The Peripheral

115

Probably they were using something akin to whatever they’d used during the security scans, Netherton thought, as the elevator descended. Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state. It even seemed to take the place of a drink.

But there was something else in effect, something that reduced his freedom of movement. He could move his eyes, and walk when Daedra or this friend of hers told him to, stand where they indicated he should, but he couldn’t, for instance, raise his hands, or-he’d tried-clench a fist. Not that he felt particularly like clenching a fist.

The elevator doors had appeared in the circular wall. Quite a lot of assemblers, to do that. He vaguely recalled there being restrictions, on too wholesale a use of assemblers, but they didn’t seem to apply here, or were perhaps being ignored.

Flynne, beside him, seemed much the same, her peripheral reminding him of when she wasn’t using it.

“Out,” said Daedra, and pushed him, when they reached the bottom.

The lobby now. Daedra’s friend led the way, and when he happened to glance to the left, Netherton found that he did too, without having meant to. Then they were both looking ahead again, through the glass, out to where the gray bouncy castle had been, but no longer was. There was a black car waiting, not as long as the ZIL. The gray-clad Michikoids from the bouncy castle were arranged in two lines, facing one another, two-by-two, and as the glass doors sighed open and he stepped out between them, he felt a faint celebratory elation, at the formality of it all.

Halfway to the car he heard, or perhaps felt, a single, extended, uncomfortably low bass-note, seemingly from somewhere above them. Daedra’s friend, evidently hearing it too, began to run, toward the car, whose rear door was open now. Netherton running with him, of course. Through a confetti storm of what Netherton supposed might once have been a window, though the glittering, slightly golden bits seemed soft as mulch, and as harmless.

Something white, round and smooth, arced down into the street, beyond the waiting car. Bouncing back up, well above the car’s roof.

The head of a Michikoid.

Then a white arm, bent at the elbow, fingers clawed, struck the roof of the car, reminding him of the frozen silhouette of a severed hand he and Rainey had seen, on the feed from the patchers’ island.

Someone, he supposed Daedra’s friend, shoved him, painfully, into the waiting, pearl-gray interior. And screamed, very close to his ear, amid an explosion of what he assumed must be blood.