The drone was somewhere else peripherals might come from, she thought, reminding her she had the Wheelie Boy on her lap, on the edge of the bed furthest from Conner. When she couldn’t look at Burton anymore, because he was unconscious, with a clear tube up his nose, sticky monitor-dots on his forehead and bare chest, and a couple of different tubes in his arm, she’d look over at Conner, face smooth and quiet, running something seventy years in the future, or at Griff, phone to his ear, nodding, talking but too low for her to hear. Then, when she could again, she’d look back at Burton.
The drone kept clunking. A pill bug was an isopod, not an insect. The biggest ones lived in the ocean. Was that high school or National Geographic? She couldn’t remember.
Clovis had gone to take a shower. Cold to start, she’d said, and fully dressed, because that would probably get most of Burton’s blood out of her clothes. Flynne hadn’t even known there was a shower. Clovis said it was on a hose, in a janitorial closet, with a drain in the floor, and right then it didn’t seem particularly strange, Clovis explaining that, standing there with Burton’s blood all over her. He’d needed a transfusion, but they’d had plenty of blood, his type. Which meant they had Flynne’s type too, because they were the same. And they’d had this drone, that Clovis said was what the Secret Service kept handy in case the president got shot, and was maybe even being run by the same surgeons.
If Conner hadn’t been under the crown, she’d have had to explain it all to him. Not that she knew anything about it, other than what she’d seen. Tommy had phoned for some deputies to clean things up in the alley, after, get whoever had been waiting in those squidsuits out of there, and there hadn’t been one single siren. Shooters hadn’t been local, or the deputies would’ve let Tommy know who they were by now. And it was like nobody in town had heard the shooting.
There was something wrong with her now, she decided, looking over at her brother’s face while the drone clicked and whirred, all those little pill-bug legs doing whatever they were doing. She’d seen them glittering, as Carlos and Griff lifted it and put it down over him, Clovis kneeling by the bed with her bloody bright blue finger still stuck in his thigh, pressing on the artery, and then she’d pulled her finger out as the drone came to life, making its noises.
The thing that was wrong was that she’d gone to where she’d been that time in Operation Northwind, but now she couldn’t scream on the couch, or walk out on Janice’s porch to puke on the grass. Just sit here, on the edge of the bed she guessed would be hers, with the ringing in her ears, and beyond it the edges of Griff’s accent, talking softly on his phone. She felt like Burton would be okay, but it worried her that she couldn’t feel more about it.
“You don’t look so good,” Tommy said, sitting down beside her and taking her hand, just like that was natural.
And she remembered Wilf’s hand, in that Oxford Street greenway, and the thing with floppy red wings, high up in the wet gray branches. “My ears are ringing,” she said.
“Be lucky if you don’t get any permanent loss,” he said. “Part of what you’re feeling now’s just decibel level. Affects your nervous system.”
“They were like the first four in that car,” she said. “Then those two down below the trailer. Dozen people dead, because of us.”
“You aren’t making them come after you.”
“I can’t tell anymore.”
“Not a good time to try to figure it out. But I’ve got something I have to run by you, while our man here’s on the phone. Not a good time for that either, but I have to do it.” He was looking at Griff.
“What?”
“I don’t want them using that shit on Luke 4:5. Not on anybody.”
“Party time?”
“You wouldn’t call it that, if you had any better idea what it does.”
“Burton said it’s a war crime.”
“It is,” he said, “and good reason. It’s an aerosol. They’d have a single little bird go down the line, painted black, tonight, spray ’em all.”
“What’s it do?”
“Stimulant, aphrodisiac, and, I have trouble pronouncing this, psychotomimetic.”
“What’s it mean?”
“It duplicates the condition of being totally serial-killer sadist bugfuck.”
“Fuck. .”
“You wouldn’t want it on your conscience. Don’t want it on mine.” He looked over at Burton. “Now I feel like shit for riding his ass, for what they did at Pickett’s.”
“He told me you were unhappy. Didn’t seem to hold it against you.”
“They didn’t know they’d set off those tanks of precursor. What they put on Conner’s gobot might’ve been fine just for Pickett and a few of his posse, which is frankly something I couldn’t hold against anybody. But they did blow up some poor assholes with no better way to make a living, on my watch, some of whom I knew to say hello to.” He gave her hand a squeeze, then let go of it.
She wondered who it was, up the line, had given Ash those crazy eyes, and whether they could do the same to somebody here, with the isopodal drone? Or if they might know how to fix whatever it was about Burton’s haptics that glitched him? Crazy things to wonder, but she felt a little better now. She reached over for Tommy’s hand again, because holding it and hearing his voice was making that Operation Northwind thing go away.
92
He was down in the well beneath Lev’s grandfather’s desk, looking for the Wheelie Boy headband. Flynne’s blank sigil seemed to be wherever he looked. “Positive it’s here,” he said, noticing a few pale flattened blobs of gum on the bottom of the marble desktop, near the chair. He imagined Lev pressing them there as a child. His fingers brushed something on the well’s carpeted floor. It moved. He fumbled for it. “Here it is.” He crawled up from beneath the desk, prize in hand.
“Fiddle with the cam,” she said. “You had it too close to your nose, last time.”
He sat in the chair, put the band on, tried to center the cam, and tongued the roof of his mouth. The sigil of the Wheelie Boy emulation app appeared, the feed opened, her blank sigil disappearing. She was seated at a table, against a backdrop of dull blue. The unit seemed to be on the table in front of her, but he didn’t try to move it, or change the angle or direction of its cam. “Hello?”
“Get it a little higher, more in line with your eyes.”
He tried to do that.
“Better,” she said. “Your nose is smaller.” She looked tired, he thought.
“How are you?”
“They fucking shot my brother.”
“Who did?”
“Guys in squidsuits. Clovis and Carlos killed ’em.”
“And your brother?”
“He’s asleep. They gave him something. Government drone gave him a long-distance operation. Got the bullet out, patched a hole in his artery, cleaned everything, stitched him up.”
“Were you hurt?”
“No. Feel fucked, but that’s not the problem.”
“What problem?”
“Lowbeer’s English boy. Back here. Griff. Gryffyd. Holdsworth. Tommy thinks Griff’s what he calls an intelligence liaison. Has diplomatic cover or some shit, out of their embassy in Washington. Lots of connections, government stuff. Our government, I mean. He got squidsuits and a micro-drone for Burton, to get me out of Pickett’s. Got the pill bug they used on Burton-”