Agency

81 Backward, Wearing Heels

It had taken Dixon less time to install the black seatback unit he’d fabbed for the bike’s rear saddle than it did for him to double-fold and lash Verity’s Muji bag to it with black nylon straps. Since the unit was bare plastic, she’d be using her clothing as a cushion. As casually as she tended to dress, she assumed that the result would require pressing. If she were headed into any sort of world where pressing was an option, which didn’t seem entirely guaranteed.

Now the drone, standing with its back to the rear tire of the bike, extended its legs farther than she’d yet seen them go, growing startlingly taller in the process. Looking as though it were in heels, it stepped backward, against Dixon’s newly attached rack. “Little to the left,” Dixon said, eyeing the joint between rack and drone.

“Good?” Conner asked.

“Hit the grippers,” Dixon said. Verity watched as a pair of small doors opened on the drone’s side, one above the other. From each of these emerged a flat rectangular hook, black. They then retracted partially, having found corresponding slots in the rack, leaving the drone fastened to it. Dixon, evidently watching the equivalent operation on the opposite side, seemed to have seen success as well. “Knees up,” he said.

Verity watched the drone’s legs shorten, lifting its feet from the ground, then retract entirely, into its body, leaving its torso facing backward, looking like a much more substantial version of the seatback.

“Not great aerodynamics,” Virgil said, beside her, “but the best option under the circumstances.”

“Where’s its charger?” Verity asked.

“Right saddlebag,” he said. “We have the neural cut-out helmet in the trunk of the Fiat. Be seeing you soon, I hope.”

“Where?” she asked.

“Back to the Bay, looks to me, but after that, who knows?”

Grim Tim had been standing to one side with his helmet off, never having removed his white N95 mask, the piercings in his forehead and nose glinting in the sun. He’d greeted her with what she now thought of as his amiable glare. Now he drew back the left sleeve of his leather jacket, revealing a large steel watch, black-dialed and complicated.

“We’re going?” she asked him.

The helmet nodded.

She’d already put on the down-lined jacket he’d brought, remembered from the ride to Oakland, over the black hoodie, with that over the tweed jacket she’d been wearing in the truck. Too warm, standing here in the sun. She walked over to Dixon. “Say hi to Kathy for me,” she said.

He nodded, jaw clenched, other things on his mind.

Grim Tim passed her a fresh mask when she returned, and then the helmet she’d worn before. “Okay,” she said to the others, before putting the mask on, “see you all later.”

Thumbs-up from Dixon and Virgil. When she looked around for Sevrin, he was up by the gate, thumb raised. She put the helmet on, fastened her own chinstrap, and waited for Grim Tim to mount the bike. When he was settled, boots on the ground, she climbed on behind him, the folded and strapped Muji bag leaving her more room than she’d expected.

When he started the engine, she raised her feet to the pegs. They bumped slowly up the dry tire ruts, his legs swinging in exaggerated strides to keep the bike upright, toward the gate Sevrin had already partially opened. Turning her head for a last look at the valley oak, and then they were bumping out over the rough shoulder, to the edge of blacktop.

“We’re half a mile from the junction with 198,” Conner said, in her headset. “Dixon follows us that far in the van. Then he hangs a left for Coalinga, inland. We go right, toward San Lucas, take another right onto the 101.”

She looked back and saw Dixon driving the van up to the fully open gate, Virgil and Sevrin standing beside it.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“North on the 101. Gas and a pee break in King City.”

“What happened to the protocol?” Still looking back. Dixon was turning out onto the shoulder behind them, Virgil and Sevrin closing the gate behind him.

“You and I are using the stiffest level of encryption your Eunice left us,” Conner said. “I don’t have a destination yet, after King City. San Francisco seems likeliest, as everything else points toward this being prom night.”

“Prom night?”

“Shit’s being prepared to hit a big fan, but nobody’s told me what flavor of either.”

Then Grim Tim gunned the Harley and they were off, the van pulling out behind them. She swung to face forward, grabbing his midsection, which felt like a piece of leather-covered masonry.

But something had just happened, she’d no idea what, directly behind her head. “What was that?”

“This,” Conner said, opening a feed. Looking down on the van’s green roof, its windshield, from about thirty feet in the air. She could see the dark bill of Dixon’s cap. “Had it down the back of my collar.” The aerial drone was climbing now, the van sinking beneath it. On either side, rolling hills, hieroglyphic oaks, cows.

“You don’t have a neck.”

“Got a hatch. Lots of surprises.”

“Why’s Dixon going to Coalinga?”

“Might have a job at the airport. Depends. If it’s a go, I’ll let you in on it.”

“You’re a lot more willing to talk than the rest of them.”

“Fewer fucks to give, is what it is. I’m here because they need somebody to pilot Neckless here. I’m left over from their last stub. They need me there too, but I get bored, doing what they need, and they know I enjoy shit like this. So they give me more context than they give you, or anybody else in your stub, probably. Ask me. If I can, I’ll tell you.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“De nada.”

More cows, receding.