The Peripheral

67

Their lawyers were from Klein Cruz Vermette, in Miami. One of the three who’d met them in the snack bar at Hefty was a Vermette, Brent, but not the one in the name. Son of the one in the name, not yet a full partner.

It had been Macon’s idea to sign the papers there. Otherwise they’d have been doing it in Fab, or the space next door, or in Tommy’s police car, Tommy having driven them over from the football field, where the helicopter they’d chartered in Clanton had landed. They’d flown in their own jet, from Miami to Clanton, and they were nice. So nice, she figured, that Coldiron must be paying them fuckloads of money not to show how weird they must think this all was, that she and Burton and Macon were being set up as a corporation that was buying a strip mall. But it did make it easier, the niceness. Brent, who had an even more expensive-looking tan than Pickett’s, had put away a plate of pork nubbins, while the other two had Hefty lattes.

She’d only seen Tommy when he’d walked them in from the parking lot, hadn’t had a chance to speak with him. She guessed driving and being security was part of his job now, or part of the part about Jackman’s deal with Pickett. He’d given her a nod, when he went back to the car. She’d smiled at him.

She’d have thought having Tommy drive the lawyers to a meeting in Hefty Mart was too obvious, but now she figured his relationship with the town had always been funny. Plenty of people must know about Jackman and Pickett, and more than she wanted to imagine must be making money off building, though maybe not that directly. So if you saw Tommy drive some people in business clothes to Hefty, then sit there in the parking lot while they had a meeting inside, maybe you’d ignore it. Or maybe you’d go over and say hello, and Tommy would give you something from the Coffee Jones machine, but you wouldn’t ask him what he was doing.

Now it was just her and Macon there, Burton having gone with Tommy to take them back to their helicopter. She’d gotten herself a half-order of chicken nubbins, which she sometimes liked more than she’d admit.

“We could all have had two heads,” Macon said, “and they wouldn’t have mentioned it.” He had his Viz in, and she guessed he was literally keeping an eye on news and the market.

“They were nice, though.”

“You wouldn’t want to be on their bad side.”

“You’re Chief Technical Officer, huh?” she asked him.

“Yep.”

“Shaylene’s not on the board? That Burton’s idea?”

“I don’t think it was his call. My guess is they’re looking at who’s essential to whatever makes this worthwhile to them. You’re essential, Burton is, evidently I am, and Conner.”

“Conner?”

“Not on the board either, but it looks like he’s essential.”

“Why does it?”

“He’s already swallowed one of these.” He took a small plastic box from the front pocket of his new blue shirt and put it on the table between them. Clear, flat, square. Inside, white foam with a single cutout, fitting a glossy black pill. “You’ll want some water.”

“What is it?” She looked at him.

“Tracker. That’s not it. Gel cap around it, makes it less easy to lose, easier to swallow. Barely big enough to see, on its own. Ash ordered them from Belgium. Bonds to your stomach lining, good for six months, then it disassembles itself and nature takes its course. Company makes it has its own string of low-altitude satellites. Have to keep putting ’em up, but they make that a feature, not a bug, ’cause they get to keep changing their hardwired encryption.”

“To keep track of where I’m at?”

“Pretty well anywhere, unless somebody sticks you in a Faraday cage, or way down in a mine. A little more robust than Badger”-he smiled-“and you could lose your phone. Want some water?”

She opened the box, shook the thing out. Didn’t feel any different than any other pill. Tiny little reflections of the snack bar lights in the deep glossy black. “Don’t bother,” she said, putting it on her tongue and washing it down with half a short cup of black coffee Burton had left on the table. “Wish it meant somebody in Belgium could tell me where the fuck I am,” she said. “In terms of all the rest of it, I mean.”

“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?”

“People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?”

“Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or killed, and it would all still just be collateral.”

“Sounds about right. What do you say we do, with that?”

“Try not to get damaged. Let it go where it’s going, otherwise, because we can’t stop it anyway. And because it’s interesting. And I’m glad you swallowed that. You get lost, it’ll tell us where to find you.”

“But what if I wanted to get lost?”

“They aren’t the ones trying to kill you, are they?” He took his Viz off, looked her in the eye. “You’ve met them. Think they’d be trying to kill you, if you stood to get them in some kind of very deep shit, or lose them a bunch of money?”

“No. Couldn’t tell you exactly why. But they could still completely screw up the world, just by dicking around with it. Couldn’t they?”

His fingers closed around the tangled, rigid, silvery filaments. She looked down and saw the lights of the projectors, moving in there. She looked up at him.

He nodded.