The Peripheral

10

The place was a drinking closet for tourists, Netherton supposed, a walled-in 1830s archway in a corner of the lower level of Covent Garden, staffed by a lone Michikoid he kept expecting to erupt in targeting devices. There was a full-sized, vigorously authentic-looking pub sign, depicting what he took to be maenads, a number of them, mounted above a bar long enough for four stools, and the curtained snug where he now sat, awaiting Rainey. He’d never seen another customer in the place, which was why he’d suggested it.

The curtain, thick burgundy velour, moved. A child’s eye appeared, hazel, under pale bangs. “Rainey?” he asked, though certain it was her.

“Sorry,” the child said, slipping in. “They didn’t have anything in adult. Something popular at the opera tonight, so everything in the neighborhood’s taken.”

He imagined her now, stretched on a couch in her elongated Toronto apartment, a bridge across an avenue, diagonally connecting two older towers. She’d be wearing a headband, to trick her nervous system into believing the rented peripheral’s movements were hers in a dream.

“I’m right off Michikoids,” she said, looking ten, perhaps younger, and in the way of many such rentals, like no one in particular. “Watched the one from the moby, while it was guarding Daedra. Nasty. Move like spiders, when they need to.” She took the chair opposite his, regarded him glumly.

“Where is she?”

“No telling. Her government sent in some kind of aircraft, but of course they blanked the extraction. Ordered the moby away.”

“But you could still watch?”

“Not the extraction, but everything else. Big guy down on his face, the rest of them sliced and diced. No more of them turned up, so no more casualties. Good for us, in theory, assuming the project in any way continues.”

“Would your friend care for something, sir?” the Michikoid asked, from beyond the curtain.

“No,” he said, as there was no point in putting good liquor into a peripheral. Not that this place had any.

“He’s my uncle,” she said, loudly, “really.”

“You suggested we meet this way,” Netherton reminded her. He took a sip of their least expensive whiskey, identical to their most expensive, which he’d sampled while waiting for her.

“Shit,” she said, small hand gesturing to encompass their situation. “Lots of it. Now. Hitting many fans. Large ones.”

Rainey was employed, as he understood it, by the Canadian government, though they were no doubt hermetically walled off from any responsibility for her actions. He considered this to be an arrangement of quite startlingly naked simplicity, in that she probably did know, at least approximately, who her superiors were. “Can you be more specific?” he asked her.

“Saudis are out,” she said.

He’d been expecting it.

“Singapore’s out,” she continued. “Our half-dozen largest NGOs.”

“Out?”

The child’s head nodded. “France, Denmark-”

“Who’s left?”

“The United States,” she said. “And a faction in the government of New Zealand.”

He sipped the whiskey. Its small tongue of fire on his.

She tilted her head. “Considered to have been an assassination.”

“That’s absurd.”

“What we hear.”

“We who?”

“Don’t ask.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Wilf,” said the child, leaning forward, “that was a hit. Someone used us to help kill him, not to mention his entourage.”

“Daedra had a significant percentage in any successful outcome. Aside from that, what’s happened can’t be good for her.”

“Self-defense, Wilf. Easiest spin on earth. You and I know that she wanted to provoke them. She needed an excuse, to make it self-defense.”

“But she was always going to be the contact figure, wasn’t she? She was already part of the package when you signed on. Wasn’t she?”

She nodded.

“Then you hired me. Who brought her in in the first place?”

“These questions,” she said, the child’s diction growing more precise, “suggest that you don’t understand our situation. Neither of us can afford any interest in the answers to questions like those. We’re going to take a hit on this one, Wilf, professionally. But that-” She left it unfinished.

He looked into the rental’s still eyes. “Is better than being the object of another one?”

“We neither know,” the child said, firmly, “nor desire to know.”

He looked at the whiskey. “They had her covered with a hypersonic weapons-delivery system, didn’t they? Something orbital, ready to drop in.”

“But they would, her government. It’s what they do. But we shouldn’t even be discussing this now. It’s over. We both need it to be over. Now.”

He looked at her.

“It could be worse,” she said.

“It could?”

“You’re still sitting here,” the child said. “I’m home, all warm in my jammies. We’re alive. And about to be looking for work, I imagine. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

He nodded.

“This would probably be a little less complicated if you hadn’t had a sexual relationship with her. But that was brief. And is over. It is over, isn’t it, Wilf?”

“Of course”

“No loose ends?” she asked. “Didn’t leave your shaving kit? Because we need it over, Wilf. Really. We need there to be no reason at all that you ever have to communicate with her again.”

And then he remembered.

But he could fix it. No need to tell Rainey.

He reached for the whiskey.