The Peripheral Read Online Free Page B

swiped his tongue from right to left, across the roof of his mouth, blanking his phone. Saw the unmade bed.
    “How does she look to you?” Rainey asked.
    “Fine,” he said, getting up.
    He walked to the vertically concave corner window. It depolarized. He looked down on the intersection, its wholly predictable absence of movement. Free of crusted salt, drama, atonal windsong. Across Bloomsbury Street, a meter-long mantis in shiny British racing green, with yellow decals, clung to a Queen Anne façade, performing minor maintenance. Some hobbyist was operating it telepresently, he assumed. Something better done by an invisible swarm of assemblers.
    “She seriously proposed to do this naked,” Rainey said, “and covered in tattoos.”
    “Hardly covered. You’ve seen the miniatures of her previous skins. That’s covered.”
    “I’ve managed not to, thank you.”
    He double-tapped the roof of his mouth, causing the feeds, left and right, from their respective corners of the square, to show him the boss patcher and his cohort of eleven, looking up, unmoving.
    “Look at them,” he said.
    “You really hate them, don’t you?”
    “Why shouldn’t I? Look at them.”
    “We’re not supposed to like their looks, obviously. The cannibalism’s problematic, if those stories are true, but they did clear the water column, and for virtually no capital outlay on anyone’s part. And they now arguably own the world’s single largest chunk of recycled polymer. Which feels like a country, to me, if not yet a nation-state.”
    The patchers had shuffled into a rough circle, with their scooters and kick-bikes, around their boss, who’d left his penny farthing on its side at the edge of the square. The others were as small as the boss was large, compactly disgusting cartoons of rough gray flesh. They wore layers of rags, gray with sun and salt. Modification had run rampant, of course. The more obviously female among them were six-breasted, their exposed flesh marked not with tattoos but intricately meaningless patterns expressed in pseudo-ichthyotic scaling. They all had the same bare, toeless, shoe-like feet. Their rags fluttered in the wind, nothing else in the square moving.
    On the central feed, Daedra soared down, swinging out wide, up again. The parafoil was altering its width, profile.
    “Here she comes,” said Rainey.
    Daedra came in low, along the widest of the intersecting avenues, the parafoil morphing rhythmically now, braking, like speeded-up footage of a jellyfish. She scarcely stumbled, as her feet found the polymer, throwing up puffs of salt.
    The parafoil released her, instantly shrinking, to land on four unlikely legs, but only for a second or two. Then it lay there, bilobed again, logo uppermost. It would never have fallen logo-down, he knew. Another money shot. The feed from the micro closed.
    On the two feeds from the cams above the square, from their opposing angles, Daedra spent momentum, running, keeping impressively upright, into the circle of small figures.
    The boss patcher shifted his feet, turning. His eyes, set on the corners of his vast, entirely inhuman head, looked like something a child had scribbled, then erased.
    “This is it,” said Rainey.
    Daedra raised her right hand in what might either have been a gesture of greeting, or evidence that she came unarmed.
    Her left, Netherton saw, was beginning to unzip the jumpsuit. The zipper jammed, a palm’s width beneath her sternum.
    “Bitch,” said Rainey, almost cheerfully, as a micro-expression, curdled fury, crossed Daedra’s face.
    The boss patcher’s left hand, like a piece of sporting equipment fashioned from salt-stained gray leather, closed around her right wrist. He lifted her, her carefully scuffed shoes parting with the translucent pavement. She kicked him, hard, in his slack stomach, just above the ragged plastic tutu, salt jumping from the point of impact.
    He drew her closer, so that she dangled above the horn-tipped