The Peripheral

110

They’d given the peripheral a shower, before she’d arrived, done its hair, and put on makeup. The dress Ash had chosen fit it better than anything Flynne had worn in her life. Nothing fancy, Ash explained, because Annie Courrèges wasn’t wealthy. But Ash’s idea of not too fancy was a little black dress, made of something that felt like velour but looked like fresh black carbide sandpaper, supple as silk. Her jewelry was a heavy round bangle made from antique plastic dentures and something that looked like black licorice, and a necklace that was a rigid loop of black titanium wire, strung with lots of different zipper pulls, like they’d been buried somewhere, the paint or plating corroded away. Ash said both of these were real neoprimitive, the bracelet from Ireland and the necklace from Detroit. The black shoes were made of the same stuff as the dress, had wedge heels, and were more comfortable than her sneakers at home. She wished they’d waited until she got there, so she could’ve put it all on, herself. But that familiar pang, when she looked into the tall mirror: Who was that? She was starting to feel like the peripheral looked like somebody she’d known, but she knew it didn’t.

The badge with the gold crown appeared in the mirror, and she thought for a second of the bull in the mirror at Jimmy’s, but it was just Lowbeer calling.

“Tommy thinks Homes is coming after us,” she said.

“Assume as much.”

“Can’t Grif do anything?”

“Not yet. In spite of being able to prove, should the opportunity arise, that the head of their Private Sector Office is in Chinese pay. But we do seem to have reached an impasse. Basically, we need to be able to command them to stop. Rescind the order.”

“What if he tells the president she’s going to be assassinated, but you can stop it, if she orders them to turn around?”

“It isn’t that simple,” said Lowbeer. “We’ve not yet established sufficient trust. Her office is riddled with those aligned with the people who’ll soon be plotting to kill her. And the rest is simply politics.”

“Seriously? There’s nothing we can do?”

“Clovis,” Lowbeer said, “my Clovis, here, is allowing the aunties to root about in her documents. She managed to extract an archipelago of data, before her flight to the U.K. I’d no idea how much, at the time. More a hoarder than a spy, Clovis. If there’s anything of use there, in our present situation, they’ll find it. In the meantime, if you’re successful tonight, it should be a game changer. Though how, exactly, is impossible to predict.”

She bit her lip, then stopped, not wanting to mess up the peripheral’s makeup.

“You look marvelous,” Lowbeer said, reminding her that she could see what the peripheral was seeing. “Have you said hello to Burton yet?”

“No,” she said.

“You should. He’s in the lounge, with Conner. You’ll be unable to see him, once you’re on the way to Farringdon. He’ll be in the trunk. I’m delighted he’s able, after his injury.”

“The trunk?”

“Folds quite flat. Like a piece of old-fashioned Swedish drain-cleaning machinery, folded. Say hello to your brother for me.” The crown was gone.

She went to the door, opened it.

They were sparring, the two of them. She remembered this from before Conner’s injury, even from before they’d enlisted. They had rules of their own. They’d hardly move, shifting weight from foot to foot, watching each other, and when they did move, mainly their hands, it was too fast to follow, and then they were back, the way they were before, shifting their weight, but one of them had won. She saw that it was the same, now, except that Conner was in Lev’s brother’s peripheral and Burton was in the white exoskeleton workout thing, with a bell jar glued where its head would be if it had one, and a pair of creepily real-looking human hands where she remembered it having white cartoon robot hands before. There was a little robot in the bell jar that did everything the exoskeleton did, but actually the other way around, because Burton was in that. Homunculus, they called it. The new hands on Burton’s exoskeleton were tanned a color that reminded her of Pickett. Then their hands moved, blurring, but Conner was faster, she thought.

“I break a finger on your Tin Woodman ass, you’re in deep shit,” said Conner. His peripheral was in a skinny black suit that looked about as restrictive as karate pajamas.

Now the little figure in the dome turned, the exoskeleton turning with it. “Flynne,” said a stranger’s voice, like a voice from an infomercial, “hey.”

“Shit, Burton,” she said, “I thought we’d lost you, back in that alley.” She sort of felt like hugging it, but then that seemed crazy. Plus it had those creepy-ass hands.

“Guess you did, for a while,” the voice said. “I don’t recall chopping that client, or anything really, until I woke up and saw the real-world version of handsome, here.”

“If you’d got yourself that piddling wound in the service,” said Conner, his peripheral holstering its large hands in the pockets of its black suit trousers, “I guess it still might count as wounded fucking warrior.”

The exoskeleton feinted at him, cat-quick, but Conner somehow wasn’t where the tan hands went, fast as they were.

“Lowbeer says say hello,” she said to Burton. “She’s glad you can come with us. So am I.”

“Cross between a trunk monkey and a fancy jack,” said his infomercial voice. “What I joined the Marines for.”