The street door is white-painted oak, but the enamel is yellowed, chipped and smudged, pre-reno. The spy-tube set into it hasn't been clean enough to see through since World War II.
She unlocks and opens it.
"Cayce? I'm Boone Chu. Glad to meet you." Extending his hand.
He's still wearing the leather car coat with the faded seams. Right hand extended, his left around the leather handle of the little suitcase, battered and buffed, that she'd noticed a few hours earlier, in Soho.
"Hello," she says, and shakes his hand.
- /
Boone Chu kicks back cowboy-style, legs crossed, on Damien's new brown couch. "You've worked for Blue Ant before?" He looks somewhat gimlet-eyed now, though maybe she's misreading some Chinese-American nerd thing, an unabashed intensity of focus.
"A few jobs in New York." From her perch on the workstation chair.
"Freelance?"
"That's right."
"Me too."
"What do you do?"
"Systems." He waits a beat. "University of Texas, Harvard, then I had a start-up. Which tanked."
He doesn't sound bitter, though people who say this seldom do, she's noticed, which she finds a little creepy. They generally know better. She hopes he isn't one of those. "I Google you, I get… ?"
"Sound of relatively high-profile start-up, tanking loudly. Certain amount of'white-hat hacker' coverage, before that, but that's media." He looks over at the robot girls propped against the wall, but doesn't ask.
"What was your start-up about?"
"Security."
"Where do you live?"
"Washington state. I've got a cliff on Orcas with a 'fifty-one Airstream propped up against it on railroad ties. It's held together with mold, and something that eats aluminum. I was going to build a house, but now I can't bring myself to spoil the view.''
"You're based there?
"I'm based in this." He toes the child-sized antique suitcase. "Where do you live, Cayce?"
"West One Hundred and Eleventh."
"Actually 1 knew you lived in New York."
"You did?"
"I Googled you."
She hears the kettle start to boil. She's left the whistle off. She gets up. He gets up too and follows her into the kitchen. "Nice yellow," he says.
"Damien Pease."
"Pardon?"
"Pease. Porridge hot. The video director. Know his work?"
"Not offhand."
"It's his flat. What did Bigend offer you, exactly, Boone?" '
"Partnership, he said."
She watches him watching her expression as he speaks.
"With him," he continues. "Whatever that means. He wants me to work with you. To find the person or persons uploading the video clips. We'd have as much as we needed for expenses, but I'm not sure what the payoff might consist of." He has one of those tall, impossibly dense Chinese-guy brush cuts, and
"Did he tell you why he wants us to work together? Or why he'd want me at all?" She tosses tea-sub into the pot and pours water over the bags. "Sorry. Forgot to ask if you wanted coffee."
"Tea's fine." He goes to the sink and starts rinsing out two mugs she's left there. Something about his movements reminding her of a chef she'd once dated. The way he briskly refolds the tea towel before using it to dry the mugs. "He said that you don't need to reinvent any wheels."
He puts the mugs down, side by side. "He said that if anyone could figure out where this stuff comes from, it would be you."
"And you?"
"I'm supposed to facilitate. You have an idea, I make it happen."
She looks at him. "You can do that?"
"I'm not magic, but I'm handy. Hands-on generalist, you might say."
She pours. "Do you want to do it?"
He picks up his tea-sub. Sniffs. "What is it?"
"I don't know. It's Damien's. No caffeine, though."
He blows to cool it, then sips. Winces. "Hot."
"Well, do you? Want to do it?"
Looks at her, steam rising from the cup he still holds close to his mouth. "I'm of two minds." He lowers the cup. "It's an interesting problem, from a theoretical point of view, and as far as we know no one's solved it yet. I'm available, and Bigend has a lot of money to throw at it."
"That's your upside?"
He nods, sips more tea-sub. Winces again. "Downside is Bigend. Hard to quantify that, isn't it?" He goes to the kitchen window and seems to be looking out, but then he points to the round transparent ventilator fan set into a six-inch hole in one pane of glass. "We don't have those things. They're everywhere, here. Always have been. I'm not even sure what they're supposed to do."
"They're part of the mirror-world," Cayce says.
"Mirror-world?"
"The difference."
"My idea of a mirror-world is Bangkok. Asia somewhere. This is just more of our stuff."
"No," she tells him, "different stuff. That's why you noticed that vent. They invented that here, probably, and made it here. This was an industrial nation. Buy a pair of scissors, you got British scissors. They made all their own stuff. Kept imports expensive. Same thing in Japan. All their bits and pieces were different, from the ground up."
