Agency

6 Dalston

Netherton had visited Ash only once before, though he hadn’t known it at the time.

His friend Lev Zubov, her employer at the time, had taken him here, to a party of hers, before either of them had met Lowbeer, so well prior to Ash working exclusively for her. A one-story brick industrial building, tucked behind a block of Victorian row houses, just off Kingsland High Street.

He’d been drunk, of course, as he generally was in those days, so all he remembered of the place, indeed of the visit, were a pair of long rectangular skylights, running the length of either side of a shallow peaked roof.

Now her tardibot answered the blue door, like an eight-legged raccoon in a small antique biohazard suit, its head an unpleasantly folded foreskin-like affair, with a central toothy ring of what he took to be mirror-polished steel. It seemed to peer up at him, however eyelessly. “Netherton,” it said, the voice hers, “come in.”

“Thank you.” Ash had brought the tardibot to work occasionally, at Lev’s house in Notting Hill. Netherton had found it less annoying than her miniature pangolins, the sinuous darting of their ribbon-like tongues peculiarly unpleasant.

He followed it in, hearing the door close and lock itself behind him.

To either side of the wide passageway he’d entered, candles flickered in dusty glasses, their faint shadows moving on white walls.

The tardibot’s gait was surprisingly efficient, its meat-hook claws clacking dully on the concrete floor.

The interior was L-shaped, the passageway at a right angle to the much longer space he recalled, the one with the skylights. He found Ash waiting for him around that corner, in pantaloons, a chitinous brown breastplate rising nearly to her chin, and a pair of oval, black-lensed spectacles. At least none of her motile tattoos were currently visible. “At a party here, once,” he said, “you were screening abstract patterns of some kind, on those.” He indicated the long twin skylights.

“What the view would have been during a Luftwaffe raid. Searchlights, flak-bursts, very visually active.” Behind her, at the far end of the space, stood a small, fungoid-looking, pseudo-primitive structure, a blackly gleaming antique motorcycle propped in front of it. To one side, a thickly crowded table of more of her nonsense. He hoped he wouldn’t be required to enter the foul-looking hut, but knew that that wouldn’t be like her. “Visited the county lately?” she asked, meaning Lowbeer’s first adopted stub.

“Not since our son’s birth.”

“Congratulations,” she said.

“Thank you. Have you visited, yourself?”

“Not since they ran Flynne’s cousin for president. I’ve been busy with the new one.” Removing her dark glasses, she unexpectedly revealed the reversal of her most unpleasant body-modification. Where once her gray eyes boasted doubled irises, one above the other, they now were normal. “What’s Lowbeer told you, about it?”

“Further back than the county, more difficult to communicate with. Vespasian made contact, then withdrew, intending to return later.”

“She’d made sure he didn’t,” Ash said, “on learning that his hobby essentially consisted of being an evil god. His return to his final stub-initiation having been prevented, the outcomes of both the Brexit vote and America’s presidential election wound up being reversed. Tea?”

“Lovely, thanks,” he said, thoroughly disliking tea, hers in particular. It would either be vilely herbal or overemphatically Russian.

“Come,” she said.

The tardibot’s claws made a sound. He turned, to see it sitting up on its two rearmost pairs of legs, apparently observing him. Ignoring it, he followed her the length of the room, to the table cluttered with her ostentatious tribal flotsam. The tallest object on it was a samovar.

She filled a small pewter cup and passed it to him. Uncomfortably hot, it was decorated with cherubs, their heads decidedly skull-like. “Jam?”

“No, thank you.”

She drew herself a similar cup, adding raspberry jam with a tarnished silver spoon.

“Have you ever been concerned,” he asked, immediately regretting the question, “that the klept might look askance, at this special interest of hers, in which we both assist her?”

“They need her,” said Ash. “Too much so to do more than look askance.” She took a first sip. “Not to mention the fear she necessarily inspires, as their culture’s autonomous internal enforcer, charged with identifying and pruning back potential destabilizers. But you are, I take it? Concerned?”

He looked down at the cup, itself more poisonous-looking than the brew it contained, then back up at her. “When you and I worked together, I was still drinking. It did occur to me to be concerned about the possibility, from time to time, but I’d more immediate problems. Now, of course, I’ve a family to think of.”

“It’s not an illogical concern,” she said. “I’ve asked her that exact question myself, more than once. Her reply always being what I just said to you.”

“And you’re satisfied with that?”

“I believe we can realistically consider ourselves protected. But I also believe in what she’s attempting to do, with the stubs. There’s nothing I’d rather be doing.”

“Thank you,” said Netherton, not particularly reassured. “I’m eager to hear more about the new stub.”

“Let’s move to the yurt,” she said. “It’s more secure.”

At this he took refuge in his tea, immediately and painfully burning his mouth.