Zero History

80. FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
Look,” said Fiona, “it’s you.”
Garreth had ordered her aloft again. Now she showed Milgrim her iPhone, the camo
tarp rustling around them.
“That’s Ajay?” Two figures on the little screen, from a high angle, steel-engraved in
washed-out green. One of them shuffling, dejected, head down, shoulders too wide for
Milgrim’s jacket. The other man was short, broad, something round and flat on his head.
Ajay’s hands were together, crossed, just above crotch-level, in what looked like a gesture
of modesty. Handcuffed.
Fiona swung down, hovered, catching them as they passed, into and out of frame.
Milgrim thought Ajay was doing a good job of conveying abject surrender, but otherwise
he didn’t see the resemblance. Chandra seemed to have done a better job with the sprayon
hair this time.
The other man, Milgrim thought, looked as if someone had subjected the Dalai Lama to
the gravity of a planet with greater mass than Earth’s. Short, extremely sturdy, ageindeterminate,
he wore a sort of beret, level across his forehead, with a pom-pom on top.
As the subjects left her frame, Fiona’s thumbs moved, whirling the point of view back
up, reminding Milgrim to check his own iPhone, where he found his penguin looking at
grass and low bushes.
When he glanced back, Fiona had found three more figures, approaching on the
Scrubs.
One was Chombo, still furled in his tissue-thin coat, and looking much more
convincingly unhappy than Ajay’s Milgrim. To Chombo’s left came Foley, limping
visibly, wearing darker pants than the ones that had elicited his nickname. He still had his
cap, though, and the short dark jacket he’d worn in Paris. On Chombo’s right, Milgrim
saw, to his horror, was the man from Edge City Family Restaurant, Winnie’s other Mike,
the one with the mullet and the knife in his Toters.
“He wants you over here,” Fiona said, meaning where her drone was, “looking for the
one I lost. Move.”
Milgrim sank his concentration into the bright little rectangle, penguin-space, his
thumbs tapping. He rolled, corrected for it, swam higher in the air.
Fiona’s drone’s night vision was so much better than the penguin’s. The penguin’s
suffered from a kind of infrared myopia; the darker it was, the closer he had to get, and
the brighter he had to make the penguin’s infrared LEDs. Which were none too bright to
begin with, according to Fiona. The grass below presented in a sort of cheesy pointillism,
monochrome, faintly green, stripped of detail. Though if anyone were there, he thought,
he’d see them.