The Peripheral

63

Little over five hours,” said Janice, putting a mug of coffee down on the bedside table. “I’d let you sleep, but Edward just called. Down at the trailer with your brother. Needs you there.”

Flynne slid her hand under her pillow for her phone, remembered it wasn’t there. Sunlight at the edges of the curtains. Pillowcase felt normal. “What’s happening?”

“Said Burton threw up, you should come down.”

“Threw up?”

“What he said.”

Flynne hitched herself up. Took a sip of coffee. Remembered looking down at the white crown, its cables running off the army blanket to Burton’s display and her phone. “Shit,” she said, putting the mug down. “He’s fucking around with it.” Then she was up and pulling on her jeans, the cuffs damp and mud-flecked.

“With what?” Janice asked.

“Everything,” said Flynne, getting up and digging for dry socks in the clothes on the chair. She found two that didn’t match, but were both black. Sat down on the bed and pulled them on. Her damp laces were a mess.

“You drink that coffee,” Janice said. “You aren’t rich enough yet to waste Ella’s coffee.”

Flynne looked up. “How’s she doing?”

“Pissed at you and Burton for being involved with Pickett, but it gives her something to do. Seriously, drink that coffee. Doesn’t matter if you get there two minutes later.”

Flynne picked up the mug, went to the window. Pushed the curtain aside. Bright and clear, everything soaked from the night before. That red Russian bike out by the gate, beside it the Tarantula, scorpion tail tipped with the brand-new fuel-nozzle grapple he was supposed to have had all the while. “Conner’s here?”

“’Bout ten minutes ago. Carlos and another guy took him down to the trailer, in kind of a swing, slung between a couple of pieces of plastic pipe.”

Flynne drank some coffee. “Tommy gone?”

“Haven’t seen him. There’s a fresh jug of coffee to take down to them.”

A few minutes later, face washed, headed down the hill, big orange Thermos banging against her knee with each step, the path looked like a platoon had been marching up and down, boots churning dark mud, but really it would only have been Burton’s posse going back and forth, however many times, plus Tommy and whoever else had been down here. A small drone whipped over from behind, headed downhill, stopped and hovered for a second, then flew on.

Burton was sitting in the Airstream’s open door, wearing an old gray sweater, light blue boxer shorts, unlaced boots. His legs seldom got any sun, but now his face was whiter than they were. She stopped in front of him, the jug bumping her knee one last time. “Well?”

“Didn’t tell me it makes you puke,” he said.

“Didn’t ask me. Anything.”

He looked up at her. “You were asleep. Saw that thing on the bed, still hooked up, and there was Edward. You know I saw Conner use his. You’d have done the same.”

“Hey, Flynne,” called Conner, from inside, “wassup?”

“Coffee.”

“Bring it. Wounded warrior here.”

“What did you do?” she asked Burton.

“Turned up in your girlfriend, there. Got up, threw up, dropped the first one came running in.”

“Shit. Who?”

“Pigtail. Funeral suit.”

“Ossian. Tell me you haven’t fucked everything up.”

“Ash doctored him. With something like a cross between a bull’s balls and a jellyfish. Are those contacts she’s got?”

“They’re like a piercing or something. How much speed, intensity, and violence of action exactly did you whip on things?”

“He’s pissed at me, not you.”

“How long were you there?”

“About three hours.”

“Doing what?”

“Getting set up. Getting my ass out of your girlfriend and into something that won’t make me blush. Talking corporatization with four-eyes. Who’s your girl supposed to be, anyway?”

“Nobody seems to know.”

“Every time I’d pass a mirror, I’d jump. Does sort of look like you.”

“Just the haircut.”

“Wounded fucking warrior here!” cried Conner.

“Get up,” said Flynne. “Let me by.”

Burton stood. She stepped up and past him. Conner was propped up on the bed with Burton’s pillow and one of Macon’s blue duffels behind him, wearing one of his Polartec body socks. So much of him missing. She remembered him running, in the other peripheral.

“What?” he asked, looking up at her.

“Just remembered,” she said, “didn’t bring cups.”

“Burton got cups,” Edward said, from his seat in the Chinese chair. He bent over and fished a yellow resin mug out of a transparent Hefty gear box.

She put the Thermos jug down on the table beside the white cables leading to her phone. “I thought that thing was custom-made for my head.”

“You have more hair,” Edward said. “I padded it out in back with Kleenex, keeps it pressed against his forehead. That and the saline, seems to do it.”

“Print him his own. I don’t want anybody using mine. Or my peripheral.”

“Sorry,” Edward said, unhappy.

“I know he made you.”

“No way he’s getting in my sweet golden boy either,” said Conner, prissily, from the bed.

“They got him something,” Edward said. “Came back here for a few minutes, then he went again.”

“A peripheral?” she asked.

“Little Muppet-assed thing,” said Burton, behind her.

She turned. He had some color back in his face. “Muppet?”

“Six inches tall. Put a kind of cockpit on this exoskeleton, where the head would go, put the Muppet in that. Synched ’em. I was doing backflips.” He grinned.

She remembered the headless white machine. “You were in that exercise thing?”

“Ash didn’t want me in your girl.”

“Neither do I. Put your pants on.”

He and Edward did a dance in the narrow space, Burton getting to his clothes rod and Edward getting to Conner, on the bed, with the yellow mug in his hand. Edward sat on the bed, holding the mug so Conner could slurp coffee. Burton pulled a brand-new pair of cammies off a hanger. “Come here a minute,” he said to her, and went out, carrying his pants. She followed him. “Close the door behind you.” He took one foot out of the unlaced boot, balancing, as he put his leg through the leg of his cammies, then his foot back into the boot, then repeated this with the other leg. “You go outside the house, when you were there?” He was buttoning the fly.

“Just in the back garden. And up in a quad, virtual.”

“Hardly anybody,” he said. “You get that? Biggest city in Europe. See many people?”

“No. Just in one place, but it’s a kind of tourist attraction, and Netherton told me they mostly weren’t real, after we got back. And it’s too quiet, in the backyard. For a city.”

“I got the quad ride too, with Ash, when she’d fixed the pigtail up, while he was getting my Muppet ready for the exo.”

“Cheapside?”

“Nothing cheap about it, just lonely. We went out over the river, low. Floating islands, some kind of tidal generator. I might’ve seen fifty, a hundred people, the whole flight. If they were people. And hardly any vehicles, nothing really like traffic. It’s the way heritage games looked, before they got updated. Before they could really do much in the way of crowds. If it’s not a game, where is everybody?”

She remembered her own first view of the city, as she rose straight up, feeling that.

“Asked her,” he said.

“So did I. What did she say?”

“Said there aren’t as many people as we’re used to. What did she tell you?”

“Changed the subject. She tell you why?”

“Said she’d explain when she had more time.”

“What do you think?”

“You know she thinks it all sucks, up there?”

“She say that?”

“No, but you can feel it. That she does. Can’t you?”

She nodded.