The Peripheral

15

Leon, the Halloween before, carved a pumpkin to look like President Gonzales. Flynne hadn’t thought it looked like her, but that it wasn’t racist either, so she left it out on the porch. Second day it was out there, she saw something had nibbled the inside of it, and pooped in it a little. She figured either a rat or a squirrel. Meant to take it around to the garden compost then, but forgot, and next day she found the president’s face caved in, pumpkin flesh behind it all eaten away, leaving the orange skin sagging, wrinkled. Plus there was fresh poop inside. She got the rubber gloves she wore for plumbing chores and carried it out back to the compost, where the wrinkled orange face gradually got uglier until it was gone.

She wasn’t thinking of that as she hung in the cradle of the gyros, watching the gray thing breathe.

It wasn’t gray now, but bronze-black. It had made itself straight, flat, with sharp right angles, but everything else on the face of the fifty-seventh floor, those flat squares and rectangles, was misted, sweating, running with condensation. The thing was perfectly dry, standing out a hand’s breadth from the surface behind it. The twisty legs had become brackets. Centered above the floor of the fold-out balcony directly beneath her.

It was breathing.

Sweat broke from her hairline, in the hot dark of the trailer. She wiped it with the back of her forearm, but some ran into her eyes, stung.

She nudged the copter closer. Saw the thing bulge, then flatten.

She had only a vague idea of what she was flying. A quadcopter, but were the four rotors caged, or exposed? If she’d seen herself reflected in a window, she’d know, but she hadn’t. She wanted to get closer, see if she could trigger an image, the way proximity had done when she’d dropped on that bug. But if her rotors were exposed, and she touched the thing with one, she’d go down.

It swelled again, along a central vertical line, paler than the rest.

Below her, they were at the railing, the woman’s hands on the rod along the top, the man behind her, close, maybe holding her waist.

It flattened. She nudged herself a little closer.

It opened, narrowly, along that vertical line, paler edges curling slightly back, and something small arced out, vanishing. Something scored the forward-cam then, a fuzzy gray comma. Again. Like a gnat with a microscopic chainsaw, or a diamond scribe. Three, four more scratches, insect-quick, flicking like a scorpion’s tail. Trying to blind her.

She pulled herself back, fast, then up, whatever it was still slashing at her forward-cam. Found the pull-down and dead-dropped, tumbling three floors before she let the gyros catch and cup her.

It seemed to be gone. Cam damaged but still functional.

Fast, left.

Up, fast. Passing fifty-six, with the cam on her right she saw him take the woman’s hands, place them over her eyes. From fifty-seven, she saw him kiss her ear, say something. Surprise, she imagined him saying, as she saw him step back, turn.

“No,” she said, as the thing split open. A blur, around the slit. More of them. He glanced up, found it there. Expecting it. Never paused, never looked back. He was about to step back inside.

She went for his head.

She was half up out of the chair, as he saw the copter, ducked, catching himself on his hands.

He must have made a sound then, the woman turning, lowering her hands, opening her mouth. Something flew into her mouth. She froze. Like seeing Burton glitched by the haptics.

He came up off his hands, a track star off blocks. Through the opening, the door in the window, which simply vanished as soon as he was inside, became a smooth sheet of glass, then polarized.

The woman never moved, as something tiny punched out through her cheek, leaving a bead of blood, her mouth still open, more of them darting in, almost invisible, streaming over from the pale-edged slit. Her forehead caved in, like stop-motion of Leon’s pumpkin of the president, on top of the compost in her mother’s bin, over days, weeks. As the brushed-steel railing lowered, behind her, on the soap-bubble stuff that was no longer glass. Without it to stop her, the woman toppled backward, limbs at angles that made no sense. Flynne went after her.

She was never able to remember any more blood, just the tumbling form in its black t-shirt and striped pants, less a body every inch it fell, so that by the time they passed the thirty-seventh, where she’d first noticed the thing, there were only two fluttering rags, one striped, one black.

She pulled up before the twentieth, remembering the voices. Hung there in the gyros’ slack, full of sorrow and disgust.

“Just a game,” she said, in the trailer’s hot dark, her cheeks slick with tears.

She took it back up, then, feeling blank, miserable. Watching dark bronze sweep past, not bothering to try to see the city. Fuck it. Just fuck it.

When she got to fifty-six, the window was gone, the balcony folded back up over it. The bugs were back, though, the transparent bubbles on their business ends facing where the window had been. She didn’t bother shooing them.

“That’s why we can’t have anything nice,” she heard herself say, in the trailer.