The Peripheral

112

It wasn’t far, Ash said.

The interior of this car felt larger than the lounge in the Mercedes RV. It wasn’t, but it felt it. The way grown-up furniture felt when you were little. And everything in here was this black that made her like her dress less. It must be a thing, that black.

And the light outside was rainy, silvery, pink, the way it was when she’d first come here, lifting out of that launch bay in the white van.

Netherton, seated beside her, was almost too far away to reach, and if they’d been closer, it would’ve felt too much like a date. Conner was up front with Ash, room enough between them for two other people.

She wished it had a coffee machine, but that made her think of Tommy and Carlos and everybody back there, with Homes convoying in from three different directions. “Can I still phone home?” she asked Ash, assuming she could hear her through the partition.

“Yes, but do it now. We’ll be there soon.”

Ash had helped her set up the peripheral’s phone for dialing, while they waited for Burton to get into the trunk and fold up, transferring the numbers from her own phone. Now she brought the badges up, scrolled to Macon’s yellow one with the single red nubbin, and tapped the roof of her mouth.

“Hey,” said Macon.

“What’s happening?”

“Guests still on the way,” he said.

“Shit. .”

“Putting it mildly.”

“Who’s with my mother?”

“Janice. And Carlos and his friends, some of them.”

Flynne saw herself in the white bed, under the white crown, Burton and Conner beside her in their own beds. What would happen here if she died there, she wondered for the first time? Nothing, except that her peripheral would go on automatic pilot, that cloud thing. Would it still bullshit, then, if you asked it about Daedra’s art? Would that be the only remaining evidence that she’d been here?

“Better wrap it up,” Ash said. “We’re driving into their protocol now.”

Faintly at first, she heard the whispers of those fairy police dispatchers, around the base of Aelita’s building.