The Peripheral

14

Ash, flesh white as paper, was pulling down the lower lid of Netherton’s left eye. Her hand quite black with tattoos, a riot of wings and horns, every bird and beast of the Anthropocene extinction, overlapping line drawings of a simple yet touching precision. He knew who she was, but not where he was.

She was leaning over him, peering close. He lay on something flat, very hard, cold. Her neck was wrapped in black lace, a black that ate light, fixed with a cameo death’s head.

“Why are you in Zubov’s grandfather’s land-yacht?” Her gray eyes had dual pupils, one above the other, little black figure eights, affectation of the sort he most detested.

“Stealing Mr. Zubov’s oldest whiskey,” said Ossian, behind her, “which I’d myself secured against oxidation, with an inert gas.” Netherton quite distinctly heard Ossian’s knuckles crack. “A pint of plain’s your only man, Mr. Netherton. I’ve told you that, haven’t I?” This was indeed something the Irishman sometimes said, though at the moment Netherton was entirely unclear as to what it might mean.

Thuggishly butler-like, Ossian had very large thighs and upper arms, black hair braided at the nape and blackly ribboned. Like Ash, a technical. They were partners, but not a couple. They minded Lev’s hobbies for him, kept his polt-world sorted. They’d know about Daedra then, and Aelita.

Ossian was right, about the whiskey. The congeners, in brown liquors. Trace amounts only, but their effects could be terrible. Were, now.

Her thumb withdrew, brusquely, releasing his lower lid. The drawings of animals, startled, fled up her arm, over a pale shoulder, gone. Her thumbnail, he saw, was painted a childish crayon green, chipped at the edges. She said something to Ossian, in a momentary tongue sounding vaguely Italian. Ossian replied in kind.

“That’s rude,” Netherton protested.

“Encryption isn’t optional, when we address one another,” she said. It altered constantly, their encryption, something sounding Spanish morphing into a faux German in the course of a simple statement, perhaps by way of something more like birdsong than speech. The birdsong was Netherton’s least favorite. Whatever randomly synthetic language the one spoke, the other understood. Never the one thing long enough to provide a sufficient sample for decryption.

The ceiling was pale wood, sealed beneath glassy varnish. Where was he? Rolling his head to the side, he saw he lay on polished black marble, thickly veined with gold. This began to rise now, beneath him, taking him with it, then stopped. Ossian’s hard hands seized his shoulders, lifting him to an approximate sitting position on what seemed to have become the edge of a low table. “Hold yourself upright, man,” the Irishman ordered. “Flop and you’ll crack your skull.”

Netherton blinked, still not recognizing the place. Was he in Notting Hill? He hadn’t known Lev’s house to have a room this small, and particularly not in its basements. The walls were the color of the ceiling, blond veneer. Ash took something from her reticule, a triangular lozenge of plastic, pale green, translucent, frosted like driftglass. Like all of her things, it looked slightly grubby. She slapped its softness against the inside of his right wrist. He frowned as he felt it move, bloodlessly settling incomprehensibly thin tendrils between the cells of his skin. He watched her doubled pupils flick, reading data only she could see. “It’s giving you something,” she said. “But you mustn’t drink on top of that, not at all. You mustn’t take liquor from the vehicles again, either.”

Netherton was watching the intricate texture of her bustier, which resembled a microminiature model of some Victorian cast-iron station roof, its countless tiny panes filmed as by the coal smoke of fingerling locomotives, yet flexing as she breathed and spoke. Or rather was observing his vision sharpen, brighten, as the Medici had its increasingly welcome way with him.

“Mr. Zubov,” said Ossian, meaning Lev’s father, and coughed once, into a fist, “may at any time require his father’s land-yacht.” Not inclined to let Netherton off, but really what was the problem? Lev wouldn’t be concerned with a single bottle, regardless of its age.

Ash’s Medici released his wrist. She tucked it into her reticule, which he saw was worked with beads of mourning jet.

Netherton stood, briskly, his surroundings now making perfect sense. A Mercedes land-yacht, something Lev’s grandfather had commissioned for a tour of Mongolian deserts. There was no place for it, at the house in Richmond Hill, so Lev’s father kept it here. The empty bottle, he now remembered, was in a toilet, somewhere to the right. But they obviously knew that. Perhaps he should look into getting one of these things, these hangover alleviators.

“Don’t even think about it,” Ash said, gravely, as if reading his mind. “You’d be dead in a month, two at most.”

“You’re awfully grim,” he said to her. Then smiled, because, really, she was. Elaborately so. Hair the nano-black of the lace at her throat, the bustier of perpetually rain-streaked iron and glass, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, the layered skirts below it like a longer, darker version of the boss patcher’s tutu. And now the line drawing of a lone albatross, slowly and as if in distant flight, circling her white neck.

He looked back at the table he’d slept on, when it had been retracted, flush, into a recess in the floor. Now it was ready to serve as breakfast nook or gaming table, or a place to spread one’s maps of Mongolia. He wondered if Lev’s grandfather had ever made the journey. He remembered laughing at the vulgarity of what Lev called the Gobiwagen, the one time he’d been shown through, but he’d noted the bar, with its very handsome stock of liquor.

“Keeping it locked from now on,” said Ossian, demonstrating his own degree of telepathy.

“Where were you two?” He looked from Ossian to Ash, as if implying some impropriety. “I came down to find you.”

Ossian raised his eyebrows. “Did you expect to find us here?”

“I was exhausted,” Netherton said, “in need of refreshment.”

“Tired,” said Ossian, “emotional.”

Lev’s sigil appeared. “I thought sixteen hours was long enough for you to be unconscious,” he said. “Come to the kitchen. Now.” The sigil disappeared.

Ash and Ossian, who’d heard nothing Lev had said, were staring at him, unpleasantly.

“Thanks for the pick-me-up,” he said to Ash, and left, down the gangway. Into the submarine squidlight of the garage’s broad shallow arches, receding down a line of vehicles. Sensing his movement, living tissue coating the arch directly above him brightened. He looked back, and up, at the vehicle’s bulging flank. Ossian was watching, from an observation bay, smugly.

As he walked to the distant elevator, past one vehicle after another, light followed him, the skin of one arch dimming as the next fluoresced.