The Peripheral by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page A

Burton’s phone locked up in it. She frowned. Homes would know that she’d just checked that, which was okay. What wasn’t okay would be if they noticed that her phone was funny. Nothing to be done about it, though. She got out of Badger and back into the searches she’d run for London the night before.
    She kept hoping Burton would phone, that they’d already let him out, but really it felt like they would, from what Leon said, so she kept clicking, deeper into random London. City in the game was London for sure, but with something bigger and harder-looking grown up out of it.
    When it was time, she got the log-in out of the tomahawk case, waved a finger for Milagros Coldiron SA, and entered the string.
    This time, she’d planned what she’d look at, going up.
    She got a closer look at the van as the copter emerged. More like an armored car than a van. Sort of heavy shouldered, like Conner’s trike. The bay she’d come out of was square, dark. She heard the voices, urgent still and just as impossible to understand.
    Same time of day she’d arrived before, late dusk. Wetter clouds, the building’s black-bronze face dull with condensation.
    Next she located the street she’d noticed before, the one that seemedto be paved with something like glass, lit from underneath. Water under there, moving?
    Looked for vehicles, seeing three.
    As the counter at ten o’clock ticked off the twentieth floor, the voices were gone.
    She first noticed it, the gray thing, as she passed the twenty-third. A dry gray, against the wet dark metal. Color of dead skin pulled from a blister. Size of a child’s backpack.
    Then she was past it, giving her full attention to a check in three directions, point recon style. Big dark towers, same height, far apart, in their grid across the older city, hers most likely one of them. No whale-thing in the sky.
    Gaming having taught her to pay attention to anything that didn’t fit, she tried to get a quick second look, down-cam, at the backpack. Couldn’t find it.
    It overtook and passed her as she reached the thirty-seventh floor. Moving that way, it no longer reminded her of a backpack, but of the black egg case of an almost-extinct animal called a skate, that she’d seen on a beach in South Carolina, an alien-looking rectangle with a single twisted horn at each corner. Tumbling straight up the building now, in a smooth sequence of sticky-footed somersaults. Caught itself with the two tips of whichever pair of horns, or legs, was leading, flipped over, then propelled itself higher with the pair it had just used to grip the surface.
    Following it up-cam, she tried to rise more quickly, but that still wasn’t under her control. Lost sight of it again. Maybe there had been a way for it to enter the building. She’d watched Macon print little pneumatic bots, like big leeches, that moved something like that, but slower.
    Her mother called the skate case a mermaid’s purse, but Burton said the local people had called them devil’s handbags. It had looked like it ought to be dangerous, poisonous, but it wasn’t.
    Kept an eye out for the thing, the rest of the way up to the fifty-sixth floor, where she found the same balcony folded down but the window frosted, disappointing. Guessed she’d missed the party, but maybe she could get an idea how it had gone. Bugs didn’t seem to be around. Whatever had kept the ride up like an elevator was gone now. She ran a quick perimeter check, hoping for another window, but nothing had changed. No bugs, either.
    Back to the frosted glass. Gave it five minutes there, five more, then ran another perimeter. On the far side, a grate she hadn’t noticed before was steaming.
    Starting to miss the bugs.
    Down-camera, a very large vehicle with a single headlight went by, fast.
    She’d just gotten around to the window again when it depolarized, and there was the woman, saying something to someone she couldn’t see.
    Flynne stopped, let the gyros hold her there.
    No