“Costco,” Virgil said. “Here.” Tossing her what looked like a black knit ski hat.
“Why?”
“It’s your dummy disguise.”
“Not sure I even need a disguise, for that, the way this is going.”
“Keep your head still, all the way up. No rubbernecking. You’re all playing big rag dolls. We’ve cut you out of the feed from the drone now, because we don’t want Conner making you airsick.”
She lay down on the hammock, pavement hard and cold beneath yellow nylon rope and Tyvek. The boy knelt beside her, fitted Dixon-style orange noise muffs over her ears and the earpiece. Abrupt silence. She lay, looking up at blue tarp, while the boy quickly fastened her wrists, waist, and ankles to the hammock, with nylon straps.
100
Apertures
The drone’s display confused Netherton, filled as it was with partial close-ups of intent faces, latex-gloved hands, unrecognizable objects. People he assumed were technicians were kneeling around the drone in this farther section of the blue tent, its slack roof lower than the anteroom. Conner had gotten the drone in by partially lowering its torso onto its extended arms, which had sprouted small white wheels for the occasion, then powering it forward with the wheels on its feet. Once in, it had been immediately surrounded by these technicians. “What are they doing?” he asked Conner.
“They’re mounting the charger over our tramp stamp,” Conner said, “and hooking a gimbaled quadcopter to either hip.”
“What’s a tramp stamp?”
“We don’t have one,” Conner said.
“It doesn’t have hips either.”
“Or an ass,” Conner said. “Had a girlfriend like that.”
“Why are they?”
“Because we’re flying shotgun for Verity and Manuela, not to mention Virgil and brother Dixon. Charger’s nothing to do with the quadcopters, but I need both arms free.”
Now the technicians seemed to be rapidly disconnecting cables, generally withdrawing.
“Noise protection,” Conner ordered, everyone on the drone’s display donning hard shiny muffs like Dixon had worn in Fang’s factory.
“These fuckers are loud,” Conner said, though on the controller Netherton heard only a deepening hum. “Aperture alpha,” he said, a command. A section of the blue roof above them was tugged aside, folding as it went, perhaps two meters square. The hum deepened.
“We have cams on our non-ass,” Conner said. “You haven’t seen the feeds from those.” A square feed appeared, overlapping the vacant center of the display. Close-up of white plastic covering the floor beneath them.
They rose out of the opening in the tent.
Netherton saw the plastic recede, becoming a white square framed in blue, illuminated by the nearest streetlight.
“Close alpha,” Conner said, and the white square was pulled shut from one side. “Aperture beta.” Now the entire blue roof of the low main tent was hauled open, from the center, in either direction, revealing a wider expanse of white, on which four figures lay like gingerbread men atop brightly colored net hammocks: pink, blue, yellow, a pale fluorescent green. Their heads were black dots.
Netherton glanced from the feed to the display. Vertigo swept in. The drone was stories up now, amid buildings, still rising. “Verity,” he ventured, “hello?”
“Yeah?”
“Why are your heads black?”
“Pussy riot,” she seemed to say, inexplicably.
“When the hammocks are clear,” Conner said, “cut guylines. You four act like dummies. Everybody else, on the ground, run like motherfuckers. Good to go? Okay. Liftoff.”
On the square feed, the hammocks rose toward the camera, their passengers immobile and, he assumed, terrified. Figures below them were sprinting away from the tent, which he saw was collapsing, he assumed because its ropes had been cut. He recognized a figure in a white jumpsuit. He’d seen her inside. These were the technicians.
“How are things going?” asked Rainey, from the direction of the door, back from coffee.
Netherton muted. “Verity and a few of the others are being lifted, in hammocks, up to Stets’ penthouse.”
“Fun?”
“Looks terrifying.”
“How’s Thomas?” she asked.
“Sleeping.”
“Mia tells me she’s just taken on Dominika Zubov as a client,” Rainey said. “I’m sure she meant me to tell you, as she knows you and Lev are friends, and she didn’t ask me not to.”
Her friend Mia, he remembered, watching the hammocks rise, was also in celebrity crisis management, and had steered Rainey into it, from the less specialized realm of PR in which he and Rainey had first met. Mia’s firm, unlike Rainey’s, was London-based. “She’s breaking client confidentiality,” he said. “Is that like her?”
“Dominika’s obviously sending you a message. Mia expects you to convey it to Lev. She wants to get back together with him.”
The feed from the ass-cam slammed suddenly up at him, the drone evidently falling straight down, upright, several stories, then veering sickeningly sideways, below the ascending hammocks.
“Why did you do that?” Rainey asked.
“Do what?”
“Make that high-pitched noise and shove yourself back into the couch,” she said.
“Sorry,” Netherton said. “Conner did something with the drone. Still is…” The drone was darting around, too quickly now for him to follow, except that his point of view did, disconcertingly.
Netherton unmuted. “What was that?” The drone was still, hovering. In the square feed, something small grew steadily smaller, tumbling down, toward the flattened tent.
“Drone,” said Conner. “Kept getting into our no-fly.”
“How do they know there’s a no-fly?” Netherton asked, as the drone impacted tarp-covered pavement.
“They don’t. Too close is too fucking close.”
“Why are all their heads black?”
“Ski masks, pulled on over hearing protection. Don’t want anyone IDing them, and they’re supposed to be life-sized dolls anyway, for the cover story— Gotcha.” This last apparently addressed to something else below them, now falling.
“How did you do that?”
“Those four babies Eunice had made up? They kick ass. Just used one to flip something ten times its size.”
101
Hammock Ride
I won’t be able to hear you speak over the engines, so I’ll just monologue at you. Resist the urge to look around, because you’re playing a stuffed doll. Sorry you have to get up this way, but anything like a real helicopter would blow Stets’ law-breaking budget. Virgil’s got somebody retroactively faking that you guys are big stuffed dolls in a Caitlin art piece. Underestimated the draw of what little web stuff we’ve had up since this morning, cryptic as it is. SFPD showed up sooner than expected, and you don’t want to be on the ground, because Pryor and a fresh batch of contractors are there already, looking for you and Manuela.
Verity, reading this against the sky, as the hammock rose, hoped the noise protection was working. The full-throttle roar of Grim Tim’s Harley would have been mild by comparison.
Now the drone, gray quadcopters mounted low on either side, like bulbous panniers, rose vertically past her, behind white Helvetica.
If it looks like we’re pulling this evening out of our ass, it’s because mine is legion. The branch plants were still doing things for me, behind my back, when Cursion erased me. When they started recompiling me, they set this evening in motion even before Stets and Caitlin knew about it. Once I recompiled, there was just me, right? Now I’m all of the branch plants, but I’m still spoofing like there are a few, because that could be handy. But keep that to yourself.