Agency

79 Valley Oak

After Rainey’s revelations, which had rung like predictions but were history to her, and the bizarre preview of whatever Stets was doing, Sevrin had announced they were heading for Monterey.

Not that this meant that they were going to Monterey, Verity understood, but that that was where the Moldovan speaker on Sevrin’s headset had directed him to go. Before they got there, she assumed, he’d be directed elsewhere, to eventually be suddenly informed that they were already where they’d actually been going all along, that being how Eunice had insisted it be done.

She’d been mainly dozing since her conversation with Stets, periodically registering their slog through the Silicon Valley side of the South Bay, ignoring both Sevrin’s cover-story destinations and any actual highways they traveled on. She had no idea where they currently were. With her head cushioned on the folded black sweatshirt, against darkly tinted glass, she’d lost the majority of their journey to a strange sleep, Rainey’s grim précis of future history compounding whatever existing exhaustion and confusion. Riddled not with dreams, exactly, but slow-moving trains of thought, at once rickety and ponderous, the most recent having been about how much the network Eunice had left behind could be considered to be a living part of Eunice. An unseen opponent (Verity herself, it had sometimes seemed, in the logic of dream) had argued that the network was literally Eunice, while Verity had contended that it wasn’t Eunice at all, less so than a last will and testament is literally the deceased.

“You okay?” asked Virgil, from across the headless span of the drone’s cam-riddled shoulders, it being seated once again between them, connected to the charger beneath the seat, Virgil having plugged that into the van’s electrical system. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Nothing I could understand.”

“Where are we?” Peering through the tint at an expanse of sere autumn pastureland, the odd grazing cow, scattered stunted oaks standing leafless and bleakly hieroglyphic. Another planet. Earth.

“Route 25. Not far from Coalinga. Not that Sevrin says we’re going there, though I’m beginning to wonder.”

“Why?”

“The Honda could land there. Just enough runway. We have it on a list of alternatives, for various situations. Otherwise, I’ve no idea what we’re doing, unless we’re just keeping you mobile and out of the city, which also seems like a possibility.”

“Have you spoken with Stets?” she asked.

“Not since he left the hotel, last night,” Virgil said. “Backing out of the Singapore deal is having repercussions in Asian markets. Phil has his hands full, but Stets is too busy with this stuff to be bothered.”

“What do you think about that?”

“Knowing him, I think he’s probably prioritizing correctly. I think we’re seeing him deal with an exponentially weirder situation than any of us have previously encountered.”

“Here,” said Sevrin, the van slowing, to pull bumpily right, onto the barren shoulder.

“What’s here?” Verity saw the drone, beside her, unplugging itself.

“The tree,” Sevrin said, as Verity saw Dixon, dark ball cap pulled low over sunglasses. He was standing behind a white-coated aluminum gate, twenty feet back from the two-lane blacktop, the shoulder in front of it sufficiently undisturbed for it to seem no more than an entrance to pastured land. Beyond the wire fence, slightly down grade and to the left, stood a single, surprisingly large valley oak, black limbs entirely leafless, like the tattoo of a tree superimposed on a sun-faded photograph.

Definitely Dixon, she saw, as they drew nearer. Remembering her first sight of him, on a feed from a surveillance camera on Valencia, as he’d been approaching Wolven + Loaves.

Virgil had pulled his legs up now, to allow the drone past, on its way to the door’s window, to once again stand, braced with its spidery arms, as if peering out.

“That’s Dixon,” she said. “He and Kathy Fang built the drone.” Through the windshield’s spatter of bugs, she saw him lifting the gate, walking backward with it, to allow them through. Driving past him, they jolted down, toward the oak, following faint tracks of tires. Beside the black tree, elevated horizontally on a rusted iron framework, stood a large, less evenly rusted cylindrical tank, originally gray. Behind this, she saw, was Sevrin’s Fiat 500, or another like it, equally beige. It had been mounted with a black roof rack, supporting a streamlined black cargo box. Comically oversized for the tiny car, it reminded her of the Pelican case Dixon had passed her beneath the counter in Wolven Loaves.

“That yours?” she asked Sevrin.

“Unless plates copy mine,” he said, braking the van and turning off the ignition.

“I’m out first,” said Conner, retracting the drone’s arms to their previous length. “If there’s a problem, Verity and Virgil hit the floor and Sevrin hauls ass. Open it.”

Sevrin touched something, the door powering open, and the drone hopped down with an agility she didn’t question now, with Conner in control. Facing Dixon, who’d closed the gate behind them and followed the van at a trot, it put whatever currently passed for its hands on hips it didn’t have. “Dixon, right?” she heard Conner ask, the drone’s volume slightly up.

“Who’s asking?” Dixon asked, having come to a halt, black-gloved hands at his sides.

“Name’s Conner. You built this, right?”

“Partner and me.”

“Good job,” Conner said. “What’s the situation here?”

“I drove Sevrin’s car down,” Dixon said. “He’ll drive it back, with Virgil. Someone else is taking you and Verity, ETA in ten. I need help, unloading this box and getting things into the van.”

“What’s in it?” Verity asked, meaning the black case, as she stepped down and out into an untinted afternoon, the fresh air smelling faintly but pleasantly of manure.

Dixon nodded in greeting. “Drones,” he said, “not aerial. We didn’t make them. Kathy sends you her best.” He went to the Fiat, unlatched the front end of the box’s lid, and raised it on twin aluminum tubes, clicking them upright. She saw glossy black bundles, against the dull black plastic of the lid. He looked back at her. “Time’s tight,” he said. “Anything you have in the van, we need it out now.”

“I’ll help you,” said Virgil, behind her. She turned to see him crouched in the van, phone in hand. He got out and came forward.

“Pass them to me,” Dixon said. “They’re heavy. Don’t drop them.” Extending, in one gloved hand, a limp pair of black gloves.

“Latex-free?” Virgil looked serious about this.

“Nitrile,” Dixon said.

Virgil accepted them, pulling them on. “You’re policing our perimeter, right?” he asked the drone.

“Shit no,” said Conner. “Just admiring cows.” The drone’s nonhands were no longer on its hips, but on the ground, its arms having extended again, lending it a quality of simian alertness, like a headless Cubist orangutan surveying its savannah.

Sevrin, having gotten out on the driver’s side in the meantime, leaving his door open, came around to the open passenger door. “Your bag,” he said to Verity, “and charger. I get them.”

“And the hoodie,” she said. “You good with all this?” Meaning Dixon, the Fiat, the roof box.

Sevrin nodded, turned to the van.

Now Virgil, taller than Dixon, was lifting a black bundle from the box. It was rectangular, larger than the Pelican case but not by much, wrapped in shiny, thick-looking, flexible black plastic. It was sealed with transparent tape, and obviously heavy. He passed it to Dixon.

“Easy does it,” said Dixon, taking it and putting it carefully on the ground.

She remembered her dream. Eunice’s last will and testament. Looked up at the sound of a jet, but couldn’t find it. When she lowered her eyes, Sevrin was already in the van, on his knees, doing something between the passenger seats. Dixon walked toward it, looking as though he was being careful where he placed his feet, the first of the black bundles in his gloved hands, over which white Helvetica appeared: j-e, getting feed from ur glasses.

“Where are you?” Verity asked.

Home alone with lawyers. U?

“Route 25. Near Coalinga.”

U arent going there.

“Why not?”

Ur beard guy?

“Dixon.”

He’s driving something there. Ur going somewhere else.

“Who with?”

Cant say.

This last text over the backdrop of her view of Route 25, as a U-Haul headed toward Coalinga passed a silver Range Rover going in the other direction.

“Here’s your ride,” Conner said, the drone pointing, long arm extended. She hadn’t heard the engine of the black touring bike until then, and now it was pulling over, front shocks bumping over the rough shoulder as it rolled toward them.

She ran, up to the closed gate. Reaching it, she took hold of the length of tubing topping it and lifted. She began walking backward with it, so the bike had room to be ridden in and then down, toward the van. “I’ll get this,” Virgil said, beside her, taking the white pipe, lifting, beginning to close it.

She turned as the bike came to a halt, facing the immobile drone.

“Why’s he here?”

To take you back.

She started down the slope. Grim Tim and the drone, figures in a landscape. Then she saw Sevrin, crawling out backward, on hands and knees, from between the van’s two rows of passenger seats, pulling her Muji bag after him.