And this had all occurred since they’d met Lowbeer, she continued, so really rather a busy week. But now, she said, the period of Netherton’s ticket, necessarily quite brief, was nearing its end. Once it ended, she expected Netherton not to mention these things at all. She had been motivated in sharing, she said, out of a degree of self-concern, but also by concern for him, and for Lev, and for Flynne and her family as well, whom she viewed as relative innocents, inadvertently abroad.
But what, Netherton asked, only now managing to ignore the constant unfamiliarity of his own verbal production, had she hoped thereby to accomplish?
She didn’t know, he understood her to say, but had felt she had to do something. And Lowbeer’s means of knowing who said what, via the aunties of the klept, were inestimable. And here it ended, with the spider springing from his hand and scrambling back to her.
Then the three of them sat there for a long moment, Netherton taking the peripheral’s hand beneath the table, and wondering how a sadistic continua enthusiast might die unexpectedly but seemingly naturally, in Rotterdam, and how he himself might best remember not to ask Lowbeer that, as he wasn’t supposed to know. But then, he thought, what if she’d heard them conversing in birdsong and gibberish? What wouldn’t she make of that?
89
Griff had made her put on armor for the ride, a black-magic cotton candy jacket. Burton wore one too, and in a way that was what nearly killed him, how the lining flash-hardened with the energy of the bullet. Fired into the concrete between Burton’s feet, by a man who was probably already dead when his finger pulled the trigger, the bullet had ricocheted up, hit the jacket’s sleeve around Burton’s left wrist. The bullet had disintegrated then, something about the physics of the cotton candy tending to cause that, and one fragment headed back down, into Burton’s right thigh, nicking the femoral artery.
It all seemed to happen at once, making no more sense than Tommy said any gunfight ever did, when you were in it. She’d been walking a little behind Burton, to his left, Clovis on her right, and afterward she remembered having sensed Clovis go up a notch, when they’d stepped out into the alley. They were going to get into Tommy’s car, to go and see her mother and try to talk her into letting them move her. Griff hadn’t mentioned the party time yet, whatever it might be, but if he didn’t, she was going to bring it up on the ride out. Mainly he’d talked about her mother, who refused to hear of moving. He wanted to move her to northern Virginia, where he said he had a safe house. Lithonia had agreed to go with her. Sweet as her mother was on Lithonia, she still wasn’t having any. Then Tommy had arrived to drive them, so she’d been looking forward to seeing her mother, even though she didn’t have much hope for her buying the idea of any safe house, and to sitting beside Tommy, if the way things were didn’t mean Carlos had to be sitting there instead, with his bullpup between his knees.
It had been so quiet outside, in spite of the forty-seven protesters the drones had been able to count, over on the far side of the building, across the street in front of the parking lot. But Burton must’ve had his tomahawk head in his right hand, arm down at his side, the handle straight up, against the inside of his arm, and when he’d seen whatever gave the man in the squidsuit away, he’d popped the Kydex sheath off and dropped the tomahawk’s head, because she’d distinctly heard the sheath hit the concrete, just by where she’d locked her bike so many times. He’d caught the handle by its very end, how he did, before the head could hit the concrete, and wrist-snapped it, somehow, smack up into the man’s still-invisible head, making a sound like whacking an unripe pumpkin, and that had been the last thing she heard for a while, because then the guns were too loud to understand as sound at all.
It seemed like separate gifs to her now. The front of Clovis’s paramedic crotch pack open like a clamshell. The fat plastic pistol clipped in it, same color as the pack. Clovis, who’d shoved her to the side so hard that it really hurt, the pistol in both her hands, arms out shoulder-high, leaning into recoil, the muzzle flash continual, until the magazine was empty, and no more expression on her face than if she’d just been driving, paying serious attention to the road. Another was ejected brass, from Carlos’s rifle, weightless cartridges, floating, like they were frozen by a strobe, but one bounced off the back of her hand, burning her. Another was the thing the squidsuits did as bullets hit them, how whatever stolen color and texture flared, whited out, died, as whoever wore it fell. And Burton on the ground, eyes open, blank, nothing moving but the blood pumping from his thigh with every heartbeat.
Her ears ringing, so bad she never expected them to stop. Tommy holding her back, as Clovis, the reloaded pistol in its open clamshell now, pulled things from pockets behind it. Homes blue latex gloves. A flat white ceramic hook. Crouched beside Burton, she used the hook to slit his cammies back in blood-soaked flaps, exposing his right thigh. Pushed the full length of her bright blue index finger straight into the spurting hole, frowned, moved it a little. The spurting stopped. She looked up. “Walter fucking Reed,” she demanded, “stat.”
90
He was in the shower, off the Gobiwagen’s master bedroom, when Rainey’s sigil appeared. “Hello,” he said, eyes closed against shampoo.
“Is it still true,” she asked, “that you don’t know who you actually work for?”
“I’m unemployed.”
“I do,” she said. “More or less.”
“Do what?”
“Know who you work for.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our last date, so to speak.”
“Yes?”
“Your friend.”
“Lev?”
“The one I met.”
“I don’t work for her.”
“But you do what she tells you to.”
“I suppose I do,” he said. “For obvious reasons.”
“So would I, if I were in your situation.”
“Which is?”
“I don’t want to know. I made a few discreet inquiries. Now anyone I asked about her, however privately, no longer knows me. Retroactively. Never have. Some have gone to the trouble of scrubbing me from group images. As metrics of caution go, that one’s telling.”
“It isn’t something I can discuss now. Not this way.”
“No need. I’m calling to tell you that I’ve tendered my resignation.”
“From whatever new version of the project?”
“From the Ministry. I’ll be looking at the private sector.”
“Really?”
“Whatever it is you’re doing, Wilf, it isn’t good to know about. But I don’t, so I’ll keep it that way.”
“Then why call me?”
“Because in spite of myself I still give a shit about you. I have to go now. Whatever it is, consider getting out of it. Goodbye.” Her sigil vanished.
He waved his hand, stopping the shower, stepped out, groped for one of Lev’s grandfather’s thin black linen towels, dried his eyes and face.
He looked into the bedroom, where Penske had left the dancing master lying perfectly straight on the huge bed, like the carved lid of a knight’s sarcophagus, hands crossed upon its chest.
“‘Whatever it is,’” he said, quoting Rainey. Surprised to discover that he missed her, and that now he supposed he would have cause to continue to.
91
With Burton on the middle bed, blood on the sheets, under a drone surgical unit like the carapace of a giant pill bug, made of that same color plastic as Clovis’s pistol, the back room of Coldiron looked like a field hospital. The drone, controlled by a team at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, was sucked down tight around him, navel to just above his knees, and making a surprising amount of noise, as it did whatever they were making it do. Clunks and clicks as it worked on him. Extracting the shapeless bullet fragment, which it extruded on a little tray, patching the artery, closing up the hole in his leg. That was the plan, anyway. Hydrostatic shock hadn’t been that bad, Griff had told her, the ricochet off concrete having spilled a lot of energy. Otherwise, at that range, the impact itself might have killed him, in spite of the armor stopping the bullet.