“She’s your fucking problem, Wilf.”
He winced, the amount of pain this caused startling him. “Have you always had this puritanical streak? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”
His eyes, a size too large for their sockets, felt gritty. “She must be nearing the patch,” he said, reflexively attempting to suggest that he was alert, in control, as opposed to disastrously and quite expectedly hungover.
“They’re almost above it now,” she said. “With your problem.”
“What’s she done?”
“One of her stylists,” she said, “is also, evidently, a tattooist.”
Again, the sigil dominated his private pain-filled dark. “She didn’t,” he said, opening his eyes. “She did?”
“She did.”
“We had an extremely specific verbal on that.”
“Fix it,” she said. “Now. The world’s watching, Wilf. As much of it as we’ve been able to scrape together, anyway. Will Daedra West make peace with the patchers, they wonder? Should they decide to back our project, they ask? We want yes, and yes.”
“They ate the last two envoys,” he said. “Hallucinating in synch with a forest of code, convinced their visitors were shamanic spirit beasts. I spent three entire days, last month, having her briefed at the Connaught. Two anthropologists, three neoprimitivist curators. No tattoos. A brand-new, perfectly blank epidermis. Now this.”
“Talk her out of it, Wilf.”
He stood, experimentally. Hobbled, naked, into the bathroom. Urinated as loudly as possible. “Out of what, exactly?”
“Parafoiling in-”
“That’s been the plan-”
“In nothing but her new tattoos.”
“Seriously? No.”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”
“Posthuman filth, according to you.”
“The tattoos!”
“Something to do with the Gyre,” she said. “Abstract.”
“Cultural appropriation. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse. On her face? Neck?”
“No, fortunately. If you can talk her into the jumpsuit we’re printing on the moby, we may still have a project.”
He looked at the ceiling. Imagined it opening. Himself ascending. Into he knew not what.
“Then there’s the matter of our Saudi backing,” she said, “which is considerable. Visible tattoos would be a stretch, there. Nudity’s nonnegotiable.”
“They might take it as a signal of sexual availability,” he said, having done so himself.
“The Saudis?”
“The patchers.”
“They might take it as her offer to be lunch,” she said. “Their last, either way. She’s a death cookie, Wilf, for the next week or so. Anyone so much as steals a kiss goes into anaphylactic shock. Something with her thumbnails, too, but we’re less clear about that.”
He wrapped his waist in a thick white towel. Considered the carafe of water on the marble countertop. His stomach spasmed.
“Lorenzo,” she said, as an unfamiliar sigil appeared, “Wilf Netherton has your feed, in London.”
He almost vomited, then, at the sudden input: bright saline light above the Garbage Patch, the sense of forward motion.
3
She managed to get off the phone with Shaylene without mentioning Burton. Shaylene had gone out with him a few times in high school, but she’d gotten more interested when he’d come back from the Marines, with that chest and the stories around town about Haptic Recon 1. Flynne figured Shaylene was basically doing what the relationship shows called romanticizing pathology. Not that there was a whole lot better available locally.
She and Shaylene both worried about Burton getting in trouble over Luke 4:5, but that was about all they agreed on, when it came to him. Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. She had a feeling they were just convenient, but it still scared her. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. For Burton, they were a way around whatever kept him in line the rest of the time.
She leaned forward now, to squint under the table for the black nylon case he kept his tomahawk in. Wouldn’t want him going up to Davisville with that. He called it an axe, not a tomahawk, but an axe was something you chopped wood with. She reached under, hooked it out, relieved to feel the weight. Didn’t need to open it, but she did. Case was widest at the top, allowing for the part you’d have chopped wood with. More like the blade of a chisel, but hawk-billed. Where the back of an axe would’ve been flat, like the face of a hammer, it was spiked, like a miniature of the blade but curved the other way. Either one thick as your little finger, but ground to edges you wouldn’t feel as you cut yourself. Handle was graceful, a little recurved, the wood soaked in something that made it tougher, springy. The maker had a forge in Tennessee, and everyone in Haptic Recon 1 got one. It looked used. Careful of her fingers, she closed the case and put it back under the table.
She swung her phone through the display, checking Badger’s map of the county. Shaylene’s badge was in Forever Fab, an anxious segment of purple in its emo ring. Nobody looked to be up to much, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Madison and Janice were gaming, Sukhoi Flankers, vintage flight sims being Madison’s main earner. They both had their rings beige, for bored shitless, but then they always had them that way. Made four people she knew working tonight, counting her.
She bent her phone the way she liked it for gaming, thumbed HaptRec into the log-in window, entered the long-ass password. Flicked GO. Nothing happened. Then the whole display popped, like the flash of a camera in an old movie, silvered like the marks of the haptics. She blinked.
And then she was rising, out of what Burton said would be a launch bay in the roof of a van. Like she was in an elevator. No control yet. And all around her, and he hadn’t told her this, were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of invisible fairy police dispatchers.
And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.
Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world.
4
Lorenzo, Rainey’s cameraperson, with the professional’s deliberate gaze, steady and unhurried, found Daedra through windows overlooking the moby’s uppermost forward deck.
Netherton wouldn’t have admitted it to Rainey, or indeed to anyone, but he did regret the involvement. He’d let himself be swept up, into someone else’s far more durable, more brutally simple concept of self.
He saw her now, or rather Lorenzo did, in her sheepskin flying jacket, sunglasses, nothing more. Noted, wishing he hadn’t, a mons freshly mohawked since he’d last encountered it. The tattoos, he guessed, were stylized representations of the currents that fed and maintained the North Pacific Gyre. Raw and shiny, beneath some silicone-based unguent. Makeup would have calculated that to a nicety.
Part of a window slid aside. Lorenzo stepped out. “I have Wilf Netherton,” Netherton heard him say. Then Lorenzo’s sigil vanished, Daedra’s replacing it.
Her hands came up, clutched the lapels of her open jacket. “Wilf. How are you?”