The Peripheral

107

Flynne opened her eyes.

“Your little buddy’s here,” said Clovis.

“Wilf?”

“Got any others?”

“Where is he?”

“Watching the news.” She lifted the crown off Flynne’s head, put it down on the bedside table.

Flynne rolled on her side, sat up slowly, lowered her legs over the side. She’d been standing with Lowbeer in Lev’s kitchen, looking out at the garden. She felt like she could still see it, if she closed her eyes. She did. Didn’t see it. Opened them.

“You okay?” asked Clovis, eyeing her narrowly.

“Jet lag, maybe,” Flynne said. Standing up. Clovis was obviously ready to catch her if she fell. “I’m okay. Burton okay?”

“Fine. Been back to pee, again to have dinner and hydrate. Walter Reed’s happy with him.”

Flynne went over to the chair where she’d left the Wheelie. Clovis had collapsed the telescoping rod the tablet rode on, and propped a tablet of her own against the back of the chair, on a wadded sweatshirt. The Wheelie was watching the Ciencia Loca episode about spontaneous human combustion. “Hey,” she said, “hi.”

“Wah!” said Netherton, startled. The Wheelie’s spherical body rotated backward on fixed wheels, tilting its tablet and camera up at her. “That was frightening me,” he said. “I kept imagining my body igniting, in the Gobiwagen’s observation cupola. It came on after the news and I couldn’t change it.”

“Want to watch the rest? Second half’s scuba stuff, the old tip of lower Manhattan.”

“No! I came to see you.”

“I’ve got to eat. I’ll take you to Sushi Barn.”

“What’s that?”

“Hong’s restaurant. It’s at the other end of the mall. Madison’s cut holes through and built a hamster run with shingle bags.” She checked her reflection in a plastic-framed mirror that someone, probably Clovis, had taped to a blue tarp with aquamarine duct tape. “That crown is hell on my hair.” She sat down on the chair, put the Wheelie on the floor, and put her sneakers on. The Wheelie extended its tablet, whirred, and wheeled across the floor, tablet swiveling. “Stay there,” she said, getting up. She crossed to it, picked it up, and ducked through the slit.

“This is bizarre,” he said, on the other side. “It looks like some primitive game.”

“Boring game.”

“They all are. What is it for?”

“If we’re under attack, we can walk through this to Sushi Barn and get the shrimp special.”

“Does that make sense?”

“It’s a guy thing. But I think it was Lowbeer’s idea, as interpreted through Burton and my friend Madison.”

“Who is Madison?”

She stepped through the hole in the central wall. “My friend’s husband, nice guy. Plays Sukhoi Flankers.”

“What’s that?”

“Flight sim game. Old Russian planes. Lowbeer is Griff.”

He didn’t say anything. She stopped, between the shingle-bag walls, raised the Wheelie Boy. “‘Is Griff’?” he asked.

“Griff. Becomes her. But not exactly. Like this isn’t her past anymore, so he won’t have her life, because none of this happened to her when she was him.” She started walking.

“You somehow seem,” he said, “to simply accept all these things.”

“You’re the one living in the future, with nanobots eating people, spare bodies, government run by kings and gangsters and shit. You accept all that, right?”

“No,” he said, just before she ducked through, into Hong’s kitchen, “I don’t. I hate it.”