The Peripheral

117

One of the two Michikoids was treating the bearded man’s right arm with a Medici. It had placed it on his right shoulder, where it now bulged and sagged, down across his lap, having engulfed the arm below. Blood swirled, through the yellowish fluid that filled the thing. The man’s eyes were closed, his face relaxed, and Netherton envied him whatever dissociative state he might be enjoying.

Netherton himself was feeling entirely too associative, whatever had been used to induce his prior state having been abruptly shut off, possibly by the impact of Penske’s peripheral. Either that or the dissociative field had been local to Edenmere Mansions, already some distance behind them. Whichever, he was now also free of the compulsion to imitative movement, or so he assumed, else wouldn’t his eyes be closed?

He turned his head to look at Flynne, beside him on the wide rear seat. She seemed to be very definitely present in the peripheral now. There was a smear of Penske’s blood across her cheek, or rather the blood from his ruined peripheral. Her dress was spattered with blood as well, but it scarcely showed on the black fabric. She gave him a look he couldn’t read, if indeed there was anything to be read.

The Michikoid, squatting in front of the bearded man, removed the Medici. It shrank, dwindled, the fluid within it darkening. Cleaners were at work on the compartment’s gray carpet, perfectly ordinary beige hexapods, removing the blood. Daedra and the bearded man sat at opposite ends of a backward-facing banquette, a second Michikoid between them, this watching Netherton and Flynne, having produced several pairs of shiny black spider-eyes for the purpose. Its arms had lengthened, both ahead and behind the elbow, and its hands were now knifelike white china fins, like the blades of two elegantly threatening spatulas.

Daedra looked from the bearded man to Netherton. “If I’d known how you’d fuck things up, I’d have killed you myself, the day I met you.”

This wasn’t something he’d ever had to respond to, before. He maintained his expression, which he hoped was neutral.

“I wish I had,” Daedra said. “If I’d known more about your stupid gift, what a stub was, I’d never have accepted. But you knew the Zubovs, or their one useless son, and I thought they’d be good to know. And Aelita hadn’t become a problem yet.”

“Be quiet,” said the bearded man, opening his eyes. “This isn’t secure. We’ll be there shortly, and you can say whatever you like.”

Daedra frowned, never liking to be told what to do. She adjusted the top of her dress. “Feeling better?” she asked him.

“Considerably. That was a broken collarbone, three broken ribs, and mild concussion.” He looked at Netherton. “We’ll start with those for you, shall we? Upon arrival.”

The windows depolarized, Netherton assuming the man had done that. He saw that they were turning onto Cheapside, and his immediate impulse was to warn them that they were violating a cosplay zone. But then he saw how utterly empty the street was. No carts, no cabs, no drays, no horses to pull them. They were headed west, past the shops vending shawls and feathers, scent and silver, all the fancy goods he’d strolled past with his mother, surreptitiously capturing the magic of the painted signs. He wondered where those images were today. He had no idea. The sidewalks were virtually empty, yet shouldn’t have been. They should have been bustling still, the day just ending. Yet the few lone walkers looked lost, confused, anxious. They were people, it struck him, so were unable to have followed whatever signal had gone out, to all those cloud-driven peripherals enacting the visible lives of cabmen, piecework tailors, gentlemen of leisure, street boys. As the car passed, they turned away, as he’d seen people turn away in Covent Garden, at the first glimpse of Lowbeer’s tipstaff.

“It’s empty,” said Flynne, sounding simply disappointed.

Netherton leaned to the side, peering around the tall back of the gray banquette, and saw, through the windscreen, the glowering bulk of Newgate. He’d only walked that far with his mother once, and she’d quickly turned around, repelled by the structure’s pitted granite flanks, spiked with iron.

At the City’s westernmost gate, she’d told him, for more than a thousand years, had stood a jail, and this its ultimate and final expression. Or had been, rather, as it had been torn down in 1902, at the start of that oddly optimistic age before the jackpot. To be rebuilt, then, by the assemblers, a few years before his birth. The klept (she would never have called it that in front of him) having deemed its return a wise and necessary thing.

Before them now, the very iron-bound wicket gate, of nail-studded oak, that he’d stared up at as a child. The one his mother told him had frightened Dickens, though he’d confused that with the Dickens being frightened out of someone.

It had frightened him then. And did now.