Zero History

34. THE ORDER FLOW
Milgrim woke as some large vehicle groaned past in the street, or perhaps in dream,
chains rattling. He’d slept with the windows open.
He sat up and looked at the blank screen of Hollis’s laptop, on the cushioned ledge
beneath the windows. The battery needed a charge, but she hadn’t given him the charger.
He guessed he had enough power left to check for Winnie’s reply to his message of the
night before. He’d intended to send Pamela the photos of Foley as well, and had bought
the cable he’d need to do that, but after his conversation with Bigend he wasn’t sure
about Blue Ant’s e-mail system. He imagined Sleight had been in charge of all of that.
How complicated could that ultimately become, for Bigend?
With no Neo, and the laptop off, he had no way of knowing the time. The television
suspended from the ceiling could tell him, he supposed, but he decided to shower instead.
If it was time to go, Hollis would call him.
The shower was one of those telephone-handle arrangements, the stall largely
conceptual. He brushed his teeth with one hand while rinsing his torso with the other, his
battery-powered toothbrush loud in the small space. Toweling off, he thought of how
Bigend seemed to regard what was going on in Blue Ant as a sort of expected burn-off,
like some brushfire on the Nature Channel, brought on by an otherwise essential excess
of intelligence and ambition.
He put on his new socks and underwear from Galeries Lafayette, and an unworn but
creased shirt from Hackett. He remembered the Russians in the elevator. Foley. Winced.
He tucked the memory card, with his pictures of Foley on it, down into the top of his left
sock.
He edged around the bed, stood looking down at Parisians passing on the sidewalk
opposite. A graying, leonine man in a long dark coat. Then a tall girl in very nice boots.
He looked for Fiona, half expecting to see her astride her motorcycle, keeping watch. He
looked up then, but didn’t see the penguin either.
A tiny garret window popped open, on a building opposite, and a girl with short dark
hair thrust her head and shoulders through, into the morning, a cigarette between her lips.
Milgrim nodded. Addictions were being serviced. He sat down on the padded bench and
checked his Twitter. No Winnie. It was five after seven, he saw, earlier than he’d thought.
He packed his bag, putting the laptop in last. What would he do, once he’d returned it?
How would he keep in touch with Winnie? The fact of Winnie made his knowledge of
Blue Ant’s internal brushfire feel awkward. Otherwise, he imagined, without her, it
would mainly have been interesting, as Bigend didn’t seem particularly worried. Though
he’d never seen Bigend worried about anything. Where most people got worried, Bigend
seemed to become interested, and Milgrim knew that that could be strangely contagious.