Agency

67 Collage Minus Glue

Is this the same year?” Verity asked Ash, who had a tangle of ultrablack hair, gray eyes below it, and wore a pale, acidy greenish-yellow shade of lipstick. She appeared to be about ten feet from Verity, while behind her stretched a single long room, its white walls windowless, the floor gray and smooth, the look of gallery space repurposed from something else.

“It is,” Ash said.

“I can’t move my head,” Verity said, having just tried.

“You haven’t a neck or shoulders,” Ash said. She came forward, wearing motorcycle boots, flowing dark pants tucked into them, and a smoothly iridescent brown carapace. She reached out, picked Verity up, and flipped her over.

“Whoa.”

“Sorry,” said Ash. “I promised you a nausea-free visit.”

They were in front of a long table, as cluttered as Joe-Eddy’s workbench but very differently textured. Ash panned Verity’s point of view the length of it, right to left. Past its end appeared what Verity took to be a hut, looking as though it had been composted from something else. In front of this was a large black-and-chrome motorcycle, old-fashioned but gleaming. “This is where you live?” Verity asked.

“Yes.”

“Where do you sleep?”

“In the yurt.” Ash swung whatever Verity inhabited back to the table, stopping at an antique vanity mirror on a tarnished silver base, then raised her, directly in front of the mirror. Verity saw the head of a doll, china, its wide eyes gray.

“You both have gray eyes,” Verity said.

“I had mine altered recently,” Ash said, “though this is the gray I was born with. I bought the doll before I had it done, to help me decide.”

“Can I see what’s on the table again?”

Ash swung the doll head to the right. “Collage minus glue, Wilf says.”

Verity glanced over decorated gourds, bundles of feathers, basketry, ethnic musical instruments both stringed and wind, ceramics, rolled tapestries, candlesticks, a tall samovar, and, most distinctively, what appeared to her to be a completely rusted submachine gun, covered with the dingy yellow plastic letters of fridge-magnet alphabets, spelling nothing Verity recognized. All of it absent anything Joe-Eddy could have de-soldered. “Is Joe-Eddy okay?” she asked, reminded of him.

“Appears to be,” Ash said. “He assumes they keylogged him, when they bugged the place. He’s right, of course.”

“Shit,” said Verity, “my laptop,” then remembered that Eunice had had someone take it from the apartment before the bugging, along with her passport.

“Guilherme,” said Ash, “has delivered, via the current pair of lawyers, a phone encrypted in a way even the aunties can’t break. Joe-Eddy can use it in bed, under the bedclothes.”

A higher purpose for black sheets, Verity thought. “The Manzilian,” she said.

“What?”

“That’s what Joe-Eddy calls Guilherme. What happened to the guy Conner gassed?”

“Kevin Pryor,” Ash said. “Ex-Army, Intelligence Corps.”

“What happened to him?”

“He wasn’t alone. Colleagues got him off the scene before police or the ambulance arrived. We assume he regained consciousness immediately, no injury when he collapsed. One of Eunice’s branch plants has quite a bit on him. He isn’t part of Cursion, but a freelancer they’ve used before. None of the principals at Cursion has an intelligence background, though neither do they assume they need one. They do, however, which is why they’ve repeatedly hired him. Lowbeer regards him as more dangerous than they are.”

“Why?”

“Intelligence background, of course, but also he’s differently ambitious. He isn’t wealthy, and she assumes he’s not satisfied with being a freelancer. She thinks he likely poses as much of a threat to them as he does to us.”

“Would he know what even hit him, back there?”

“Not necessarily, but we assume he knows quite a bit about you, given his current assignment. So we’re keeping an eye out for him.”

“Where are we going now?” Verity asked. Sevrin had showed her the van’s new decals on his phone. Logo of a vegan wholesaler in Chico, stylized vines and swirling leaves, the roof entirely green.

“Dogpatch, according to Sevrin,” said Ash. “Which may change, now that he thinks he’s spotted someone following the van on a motorcycle.”

“Shit,” said Verity.

“Best get used to it,” said Ash. “Would you like to go back to the van now?”

“Yes,” said Verity, and instantly was.