The Peripheral by William Gibson Read Free Book Online Page B

sign there had ever even been a party. Room didn’t look the same at all, like the little bots had been moving serious furniture. The long table was gone. Now there were armchairs, a couch, rugs, softer lighting.
    The woman wore striped pajama bottoms and a black t-shirt. Flynne guessed she’d only recently gotten out of bed, because she had the bedhead you could have with hair that good.
    Check for bugs, she reminded herself, but they still weren’t there.
    The woman laughed, as if the person Flynne couldn’t see had said something. Had that been her ass against the window, the time before? Was she talking to the man who’d kissed her, or tried to? Had that worked out after all, the party great, and then they’d spent the night together?
    She forced herself to do another perimeter, a slow one, watching for bugs, the runaway backpack, anything. The steam had gone, and now she couldn’t see where the grate had been. That gave her the feelingthat the building was alive, maybe conscious, with the woman inside it laughing, high up in the bugless night. Thinking that, she felt close heat in the trailer, sweat trickling.
    Darker now. So few lights in the city, and none at all on the big blank towers.
    Coming back around, she found them standing at the window, looking out, his arm around her. Just that much taller than she was, like a model from an ad where they didn’t want to stress ethnicity, dark hair and the start of a beard to match, expression cold. The woman spoke, he answered, and the coldness Flynne had seen was gone. The woman beside him wouldn’t have seen it at all.
    He wore a dark brown robe. You smile a lot, she thought.
    Part of the glass in front of them was sliding sideways, and as it did, a skinny horizontal rod rose from the forward edge of the ledge, bringing up a quivering soap bubble. The rod stopped rising. Bubble became greenish glass.
    She remembered the SS officer, when she’d worked for Dwight. Face of the man at the window reminded her.
    She’d crouched for three days on Janice and Madison’s couch, taking her old phone when she ran to the bathroom and back, so as not to miss her chance to kill him.
    Janice brought her the herbal tea Burton made her have with the wakey he’d left, white pills, built two counties over. No coffee, he said.
    The SS officer was really an accountant in Florida, the man Dwight played against, and nobody had ever killed him. Dwight never fought, himself, just relayed orders from the tacticians he hired. The Florida accountant was his own tactician, and a stone killer to boot. When he won a campaign, which he usually did, Dwight lost money. That kind of gambling was illegal, and federally, but there were ways around that. Neither Dwight nor the accountant needed the money they won, or cared about what they lost, not really. Players like Flynne were paid on the basis of kills, and on how long they could survive in a given campaign.
    She’d gotten to feeling that what the accountant most liked, about killing them, was that it really cost them. Not just that he was better at it than they were, but that it actually hurt them to lose. People on her squad were feeding their children with what they earned playing, and maybe that was all they had, like she was paying Pharma Jon for her mother’s prescriptions. Now he’d gone and done it again, killed everyone on her squad, one after another, taking his time, enjoying it. He was hunting her now, while she circled, alone, deeper into that French forest and the flying snow.
    But then Madison called Burton, and Burton came over, sat on the couch beside her, watching her play, and told her how he saw it.
    How the SS officer, convinced he was hunting her, wasn’t seeing it right. Because really, now, Burton said, she was hunting him. Or would be, as soon as she realized she was, while his failure to see it was a done deal, fully underway, growing, a wrong path. He said he’d show her how to see it, but he’d need her not to