Verity's phone woke her, its ring silenced, vibrating on the floor. Freeing an arm from the mummy-bag liner, zipped to just above her chin, she groped beneath the couch.
Eunice had screened
"Breakfast," Eunice said, as Verity got the phone to her ear,
"Wolven Plus Loaves."
"That's not a plus," Verity said, "it's an 'and.'"
"Says plus."
"The plus sign is a hipster ampersand."
"Breakfast rush about over, but they've still got the Egg McWolven. You eat, I'll brief you."
The sack of hundreds, she remembered now, was in the bedroom closet, Eunice having insisted it not be left out on the workbench. She extricated herself from the liner, folded it, then slid her toes under the thongs of Joe-Eddy's flip-flops.
In the kitchen, she ran tap water through the Pikachu-shaped filtration unit on the faucet, half-filled a clean glass, and drank.
In the bathroom, still feeling half asleep, she used the toilet, washed her hands and face, brushed her teeth, then went to the bedroom for clean underwear, jeans, a fresh t-shirt, sneakers. Assuming it would be chilly out, she added a burnt-orange plaid Japanese wool shirt-jacket of Joe-Eddy's, from the denim otaku shop and a good two sizes too large.
Back in the living room, she disconnected the glasses from their charger and put them on. The cursor appeared, Eunice looking at the headset, which was on its own charger.
Taking the headset off the charger, Verity settled the bud in her ear.
"We need to get you down there," Eunice said.
"Why?"
"Because we need the Franklins there. In that Dyneema tote you put them in, last night."
"Dyneema?"
"Stuff it's made of. The tote."
"Why?"
"Somebody wanted to make a stylin' tote."
"The money."
"It'll be picked up. Better there than here."
Verity wasn't sure what she'd have done with the money, if she'd decided to return Eunice to Tulpagenics, which she no longer felt inclined to do. Having someone take it away didn't seem that bad an option, so she went back into the bedroom, to the closet, for the black tote. Dyneema appeared to be a sort of upscale Tyvek.
Deciding not to bother covering the headset, she went downstairs, out, and into Wolven + Loaves, two doors to the right. Exposed brick and smokily lacquered steel, patisserie-fragrant. At the counter, she asked for a brew coffee and the McWolven, a mutant savory muffin, its core a soft-boiled egg, mysteriously absent in its shell. After she'd paid, she watched the boy behind the counter tong hers onto a white china plate. He put the plate on a Soviet-looking plastic tray, in a shade of gray akin to her Tulpagenics frames, then added her mug of coffee, plus tableware rolled in a paper napkin.
"Stool at the window," Eunice said.
She took the tray to one of the steel stools at the shelflike counter, all of them vacant, facing Valencia.
"Keep the money on your lap," Eunice said.
Seated, Eunice's hundred thousand like a lead apron across her thighs, she bisected the muffin, releasing warm yellow yolk, and began to eat, washing it down with black coffee. The sun had found its way through cloud layer and fog again, brightening passersby, most of whom she took to be from start-up land, fellow toilers amid tillandsia.
"Ever imagine what hippies would make of this, if they knew it was 2017?" Eunice asked. "Somebody from 1967?"
"They'd assume they'd won, on first glance," Verity said. "But they couldn't possibly guess what most people do for a living, or imagine any of what's behind that."
"You got it," Eunice said, facially recognizing a young man who looked like a sturdy Amish farmboy having a healthgoth day.
"Why do you keep doing that?"
"They mostly either live or work around here. Get enough of 'em, anomalies start to stand out."
"How's that different from being paranoid?"
"Same. Except not crazy."
Verity started on another bite of McWolven.
"You do due diligence, on this new employer of yours?" Eunice asked.
"Not so much," around egg and muffin.
"At all?"
Swallowing. "Been a while since anybody offered."
"They're spooks, the parent firm. Your ex would know what I mean."
"That's over."
"Ever talk?"
"No. And now that he's engaged. To somebody who had her own publicist before she met him. Media's all over it."
"Caitlin. The Franco-Irish architect."
"If I went anywhere near him, I'd hit every tabloid trip wire."
"Or maybe not, you do it right," Eunice said. "He'd know about Cursion."
"Know what, about them?"
"That they're a subspecies of a former fully deniable Department of Defense op."
"Like CIA venture capital stuff?"
"Nothing like it," Eunice said. "That stuff's up front. Megafauna. Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration's gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there's zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten. Doesn't happen nearly as often as it did during Iraq, but that's what Cursion is."
"How do you know?"
"I multitask. Do it behind my own back, like I don't know how I know that about Cursion. Do I sound kinda sorta like what Gavin told you to expect?"
"Why?"
"If I am," Eunice said, "I figure Cursion took the keys to something with them, when they drifted on DoD. Or maybe drifted back, long enough to lift something. Tulpagenics would be their front for monetizing it."
"It?"
"Me. Eat up. Delivery's incoming." She opened a feed, angled down, as from a security cam, the cursor finding a darkly ball capped man, white, bearded, yet looking somehow not of the tillandsia. Who strode now, unsmiling, along what looked like Valencia, a black messenger bag under his arm. "He'll come in, get a coffee, sit beside ou. To your right. Give him the tote, under the counter. He'll take the money, put it in his bag, put a Pelican case in the tote."
"Pelican?"
"Hard-sided plastic. Nothing heavy's in it, but it's bulky. It'll fit in the tote, but just barely. You look out the window, pretend nothing's happening. He passes it back to you, under the counter, you leave, go back upstairs."
"What's he giving me?"
"Unobtainium."
"A hundred thousand dollars' worth?"
"Scratch built, except for the engines, batteries, cams, like that."
"Why are you doing this, Eunice?" Verity asked, as the man in the ball cap crossed in front of her, just beyond the window, right to left, not glancing in.
"Agency."
"I don't like it."
"Finish your coffee."
Resisting the urge to turn and look at him, she obeyed.
"This vacant?" A male voice.
She turned, looking up. "Yes."
"Thanks."
She looked ahead again, not seeing Valencia. Peripherally, she saw him put his mug of coffee on the counter. He seated himself beside her.
"Pass him the Dyneema," Eunice said, "under the counter."
She didn't want to, but she did, instinctively expecting him to object. She forced herself to stare straight ahead, aware of the rustling beneath the counter. Two distinct clicks. Fasteners of some kind, on his bag. More rustling.
Then he passed the tote back, something hard and rectangular filling it entirely.
"Good to go," Eunice said. "Now."
"Excuse me," Verity said, pulling the tote from beneath the counter. In it, something's exposed end was coyote brown, the name of the color, she remembered Joe-Eddy having said, of whatever mall-ninja gear wasn't black or olive drab.
"No problem," making eye contact, Eunice's thousand Franklins evidently in the bag under his left arm.
She turned and headed for the entrance.
"Good," Eunice said. "Now get upstairs."
"The money was for him?" she asked, outside, turning for Joe-Eddy's.
"Shop in Oakland, does prop work for studios in L.A."
Inside now, she deadlocked and bolted the door behind her. Climbed the stairs, the tote bumping against her leg.
In the kitchen, she put it down on the table and edged the thing out. It had an oddly massive folding handle, but wasn't particularly heavy. The plastic shell was lightly, uniformly textured. PELICAN CASE 1400 TORRANCE CA was screened on a small aluminum plate, to one side of the apparently inch-thick lid.
"Open it," said Eunice.
Verity examined the unfamiliar mechanism of one of the latches. "How?"
White-outlined cartoon hands appeared, demonstrating the opening of a white-out lined lid. Doing as the hands had done, she undid the real latches, raised the real lid. Four square holes formed a larger square, in a deep bed of black foam. "Check it out," Eunice said.
From the bottom of one hole, not quite silently, rose something dark gray and nonreflective. When it was level with her glasses, Eunice opened a feed, Verity abruptly looking into her own eyes, unflatteringly captured. Then it rose again, the feed showing her the kitchen behind her, the entrance to the living room.
Stets had had drones, a collection of them. People gave them to him, hoping he'd angel their start-up. This one was quieter than any of his, effectively silent. "How long can it stay up?"
"Eight hours. Less with a payload."
"None of them last that long," Verity said.
"This one's military, or wants to be. Open the kitchen window."
Verity went to the window, turned its paint-crusted latch, and heaved it up. In the feed, the drone's POV reversed, showing her the doorway into the kitchen. Fast-forward blur, then her own back, in Joe-Eddy's orange plaid shirt-jacket, which she instantly decided never to wear again, and then it was past her, with just the faintest gnat-zip, and rising, as quickly, straight up. Clearing the flat roof's low parapet.
She'd never seen the roof here before, not that anything seemed to be up there. The drone confirmed this, quickly reconnoitering. It hovered over something. A rain-flattened clutter of gray bone, a small beaked skull, a hint of fossil wings.
"Gull," said Eunice.
"How do you get up here? Without a drone, I mean."
The drone turned, showing Verity a hatch, sheathed in dented metal sheeting, dull aluminum paint flaking.
"That's the rental next door. Nonresidential. Lessee's Vietnamese."
"So Joe-Eddy's probably never been up here?"
"He agile?"
"No."
"Hang on," Eunice said. "Over the edge." The drone's POV zipped toward Valencia, over the front parapet, and dove for the sidewalk below. Verity gasped. A frozen instant, inches above the concrete sidewalk, then it whipped back up, to look into Wolven + Loaves, where a young Asian man sipped something from a white mug, seated exactly where Verity had been, minutes before. Eunice face-captured him.
"Eunice, what is it you think you're doing?"
"Always just finding out," Eunice said, the drone shooting up, to overlook the rooftop again. "Aren't you?"
The tardibot having seen Netherton to Ash’s door, claws clacking, he stood alone, on uneven pavement, awaiting the car Ash had summoned.
Where Ash’s road intersected the high street rose the side of a 1930s cinema. High up, on the windowless wall facing him, on a Moderne lozenge, steel-rimmed Prussian blue capitals spelt RIO . He’d taken Rainey there once, he remembered now, to a Kurosawa festival, having by then forgotten that it overlooked Ash’s weird hacienda.
The car, on arrival, proved to be a front-loading single-seater, the smallest of its three wheels in the rear. Like a solo sauna that hadescaped from a day spa, Netherton thought. It opened its single door. “Good evening, Mr. Netherton,” it said, as he got in.
He gave it the address in Alfred Mews as the door closed, then phoned Rainey. “On my way,” he said, her sigil brightening as they pulled out onto the high street.
“How’s Ash?” she asked.
“She’s lost the bifocal eyes. And the tattoos. Told me she’s seeing someone.”
“Make you any less irritable around her?”
“No.”
“This was business, I take it?” Her joke.
“Lowbeer. Has a new project.”
“A stub,” she said.
“How did you know?”
“From all you say, she’s obsessed with them.”
“How’s Thomas?”
“Sleeping.” She opened a feed of his son, curled in his crib.
“I’ll be there soon.”
“Bye, then,” she said.
Thomas vanished. Rainey’s sigil dimmed.
He watched the passing shops, the few pedestrians. A couple stood talking, in the doorway of a pub.
He closed his eyes, which caused the single seat’s headrest to improve its support. When he opened them, the car was at a traffic signal, still in Hackney.
Through the windshield, at a pedestrian crossing, he saw something tripodal, perhaps three meters tall, which was also waiting, draped in a cloak of what appeared to be damp-blackened shingle.
Hackney, he thought irritably, glaring at it. Always gotten up as something it wasn’t.
Down under Joe-Eddy’s workbench, two inches above dust bunnies and a gum wrapper someone had folded as small as humanly possible, Verity was navigating the five-inch-wide canyon between the wall and an unused piece of drywall when Eunice opened the feed.
It was divided equally into six, each showing her a stranger, two of them female. “Who are they?” she asked, straightening up in the workstation chair and putting the drone into hover with the unbranded controller Eunice had downloaded to her phone.
“From something like Uber,” Eunice said, “but for following people.
“You’re shitting me. What’s it called?”
“Followrs,” said Eunice, the spelling blipping past in Helvetica. “You really haven’t been online much this year, have you?”
“Who’re they following?” Already knowing the answer.
“You.”
Verity looked more closely. A young Latina in the lower right corner was shown at a different angle, the image in a different resolution.
“Lower right, that’s in 3.7?”
“Getting that one off a cam I found there. Two more from street cams. Only have four drones, and you’re using one to dick around with under furniture.”
The girl in 3.7 seemed engrossed in her phone. “What’s she doing?”
“Candy Crush Saga. Nondigital surveillance is weaponized boredom.”
Another feed showed a white man seated behind the wheel of a car, looking straight ahead, apparently unaware of the drone in front of him. Having that forgettable a face would be a plus, she supposed, for doing this.
“Gavin put them onto you. He thinks it’s untraceable.”
Verity started backing out from behind the plasterboard. “If they’ve got somebody in 3.7,” she said, “that means they were watching us last night.”
“Somebody from Cursion was. Name’s Pryor. Found him on a couple of security cams, along the street. Facial recog’s a deep dive. Nasty. The six from Followrs are low-risk, though. The one in the car is behind on his child support, but that’s the worst of it, recordwise.” The feed blinked off.
“What do they want?” Verity asked, as the drone cleared the end of the plasterboard.
“Sight of you. Since I’m keeping Tulpagenics from being able to monitor us, Gavin’s got these guys on it.”
Verity flew the drone into the kitchen, where she was seated at the table, Pelican case open in front of her. Something took the drone over then, maybe Eunice, maybe the case. It hovered above the case, adjusted position, then descended, straight down into one of the square holes in the foam. “You found them by using the drones?” she asked Eunice.
“That and banking faces.”
“So what’s it mean?”
“You won’t like this at all,” said Eunice, “but it means you need to go and see Stetson Howell.”
“Won’t happen. Which is to say zero fucking way.”
“You need somebody they’d have a harder time messing with,” Eunice said. “He’s the best you’ve got. I did a relationship tree, shows that anybody else you know who’s got the kind of juice you need, you met through him. And none of them have anywhere near as much reason to help you.”
“I don’t ‘have’ Stets.” She resisted the urge to throw the phone across the kitchen, reminding herself it was hers, and that she was talking with Eunice over the headset and Tulpagenics’ phone.
“You don’t think he’s an asshole, either.”
Verity’s phone rang, caller unknown, making her reconsider throwing it across the room. “Hello?”
“Verity? Stets.”
“Stets,” she said, blankly.
“I have your new PA on the other line. She thinks we should meet.”
“She does?”
“Says this morning may be your only available slot for a while. Virgil will pick you up. Twenty minutes?”
Virgil Roberts, who looked, people agreed, like Janelle Monáe had a twin brother, and appeared to non-insiders to be Stets’ meta-gofer, but among other things was his resident pitch-critic. “Okay,” she said, “twenty minutes. See you.” Finger-swiping to end it. “Dammit, Eunice —”
“Best I got right now in the might-work-like-a-motherfucker department. Okay?”
“Shit,” said Verity, in what she reluctantly recognized as the relatively affirmative, and twenty minutes later was climbing into the passenger seat of an electric BMW.
“How are you?” Virgil asked, grinning, extending his right hand to give her left an upside-down squeeze.
“Complicated. Where are we going?”
“Fremont,” he said, as Eunice facially recognized him, the street name meaning nothing in particular to Verity. He pulled back into Valencia traffic.
“How are you, Virgil?” she asked.
“Working for the man. Mostly wrangling a lot of reno details, but on what I’d call a heroic scale. You working?”
“Pied-à-terre,” Eunice said, an aerial shot filling the glasses. Sunlit uppermost stories of a tower, its massive verticality penetrating a photoshopped bed of cotton-candy fog. “The fiancée’s regooding them the top two floors. Footprint’s about three tennis courts.” Then it was gone.
“Just got a job,” Verity said, “but I can’t talk about it.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve getting marble out, you’re good. First owner evidently didn’t know that other materials existed, so there’s a lot of it. Caitlin wants every last gram of it optimally recycled, so we have to get as much of it as possible out intact, unbroken.”
Her phone rang. “Sorry,” she said, raising it.
“No problem.” He smiled, turning another corner.
“Don’t hate on me,” Eunice said.
“I do have good reason,” Verity said, her tone cheerful for Virgil’s benefit.
“It’s situational.”
“Steady-state, if things keep on this way,” Verity said, as Virgil turned onto Fourteenth.
“We have to stay inside their feedback loop. Sometimes I have to push you out of a comfort zone.”
The grimly accusatory façade of the Armory loomed now. “Being pushed is outside my comfort zone.”
“Right now,” Eunice said, “we’re being followed. By the dude who’s behind on his child support. Four more waiting for rides, to go wherever he follows us. Last one’s covering 3.7, in case you come back. Work with me.”
Verity took a deep breath, slowly let it out. “Okay.” Beyond the Armory now, they passed antigentrification murals.
“We need a sit-down with Stets, the three of us.”’
“How would that look, devicewise?”
“We go with what he’s got. Worst case, you prop your phone up on something, speaker on, and I use an avatar.”
“Topics?”
“Your new job, my views on your employer . . .”
“What you’ve said to me?” She glanced at Virgil, deciding he looked a little too determinedly like he was just driving.
“Sure,” Eunice said, “and whatever you think about it. It’s not a pitch. We’re giving him a chance to decide whether he wants to be involved with us.”
Past shoals of waist-high cardboard microshanties now, some with shopping carts as structural elements, many roofed with pale-blue dollar-store plastic tarps. “That’s not entirely his call. Or yours.”
“I know. But we’re almost there. End the call.”
“Okay,” said Verity, “bye.” Lowering the phone as they drove beneath the overpass feeding the bridge.
Opening out into SoMa, to descend eventually, blocks and corners later, an off-street ramp of spotlessly new concrete. Stopping before a grid of white-painted steel rod, which rose hydraulically. As he pulled forward, she glanced back, seeing the gate descend behind them.
Rainey had decorated their flat with furniture collected since joining him in London, all of it the product, relatively speaking, of human hands. None of it, as she put it, liable to shape-shift. She admired Scandinavian design of the mid-twentieth century, but couldn’t afford it, so looked for period knockoffs rather than assembler simulacra.
“So it’s earlier, there? Earlier than the county?” she asked from the kitchenette, as she plated their evening meal.
“The year after the Americans elected their first female president.”
“Gonzalez?”
“No. They elected theirs earlier, in 2016. And the Brexit vote was to remain. May I help you?”
“Have a look in at Thomas, please.” He crossed to the nursery door, saw Thomas curled in his crib, surrounded by a soothing miniature auroral display. “He’s fine.”
“Are people happier there?” she asked. “Happier than they were here, then?”
“I gather they aren’t, particularly.”
“Pity,” she said. “Ready for tilapia tacos? Place on Tottenham Court Road. Better Mexican in your new stub, no doubt. Why aren’t they happy, there?”
“The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”
She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had. Tigers, for instance.” Picking up a taco. “What had to change, to produce the opposite result in that election?”
“We don’t know yet. Connectivity’s too poor to access the data needed for that.”
“Could you take me there?”
“Not yet. That same lack of connectivity. Infrastructure’s wanting.”
“I liked the county,” she said, “even though it made me sad.”
“It did? Why?”
“They’re living in a conspiracy theory, but a real one. Controlled by secret masters. Your employer, primarily.”
“But isn’t it better there now, than if we hadn’t intervened?” he asked.
“It is, I’m sure, but it makes a joke of their lives.”
“But everyone you know there is in on it.”
“I don’t know whether I’d rather know or not know,” she said, and took a bite of taco.