The Peripheral

11

Locked her bike in the alley and used her phone to let herself into the back of Forever Fab, smelling pancakes and the shrimp rice bowl special from Sushi Barn. Pancakes meant they were printing with that plastic you could compost. Shrimp special was Shaylene’s midnight snack.

Edward was on a stool in the middle of the room, monitoring. He wore sunglasses against the flashes of UV, with his Viz behind the glasses, on one side. In the low light the glasses looked the same color as his face, but shinier. “Seen Macon?” she asked.

“No Macon.” Near comatose with boredom and the hour.

“You want a break, Edward?”

“I’m okay.”

She glanced at the long worktable, stacked with jobs needing removal of afterbirth, smoothing, assembly. She’d spent a lot of hours at that table. Shaylene was a solid source of casual employment, if you got along with her and were quick with your hands. Looked like they were printing toys tonight, or maybe decorations for the Fourth.

She went into the front, found Shaylene watching the news: ugly-spirited sign-carriers. Shaylene looked up. “Hear from Burton?”

“No,” Flynne lied. “What’s happening?” Didn’t want to have the Burton conversation. Odds of avoiding it were zero.

“Homeland took some vets away. I’m worried about him. Got Edward to sub for you.”

“Saw him,” Flynne said. “Breakfast?”

“You’re up early.”

“Haven’t slept.” She hadn’t said what it was she’d needed to do, wouldn’t now. “Seen Macon?”

Shaylene flicked through the display with a fancy resin nail, Luke 4:5 tumbling back into the green of some imaginary savannah. “Wasn’t that kind of night.” Meaning she’d pitched the all-nighter because there was excess work to be done, not because Macon needed peace and quiet to fab his funnies. Flynne wasn’t sure how much of Fab’s income was funny, but assumed a good part of it was. There was a Fabbit franchise a mile down the highway, with bigger printers, more kinds, but you didn’t do anything funny at Fabbit. “I’m dieting,” Shaylene said. Flamingoes rose from the savannah.

“That the purple?”

“Burton,” Shaylene said, standing, slipping in a finger to tug at the waist of her jeans.

“Burton can take care of himself.”

“VA aren’t doing shit, to help him recover.”

What Shaylene saw as Burton’s primary symptom of traumatic stress, Flynne thought, was his ongoing failure to ask her out.

Shaylene sighed, that Flynne didn’t get it, how her brother was. Shaylene had big hair without actually having it, Flynne’s mother had once said. Something that came up through any remake, like marker ink through latex paint. Flynne liked her, except for the Burton thing.

“You see Macon, ask him to get in touch with me. Need some help with my phone.” Starting to turn to go.

“Sorry I’m a bitch,” Shaylene said.

Flynne squeezed her shoulder. “Let you know as soon as I hear from him.”

Let herself out the back, with a nod to Edward.

Conner Penske blew past on his Tarantula, as she was turning out of the alley behind Fab, what was left of him a jagged black scrawl behind the two front wheels. Janet sewed him these multizippered socklike things, out of black Polartec. They looked, as Janet worked on them, like fitted cases for something you couldn’t imagine, which Flynne guessed they were. Town’s only other HaptRec vet, he’d come back in one of the ways she’d been scared Burton would: minus a leg, the foot of the other one, the arm on the opposite side, and the thumb and two fingers of the remaining hand. Handsome face unscarred, which made it weirder. She smelled recycled fried chicken fat hanging in the trike’s exhaust trail, as the single huge rear slick vanished down Baker Way. Rode at night, mostly county roads, this county and the next two or three over, steering with a servo rig the VA paid for. She figured he got loose, that way. Basically didn’t stop until the fuel was running out, hooked up to a Texas catheter and high on something wakey. Slept all day if he could. Burton helped him out at home, sometimes. He made her sad. A sweet boy in high school, for all he’d been that good-looking. Neither he nor Burton ever said anything to anyone, that she knew of, about what had happened to him.

She rode to Jimmy’s, letting the hub do most of the work. Went in and sat at the counter, ordered eggs and bacon and toast, no coffee. In the Red Bull mirror behind the counter, the cartoon bull noticed her, winked. She dodged eye contact. She hated it when they spoke to you, called you by your name.

That mirror was the newest thing in Jimmy’s, a place that had been old when her mother had gone to high school. Everything old in Jimmy’s had at some point been painted in one or another generation of dark shiny brown, including the floor. The onions were starting to sizzle for the lunch dogs. Stung her eyes. She’d have the smell in her hair.

Hefty Mart would be open. She’d walk up and down the aisles, while forklifts brought in shrink-wrapped pallets. She liked it in there, early. She’d spend one of the shiny new fives on two bags of groceries, things that would keep in the cupboard. The neighbors had all grown more vegetables than they knew what to do with, out of a random stretch of rain. Then she’d go by Pharma Jon and put another five against her mother’s prescriptions. Then ride home, get the panniers unloaded, contents into the pantry, lucky if she didn’t wake anybody but the cat.

The edge of the counter was trimmed with LEDs like the ones in Burton’s trailer, under a sloppier application of polymer. She’d never seen them on, but it had been at least a year since she’d been in here with the place in bar mode. She pressed the polymer with her thumb, feeling it give.

Burton and Leon, before they enlisted, learned you could use a syringe to inject this same stuff, still liquid, into the part of a shotgun shell that held the shot, then quickly epoxy over the hole you’d made. The polymer stayed wet in there, most of the time anyway, between the little lead balls, so it didn’t expand. When you fired one, it solidified as the shot left the barrel, producing a weird, potato-shaped lump of polymer and lead, so slow that you could almost see it tumble out of the barrel. Heavy, elastic, they’d bounce these off the concrete walls and ceilings, in the county storm shelter, trying to hit things around corners. Leon had gotten keys to the place. Looked weird when you weren’t in there with everybody else, hiding from a tornado. Burton, after a while, actually could hit things around corners, but the sound of the Mossberg hurt her ears, even with earplugs.

Burton had been different then. Not just thinner, gangly, which seemed impossible now, but messy. She’d noticed, the night before, how everything she hadn’t touched, in the trailer, was perfectly squared up with the edge of something else. Leon said the Corps had turned Burton into a neatfreak, but she hadn’t really thought about it before. She reminded herself to take that empty Red Bull can out to the recyc bin, spend some time straightening things up.

Girl brought her eggs.

She heard Conner’s trike pass again, out beyond the parking lot. Nothing else on the road sounded like that. Police pretty much gave him a pass, because he ran mostly late at night.

She hoped he was on his way home.