with lawyers driving over from Clanton, bags of cash. Might as well be builder money, that way. Can’t put it in the bank, can’t pay taxes on it, and we get a haircut every time any’s laundered. If we’re working for Coldiron USA, incorporated right here, that’s a salary. Salary and shares. Corporate headquarters.”
“So what does Coldiron USA do?”
“Property development,” he said, “today. Lawyers have papers for you to sign.”
“What lawyers?”
“Ours.”
“What papers?”
“Incorporation stuff. Buying the mall. Your contract as CCO of Milagros Coldiron USA.”
“I am fucking not. What’s CCO?”
“Chief communications officer. You are. You just haven’t signed yet.”
“Who decided? Not me.”
“London. Ash told me when I was up there with them.”
“So what are you, if I’m CCO?”
“CEO,” he said.
“Know how stupid that sounds?”
“Talk to Ash. You’re CCO, communicate.”
“We aren’t doing that timely a job communicating ourselves, Burton,” she said. “You keep agreeing to shit without asking me first.”
“It’s all moving that fast,” he said.
Conner’s Tarantula swung, growling, into the empty parking lot, to brake beside them, coughing the smell of fried chicken until he killed the engine. She looked down, saw him grinning up at her.
“What did they put him in?” Burton asked her.
“Cross between a ballet dancer and a meat cleaver,” she said, as Conner squinted up at her. “Martial arts demonstrator.”
“Bet he was loving that,” said Burton.
“Too much,” she said, and opened her door. Burton got out on his side, walked around front.
Conner twisted his head, to see her. “Let’s get back where there’s all the fingers,” he said.
She rapped him with a knuckle, hard, on top of his stubbled head. “Don’t go forgetting who took you up there. My brother’s gone native there. Thinks we’ve got a startup going, that he’s CEO of. Don’t get like that.”
“Fingers, legs ’n’ shit, that’s all I want. Brought my catheter. In a ziplock, on the back of the trike.”
“Now that’s exciting,” she said.
Burton was unstrapping him.
“Lady, gents,” said Macon, opening the blank gray glass door from inside, “our North American flagship and headquarters.” He wore a blue business shirt, with a striped tie that was mostly black. Every button buttoned, but the crisp tails weren’t tucked into his holey old jeans.
“Not casual Friday,” Flynne said, seeing Shaylene, behind Burton, in a navy skirt-suit, still managing her big hair thing but looking surprisingly office-ready.
“Hey, Shaylene,” Burton said. He bent over and picked up Conner, like you’d pick up a ten-year-old who couldn’t walk. Conner slid his left arm, his only arm, around Burton’s neck, like he was used to it.