The Peripheral

120

Sir Henry’s involvement surprises me,” said Lowbeer’s bone-static, like a full-body migraine that could talk. “He must have suffered some well-concealed setback in his affairs. That’s usually the way.”

“What way?” she asked, forgetting they weren’t alone, and that even when she was, tonight, she wasn’t supposed to speak to Lowbeer.

“Way?” asked al-Habib, sharply.

Faint warmth at her wrists. She looked down, seeing the iron cuffs crumble, collapse, like they’d only been pressed from dry, rust-brown talc. Beneath her right hand, the granite was going to talc too, spurting up between her fingers, drifting like smoke. And up from within what had been the chair arm’s surface rose something hard and smooth. The candy-cane gun, its parrot-head handle pressing back against the base of her thumb, like it was alive, eager.

“Finish it,” the balcony man said to the man with the hat, as if he sensed something, and she knew he meant the Homes drones hitting Coldiron. “Tell your people. Now.”

“Surprise,” Flynne said, and she was back on Janice’s couch, full of the wakey Burton had given her, but now she was standing up, raising the gun, and the white bump that was the trigger didn’t even seem to move. Not a sound. Nothing happened.

Then the balcony man’s head fell off, having somehow become a skull, perfectly dry and brown, like you’d see in almost any issue of National Geographic, and then the top of his body caved in, inside his clothes, collapsed with a dry clatter of bone, every bit of softer tissue gone, as his knees gave way, so that the last parts of him in her field of vision, just for a second, were his hands, untouched by whatever had happened. She looked at the gun, its barrel slick as candy a kid had just licked, then down at the brown skull, on the stone floor in front of what was left of him, his legs and lower torso. It must seal the blood in, she thought, remembering the gloss of sliced red brick, like raw sliced liver, in the shadows of the Oxford Street greenway. A brown bone was poking out of the front of his black suit, like a dry stick. “Just as well,” said the static, “that you don’t legally exist here. Death by misadventure.”

The robot girls started for her, then, but the whitewashed stone wall to her right was smoking, a big square of it falling down, dust, and out of the black hole shot this big red block. Cube, cuboid, thing. A nursery red. Cheerful. She heard the ceramic-looking shells of the robot girls shatter, between it and the far wall. Just hung, shivering, a few feet off the ground, like it was glued there, making a faint revving sound, like internal combustion motorcycles but really far away. Then it flipped, up and off the wall, the robots dropping to the stone floor in pieces, and came down on one of its eight corners without making a sound. And just stayed there, balanced, red, impossible.

“Security,” said the man with the black hat, softly. “Red. Red.”

Was he warning someone about the red thing?

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wilf, who must have discovered that his cuffs had crumbled too, starting to stand up too. “Sit the fuck down, Wilf,” she said. He did.

“Hey, Henry,” said a smoothly upbeat male voice, from the head of the stairwell, “sorry I broke your car.” The exoskeleton stepped through the arch, the homunculus on its massive shoulders, under the bell jar. It stopped, seemed to look at the man in the hat, except it didn’t have any eyes you could see.

“Red,” said the man, softly.

“Sorry I killed your driver and your security detail,” said the infomercial voice, like it was apologizing for not having 2-percent milk.

The cube rotated slightly, on the corner it was balanced on. Lowbeer appeared, on a square panel covering most of the nearest face. “You’ll be unhappy to learn, Sir Henry,” Lowbeer said, but not in that bone-static voice, “that your successor is your longtime rival and chief thorn-in-side, Marchmont-Sememov. It’s an inherently awkward position, City Remembrancer, but I’d thought, until this, that you’d done rather well, considering.”

The tall man said nothing.

“A real estate and development scheme, with resource extraction?” Lowbeer said. “And for that you’d see fit to deal with someone on the order of al-Habib?”

The tall man was silent.

Lowbeer sighed. “Burton,” she said, and nodded.

The exoskeleton raised both its arms. The creepily tanned hands were gone, or else in black robotic gloves, both of them in fists now. A little hatch flipped open, on top of the exoskeleton’s right wrist, and the other candy-cane gun popped out. From a second, slightly larger hatch, on the left wrist, emerged Lowbeer’s tipstaff, gilt and fluted ivory. Burton had a better idea of how to aim it, because the tall man just blinked to bone entirely, his empty clothes falling straight down, with a rattle, and his tall hat rolling in a circle on the floor.

“So who do I have to kill,” Flynne said, showing them she still had her own candy-cane gun, “to get somebody to fucking do something, back in the stub, about stopping fucking Homes from killing us all with drones, like right fucking now? Please?”

“Sir Henry’s death has deprived your competitor of the sort of advantage that Lev and I afford you now. I took the liberty of effecting that immediately, upon Sir Henry’s arrival here, this evening, assuming he would prove guilty. Which has resulted in a shift of influence, allowing for Homeland Security’s withdrawal, their orders rescinded.”

“Shit,” said Flynne, lowering the gun, “what did we have to buy to do that?”

“A sufficient share of Hefty Mart’s parent corporation, I gather,” said Lowbeer, “though I haven’t had the details yet.”

“We bought Hefty?”

“Some considerable share of it, yes.”

“How can you buy Hefty?” It was like buying the moon.

“May I stand up?” Wilf asked.

“I want to go home now,” said Daedra.

“I imagine you do,” said Lowbeer.

“My father’s going to be very angry with you.”

“Your father and I,” said Lowbeer, “have known one another for a long time, I’m sad to say.”

Now Ash was in the doorway, in her chauffeur outfit, Ossian behind her, in a black leather coat, the wooden pistol-box under his arm. He crossed to Flynne, eyes on the candy-cane barrel, keeping out of its way. He put the box down on the arm of her chair, where the iron cuff had been, lifted its lid, carefully took the gun from her hand, placed it in its felted recess, and closed the box.

“Goodnight, Miss West,” said Lowbeer, and the screen went blank.

“We’ll be going now,” said Ash. She looked at Daedra. “Except for you.”

Daedra sneered at her.

“And that,” said Ash, gesturing with her thumb at the red cube. Which flung itself, somehow, straight up and then to the side, crashing with a big clang into the white-barred cell doors of the second level, a few lights going out. Then it threw itself to the far side just as loudly. Then somersaulted, fell, to land again on a single point. And began to spin, its corners blurring past, inches from Daedra’s chin. She didn’t move at all.

“Out,” said Ash, “now.”

And then they were single-filing the stairway, Ossian behind her. “What’s Conner doing to her?” she asked, over her shoulder.

“Reminding her of the potential of consequences, at least,” said Ossian, “or attempting to. Won’t harm a hair on her head, of course. Or do a bit of good. Father’s a big American.”

Above them, the sound of crashing iron.