The Peripheral

69

When Reece tased her in the neck with what she’d thought was a flashlight, she’d just noticed how nothing on Burton’s table was squared up straight. It hurt. Then she wasn’t thinking, wasn’t there.

After her talk with Macon, she’d ridden home, taking her time, trying not to notice where the dead men’s car went into the ditch. Not looking out for drones. Pretending things were normal.

Her mother was asleep when she got there, Janice replaced by Lithonia, who said Leon had driven her out from Fab. Upstairs, she stretched out on her own bed, not meaning to sleep, and dreamed of London. From the air, every street was crowded as that Cheapside, but cars and trucks and buses instead of horses and carts. Full of people, except it wasn’t London but her town, gotten huge, rich, with a river the size of the Thames because of that. Waking, she went downstairs. Her mother still sleeping, Lithonia watching something on her Viz. Then down to the trailer, wondering if Burton was there but too lazy to check on Badger.

“Fuck, Reece,” she protested now, tugging at the zip ties around each of her wrists.

Reece, driving, didn’t say anything, just looked over, and that made the fear come. Not because he’d tased her and fastened her to this car seat with zip ties, but because, when he looked over, she saw that he was scared shitless.

She had a zip tie around each wrist, one fastening those together, all looped through with a longer one that went down under the front of the seat. She could raise her hands high enough to rest them on her thighs, but that was it.

Didn’t know what he was driving, but it wasn’t cardboard, wasn’t electric.

“Made me,” he said. “No fucking choice.”

“Who did?”

“Pickett.”

“Slow down.”

“He’ll be after us,” he said.

“Pickett?”

“Burton.”

“Jesus. .” Was this Gravely? She thought it was but then she didn’t. Looked out at roadside bushes, whipping past.

“Said they’d kill my family,” he said. “Would, too, ’cept I don’t have any. Just be me. Dead.”

“Why? What did you do?”

“Not a fucking thing. Kill me if I didn’t get you for them. He’s got people inside Homes. Homes can find anybody. So they’d find me, then somebody’d come and kill me.”

“Could’ve told us.”

“Sure, then they’d come and kill me. Kill me anyway, I don’t get you over there right now.”

She looked over and saw a muscle working, all on its own, at the hinge of his jaw. Like if you hooked it up to something, it could send his life story in code, all the parts of it he couldn’t tell, maybe didn’t know.

“Didn’t want to,” he said. “Not like I had a choice, to believe them or not. They’re who they are, and that’s what they do.”

She felt both front pockets of her jeans. Phone wasn’t there, wasn’t on her wrist, she wasn’t sitting on it. “Where’s my phone?”

“Copper mesh they gave me.”

She looked out the window. Then at the plastic chrome lettering on the glove compartment. “What’s this you’re driving?”

“Jeep Vindicator.”

“Like it?”

“Are you crazy?”

“Helps to make conversation,” she said.

“It’s not cardboard,” he said, “it’s American.”

“Don’t they make most of it in Mexico?”

“You just want to shit on my damn car now?”

“That you’re fucking kidnapping me in?”

“Don’t say that!”

“Why not?”

“How it sounds,” he said, between his teeth, and she knew he was just that far from crying.