“My father was on the fence about it until yesterday afternoon,” Daedra said, not sounding sad at all.
“Is he here?” Flynne asked.
“Baltimore,” Daedra said. “He doesn’t travel.” And behind her, through the crowd, came the man from the balcony, not in a dark brown robe now but a black suit, his dark beard grown in a little, trimmed. Smiling.
“Fuck,” Flynne said, under her breath.
Daedra’s eyes narrowed. “What?”
Tongue to palate. That shiver of frames, around him.
“Sorry,” said Flynne. “I’m so awkward. You’re my favorite artist in the whole world. I keep feeling like hyperventilating or something. And asking you about your dad when you’ve just lost your sister. .”
Daedra stared at her. “I thought she was English,” she said to Wilf.
“The neoprims she’s embedding with in Brazil are American,” said Wilf. “Working on fitting in.”
The man from the balcony walked right past, didn’t glance at them, but Flynne wondered who wouldn’t take a second look at Daedra?
“But we’ve come at the wrong time,” said Wilf, who as far as Flynne knew would have no idea that she’d just tagged their man. They should have worked out a signal. He was bluffing now. She could tell. “At least the two of you have been reintroduced-”
“Downstairs,” Daedra said. “Easier to talk there.”
“Go with her,” said the bone-voice. It made dragging your fingernails across a chalkboard seem like stroking a kitten.
“This way,” said Daedra, and led them toward the windows facing the river, around a low wall and down a wide flight of white stone stairs. Flynne looked back, saw Conner following them, flanked by two of the china-white robot girls, with their identical featureless faces, in loose black tunics and pants that zipped tight at their ankles, their feet white and toeless. They’d been standing at the head of the stairs, she guessed guarding it. Wilf walked beside her, still carrying his glass of water, which he didn’t seem to be drinking.
The floor below was more like what she’d seen from the quadcopter. Like a more modern version of the ground floor at Lev’s, rooms in every direction. Daedra led them into one with windows on the river, but Flynne saw them frost over as they walked in. Another Daedra, in the same dress, was standing there. She seemed to see them but didn’t react. A brunette in exercise clothes was sitting in an armchair that looked uncomfortable but probably wasn’t, a few white papers in her hand. She looked up. “You’re on in ten,” Daedra said to her, Flynne getting it that this woman wasn’t a guest at the party.
“Is that a peripheral of you?” Flynne asked, looking at the other Daedra.
“What does it look like?” Daedra asked. “It’s giving my talk. Or Mary is, with it. She’s a voice actress.”
Mary had gotten to her feet, the white paper in her hand.
“Take it somewhere,” Daedra said. “We’re having a talk.”
Mary took the Daedra-peripheral’s hand and led it away, around a corner. Flynne watched her go, feeling embarrassed.
“You think you’re safe here,” Daedra said.
“Yes,” said Flynne, all she could think of to say.
“You aren’t, at all. Whoever you are, you’ve let this idiot bring you here.” She was looking at Wilf, who put his glass of water down on the piece of furniture nearest him, looking pained. “Take that apart,” Daedra said, apparently to the two robot girls, pointing at Conner. And one of them, instantly, too quick to follow, was squatting upside down on the ceiling, white mantis-arms lengthening.
Flynne saw Conner smile, but then he was gone, a blank curved wall surrounding Flynne, Wilf, Daedra. It was just there, or seemed to be. Flynne reached over and rapped it with the peripheral’s knuckles. Hurt.
“It’s real,” Daedra said. “And whoever was operating your guard is now wherever you started from, whenever, telling whoever is there that you’re in trouble.” She was right about Conner. If the robots wrecked Lev’s brother’s peri, Conner woke up in the back of Coldiron, beside Burton. “But not understanding how much.”
The man from the balcony stepped through the wall, then. Just stepped through it, like it wasn’t there, or like he and it could temporarily occupy the same space and time.
“How’d you do that?” she asked, because you couldn’t see that and not ask.
“Assemblers,” he said. “It’s what we do here. We’re protean.” He smiled.
“Protein?”
“Without fixed form.” He waved his hand through the wall, a demonstration. He crossed to the side she thought Conner would be behind, stuck his face into it, instantly withdrew it. “Get them some help,” he said to Daedra.
“I can’t move,” said Netherton.
“Of course you can’t,” said the man. He looked at Flynne. “Neither can she.”
And he was right.
Two more robot girls ran out of the wall, where he’d come through, and back into it, where he’d stuck his head in, and then they were gone.
115
Probably they were using something akin to whatever they’d used during the security scans, Netherton thought, as the elevator descended. Something that induced a dissociative state. It was difficult to complain about a dissociative state. It even seemed to take the place of a drink.
But there was something else in effect, something that reduced his freedom of movement. He could move his eyes, and walk when Daedra or this friend of hers told him to, stand where they indicated he should, but he couldn’t, for instance, raise his hands, or-he’d tried-clench a fist. Not that he felt particularly like clenching a fist.
The elevator doors had appeared in the circular wall. Quite a lot of assemblers, to do that. He vaguely recalled there being restrictions, on too wholesale a use of assemblers, but they didn’t seem to apply here, or were perhaps being ignored.
Flynne, beside him, seemed much the same, her peripheral reminding him of when she wasn’t using it.
“Out,” said Daedra, and pushed him, when they reached the bottom.
The lobby now. Daedra’s friend led the way, and when he happened to glance to the left, Netherton found that he did too, without having meant to. Then they were both looking ahead again, through the glass, out to where the gray bouncy castle had been, but no longer was. There was a black car waiting, not as long as the ZIL. The gray-clad Michikoids from the bouncy castle were arranged in two lines, facing one another, two-by-two, and as the glass doors sighed open and he stepped out between them, he felt a faint celebratory elation, at the formality of it all.
Halfway to the car he heard, or perhaps felt, a single, extended, uncomfortably low bass-note, seemingly from somewhere above them. Daedra’s friend, evidently hearing it too, began to run, toward the car, whose rear door was open now. Netherton running with him, of course. Through a confetti storm of what Netherton supposed might once have been a window, though the glittering, slightly golden bits seemed soft as mulch, and as harmless.
Something white, round and smooth, arced down into the street, beyond the waiting car. Bouncing back up, well above the car’s roof.
The head of a Michikoid.
Then a white arm, bent at the elbow, fingers clawed, struck the roof of the car, reminding him of the frozen silhouette of a severed hand he and Rainey had seen, on the feed from the patchers’ island.
Someone, he supposed Daedra’s friend, shoved him, painfully, into the waiting, pearl-gray interior. And screamed, very close to his ear, amid an explosion of what he assumed must be blood.
116
Summers they’d all go to the town pool, which was beside the Sheriff’s Department and the town jail, and Burton and Conner would do cannonballs off the high board, curled up with their heads on their bent knees, hands holding their ankles in, against their haunches, to come up, laughing, to cheers, or sometimes just to Leon, executing a massive belly flop off the same board, making fun of how hard they tried.