“Conner,” Shaylene said. “How’re you doing?” She seemed different now, Flynne wasn’t sure how.
“Hangin’ in,” said Conner, and used his crooked arm to pull himself up to where he could give Burton a big wet smack on the cheek.
“Could just drop an asshole on the concrete,” Burton said, like he was thinking out loud.
“Let’s get in out of the public eye,” Conner said. Macon stepped back, out of the doorway. Burton carried Conner in, Flynne behind them. Then Shaylene, who closed the door behind her. One big room, lit by shiny new work-LEDs on clean yellow cables. Musty smell. Gyprock walls randomly patched with paint, showing where counters and dividers had been before. Someone had sawn a doorway through, just a raw door-shaped hole, from the back room of Fab. Covered with a blue tarp, on the Fab side. A couple of new electric saws lay beside it on the floor.
Further back, there were three new hospital beds, partially extracted from their factory bubble wrap, white mattresses bare, and three IV stands, plus a lot of white foam cartons, stacked high as Flynne’s head. “What’s all this?” she asked.
“Ash tells me what we’ll need, I order it,” Macon said.
“Looks like you’re setting up a ward,” Flynne said. “Smells, for a hospital.”
“Plumber’s on the way to fix that,” Shaylene said. “Electrical’s good to go, and the mini-paintball guys put in a shitload of outlets. Going to try to get it cleaned up, working around whatever we wind up doing here.”
“Those beds are for us,” Flynne said to Burton. “We’re going back together, aren’t we?”
“Conner first,” Burton said, carrying him to the nearest bed and putting him down on it.
“Just finished printing him a new phone,” said Macon. “Same as yours, Flynne. Ash wants him to acclimate more, work out. They can run training sequences for him through the peripheral’s cloud AI.”
Flynne looked at Macon. “You sound pretty well up on things there,” she said.
“Biggest part of the job,” Macon said. “It mostly makes its own kind of sense, then you hit something that seems impossible, or just completely wrong, and she either explains it or tells you to ignore it.”
She looked back and saw Burton and Shaylene talking. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Shaylene’s thing about Burton looked to her to be gone. “She sell Fab, to them?” she asked Macon.
“Did,” he said. “Don’t know what she got for it, but they’ve totally got her attention. Which is good, because I’m too busy to wrangle stuff that’s late, and she’s a natural at that.”
“She get along with Burton?”
“Just fine.”
“Used to be awkward,” Flynne said, “like a whole day or two ago.”
“I know,” Macon said. “But before this, she’d managed to feed herself, and a bunch of other people in this town, with a business that wasn’t Hefty, wasn’t building drugs, and was at least partly unfunny. That way, I’d say she hasn’t actually changed much. Just gotten more focused.”
“I wouldn’t have expected she’d get over that, about Burton.”
“What’s changing here,” he said, “is economics,” and the look on his face reminded her of being in Civics with him, when they’d studied the electoral college. He’d been the only one who really got it. She remembered him sitting up straight, explaining it to them. Same look.
“How’s that?”
“Economy,” he said. “Macro and micro. Around here’s micro. Pickett’s not the biggest money in this county anymore.” He raised his eyebrows. “Macro, though, that’s mega weird. Markets all screwy everywhere, everybody’s edgy, Badger’s buzzing, crazy rumors. All just since Burton came back from Davisville. That’s us, causing all that. Us and them.”
“Them?” She remembered how good he’d been at math, better than anybody, but then they’d graduated and he’d had family needed taking care of, college no option. He was one of the smartest people she knew, good as he was at helping you forget it.
“Ash tells me there’s somebody else, up there, able to reach back here. You know about that?”
She nodded. “Hiring people, to kill us.”
“Uh-huh. Ash says there’s two different anomalous proliferations of subsecond extreme events in the market, right now. Us and them. You understand subsecond financial shit?”
“No.”
“Markets are full of predatory trading algorithms. They’ve evolved to hunt in packs. Ash has people with the tools to turn those packs to Coldiron’s advantage, nobody the wiser. But whoever else is up there, with their own backdoor to now, they’ve got the same tools, or near enough.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“I think it’s like an invisible two-party world war, but economic. So far, anyway.”
“Macon, honey,” called Conner, from his hospital bed, framed by a corona of ragged bubble-pack, “bring a wounded warrior his catheter. It’s out on the back of my trike. Wouldn’t want some dickbag stealing it.”
“Or maybe I’m just crazy,” said Macon, turning to go.
Flynne went to the very back of the room, behind the beds and the IV stands, and stood looking at the barred, unwashed windows, dusty cobwebs in their corners, dead flies and spider eggs dangling. Imagined, behind her, kids paintballing their little robots and tanks in the big sandbox they’d had in here. Seemed forever long ago. A couple of days seemed a long time, now. She imagined the spider eggs hatching, something other than spiders coming out, she had no idea what. “Predatory algorithms,” she said.
“What?” Conner asked.
“Haven’t got a clue,” she said.
66
She’ll ring you,” Ash said, passing Netherton a U-shaped piece of colorless transparent plastic, like something to hold back a young girl’s hair. “Put it on.”
Netherton looked at the thing, then at Ash. “On?”
“Your forehead. Haven’t eaten, I hope?”
“She suggested I wait.”
Ash had, ominously, come equipped with the polished-steel wastebasket he remembered from Flynne’s initial arrival. It stood, now, beside the crow’s nest’s longest section of gray upholstery.
Lowbeer’s sigil appeared. “Yes?” he asked, before it could pulse.
“The autonomic cutout, please,” said Lowbeer.
He saw that Ash was descending the stairway, taut wires vibrating with her every step. He gingerly settled the flimsy yoke across his forehead, nearer hairline than brows.
“Best you fully recline,” said Lowbeer, her tone reminding him of dental technicians.
Netherton did, reluctantly, the upholstered bench all too eagerly adjusting itself to more comfortably support his head.
“Eyes closed.”
“I hate this,” said Netherton, closing his eyes. Now there was nothing but the sigil.
“With your eyes closed,” said Lowbeer, “count down from fifteen. Then open them.”
Netherton closed his eyes, not bothering to count. Nothing happened. Then something did; he saw Lowbeer’s sigil, just for an instant, as though it were some ancient photographic negative. Opened his eyes.
The world inverted, slammed him down.
He lay curled on his side in an entirely gray place. The light, what little there was, was gray as every visible thing. Beneath something very low. It would have been impossible to stand, or indeed to sit up.
“Here,” said Lowbeer. Netherton craned his neck. Huddled, too near his face, was something unthinkable. A brief, whining sound, then he realized he’d made it himself. “The Australian military,” Lowbeer said, “call these drop bears.” The thing’s blunt, koala-like muzzle, unmoving when she spoke, was held slightly open, displaying a nonmammalian profusion of tiny crystalline teeth. “Reconnaissance units,” she said, “small, expendable. These two were haloed in, then guided here. How are you feeling?” Its blank gray eyes were round and featureless as buttons, the color of its hairless face. Mechanical-looking concave ears, if they were ears, swiveled fitfully, independent of one another.