The Peripheral by William Gibson Page A

a game of some kind, somebody would want to kill Burton, thinking he’d been there instead of her. For having seen a kill in a game? When she’d asked Netherton about that, he’d said he didn’t know, like he didn’t know why there was no capture, wasn’t anxious to know, and that she shouldn’t be either. Which had felt to her like when he was realest.
    Her mother, up early, had been making coffee in the kitchen, in her bathrobe older than Flynne was, with the oxygen tube under her nose. Flynne had kissed her, declined coffee, been asked where she’d been, said Jimmy’s. “Older than dirt, Jimmy’s,” her mother had said.
    She’d taken a banana and a glass of filtered water upstairs. Saved some of the water for brushing her teeth. Noticed, as she always did when she brushed them, that the brass fittings on the sink had once been plated, but now there were only little flecks of chrome left, mostly near the porcelain.
    She’d gone back into her room, closed the door, taken off herdebadged Coffee Jones shirt, her bra and jeans, put on a big USMC sweatshirt of Burton’s and gotten into bed.
    To sort of vibrate, exhausted but far from sleep. Then she remembered that she had an app for Burton and Leon’s drone games on her old phone, and that Macon would have moved it to her new one along with the rest of her stuff. She got the phone from beneath the pillow and checked. There it was. She launched it, selected a top-down view, and saw a low satellite image of their property, the roof she lay under a gray rectangle, while above it moved, in a complicated dance, the twenty drones, each one shown as a point of light, weaving something she knew to call, if only from tattoos, a Celtic knot. Each one to be replaced by one of the twenty spares, then recharged, in rotation.
    Burton won a lot of drone games, was really good at them, Haptic Recon 1 having been about them, so many ways. Even, she’d heard someone say, that Burton himself had been a sort of drone, or partially one, when he’d still had the tattoos.
    Watching the drones weave their knot above her house seemed to help. Soon she thought she might be able to sleep. She closed the app, shoved her phone under the pillow, closed her eyes.
    But just before she did sleep, she saw the woman’s t-shirt and striped pajama pants, fluttering and turning, down into the street.
    Fuckers.

24.
    ANATHEMA
     
    T he thylacine preceded Lev into the Mercedes, its claws ticking dryly on pale wood. It regarded Netherton beadily and yawned, dropping a jaw of quite noticeably undoglike length, like a small crocodile’s but opening in the opposite direction.
    “Hyena,” Netherton greeted it unenthusiastically. He’d spent the night in the master cabin, which made the gold-veined desk seem austere.
    Lev frowned, Ash behind him.
    Ash wore what he’d come to think of as her sincerity suit, a long-sleeved one-piece cut from dull gray felt, an antique aluminum zip running from crotch to throat. It was covered with a multitude of patch pockets, some of them stapled on. Wearing it, he’d noted before, seemed to dampen her more florid gestural tendencies, as well as hiding her animals. It signified, he assumed, that she wished to be taken more seriously.
    “So you’ve slept on it,” Lev said, absently bending to stroke Tyenna’s flanks.
    “Have you brought coffee?”
    “The bar will make you whatever you like.”
    “It’s locked.”
    “What would you like?”
    “An Americano, black.”
    Lev went to the bar, applied his thumb to the oval. It opened instantly. “An Americano, black,” he said. It produced one, almostsilently. Lev brought it to him, steaming. “What did you make of her story?” Passing him the cup and saucer.
    “Assuming she told me the truth,” Netherton said, watching as Tyenna closed her mouth and swallowed, “and if that was Aelita she saw . . .” He caught Lev’s eye. “Not an abduction.” He sipped his coffee, which was painfully hot but quite