“Hear you’ve got a lot. Access.”
“He does,” Burton said, moving the tarp aside with an index finger. He looked tired, and like he needed a shower. His cammies and black t-shirt were dusty. “Handy for fixing things.” He stepped in.
“Sheriff Tommy been wearing you out?” she asked him.
He put his tomahawk down on the card table, its edges clipped into orthopedic Kydex.
“Punishment detail, but he won’t admit it. Doesn’t like what we did over there. Way of rubbing my nose in it. Not that it wasn’t more than we intended, Jackman aside. Wouldn’t have minded finding a little bit of Pickett while I was at it, though. Then I heard Luke’s bringing us the Lord’s own sweet judgement, here.” He looked at her. “Thought you were in London.”
“Lowbeer got me back,” she said. “Whoever wants us dead has Luke down here to psych you out. Get you to fuck up, like you tend to do when they protest shit.”
“You seen the animations on those signs?”
“Looks delicious,” said Griff, who’d opened the foam boxes. “Where is Hong from?”
“Philadelphia,” Flynne said.
“I’ll wash up,” said Burton, picking up his tomahawk.
“Now you’ve got me feeling like following him,” she said to Griff, when Burton was out of earshot.
“Carlos is on the front entrance, to discourage him leaving,” he said, unscrewing the caps on the three bottles of water. “Clovis on the rear and the inside route to Hong’s.” He began to transfer the food to the three compostable plates Hong had brought with it, using two pairs of plastic chopsticks like a fork. Then he used a single pair to quickly reposition everything, so that it suddenly looked better than she would’ve guessed it was possible for Hong’s food to ever look. If she’d done it, she knew, she’d have wound up with three approximately same-sized messes of noodles and rolls. Watching him use the chopsticks to redistribute those little salty fake fish eggs, she remembered the robot girls prepping the snacks for the dead woman’s party. “Consider ignoring the placards our rent-a-zealots are displaying,” he said. “They were designed by an agency that specializes in political attack ads, and are specifically intended to upset you personally, while turning the community against you.”
“The other guys put them up to it?”
“Luke 4:5 are as much a business as a cult. As tends to be the case.”
“You’re from the Chef Channel or something?”
“Only with authentic Philadelphian cuisine,” he said. He tilted his head. “Give me the best northern Italian and I’ll have it looking like rubbish.”
“Let’s eat,” said Burton, coming back in and putting his tomahawk down on the table again, beside one of the plates. Seeing it, this time, Flynne remembered stumbling over the dog-leash man in Pickett’s basement.
She put the Wheelie Boy in the middle of the table, like it was flowers or something, then sat down on one of the folding chairs.
“What’s that?” Burton asked, looking at the Wheelie Boy.
“Wheelie Boy,” she said.
Griff put the empty boxes in one of the plastic bags, then put that in the other plastic bag, put it on the floor, seemed to consider the way the table was set, then sat. She almost wondered if he was about to say grace, but then he picked up his plastic chopsticks and gestured. “Please,” he said.
The going back and forth between her body and the peripheral was confusing. Was she hungry or not? She’d had a banana and coffee, but she felt like the walk through the greenway had been real. Which it had, but her body hadn’t done it. Smell of the food made her miss the week before, when none of this had happened, plus there was how Griff had made the plates look. “What’s party time?” she asked him.
“Where’d you hear that?” Burton asked.
“Clovis gave me the antidote,” she said.
“Party time around here?” Burton was looking at Griff, hard.
“Let’s discuss it after we eat,” Griff said.
“What is it, Burton?”
“On a war crimes dial stops at ten? About a twelve.” Burton put a slice of roll in his mouth, chewed, looking at Griff.
88
Ash’s tepee smelled of dust, though nothing there seemed actually to be dusty. Perhaps there was a candle for that, he thought, taking a seat. The peripheral regarded him levelly, from around the ostentatious intricacy of Ash’s faux-antique display, then lowered its eyes, as if tracing the patterns carved in the tabletop. Ash was to his left, nearer the peripheral. She’d unpinned her threatening little hat, which resembled a black leather toad, and placed it before her on the table. “You’re being given a ticket for the parliament of birds,” she’d said to him, and when he’d started to ask what that might mean, she’d touched a finger to her black lips, silencing him.
Now he saw the jet-and-sterling spider from her chatelaine, untethered, crawl down from her left jacket cuff, to pick its rapid, needle-footed way across the carving, toward him, rhinestone eyes glinting.
It climbed onto the back of his left hand. Entirely painlessly. Indeed, he couldn’t feel it there. He thought of the Medici, dropping tendrils imperceptibly between the cells of his skin.
Ash spoke at length then, in birdsong, and he understood.
“Don’t do that,” he said, horrified, when she’d stopped, but what he actually produced was birdsong, shrill and urgent. But then he realized that what she’d told him was that the “ticket,” which they could only use here, and the one time, admitted him to their morphing encryption, hers and Ossian’s, which was as impenetrable as anything in the world, so that even Lowbeer and her omnipotent aunties were unlikely to learn what was said. And then she began to tell him more.
That Lowbeer (and he did his best to ignore birdsong gradually becoming something characterized by harsh glottal clicks) had become very interested in continua and their enthusiasts. There were, for instance, Ash said, continua enthusiasts who’d been at it for several years longer than Lev, some of whom had conducted deliberate experiments on multiple continua, testing them sometimes to destruction, insofar as their human populations were concerned. One of these early enthusiasts, in Berlin, known to the community only as “Vespasian,” was a weapons fetishist, famously sadistic in his treatment of the inhabitants of his continua, whom he set against one another in grinding, interminable, essentially pointless combat, harvesting the weaponry evolved, though some too specialized to be of use outside whatever baroque scenario had produced it.
Netherton glanced at the peripheral, which could have understood none of this in any language, but was watching Ash as she said that Lowbeer had obtained from this Vespasian plans and specifications for something that Conner Penske was being trained to operate.
“What?” Netherton asked, hearing the query emerge instead as two mewling, long-voweled syllables.
She’d no idea, Ash said, her own vowels lengthening, but given Vespasian’s fetishism and Conner’s evident delight in his first lesson, it was most certainly a weapon of some kind. Lowbeer, she pointed out, would have resources for having things rapidly and secretly fabricated.
But why, Netherton asked, their shared tongue growing more Germanic, was Ash telling him this now? He didn’t tell her that he found it increased his anxiety, or that this costume jewelry perched on the back of his hand made him want to scream, but he wished that those feelings could somehow be inadvertently conveyed through whatever mutant Low Dutch he might momentarily be mouthing.
Because, Ash said (swinging off into something that reminded him of no language whatever, nor birdsong), Lowbeer had herself, virtually overnight, become a continua enthusiast. And because she, Ash, had come to see, while facilitating Lowbeer’s strategies in Lev’s stub, that Lowbeer was playing a longer game there than made sense for her to play. And because, and here her eyes narrowed to a single pupil per, having delivered the plans for whatever system or device to Lowbeer, Vespasian had gone uncharacteristically off to Rotterdam and died there, on Friday, suddenly and unexpectedly, but of apparently natural causes, a circumstance in which Lowbeer, in Ash’s opinion, had seemed remarkably uninterested.