The Peripheral

118

It wasn’t Conner. Not Conner. It was the peripheral. Lev’s brother’s. Pavel. Wilf called it Pavel. Called it the dancing master. And Conner had meant to do that. Had tried to kill this asshole with it. Was okay. Was back in his white bed, beside Burton, totally pissed that he’d missed. Even so, fifty-five floors, straight down, he’d come that close. No way he’d been aiming for the robot girl.

She knew she’d seen it, could tell you what had happened, but she couldn’t remember seeing it. That might be whatever the robot girls used to do the searches and scans, in that inflatable security tent, going into the party. Like the stuff they gave you for surgery. You didn’t sleep, exactly, but you didn’t remember.

Now it looked like they’d shut that Cheapside down.

And then she saw what Wilf was craning his neck at. Like a huge squashed stone pineapple, prickly with black iron spikes. Built to scare the shit out of people. So weird that she wondered why she’d never seen it in National Geographic. You’d figure it would be a big tourist thing.

Then the cardoor was open and the robot girls were getting them out, making sure they didn’t try to run.

Nobody to meet them. Just her, Wilf, Daedra, balcony man, and the two robot girls, their white faces flecked with the peripheral’s blood, like a robot skin disease. She had a robot girl’s white hand around her upper arm, guiding her from behind. The other one had Wilf.

In through a gate that reminded her of a Baptist anime of hell she’d seen. Burton and Leon had thought the fallen women were hot.

Into this thing’s shade, its coldness. Iron-barred doors, painted white but rust still coming through. Flagstone floors like paths in some very wrong garden. Dull lamps, like the eyes of big sick animals. Little windows, looking like they didn’t go anywhere. Up a narrow stone stairway, where they had to go one at a time. It was like the intro segment for a Ciencia Loca episode, paranormal investigators, going someplace where a lot of people had suffered and died, or maybe just where the feng shui was so totally fucked that it sucked in bad vibes like a black hole. But she’d probably have to go with suffered and died, by the look of it.

When they got to the top of the stairway, she looked back at her robot girl, saw that it had sprouted extra eyes on that side of its face, just to keep better track of her. Neither Daedra nor the balcony man were saying anything at all. Daedra was looking around like she was bored. Now they crossed a court, open to the cloudy glow of sky, and entered something like a narrow, prehistoric Hefty Inn atrium, four floors of what looked to be cells, up to a glass roof, little panes set in dark metal. Lights flickered on, thin bright strips beneath the railings on the floors of cells. She guessed that wouldn’t have been original. The robot girls marched them to a pair of whitewashed stone chairs, really simple, like a kid would build from blocks of wood, but much bigger, and sat them both down, side by side and about six feet apart. Something rough moved, against each of her wrists, and she looked down to see that she was fastened to the tops of the slabs that formed the chair’s arms, her wrists in thick rusted cuffs of iron, polished brown with use, like they’d been there a hundred years. It made her expect Pickett might walk in, and for all she knew, given the way things were going, she felt like he might.

The stone seat was cold, through the fabric of her dress.

“We’re waiting for someone.” Balcony man was talking to her. He seemed to have gotten over what Conner had tried to do to him, physically anyway.

“Why?” she asked him, like he’d tell her.

“He wants to be here when you die,” he said, watching her. “Not your peripheral. You. And you will, where you really are, in your own body, in a drone attack. Your headquarters is surrounded by government security forces. It’s about to be leveled.”

“So who is it?” All she could think to say.

“The City Remembrancer,” said Daedra. “He had to stay to hear my appreciation.”

“Of what?”

“Of Aelita,” Daedra said. Flynne remembered the peripheral, the embarrassed actress. “You didn’t manage to ruin our celebration, if that was what you had in mind.”

“We just wanted to meet you.”

“Really?” Daedra took a step closer.

Flynne looked at the man instead. He looked back, hard, and then it was like she was up by the fifty-seventh floor again, seeing him kiss the woman’s ear. Surprise, he’d said. She fucking knew he’d said that. And she saw the SS officer’s head pop, the red mist blown with the horizontal snow. But those had just been pixels, and it wasn’t really France. The man from the balcony was looking back at her like there was nothing else in his entire world, right then, and he wasn’t some accountant in Florida.

“Be calm,” said the scratchy thing, not words so much as wind across some cold dry ridge, making her flinch.

He smiled, thinking he’d caused that.

She looked at Wilf, not knowing what to say, but then she looked back at the man from the balcony. “You don’t have to kill everybody,” she said.

“Really? No?” He thought that was funny.

“It’s about me. It’s because I saw you lock her out on the balcony.”

“You did,” he said.

“Nobody else did.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“Say I go back. Say I go outside. In the parking lot. Then you don’t need to kill everybody.”

He looked surprised. Frowned. Then like he was considering it. He raised his eyebrows. Smiled. “No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because we have you. Here, and there. Shortly you’ll be dead, there, and that very expensive toy you’re wearing will become my souvenir of this ridiculous episode.”

“You’re a horrible piece of shit,” said Wilf, not sounding angry, but like he’d just come to that conclusion, and was still a little surprised by it.

“You,” the man said to Wilf, cheerfully, “forget that you aren’t present virtually. So you, unlike your friend, can die right here. And will. I’ll leave you with these units, instructing them to beat you very nearly to death, restore you with their Medicis, then beat you again. Rinse. Repeat. For as long as that lasts.”

And she saw how Wilf couldn’t help but look at the robot girls then, and how they both grew extra sets of spider-eyes, looking back at him.