“The—the bastards, set me fucking shitting up—” The Tourette’s is threatening to break out, as is a residual urge to burst out in song even as the huge golems clamp inhumanly gentle six-fingered hands the size of ditch-diggers around his arms. “—party in fucking cockass Monmouth, fucking minger Bonnie slipped me the shit-shit-shitting godvomit raining on Northern fucking Europe, set me up that wasn’t the fucking New Libyan consulate at all, was it? And, and—”
One of the golems slaps a hand over his face. The hand has some kind of flexible membrane on it, with built-in antisound. Huw can hear himself chattering and cursing inside his own head, but nothing’s getting out. The golem slowly shrinkwraps his legs together from hip to ankle, and the other golem picks him up under one arm and carries him through the broken front door. The hands of the first golem part easily at the wrist and go with him, a temporary gag.
“We’ll discuss the charges later, in my chambers,”
Giuliani says in his ear. Then she whisks off in a flapping of black-winged robes as the golem lowers Huw into something that looks like a cross between a pedal-powered taxi and an upright coffin.
Bastard fucking bastard must stop fucking swearing, Huw thinks desperately, as he confronts a baby blue padded cell lined with ominous-looking straps. Bonnie set me up for this, bastard neophiliac, but why did the fucking tin whistle want to talk to the shit-monster? Why was the thing happy to hear me—? He stops as the lid closes behind him, momentarily shocked. Because that was the oddest thing about it: the way the godvomit responded to his unwanted flight of song—
As the golems start leaning on the pedals, something squirms in his pocket, like an inquisitive worm. It’s the whistle the hacker yanked out of his throat, he realizes, half-horrified that he’s locked in with it. Which is worse, he asks himself, a traitorous djinni or a musical instrument that wants to nest in my larynx? He gets his answer a moment later as the whistle squirms again, then digs in tiny claws and begins to inch up his shirt. Locked in a small box, on the way to the cells beneath the courthouse, Huw confronts his most primal fear, gives in, and screams himself hoarse behind his antisound gag.
Eventually, his screams taper off. But after a couple of minutes, he feels a heretofore subliminal buzzing against his hip, and screams afresh as he envisions spidery trefoils crawling over his pelvic girdle toward his crotch. Then reason takes over and he realizes that it’s his goddamned phone. Squirming around in the cramped box, he pulls it out and shakes it to life, holding it before his mute face. The picture on the other end resolves. Adrian and his bicycle, in some swarming souk. “Wotcher!” Adrian says. Huw waggles his eyebrows frantically at the pinhole cam. The whistle has climbed atop his chest and is stuck crawling in circles as it tries to locate a suitable aperture to return to its nest by.
“Saucy,” Adrian says. “Hadn’t figured you for bein’ inta that kink. Met a lucky lady, then?”
Huw shakes his head frantically, rolling his eyes. Slowly, he pans the phone around the box, then brings it back to eye level.
“Oh ho! Not voluntary, then.”
Huw nods so fiercely, his head smacks into the padded wall behind him.
“Right, then. See you in two ticks.” The picture on the phone swings crazily as Adrian clips it to one of the thousands of clever grabbers on the front of his wash-n-wears and pedals off on the bike. Periodically, his face looms in the screen as he looks down at the positional data that Huw’s phone is relaying.
Then Huw is looking at a jittery high-def image of the judge’s caravan, at the slowly moving lockbox he’s encased in. Adrian holds his phone up again and Huw sees that his eyes are, if anything, redder than they’d been that morning, nearly fluorescent with stoned glee. “You’re in there, yeah?” he says, and swings the phone toward the strongbox. Huw nods.
“Hrm.” Adrian says, “Tricky.” He clips his phone back to his shirt and turns around. Huw sees two young women swathed in paramilitary black bodysuits bulging with cargo pockets and clever sewn-in bandoliers. They exchange rapid hand signals; then the phone’s POV wheels sickeningly as Adrian does a tire-torturing doughnut and zips off to the head of the caravan. The camera frames the two impassive golems pumping the pedals of the palanquin. Adrian rolls the bike directly into their path, then makes terrified tourist squeaks as he rolls clear of the frame at the same moment as the golems plow through it. They grind to a sudden halt: their wheels have delaminated on impact with Huw’s bike’s frame, which has gone into self-defensive hedgehog mode. Huw hears the Vulture croaking enraged threats at Adrian, whom Huw is certain is shrugging with gormless English apologies.
Huw is thrown to one side, losing his phone in the process. A moment later, light scythes into Huw’s cell and he’s staring up into the eye-slit of a ceramic-reinforced veil. Strong, long-fingered hands lift him free and he’s unceremoniously slung over a hard female shoulder. Dangling upside down, he catches a glimpse of the smoking ceiling of the palanquin dissolving into blue goo. The Vulture waves her arms in their direction, her black robe spread out like tattered wings as she screams orders. The golems are lumbering toward them, but in a moment they’re in the crowd, lost in the swarm.
The safe house is another inflatable, half-buried in sand and ringed with a memory-wire fence that guards some shepherd’s noisome cache of mutant livestock—cows that give chocolate milk, goats that eat scrap plastic and excrete a soft spun cotton analogue, miniature hamster-sized chickens that seem even stupider than real chickens and flock like tropical fish. Adrian’s already waiting for them when they arrive, standing over the remains of Huw’s bicycle.
“Guess you get to keep the hash, old son,” Adrian says, kicking the wreckage. “Too bad—it was a lovely ride. I see you’ve met Maisie and Becky. Becky, love, would you mind setting Huw down now? He’s looking a little green and I’m sure he’d appreciate some terror firmer and the removal of that horrid gag.”
Neat as that, Huw is sitting plonk on his bottom in the sand, while Adrian laboriously pries back and snaps off each of the golem’s fingers. Adrian tosses them to the goats, and Maisie says something to him that Huw can’t understand.
Adrian shakes his head. “You worry too much—those buggers’ll eat anything.”
Once he’s free of the gag, Huw gives his jaw an experimental wiggle, then opens his mouth in a wide gasp. While he’s catching his breath, the whistle—which has staked out a hiding place behind his left ear—abseils around his jaw, nips inside his mouth, and darts down his throat. “Shit!” Huw chokes: and the whistle nestling in the back of his larynx supplies a buzzing harmonic counterpoint.
“Aha!” says Adrian. “You’re the designated carrier, all right. Excellent. The sisters want samples, later. You’re going to need a bath first, no offense. Come on in,” he says, kicking away sand to reveal a trapdoor. Hoisting it open, Adrian exposes a helical slide into the bounce-house’s depths; he slides in feetfirst and spirals down into the darkness.
Huw gasps for breath, balanced on the fine edge between nervousness and stark screaming terror. Normalcy wins: The whistle doesn’t hurt, indeed barely feels as if it’s there. A goat sidles up behind him with evil in its eyes and leans over his shoulder, sniffing to determine if he’s edible; the hot breath on his ear reminds him that he’s still alive, and not even unable to talk. One of the Libyan goth ninjettes is squatting patiently by the door. “Hello?” he says, experimentally rubbing his throat.