Agency

10 Rio

The tardibot having seen Netherton to Ash’s door, claws clacking, he stood alone, on uneven pavement, awaiting the car Ash had summoned.

Where Ash’s road intersected the high street rose the side of a 1930s cinema. High up, on the windowless wall facing him, on a Moderne lozenge, steel-rimmed Prussian blue capitals spelt RIO. He’d taken Rainey there once, he remembered now, to a Kurosawa festival, having by then forgotten that it overlooked Ash’s weird hacienda.

The car, on arrival, proved to be a front-loading single-seater, the smallest of its three wheels in the rear. Like a solo sauna that had escaped from a day spa, Netherton thought. It opened its single door. “Good evening, Mr. Netherton,” it said, as he got in.

He gave it the address in Alfred Mews as the door closed, then phoned Rainey. “On my way,” he said, her sigil brightening as they pulled out onto the high street.

“How’s Ash?” she asked.

“She’s lost the bifocal eyes. And the tattoos. Told me she’s seeing someone.”

“Make you any less irritable around her?”

“No.”

“This was business, I take it?” Her joke.

“Lowbeer. Has a new project.”

“A stub,” she said.

“How did you know?”

“From all you say, she’s obsessed with them.”

“How’s Thomas?”

“Sleeping.” She opened a feed of his son, curled in his crib.

“I’ll be there soon.”

“Bye, then,” she said.

Thomas vanished. Rainey’s sigil dimmed.

He watched the passing shops, the few pedestrians. A couple stood talking, in the doorway of a pub.

He closed his eyes, which caused the single seat’s headrest to improve its support. When he opened them, the car was at a traffic signal, still in Hackney.

Through the windshield, at a pedestrian crossing, he saw something tripodal, perhaps three meters tall, which was also waiting, draped in a cloak of what appeared to be damp-blackened shingle.

Hackney, he thought irritably, glaring at it. Always gotten up as something it wasn’t.