The Peripheral

124

Living with Rainey was a little like having a cognitive implant, he thought, getting out of bed and looking down at her, but nicer in so many ways. He’d scarcely been aware that she had freckles, for instance, or that they were so widely distributed, or, indeed, that he liked freckles. Now he covered some of his favorites with the corner of the duvet and went to clean his teeth.

Her sigil appeared, before he could start. “Yes?”

“Coffee,” she said, and he could hear her from the bedroom as well as on his phone.

“I’ll use the machine as soon as I’ve brushed my teeth.”

“No,” she said, “that’s a real Italian downstairs, in that fake news agent’s. I want his espresso.” She made it sound pornographic. “His crema.”

“Phone him.”

“You ruined my career, put me in a position that forced me to resign from an enviable government position, and ultimately resulted in my being threatened by assassins in the pay of New Zealand’s secret state, and you won’t bring me a decent human-made coffee? And a croissant, from that place across the street.”

“All right,” said Netherton. “Let me brush my teeth. I did rescue you from those darknet kiwis, who were hardly state assassins, and bring you here, under the protection of the British secret state. So to speak.”

“Crema,” she said, sleepily.

He brushed his teeth, remembering how Lowbeer had had to get her out of Canada, then into England, and how they’d wound up in bed together, not for the first time but definitely the first time he hadn’t been drunk. And how he’d confessed, in possibly the single most awkward morning-after moment of what seemed a long career of them, his feelings for Flynne, or possibly her peripheral, or both, with Rainey pointing out that she, Flynne, had recently become his client. And hadn’t he, she asked, had ample proof of what could come of having it off with clients? But Flynne wasn’t Daedra, he’d protested. But what he was, most definitely, Rainey had said, was someone so immature as to believe that his own erotic projections should have actual weight in the world. And then she’d pulled him back into bed and argued it differently, though from the same position, and he’d begun, he supposed, to see it her way. And soon it had become apparent that Flynne and Sheriff Tommy were a couple, and here he was dressing, in their newly shared flat, to go down to the street, on a sunny Soho afternoon, grateful as ever that plans to implement a Cheapside-style cosplay zone here had never been implemented.

He was coming out of the baker’s when Macon’s sigil appeared. “Yes?”

“If we fly your boy to Frankfurt, will you be able to brief the German PR team, tomorrow morning, ten your time?”

“Where is it, now?”

“On the runaway in Cairo, cleared for takeoff. We’ve got Flynne’s peri, the one for this hemisphere, in Paris, so if she’s available then, you could brief them together.”

“Sounds good. Anything else?”

“Nope. You coming to the barbecue, Sunday?”

“Wheelie, yes.”

“You’re weird, Wilf. I heard you got your girlfriend one.”

“We’ll both be there.”

“You want to fetishize an extremely narrow-bandwidth experience,” Macon said, “that’s your business.”

“If you spent more time up here,” said Wilf, “you might start to appreciate that sort of thing. It’s relaxing.”

“Too rich for my blood,” said Macon, cheerfully, and his sigil was gone.

Putney tomorrow, Netherton reminded himself, after ordering a pair of double espressos to take away. Two in the afternoon. His second follow-up appointment. If it was sunny, they’d ride bicycles. He doubted the German PR business would take that long.

Always nice to see Flynne.