Zero history

81. ON SITE

I saw him,” Hollis said, not quite believing it herself. “I think Milgrim saw him too, but then he was gone.”

“I know,” said Garreth, “but we’re go now.”

Fiona’s drone hovered as Ajay and the man called Charlie reached the other three, who now stood waiting. Charlie put his hand on Ajay’s arm, stopping him. Ajay stood with his head lowered.

Now Foley led Chombo forward. Chombo squirmed, looking in every direction, and Hollis saw the black O of his mouth. Foley jabbed his hand into Chombo’s ribs.

Garreth touched the switchbox. “Hit him,” he said.

She saw Ajay blur, or teleport, across the space separating him from Foley. Whatever befell Foley, on Ajay’s arrival, was equally, invisibly fast, with Ajay seeming to have spun and grabbed Chombo before Foley had hit the grass.

Now Charlie, the short, fridge-shaped man with the plaid tam, was between those two and the man with the mullet.

She never saw the man’s knife, only the way he held his hand, as he closed with Charlie, and then she saw him fall, though Charlie seemed only to have stepped back. The man rolled, sprang up, almost as quickly as Ajay had pounced on Foley, lunged again, fell.

“Charlie tried to teach me that, once,” said Garreth, “but I couldn’t bring myself to be sufficiently superstitious.”

By now the man was on the ground again, without Charlie ever having seemed to touch him.

“Why does he keep falling?”

“Some kind of Ghurka feedback loop. But your Foley’s not getting up. Hope Ajay didn’t overdo it.”

Hollis glanced up, saw Milgrim’s screen. The gray-haired man. A rifle- “He has a gun-”

“Fiona,” he said, “shooter. Under the penguin. Now.”

Thumbing the wings to rotate, slowly, just briefly enough, in opposite directions, had brought the penguin around, but had presented Milgrim with the iconic silhouette of a Ruchnoy Pulemyot Kalashnikova, for which he’d instantly lost all English.

It lay across Gracie’s legs, metal shoulder-stock unfolded, as Gracie attached the curved magazine, a humble unit about which Milgrim, in his period of government employment, had known an absurd amount. The Russian for terminologies for every piece of machinery used to produce them: stampers and spot-welders and so many more. He’d noticed them ever since, on television screens, those magazines: ubiquitous objects in the world’s harsher places, never auguring good.

“Fuck,” from Fiona, beside him, just the least little plosive. Then: “On it.”

Gracie pulled something back, on the side of the rifle, released it, sat up and forward, bringing his knees up, settling the orthopedic-looking stock against his shoulder.

The penguin paddling down, it seemed, of its own accord, as Gracie leaned his cheek in. Barrel moving, slightly-

Jerking, as something dark and rectangular shot beneath it. Fiona’s drone.

Gracie looked up. Through the penguin, directly at Milgrim. Who must have done that awkward thing, though he could never remember it, the configuration she’d shown him in the cube.

Something smashed Gracie down, and sideways, out of his sniper’s posture, an idiot giant’s invisible hand, the penguin jerking simultaneously, image blurring. Milgrim never saw the wires at all, those fifteen feet of them, but he supposed they were very thin.

Gracie rolled on his back, convulsed as Milgrim fired the Taser again. “Galvanism,” the word recalled from high school biology. Gracie grabbed invisible strings. Milgrim tapped the screen again. Gracie jerked again, held on.

“Stop!” Fiona said. “Garreth says!”

“Why?”

“Stop!”

Milgrim raised both thumbs, obedient now, terrified that he’d done something irrevocable.

Gracie sat up, clawing at his neck, then gave the invisible string a vicious yank, blurring the image again.

And then the penguin was rising, slowly, away from him. Milgrim’s thumbs went to the wings. Nothing happened. He tried the tail, tried auto-swim. Nothing. Still rising. He saw Gracie stagger to his feet, sway, then run, out of frame, as the penguin, freed of its unaccustomed ballast of Taser, ascended of its own accord into the calm predawn air of the Thames Valley.

He thought he glimpsed the wheel of the London Eye, just as Fiona thrust her own iPhone in front of his.