Now the little figure in the dome turned, the exoskeleton turning with it. “Flynne,” said a stranger’s voice, like a voice from an infomercial, “hey.”
“Shit, Burton,” she said, “I thought we’d lost you, back in that alley.” She sort of felt like hugging it, but then that seemed crazy. Plus it had those creepy-ass hands.
“Guess you did, for a while,” the voice said. “I don’t recall chopping that client, or anything really, until I woke up and saw the real-world version of handsome, here.”
“If you’d got yourself that piddling wound in the service,” said Conner, his peripheral holstering its large hands in the pockets of its black suit trousers, “I guess it still might count as wounded fucking warrior.”
The exoskeleton feinted at him, cat-quick, but Conner somehow wasn’t where the tan hands went, fast as they were.
“Lowbeer says say hello,” she said to Burton. “She’s glad you can come with us. So am I.”
“Cross between a trunk monkey and a fancy jack,” said his infomercial voice. “What I joined the Marines for.”
111
Netherton walked around the black limousine, their transport to Farringdon and the reason Ash was dressed that way. Built in 2029, she’d informed him, the ZIL, the last off the assembly line, had never been a part of Lev’s father’s collection, but his grandfather’s personal vehicle, dating from when he’d lived in this house. Lowbeer, apparently, had opted to use it now.
Its bodywork reminded him of Flynne’s new dress, at once dull and very faintly lustrous. What few bits weren’t that peculiar black were stainless steel, beadblasted to nonreflectivity: the oversized wheels, and the broad and utterly minimalist grille, looking as though it had been laser-sliced off a loaf of ZIL grille-stuff. The hood was only fractionally longer than the rear deck, both of which could easily be imagined as tennis courts for the use of rather large homunculi. It had no rear window whatever, which gave him the sense that it had turned up its collar. The gravitas of its imminently thuggish presentation was remarkable, he thought. Perhaps that was why Lowbeer had chosen it, though he couldn’t see the sense in that, particularly. Curious about the interior, he leaned forward.
“Don’t touch it,” Ash said, behind him. “You’d be electrocuted.”
He turned. Met her double stare from beneath the patent bill. “Seriously?”
“It’s like the pram. They had trust issues. Still do.”
He took a step back. “Why did she want this one? Hardly in character for me, and certainly not for Annie. If I were really attending, this evening, I’d arrive in a cab.”
“You are attending, this evening. Otherwise I wouldn’t be gotten up this way.”
“Without an agenda, I mean.”
“When was it you were last without one?”
Netherton sighed.
“I imagine,” said Ash, “that she’s decided to make a point. This will be recognized, absolutely, as belonging to Lev’s grandfather. Daedra’s security, whatever that may consist of, will certainly know that it emerged from this address. Any pretext that you aren’t associated with the Zubovs will end, upon our arrival. Possibly she sees advantage in that. There’s usually some degree of advantage in underlining one’s association with klept. Disadvantages too, of course.” She considered him. “Suit’s not bad.”
Netherton looked down at the black suit she’d had made for him. Looked back up. “Is it black because the occasion requires it, or because you ordered it?”
“Both,” said Ash, a distant herd of something or other choosing that instant to transit her forehead, what was visible of it below the bill, making it appear as though a cloud of restless foreboding were lodged beneath her hat.
“Will you wait for us, there?”
“We aren’t allowed to park within two kilometers,” she said. “When you’re ready to go, they’ll call us. Though Lowbeer will already have done, I’m sure.”
“When do we leave?” He glanced up at the Gobiwagen.
“Ten minutes. Need to put Burton in the trunk.”
“I’ll use the toilet,” he said, starting for the gangway. And check to see that the bar’s still locked, he thought, certain as he was that it would be.
112
It wasn’t far, Ash said.
The interior of this car felt larger than the lounge in the Mercedes RV. It wasn’t, but it felt it. The way grown-up furniture felt when you were little. And everything in here was this black that made her like her dress less. It must be a thing, that black.
And the light outside was rainy, silvery, pink, the way it was when she’d first come here, lifting out of that launch bay in the white van.
Netherton, seated beside her, was almost too far away to reach, and if they’d been closer, it would’ve felt too much like a date. Conner was up front with Ash, room enough between them for two other people.
She wished it had a coffee machine, but that made her think of Tommy and Carlos and everybody back there, with Homes convoying in from three different directions. “Can I still phone home?” she asked Ash, assuming she could hear her through the partition.
“Yes, but do it now. We’ll be there soon.”
Ash had helped her set up the peripheral’s phone for dialing, while they waited for Burton to get into the trunk and fold up, transferring the numbers from her own phone. Now she brought the badges up, scrolled to Macon’s yellow one with the single red nubbin, and tapped the roof of her mouth.
“Hey,” said Macon.
“What’s happening?”
“Guests still on the way,” he said.
“Shit. .”
“Putting it mildly.”
“Who’s with my mother?”
“Janice. And Carlos and his friends, some of them.”
Flynne saw herself in the white bed, under the white crown, Burton and Conner beside her in their own beds. What would happen here if she died there, she wondered for the first time? Nothing, except that her peripheral would go on automatic pilot, that cloud thing. Would it still bullshit, then, if you asked it about Daedra’s art? Would that be the only remaining evidence that she’d been here?
“Better wrap it up,” Ash said. “We’re driving into their protocol now.”
Faintly at first, she heard the whispers of those fairy police dispatchers, around the base of Aelita’s building.
113
A Michikoid with a luminous wand waved their ZIL to the curb, behind something more on the order of the six-wheeled silver Bentley steam iron, though the color of Lowbeer’s car when uncloaked. A couple with shaven heads and Maori facial tattoos were briefly visible, between the sleek graphite wedge of the vehicle and a solemn-looking bouncy castle affair that obviously wasn’t a routine architectural feature of Edenmere Mansions or any other shard. The various scanners would be in there, he assumed. The entrance seemed staffed entirely with Michikoids, in identical gray, vaguely quasi-military uniforms. He remembered the one on Daedra’s moby, just before it flung itself over the rail, bristling with weapons, and what Rainey had said about how she’d seen them move like spiders, down on the patchers’ island.
Ash and Conner each opened a door, as if on cue. The ZIL’s doors were so massive that they must be servo-powered, though silently. Simultaneously, Ash on Netherton’s side and Conner on Flynne’s, they opened the passenger doors.
Without thinking, Netherton leaned toward Flynne, squeezed her hand. “We’ll lie like champs,” he said, not knowing where that had come from. She gave him an odd, startled smile, and then they were out, on either side, the air damp, colder than he expected, but fresh. A Michikoid scanned Conner with a nonluminous wand, another doing the same to Ash, and then he and Flynne were waved into the bulging gray inflatable, as between the thighs of some oversized toy elephant.