The author wishes to thank two amazing bands, The Methadones and Shot Baker, for permission to reprint some of their lyrics

First published in Great Britain 2012

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

239 Kensington High Street

London W8 6SA

First e-book edition 2012

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2012

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

The digital experience that accompanies this book was created by The Shadow Gang in conjunction with the author (www.theshadowgang.com)

ISBN 978 1 4052 5993 4 (hardback)

ISBN 978 1 4052 6430 3 (trade paperback)

ISBN 978 1 7803 1078 7 (ebook)

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For Katherine, Jake and Julia

Oh, that way madness lies;

let me shun that.

King Lear

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

One

Two

Three

Four

Artifact

Five

Six

Artifact

Seven

Eight

Nine

Artifact

Artifact

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Artifact

Artifact

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Artifact

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Artifact

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Artifact

ONE

A girl sat just three chairs down from Noah talking to her hand. To the back of her hand, actually, as she spread her fingers wide. Her fingertips were painted alternately red and gold, but not with fingernail polish, and not strictly on the fingernails. Rather, it looked as if she had used a can of spray paint.

She explained to the back of her hand that she was, “Perfectly all right. Perfectly all right.”

Noah thought she might have been pretty, but it was hard to really assess her face or body when his glance was drawn so irresistibly to the rope burn around her neck.

She started screaming when the orderlies came for her. They had to lift her up bodily, one on each rigid arm. Her mother, or perhaps older sister, stood with her hand over her mouth, wept and echoed the girl’s own speech.

“It’ll be all right,” said the sane one.

“I’m perfectly all right!” cried the crazy one.

The girl kicked her chair across the floor, and shot Noah a savage look from eyes edged red.

Noah Cotton. Sixteen years old. He had brown hair that defaulted to bed head without any effort on his part. His lips were full and downturned just a little, as if prepared for sadness. The nose was strong and sharp, a damned-near-perfect nose. But of course it was those blue eyes that drew you in. Where had he gotten eyes that blue? They looked unnatural. Like someone wearing tinted contact lenses. And Noah would turn those bright, unnatural blue eyes on you, and you wouldn’t know whether you were looking into profound depths or maybe just into a very crazy place.

Well, if the answer was, “A very crazy place,” then he would fit in perfectly with his location, which was the waiting room in the central hall of The Brick.

This place weighed down on him. Maybe it was the history. In the eighteenth century it had been called the Lord Japheth LeMay Asylum for the Incurably Mad. By the mid-nineteenth century that had been softened a bit to become the East London Asylum for the Insane.

Today it was officially called the East London Hospital for the Treatment of Serious Mental Illness.

But no one called it that, at least not outside the facility itself. Out in the world it was called The Brick.

It was a redbrick architectural monstrosity that had grown—metastasized, maybe—over the course of more than two hundred years. It wasn’t all brick. Some of the towers and wings were stone. Some outbuildings were flaking, painted plaster over ancient half-timbered walls. But the massive hall, with its fraternal twin towers, the Bishop and the Rook—one tall and pointed, the other squat and intimidating—were all in soot-encrusted red brick.

Noah was doing his best not to feel the echoes of the mad girl’s cries, but the waiting room was about as schizophrenic as many of the patients: ancient oil paintings, a vaguely off-kilter black-and-white tile floor, yellow walls that were probably someone’s idea of cheerful, and furniture from a rummage sale. Then, to top it all off, there was the chandelier, which had to have been plundered from some gaudy palace during a long-ago colonial war. It cast a light that was excellent at creating shadows, so that even the space under the chairs looked as if it might be the dark lair of tiny monsters.

Noah was here to visit his brother, Alex. His much older brother, Alex. Age twenty-five, ex-army veteran of Afghanistan, Royal Highland Fusiliers. (Motto: Nemo Me Impugn Lacessit—No One Assails Me with Impunity. Or the alternative version—Do Not Fuck with Us or We Will Hurt You.) Shoulders you could break a cinder block on, disciplined, up every morning to run ten kilometers in whatever weather London had on offer.

Alex Cotton, who had earned the Conspicuous Gallantry Cross for basically having balls so big he had taken out three Hajis in a machine-gun nest while literally carrying a wounded comrade on his back.

And now . . .

Noah’s name was called. An attendant, a swaggering thug with fat legs, a Taser in one pocket and a leather-covered sap sticking out of the other, led the way. Past office doorways. Through a reinforced glass and steel security door.

Through a second security door.

Past the control center where bored guards watched flickering screens and discussed sports with their feet up.

Through a third door. This one had to be buzzed open by an attendant on the other side.

And here the screams and wails and sudden shrill, rising cries and gut-wrenching sobs began. The sounds leaked through steel doors of individual rooms: cells, in reality.

Noah didn’t want to feel those screams inside himself, but he wasn’t armored, he wasn’t impervious. Each wild trill of mad laughter made him flinch as if he was being whipped.

A nurse and two scruffy attendants were making their way from door to door. One of the attendants pushed a squeaky cart loaded with little plastic cups, each designated with a code number and containing no fewer than half a dozen and sometimes a baker’s dozen brightly colored pills.

The pill crew came to a door, knocked, warned the inmate to stand back, waited, then unlocked and opened the door. One attendant—no, let’s cut the bull, they were guards, turnkeys, screws, but not attendants—went inside with the nurse while the remaining guard stood ready with a Taser.

Noah reached Alex’s cell. Number ninety-one.

“Don’t worry, he’s shackled,” the guard said. “Just don’t try to touch him. He don’t like people touching him.” The guard grinned ruefully and shook his head in a way that suggested Noah knew what he meant.

The door opened on a room five feet wide, eight feet deep. The only furnishing was a steel bunk. Fat steel bolts fixed the cot to the cracked tile floor. There was a radio on a high shelf, too high for a person to reach. The BBC was on, soft, some politician being grilled.

Alex Cotton sat on the edge of the bunk. His wrists were handcuffed to steel rings on either end. The effect was to stretch his arms out and limit his ability to move anything but his head.

The ghost of Alex Cotton turned hollow, vacant eyes on his little brother.

Noah couldn’t speak for a moment. Because what he wanted to say was, “This is the wrong room. That’s not my brother.”

Then a low growl that at first sounded as if it might be coming from the radio. An animal sound. Alex Cotton’s mouth snapped suddenly, like a shark missing the bait.

“Alex,” Noah said. “It’s me. It’s just me, Noah.”

The guttural sound again. Alex’s eyes suddenly focused. He stared at Noah, shook his head as if the vision caused him pain.

Noah made just the slightest move to touch his brother’s strained arm. Alex yanked his whole body as far away as he could, which was no more than a few inches. He strained so hard that the handcuffs drew blood.

Noah backed away, held up his hands reassuringly.

“Told you, don’t try and touch him, he’ll start screaming about his little spiders and shit,” the guard said.

“Alex, it’s just me. It’s Noah.”

“Nano nano nano nano,” Alex said in a singsong voice, and then giggled. He wiggled his fingertips like he was acting something out.

“Nano? What is that, Alex?” He whispered it, speaking as he would to a frightened child. Gentle.

“Heh heh heh, no. No. No no no nano nano nano. No.”

Noah waited until he was done. He refused to look away. This was his brother. What was left of his brother.

“Alex, no one can figure this out. No one can figure out what happened to you. You know what I mean, to have you end up here.”

Explain your craziness, crazy man. Tell me what happened to my brother.

“Nano, macro, nano, macro,” Alex muttered.

“He says that a lot,” the guard offered. “Mostly nano.”

“Is this from the war?” Noah asked, ignoring the guard. He wanted an explanation. None of the doctors had been very convincing. Everyone said it was probably the war, but Alex had been examined for post-traumatic stress when he came home, and everything had seemed fine with him. He and Noah had taken in some sports, gone on a road trip to the Cornish coast for the beach and for some girl Alex knew. His brother had been a little distracted, but that was all. Distracted.

The guard hadn’t answered.

“I mean, is it memories and all that?” Noah pressed. “Is that what he goes on about? Afghanistan?”

To his surprise, it was Alex who answered.

“Haji?” Alex laughed a crooked-mouth laugh, like half his face was paralyzed. “Not Haji. Bug Man,” Alex said. “The Buuug Man. One, two, three. All dead. Poof!”

“That’s pretty good for him,” the guard opined approvingly.

And for a few seconds it almost seemed as if the crazy had cleared away. Like Alex was straining to make his mouth say words. His voice went down into a whisper. He nodded, like he was saying, Pay attention to this; this is important.

This. Is. Important.

Then he said, “Berserk.”

Alex nodded, satisfied with himself, then kept nodding harder and harder, until his whole body was vibrating almost like some kind of seizure. The shackles rattled the bed. The whole cell seemed to vibrate in sympathy.

“Berserk!” Alex said, louder now and louder still until he was shouting it.

“Berserk! Berserk!”

“Jesus,” Noah said, hating himself for reacting, for letting his horror show.

“Once he starts on this, it’s over for the day,” the guard said wearily. He grabbed Noah’s arm, not unkindly. “Goes on for hours with this ‘Berserk’ shite of his.”

“Berserk! Berserk!”

Noah let himself be led from the cell.

“Berserk!”

When he heard the door locked behind him, he felt a wave of sickness and relief. But it didn’t stop the sound of his mad brother’s cries, which followed him down the hallway, drilling holes into Noah’s reeling mind.

“Berserk!”

“BERSERK!”

TWO

Stone McLure wasn’t model handsome. Not one of those guys who looked pretty. Even though he was just seventeen, Stone wasn’t really for girls. He was for women.

Women would look at him and let their eyes slide over his face and those shoulders, because, you know, women don’t stare the way men do. They just need a glance. And then, having memorized him with a glance, they would regret their marriage, regret their age, regret their sweatpants and faded Abercrombie T-shirts, regret that they were carrying a plastic bag of groceries in one hand and a twenty-four pack of Pampers in the other.

Stone pulled his earbuds out.

“Where are we stopping first?” he asked his father.

“We’ll refuel in San Francisco and pick up a second pilot. Then I have a brief meeting in Hokkaido, and it’s on to Singapore.” He said it without looking up from his work.

Earbuds back in.

Stone had curly dark hair and eyes like polished green marble with golden threads woven through. He had a brow that seemed designed by God to mark him as honest, a strong nose, a complexion that had surely never been marred by so much as a freckle, let alone a pimple—what pimple would dare?

He looked a bit like his father, Grey McLure—and most of the world knew Grey’s face—but Grey had the signs of weariness and wariness that came with being a billionaire of the better sort. A billionaire who had made his money with science and innovation and in all the ways you’d hope a billionaire would make his money.

They were sitting just a couple of feet apart in the back of a Cessna Citation X, Grey facing aft, Stone facing forward. It was a private jet, yes, but no more ostentatious than was absolutely necessary in a private jet. There was no hot flight attendant in a teasing uniform. No flowing Champagne. None of that. Grey’s jet was about business. And his son was learning that business.

Grey was drinking coffee from a mug that said fairly decent dad. See, a mug that said world’s best dad would have violated the Grey family’s style, which was self-deprecating, wry, and utterly devoted.

Grey was tapping away at his pad and sipping and tapping and frowning a bit from time to time.

Stone was reading a book on his own pad, not maybe paying as much attention as he should, because in his ears were the buds and through them came the raw, hoarse voice of Tony Kovacs.

Being here with my surroundings, Seeing all I’m looking at, Evolution winking at me, My face forms a smile.

Earbuds out.

“So this would be a flight measured more in days than in mere hours,” Stone said, and stretched his legs.

“Long flight,” his father acknowledged. “You could have spent the time with your grandmother in Maryland.”

Stone held up mock-surrender hands. “Did I sound like I was complaining?”

“Your grandmother loves you.”

“My grandmother loves painting ceramic figurines of First Ladies.”

“Historically accurate figurines,” Grey said and grinned. “You could have helped her decorate Abigail Fillmore’s bonnet.”

Stone pretended to weigh the alternatives. “Abigail’s bonnet . . . Singapore girls in formfitting saris. Hmm. Tough one.”

Earbuds back in.

Here am I living in it, Here am I in everything.

His sister, Sadie, had gotten him started on punk, probably thinking he needed something less, well, insipid than what he came up with by following his usual pattern: downloading whatever his friends were listening to. Sadie was like that, one of those people untouched by trend or fashion, comfortable building her own world out of what she liked, from tunes and styles and reads that could be so ancient they were cobwebbed, up through to things so new they barely existed yet. Sometimes it was like she imagined something and conjured it into reality.

Sadie could be a prickly little witch, but at sixteen she was who she was in a way that Stone could not quite equal. Didn’t bother him, not really. Stone had a defined role to play. He was the heir, the scion, the eldest. There’d been lots of times he envied Sadie’s freedom—man, who wouldn’t?—but he was okay with his destiny. Someone had to do it. Might as well be him.

Spent so much of my time thinking, Feeling like I’m under attack. Overlooking the reality in front of me, Wandering down so many paths.

And for his mother, whose ashes had settled into the Atlantic at the midpoint between her native London and her adopted New York.

He looked out of the window, veering his thoughts away from that last image. Not right now, not right now, not that memory.

Stone and his father had taken off from Teterboro and now were flying over the Meadowlands. Down below, a game. Football, American style.

Stone’s life had been split more or less evenly between New York and London, so he could appreciate both sets of sport obsession: football and baseball in the States, soccer and cricket in the UK. Still couldn’t imagine what anyone saw in hockey, because . . .

Then he remembered.

Earbuds out.

“Hey, isn’t Sadie at that game?”

Grey looked up and smiled, a conspiratorial look. “And I’m sure she’s loving every minute of it.”

Stone laughed. “Yeah. Nothing Sadie likes better than being outside in the cold and part of some big, cheering crowd.” He shook his head. “I hope the dude is worth it. Is it that Tony guy I met?”

Grey nodded. “I think highly of his father. Tony himself . . . well, I suppose I could offer Sadie some fatherly advice on that kid.”

They both burst out laughing. The idea of Sadie listening to advice from anyone. On any topic. Let alone her love life.

“You’re not that brave,” Stone teased.

“I’m not that stupid,” Grey countered with a look of mock fear. Then, in a softer tone, turning his eyes away, looking out and down, “She’s got your mother in her.”

Which just veered Stone back to a place he didn’t want to go. He nodded and didn’t trust his voice to answer. Not even a “Yeah.” Even one syllable could break his voice.

Earbuds in.

Shot Baker was done. Someone else was singing, another song Sadie had put on his playlist. Come to think of it, was there anything on it that Sadie hadn’t chosen for him?

Down below, the dome was a huge, oblong cereal bowl filled with eighty thousand Jets fans. The Jets actually had eighty thousand fans this year, because it was early December and damned if they weren’t still in contention.

The dome’s cover had been drawn back to let fans take advantage of the clear, weak, low-slung sun of fall. The sleet and the cold wind would come soon enough; a last sunny Sunday, even a chilly one, was not to be wasted.

A blimp turned lazily above the dome. It looked like some leisurely version of sperm and egg from up here. The image brought a smile to Stone’s lips. He totally had to work that into his next English comp paper. Freak out his teacher with a sudden display of analogy. Or was it simile?

Earbuds out, reluctantly.

“Hey, I see her head. That’s her, on the left,” Stone said. “End zone.” Making conversation so Grey wouldn’t think he was upset about the mention of Mom. From this height the tops of heads were a mere suggestion of a dot.

“No,” Grey said, “She’s closer to midfield.”

Like he knew right where she was sitting. Playing along, Stone thought. Although, sometimes it seemed to Stone that their father knew Sadie’s every move. They had something, those two.

Sadie and Grey fought—word battles with all kinds of subtext Stone could hear but not understand. Word ninjas, those two. Fortunately Stone had always gotten along with his sister, because he’d be the first to admit he could not throw down in a verbal battle with her. The girl could put a knife right into your ego.

Sometimes it made him jealous that Sadie and their father could yell at each other. He and Grey never did.

The jet banked a sharp left. Like the pilot had read Grey’s mind and wanted to give the boss a chance to peer down and make out the top of his daughter’s head. Or like—

The turn was too sharp.

Way too sharp, hard and sudden. The right wing was arcing downward.

Stone was pulled against the bulkhead by gravity. The pad fell from his father’s lap. Grey’s fairly decent dad mug scooted across the table and toppled over to roll down the aisle.

“What the hell?” Grey demanded.

There was an intercom in Grey’s armrest. He punched the button. “Kelly. What’s the matter?” Kelly, the pilot. She’d flown the jet for six years. Like a member of the family.

No answer.

“Strap in,” Grey told Stone. He stood up, but the g-forces threw him off-balance so that he had to sort of twist around his seat. He fell against a bulkhead and then pushed himself back up and lurched toward the cockpit door, moving like a drunk in a strong wind.

Now the jet was tilting not just to the right but downward. A definite dive. Like way too steep. Through the window Stone saw the field below already closer, and tilted crazily. Big men on a green rectangle seeming somehow to run uphill. He saw the Jumbotron screens showing a replay.

“Kelly!” Grey had reached the cockpit door, barely holding himself up. “Are you okay in there? What’s happening?”

Grey rattled the little door handle. The door did not open.

That’s when Grey looked back at his son. Their eyes met.

Weird how much a two-second glance could convey. Fear. Sadness. Regret.

Defeat.

Grey banged on the cockpit door. “Open up, Kelly! Open the door!”

Stone unbuckled and lurched to his feet. But the floor was falling away from him. It was as if he couldn’t fall fast enough to keep his feet on the floor. Like when a roller coaster crosses that first big crest and suddenly you are gravity’s toy. The ceiling came down and hit him. Not hard, but the ceiling had no business hitting him at all.

Stone didn’t walk to the cockpit door, he tumbled. He snatched at seat backs and missed, fingers slapping tan leather, feet scooting uselessly on carpet. He plowed hard into his father.

Grey was slamming himself as well as he could against the cockpit door. Yelling. Cursing, which was not something Grey McLure did.

The plane was tilted so sharply now that it was more vertical than horizontal. Stone lay on his back on the carpeted floor and kicked against the cockpit door beneath him, while his father lay pressed against the bulkhead and slammed himself against it.

“Dad! What’s happening?”

Stone kicked again and again.

A sudden give. The doorjamb cracked. One more hit would do it.

Stone hauled himself back up, using the seats to climb, like a slippery ladder, then dropped, feet punching out with every bit of power he had to give, and with a sound like a breaking branch the door gave way.

Stone fell through in a tangle with his father. The two of them hit Kelly’s seat and crashed into the instrument panel, smashed into the windshield. Pain shot through Stone’s knees, his elbow, his shoulder. Didn’t matter because now the green field was so near. Zooming up at him.

A flash of Kelly’s face, eyes blank, mouth bleeding from hitting the instrument panel, short-cut gray hair matted, staring hard in horror. Staring at something maybe only she could see.

A flash of the stands full of people.

His father flailing, legs tangling, something broken, head hanging the wrong way, too confused to . . .

“Dad!” A sob, not a shout.

Stone pushed himself back from the instrument panel and somehow found the stick with his right hand and pulled hard.

Kelly turned to look at him. Like Stone’s action was puzzling to her. Like she was amazed to find him there. With dreamy slowness she reached for the stick.

The three of them tangled together in a heap and the field rushing up at them. So fast.

Way too fast.

And Stone knew it.

But he pulled back on the stick and yelled, “Dad!” for no reason because there wasn’t anything Stone could do but look at him with eyes full of horror and so sad; so, so sad.

“Dad!”

The jet began to respond. The nose started to come up. The stadium seats looked like they were falling away, and now the top of the stadium, the upper rim was in view.

And some remote, still-functioning part of Stone’s brain realized they were actually inside the stadium. A jet. Inside a bowl. Climbing toward safety.

Faces. Stone could see thousands of faces staring up at him and so close now he could see the expressions of horror and see the eyes and open mouths and drinks being spilled, legs tripping as they tried to run away.

He saw team shirts.

A redheaded kid.

A mother pulling her baby close.

An old guy making the sign of the cross, like he was doing it in slow motion.

“Dad.”

Then the jet flipped. Up was down.

The jet was moving very fast. But not quite the speed of sound. Not quite the speed of sound, so the crunch of the aluminium nose hitting bodies and seats and concrete did reach Stone’s ears.

But before his brain could register the sound, Stone’s honest brow and strong nose and broad shoulders and his brain and ears, too, were smashed to jelly.

Stone was instantly dead, so he did not see that his father’s body was cut in two as it blew through the split side of the cockpit.

He did not see that a section of Grey’s shattered-melon head flew clear, bits of gray-and-pink matter falling away, a trail of brain.

A small piece—no bigger than a baby’s fist—of one of the great minds of modern times landed in a paper cup of Coors Light and sank into the foam.

Then the explosion.

THREE

Sadie McLure didn’t see the jet until it was far too late.

The boy she was with—Tony—was not a boyfriend. Not really. But maybe. If he grew up a little. If he got past being weird about the fact that his father was just a department manager at McLure Industries. That he lived in a house half the size of the McLure home’s garage.

“Sorry about these seats,” Tony said for, oh, about the tenth time. “I thought I might get access to my buddy’s skybox, but . . .”

Yeah, that was the problem for Sadie: not being in a skybox while she watched a game she didn’t understand or like.

Until Tony had brought it up, Sadie had had no idea what a skybox was.

So not the most important thing in the world, that disparity in income. If she limited herself to dating the kids of other billionaires, she wasn’t going to have much to choose from.

“I enjoy mixing with the common people,” Sadie said.

He looked startled.

“That was a joke,” she said. Then, when he didn’t smile, she added, “Kidding.”

Try to be nice, she told herself.

Try to be more flexible.

Sure, why not a football game? Maybe it would be fun. Unless of course it involved some otherwise perfectly attractive and intelligent boy apologizing for his five-year-old Toyota and his jacket, which was just . . . she didn’t even remember what brand, but he seemed to think it wasn’t the right brand.

If there was a downside to being well-off—and there weren’t many—it was that people assumed you must be a snob. And no amount of behaving normally could change some people’s mind.

“Have a nacho,” Sadie said, and offered him the cardboard tray.

“They’re pretty awful, aren’t they?” he replied. “Not exactly caviar.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve already had my caviar for the day,” Sadie said. And this time she didn’t bother to explain that that was a joke. Instead she just scooped up a jalapeño and popped a chip in her mouth and munched it gloomily.

This was going to be a long date.

Sadie could be described as a series of averages that added up to something not even slightly average. She was of average height and average weight. But she had a way of seeming far larger when she was determined or angry.

She was of average beauty. Unless she was flirting or wanted to be noticed by a guy, and then, so very much not average. She had the ability to go from, “Yeah, she’s kinda hot,” to “Oh my God, my heart just stopped,” simply by deciding to turn it on. Like a switch. She could aim her brown eyes and part her full lips and yes, right then, she could cause heart attacks.

And five minutes later be just a good-looking but not particularly noticeable girl.

At the moment she was not in heart-attack-causing mode. But she was getting to the point where she was starting to seem larger than she was. Intelligent, perceptive people knew this was dangerous. Tony was intelligent—she’d never have gone out with him otherwise—but he was not perceptive.

Jesus, Sadie wondered, probably under her breath, how long did these football games last? She felt as if it was entering its seventy-fifth hour.

She couldn’t just walk away, grab a cab, and go home; Tony would think it was some reflection on his lack of a diamond-encased phone or whatever.

Could she sneak a single earbud into the ear away from Tony? Would he notice? This would all go so much better with some music or an audiobook. Or maybe just white noise. Or maybe a beer to dull the dullness of it all.

“Clearly, I need a fake ID,” Sadie said, but too quietly for Tony to hear it over a load groan as a pass went sailing over the head of the receiver.

Sadie noticed the jet only after it had already started its too-sharp turn.

She didn’t recognize it as her father’s. Not at first. Grey wasn’t the kind of guy who would paint his plane with some company logo.

“That plane,” she said to Tony. She poked his arm to get his attention.

“What?”

“Look at it. Look what it’s doing.”

And the engine noise was wrong. Too loud. Too close.

A frozen moment for her brain to accept the impossible as the inevitable.

The jet would hit the stands. There was no stopping it. It was starting to pull up but way too late.

Sadie grabbed Tony’s shoulder. Not for comfort but to get him moving. “Tony. Run!”

Tony dug in his heels, scowled at her. Sadie was already moving and she plowed into him, knocked him over, skinned her knee right through her jeans as she tripped, but levered one foot beneath herself, stepped on Tony’s most excellent abs, pushed off, and leapt away.

The jet roared over her head, a sound like the end of the world, except that the next sound was louder still.

The impact buckled her knees as it earthquaked the stands.

Then, a beat. Not silence, just a little dip in the sound storm.

Then a new sound as tons of jet fuel ignited. A clap of thunder from a cloud not fifty feet away.

Fire.

Things flying through the air. Big foam fingers and the hands that had been waving them. Paper cups and popcorn and hot dogs and body parts, so many of those, tumbling missiles of gore flying through the air.

The blast wave so overwhelming, so irresistible, that she wouldn’t even realize for several minutes that she had been thrown thirty feet, tossed like a leaf before a leaf blower, to land on her back against a seat, the impact softened by the body of a little girl. Thrown away like a doll God was tired of playing with.

She felt the heat, like someone had opened a pizza oven inches from her face. And set off a hand grenade amid the cheese and pepperoni. The first inch of hair caught fire but was quickly extinguished as air rushed back to the vacuum of the explosion.

The next minutes passed in a sort of loud silence. She heard none of the cries. Could no longer hear the sounds of falling debris all around her. Could hear only the world’s loudest car alarm screaming in her brain, a siren that came not from outside her head but from inside.

Sadie rolled off the crushed form of the girl. On hands and knees between rows of seats. Something sticky squishing up through her fingers. Something red and white: bloody fat. Just a chunk of it, the size of a ham.

Should do something, should do something, her brain kept saying. But what? Run away? Scream?

Now she noticed that her left arm was turned in a direction arms didn’t turn. There was no pain, just the sight of bones—her own bones—sticking through the skin of her forearm. Thin white sticks jutting from a gash filled with raw hamburger.

She screamed. Probably. She couldn’t hear, but she felt her mouth stretch wide.

She stood up.

The fire was uphill from her in the stands, maybe thirty rows up. A tail fin was intact but being swiftly consumed by the oily fire. A pillar of thick, greasy smoke swirled and filled her nostrils with the stench of gas stations and barbecued meat before finding its upward path.

The main fire burned without much color to the flame.

Bodies burned yellow and orange.

Unless he had been blown clear, Tony’s would be one of them.

A fat man crawled away, pulling himself along on his elbows as fire crawled up his legs.

A boy, maybe ten, squatted beside his mother’s head.

Sadie realized a different scene of madness was going on behind her. She turned and saw a panicked crowd shoving and pushing like a herd of buffalo on the run from a lion.

But others weren’t running away but walking warily toward the carnage.

A man reached her and mouthed words at her. She touched her ear, and he seemed to get it. He looked at her broken arm and did an odd thing. He kissed his fingertips and touched them to her shoulder and moved along. Later it would seem strange. At that moment, no.

The tail of the plane was collapsing into the fire. Through the smoke Sadie just made out the registration number. She’d already known, somewhere down in her shocked brain. The number just confirmed it.

She wanted to believe something different. She wanted to believe her father and brother were not in that hell of fire and smoke. She wanted to believe that she was breathing something that was not the smoke of their roasted bodies. But it was hard to pretend. That took an effort she couldn’t muster, not just yet.

Right now she could believe that everyone, everywhere was dead. She could believe she was dead.

She looked down then and saw blood all down one trouser leg. Saturated denim. She stared at this, stupid, something going very wrong with her brain.

And then the stadium spun like a top and she fell.

*

“Good twitch,” the Bug Man whispered to himself, a quiet congratulations. Satisfaction at a victory. Not that it was much of one. However dramatic the end result might be in the macro, in the nano it had just been a long wire job. There’d been no bug-on-bug fighting. Just wiring, connecting image to action.

Anyone could have done it. But could they have done it as fast? Could they have wired the pilot’s brain in three days? And set her up to have a switch thrown as dramatically as this?

Hell, no.

He pulled his left hand from the glove. Then his right hand. They came free with a slight sucking sound. And with his hands freed he reached up and worked the tight helmet off his head.

Had to get that back strap adjusted right. It was still digging into the back of his head where the flesh of his neck met the close-cropped skull.

He was alone. There were larger rooms here on the fifty-ninth floor, and other twitcher stations with as many as four consoles. But the Bug Man rated a private space. Had he pressed the button for the motorized shade, he’d have seen the spire of the Chrysler Building a block to the west. No other twitcher had that view—not that he looked at it much. It wasn’t about the view, it was about having the right to it.

The room was simple, scarcely furnished aside from the console. The light was low, just a glow coming from the Peace Pearl aromatherapy candles in their elegant crystal dish. And the gray light of static on the monitor.

The Bug Man breathed.

A win. Take it, rack it, add it to the total.

He had known it was done when all eighteen nanobots—two fighters and sixteen frantic spinners—in the pilot had gone dark at the same instant.

Could anyone else have run eighteen bugs at once, with sixteen actively laying wire? Even platooned? No. No one. Let them try.

Still, just a wire job. Now if Vincent had been coming at him, yeah, then it would have been mythic. Could he have pulled that off? Maybe. No good would come from underestimating Vincent. Vincent had twitch.

The Bug Man glanced at the display panel, checking a readout from the telemetry off the lone “sneaker” nanobot on Sadie McLure’s date, hiding out up in his hair where no one would look. The readout showed a sudden spike from ambient temperature of twelve Celsius to sixty-three Celsius.

Fireball.

But not enough to kill the kid. Not enough to kill Sadie unless she was a lot closer to the explosion or else took some shrapnel.

Success. But not total. In all likelihood there was still a McLure.

Bug Man knew they’d all be waiting outside his room to congratulate him. He dreaded it because they would have the TV on and they’d be watching it all in lurid color, hanging on the tension-pitched voices of reporters in helicopters.

Bug Man didn’t like postmortems. It was enough to succeed. There was no point in wallowing in it and high-fiving and all the rest.

He wished he didn’t have to go out at all. But he needed to pee in the worst way.

He fumbled for his phone and stuffed the earbuds in. He found the music he was looking for.

When enemies start posing as friends, To keep you even closer in the end, The rooms turn to black. A kitchen knife is twisting in my back.

Bug Man had no friends. Not in this life. Not in this job. And plenty of people would put a knife in his back. Paranoia? Hah. Paranoia was common sense.

He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and, with a deep, bracing breath, opened the door.

Sure enough, Jindal was waiting with a high-five. Jindal was . . . well, what was he, exactly? A sort of office manager for twitchers? He saw himself as being in some kind of position of authority. The twitchers saw him as the guy who made sure the fridge had plenty of Red Bull.

Thirty-five years old, grinning ingratiatingly at a sixteen-year-old kid in a hoodie. Sucking up. Even doing a little dance move, like he was trying to impress the Bug Man with a flash of ghetto. Bug Man was from Knightsbridge, a pricey neighborhood in London. He was not from the Bronx. But what did Jindal know? Any black face had to be ghetto.

“The damn signal repeater on the blimp went weak on me, Jindal,” Bug Man said, a little too loud over the music in his ears. “I was down to eighty percent.”

Let’s see if Jindal wanted to dance about a glitchy repeater. Bug Man pushed past him.

But Burnofsky was a different thing. Couldn’t really just blow off Burnofsky. He might be a sixty-year-old burnout with a six-day growth of white whiskers and a drunk’s chewed-up nose, but Burnofsky had game. No one was a better twitcher than Anthony Elder aka Bug Man, but if there was a close number two it was Burnofsky.

After all, he had created the game.

Bug Man pulled out one earbud. The band was going on about watching the company that you keep. Burnofsky was making that twisted, sneering face that was his most pleasant expression.

“S’matter, Bug? You don’t want to see the video?”

“Bugger off, Burnofsky. I need a slash.”

Burnofsky must have already been hitting the Thermos where he kept his chilled vodka. He grabbed Bug Man’s shoulder and spun him around. “Come on, kid. Don’t you want to see the macro? This is an accomplishment. A great moment for all of us.”

Bug Man knocked the old drunk’s hand away, but not before being exposed to a high-def visual of devastation. Looked like a camera angle from that same blimp, too steady to be a helicopter. Smoke and bodies.

Bug Man turned away. Not because it was too terrible to see, but because it was irrelevant. “I just play the game, old man.”

“The Twins will want to thank you,” Burnofsky taunted. “You going to tell them to ‘bugger off’, too? I mean, you struck a major blow today, kid. Grey McLure and his boy are charcoal briquettes. You’ve stepped up to the big times, Anthony: you’re a mass murderer now, up in the macro, not just shooting spiders down in the meat. And we’re all one step closer to a world of perfect peace, happiness, and universal brotherhood.”

“I just want to be one step closer to the loo, man,” Bug Man said.

“It’s called the restroom in this country, you little British bastard.”

He started to move away, but Burnofsky stepped suddenly closer, put his bloodless, papery-fleshed hands on Bug Man’s neck, pulled him close, and breathed eighty-proof fumes into his ear. “You’ll grow up some day, Anthony. You’ll know what you did.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “And it will eat you alive.”

Bug Man shoved him back, but not so hard as to knock him down. “How stupid are you, Burnofsky?” Bug Man grinned and shook his head. He pointed a finger at his own temple. “I just rewired that pilot’s brain. You think I won’t rewire my own? You know, if I ever feel the need?”

That shut Burnofsky up. The old man took a step back, frowned, and waved his hand like he was trying to block the sight of Bug Man’s smooth face.

“The macro is all micro, old man. You drown your conscience in booze or whatever it is you smoke that makes you smell like roadkill . . .” He saw Burnofsky glance nervously back at Jindal. So: Burnofsky thought that was a secret, did he? Old fool. “You do what you have to do, Burnofsky. It’s not my business, is it? But I have a better way. Snip snip, wire wire. I mean, you know, if I ever get old and soft in the head like you. Now: I either go to the toilet or pee on your leg.”

FOUR

Sadie McLure had passed out in the ambulance on the way to the ER.

She’d awakened in bits and pieces, in flashes of light, and hovering faces, and tiled ceilings and fluorescent fixtures rushing by overhead. Images of green scrubs, masks, tubes, and shiny metal instruments.

Like a dream. Not a good dream.

Sharp, breathtaking pain from her arm when someone jostled it.

And with the scrubs came the black suits. Security. Protect the McLure. That was her now: the McLure.

A stab of pain that was not from any nerve ending, a stab like a cold knife wielded by her own soul.

Then muzzy relief flowed through her veins as the opiates arrived to take the edge off.

Sleep. And terrible nightmares of falling into an oozing mass of burning flesh. Like overcooked marshmallow. And it wasn’t her father or brother burning but her mother, who hadn’t burned, who had died in a bed like this one, her insides eaten by cancer.

Sadie woke. How much later? No way to know. There was no calendar or clock in the room. What there was was a man in a black suit, white shirt, black tie, and an earpiece. He was sitting in the chair, legs crossed, reading a graphic novel.

He would have a gun. He would also have a stun gun. And probably a second gun in an ankle holster.

Sadie’s body was one massive bruise. She did a quick inventory and decided, yes, every single inch of her hurt. Inside and outside, she hurt.

She was on her back, head slightly elevated, a needle taped to her right arm. A clear plastic bag hung beside the bed.

Her left arm was wrapped in hard plastic sheathing, bent into a lazy L and suspended from a wire.

Something had been inserted in her urethra. It hurt, but at the same time she had the feeling it had been there for a while.

“Who are you?” she asked. It sounded perfectly clear in her head, but she had the impression it came out as a whisper.

The man’s eyes flicked up from his book.

“Water,” Sadie gasped, suddenly overwhelmed by the sensation of thirst.

The man rose quickly. He came to the bed and pressed a button. The door opened within seconds, and two nurses came in. No, a nurse and a doctor, one was wearing a stethoscope.

“Water,” Sadie managed to say in a semicoherent voice.

“First we have to—” the doctor said.

“Water!” Sadie snapped. “First: water.”

The doctor took a step back. She would not be the first or last to take that step back.

The nurse had a drinking bottle with a bent straw. She let Sadie swallow a little. A blessing.

Nurses, Sadie remembered. That’s what her mother had said as she lay dying. Doctors can all go to hell; nurses go straight to heaven. Not that Birgid McLure took either heaven or hell literally.

Alone.

Sadie was alone. The realization scared her.

Just me, she thought.

She thought she might be crying, but she couldn’t feel tears, only the need to shed them.

A second guy in a black suit was in the room. Older. The corporate security chief. Sadie knew him. Should remember his name, but she didn’t. A third man, sleek in a very expensive striped suit, might as well have had “lawyer” tattooed on his forehead.

The corporation was swinging into action. Lawyers, security, all of it too damned late.

She had a stupid question to ask. Stupid in that she already knew the answer. “My Dad. And Stone.”

“Now isn’t the time,” the nurse said kindly.

“Dead,” the security chief answered.

The nurse shot him a dirty look.

“She’s my boss,” the man said flatly. “She’s McLure. She asks a question, I answer.”

The doctor was busy reading the chart. The nurse peered at Sadie, as if measuring her courage. She was Jamaican, maybe, judging from the accent. Or from one of those other islands where they do cool things to the English language.

She gave a slight shrug and let Sadie take another blessed, blessed sip of water.

“I need to know how soon I can move her,” the security chief said. Stern. That was his name. Something Stern. He had one of those faces that always looked as if he had just come from shaving. His tie was neat, but the collar was twisted a bit sideways around his neck. And although he was trying hard to look impassive, the corners of his mouth kept tugging downward. His eyes were red. He had cried.

“Move her?” the doctor yelped. “What are you talking about? She has a compound fracture of the ulna and radius, a concussion, internal bleeding—”

“Doctor,” Stern said. “I can’t keep her safe here. We have a place. Our own doctors, our own facilities. And air-tight security.”

“She needs an MRI. We need to see if there’s any brain damage.”

“We have an MRI machine,” the lawyer said, oozing confidence. A Harvard Law voice. A voice with which you were simply not allowed to argue. “I am Ms McLure’s temporary legal guardian, and her attorney. And I think Ms McLure would rather have our own doctors. And frankly, you and this hospital would rather not have the media camped outside twenty-four/seven.”

Stern looked at her. He was careful not to be too obvious, but Sadie intercepted the look and understood.

No, it would not do to have strangers looking inside her skull. They might see something they’d have a very hard time understanding. So, Stern knew. Useful.

“Take me home,” Sadie said.

Stern nodded once. “Yes, Ms McLure. Home.”

*

There was a park not far from Noah’s home, but it was drizzling and threatened to go to full-on rain, so he and his two mates, Mohammed and Little Cora, kicked the football around in the partial shelter of two high walls.

Noah dribbled it, did an agile pedalada, and back-heeled it to Mohammed.

“I can, too, do a fuckin’ Chilena,” Little Cora insisted, referring to a bicycle kick that involved somersaulting to kick a ball out of the air. Little Cora felt no sentence was complete without the modifier “fuckin’.”

“You can do it once, maybe,” Mohammed insisted. “Then you fall on your head, and it’s six weeks in hospital.”

Little Cora charged at him, took the ball, and kicked it with impressive power and very poor aim at the nearest wall. It struck the bars on the back window of a pizza restaurant and took a wild bounce toward a motorcycle locked to the fence. The fence separated the alley from the train tracks, and just as Mohammed started berating Little Cora a train went roaring past obliterating the banter.

Noah grabbed the handlebar of the motorcycle and righted it before it could topple over. Then he went after the ball, which had rolled some distance.

A young man got there first. He stopped the ball, dribbled it a bit just to show he knew how, and kicked it away from Noah and back to his friends.

The man was Asian—Chinese, Alex guessed—and startlingly handsome. Definitely not someone from this neighborhood.

The man said, “Noah?”

And that froze Noah where he stood. His friends moved closer, slowly, protective but wary.

There was nothing threatening about the man. He didn’t bare his teeth, he didn’t move farther forward. He met Noah’s gaze easily.

“Who’s asking?”

“I’m looking for Noah Cotton.”

An American accent, at least Noah thought so.

“That’s me,” Noah admitted with a blend of defiance and indifference. He was a city boy, Noah, bred for wariness.

The American was in his early twenties, tall, especially for someone of Chinese background, thin, immaculate. He wore a long, navy cashmere coat over a dark suit, over an expensive white shirt held at the neck not by a tie but by a sort of white floral pin.

“My name is Nijinsky,” the American said. “I’m a friend of your brother.”

“Nijinsky. That sounds Russian.”

Nijinsky shrugged and smiled, offering a glimpse of amazingly perfect white teeth. “It’s an odd name, I must admit. Most people call me Jin.”

“Why are you looking for me?”

Nijinsky looked down, gathering his thoughts. Or at least acting the part of a man gathering his thoughts. Then he said, “Well, Noah, Alex asked me to look in on you if . . . if anything ever happened to him.”

Noah’s breathing suddenly felt labored. “Yeah?”

“Yes. Your brother was doing very important but very dangerous work. He had a special talent, you know.”

“He was out of the army. Quits with all that.”

“This isn’t about the army.”

Noah stared at him, and the man looked back with black, almond eyes fringed by girlishly long lashes. His expression was open and frank. Like he was hiding nothing.

Nijinsky glanced meaningfully at Mohammed and Little Cora, who had strayed ever closer.

“It’s all right, guys,” Noah said to his friends. “Too wet out anyway. Tomorrow, eh? After school.”

Little Cora had never been one to take a hint, but Mohammed was. He grabbed her arm and said, “Come on, then, LC.”

“I’m taking my ball,” Little Cora said belligerently, but she followed Mohammed down the alley and around the corner.

“What happened to Alex?” Noah blurted.

“You mean—”

“You know bloody well what I mean, don’t you?” Noah interrupted.

The outburst brought no anger to Nijinsky’s expression, just compassion. “I know that Alex suffered a sudden, complete mental breakdown. Almost overnight he went from being a normal, if perhaps intense, person to being what people might call a raving lunatic.”

Now Noah’s chest was pounding and he was breathing hard, too much emotion pushing out from where he’d buried it. “I saw him, you know? Twice I went to see him. Right? In that awful place. They have him chained up like a fucking dog!”

Nijinsky nodded. Nothing more.

The rain came on in a wave, rushing down the alleyway. Nijinsky pulled an umbrella from his coat pocket and opened it seconds before the first fat drops hit. He stepped closer, to cover Noah as well, but Noah wasn’t having it. He stepped back into the rain, letting it beat on his bare head and shoulders.

“He’s sitting there in that place, just babbling, just, just . . .”

“What does he say? When he’s babbling?”

“Nano nano nano. I know, it sounds kind of funny, doesn’t it?”

“No. It doesn’t, Noah. What else does he say?”

Noah shook his head. “Something about a bug man.”

And there, at last, that tightening of Nijinsky’s impassive eyes, that twitch of his upper lip. And the warm compassion flowing from Nijinsky was, just for a moment, a cold front.

Noah had not missed that split second of something dark. Sadness? No, although maybe that was part of it.

Fury. That was it. Fury. But quickly extinguished.

“Anything else?” Nijinsky asked. And now he wasn’t bothering with the mask. He knew that Noah had seen some little bit of truth in his eyes. The bullshit was over. Truth was on its way.

“Yeah,” Noah said. “This word. He started screaming it. Just screaming it like a . . . like a . . .” He couldn’t talk for a moment. Too much. Too fast. He pressed his back against the wall, partly shielded from the worst of the downpour.

“Berserk,” Nijinsky said quietly.

Noah’s heart froze. His eyes snapped up. “What the hell does it mean? What is it? And how did you know?”

Nijinsky sighed. “What is it? It’s an organization. I’m part of it. And so was Alex.”

He waited and watched as Noah digested this. And as the truth dawned on Noah. “Are you here to . . .” He couldn’t finish the question. It seemed absurd, and if he asked it, it would be embarrassing.

“Your brother had a very special skill. A very rare skill. Sometimes it runs in families. If you have this skill, then we may want to talk further. If not, then we will part ways and you’ll hear nothing more from us.”

Noah blinked water out of his eyes. “What the hell?” When Nijinsky didn’t answer, Noah said, “Bug Man. Is that a real person? I mean, is he the person who did this to Alex?”

“The Bug Man is real.”

“How do I . . . I mean, how do I find out if, you know, I have this thing you’re talking about?”

Nijinsky drew a business card from his inner coat pocket and handed it to Noah. It was a rather odd set of handwritten instructions. Noah quickly shielded it from the rain with the arc of his body.

Nijinsky turned to walk away but then stopped at a distance and called back to Noah. “Tell me something, Noah. Which is more important: freedom or happiness?”

What was this, a game? But Nijinsky wasn’t smiling.

“You can’t be happy unless you’re free,” Noah said.

The American nodded. “Skip school tomorrow.”

ARTIFACT

To: C and B Armstrong

From: S Lebowski

Division: AmericaStrong, a division of Armstrong Fancy

Gifts Corporation

Status: EYES ONLY ENCRYPT Read and safe-delete

Gentlemen: You have requested occasional updates on subject Burnofsky’s state of mind. We have been able to penetrate security on his computer files. The following is an extract from a video diary. Despite the fact that Burnofsky appears to be addressing someone, there is no evidence that anyone other than Burnofsky himself has viewed these files.

We assess their condition to be secure.

We make no judgments of subject Burnofsky’s mental condition at this time, but note that he is a heavy drinker and opium addict.

The following is a transcript. The video itself is also available.

ENTRY FOLLOWS:

Let me tell you about the nano. Down there, down in the nano, you see marvels, man. You think you see glory in a sunset or the shape of a tree? No, man, the genius, the creation, the architecture, the fucking complexity, the edges and the patterns and the horrors – oh yeah, because there are horrors – are down there in the meat.

You want to see God the Creator, the supreme artist? Gaze into the nano. You’ll see your God, and he will scare the shit out of you.

God isn’t in big things measured in miles, he’s down there. Down there in a flea’s antennae like a hairy tree trunk twitching for blood, and a macrophage slithering along like a shell-less snail come to eat you up, and the cells you see splitting beneath your feet, and landscapes of seething bacteria, and yeah, right there, you want to see God up close and personal?

Come with me into the nano, and I’ll show you what happens when you empty a sac full of staph germs, the hard stuff, the boosted MRSA, the necrotizing fasciitis itself, the true shit, into the ocular orb, behind a man’s eye. Oh, you don’t know that term, that neat Latin? Does the phrase “flesh-eating bacteria” ring any bells for you?

Cut it open – the sac – and dump it out, and it goes right to work. It eats into the eye and into the nerves and into the brain, and you haven’t really seen God’s true handiwork until you’ve seen those little staph balls, down there, down in the meat –they look about as big as cats, maybe, you know? And they’re fuzzy. But no eyes or face, just these soulless rugby balls covered in bumps. And man, you should see them work.

See them turn healthy cells into goo.

See them eat right through the meat, explode cells, grow; double, double toil and trouble, again and again, and eat all the while, those bumpy little balls, and by the time the guy feels the pain it’s way too late.

Yeah. You want to see the face of God the Artist? Get down in the nano, watch a sea of healthy flesh overrun by those microscopic hordes, like murdering Huns.

They’ll eat their way through to sunlight eventually. Through a nose, a cheek, an eye, a skull.

Praise the Lord: the Great and Crazy Artist.

END OF TRANSCRIPT

FIVE

Vincent was also visiting London, but miles away from Noah and Nijinsky.

Vincent was twentysomething, a trim, average-size guy with carefully barbered brown hair and a downturned mouth and eyes that were brown but with no sense of warmth in them. He had a slightly curved nose and nostrils that flared and a faint scar that extended half an inch above and half an inch below his lips.

He held himself like a guy who wanted to avoid attention, but he didn’t have the gift of disappearing in a crowd. He had the curse of being noticed, no matter how careful he was to keep his eyes down and his face impassive. People still noticed him because there was just an air about Vincent that suggested tamped-down emotion and volatility barely disguised by his careful movements and his soft, almost inaudible voice.

He was at dinner, sitting at a dark table in a nice but not stuffy Indian restaurant on Charlotte Street, picking at a poppadom. The target sat across the room at one of the larger, brighter, noisier tables.

There were five people at that table and the target—Liselotte Osborne—was not the richest or most powerful, so she didn’t sit at the head, she sat halfway down on one side, with her back to Vincent.

Nevertheless, Vincent had an excellent view of her eye. The left one.

A part of Vincent’s mind was in the room, hearing without focusing on conversation punctuated by sudden bursts of laughter, seeing the reflection of yellow overhead lights in standard restaurant-grade wine glasses, wondering abstractedly about the choice of art on the papered walls.

Another part of Vincent’s mind was across the room, perched on Liselotte Osborne’s left lower eyelid. From that vantage point Vincent saw thick-trunked trees that grew in impossibly long curves from spongy, damp pink tissue. These trees had no branches; they were like rough-barked brown palm trees, bending away to disappear out of view behind him. The bark was then glopped in uneven patches by a black tarry substance, like someone had thrown big handfuls of tar at the lashes.

Eyelashes.

Eyelashes with mascara.

Vincent’s spidery legs stepped over a pair of demodex, like crocodiles with the blank faces of soulless felines. Reptilian tails of demodex babies protruded from the base of the eyelash. They wiggled.

From his perch between two rough-barked, gooey, drooping eyelashes Vincent saw the vast, wet plain of white stretched out to the horizon, a sea of milk beneath a taut wet membrane. Within that milky sea were jagged red rivers. When he tuned his eyes to look close, he could make out the surge and pause, surge and pause of Frisbee-shaped red blood cells and the occasional spongy lymphocyte.

He was looking out across the white of Liselotte’s eyeball—an eyeball shot through with the red capillaries of a woman who’d had too little sleep, rimmed with black tar, home to microfauna he could see and, of course, a multitude of lifeforms too small even for a biot to make out.

Vincent felt a rush of wind and saw a barrier rushing toward him at terrifying speed. It was an endless, faintly curved wall of pink-gray that appeared to be maybe ten feet tall. It came rushing across the eyeball like a storm front, swift, irresistible. Jutting far out from that pink-gray wall were more of the dark brown palm trunks, curving upward and extending beyond the range of Vincent’s sight. Like a wall festooned with ridiculously curved pikes.

Liselotte was blinking.

Vincent said, “Sparkling, please,” in response to the waiter’s question about what sort of water he would prefer.

“And are you ready to order?”

“What’s the speciality of the house? Never mind—whatever it is, I’ll have it. Extra spicy.” He handed the menu to the waiter, who insisted on telling him the special anyway.

It did not matter to Vincent. Food generally did not matter much to Vincent. It was just one of many pleasures to which he was indifferent, although highly spicy foods created a sensation that was something related perhaps to pleasure.

Vincent—his real name was Michael Ford—suffered from a rare disorder called anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure. It’s usually a symptom of long-term drug use. Or schizophrenia. But Vincent was neither a junkie nor crazy.

Well, not crazy in the clinical sense.

Yet.

The biot with the functional and not very clever name of V2, tensed its six legs and timed the onrushing eyelid. When it was just a few dozen feet away micro-subjective or “m-sub”—less than a few millimeters macro-actual or “mack”—the biot leapt.

It flew through the air. It spread short, stubby wings that helped it avoid tumbling. It also spread its legs wide in flex position to take the shock. Then it scraped down the side of an eyelash, picked up a smear of mascara, landed, and jabbed six sharp-tipped legs into flesh. The ends of the legs split to become barbs, locking the biot in place.

Always dangerous to use the barbs because if you had the bad luck to be too near a nerve ending the target just might feel the faintest irritation. And just might decide to scratch the itch. Which wouldn’t crush the biot but could sure as hell relocate it and waste valuable time.

The fast-moving upper lid slammed violently into the lower lid. The giant lashes wobbled and vibrated overhead, a sparse forest of palm. It was an earthquake there on the eyelid, but with barbs deployed V2 was fine.

Sticky liquid squeezed up between the lids and then, when the top lid began to pull away, stretched like chewed gum until it snapped.

Tears.

Vincent had been through a crying jag on another mission and had ended up with his biot all the way down the face and trapped in running snot.

But these weren’t weeping tears, just lubrication.

The upper lid receded, zooming across the icy white and then over the iris. Vincent would have found it exhilarating if he were the sort of person who did exhilaration.

There were many parts of the human body that were disturbing up close. But few more surprisingly so than a human iris. What looked like blue ice from a distance was an eye-of-Jupiter storm up close. Right at the outer edges Vincent saw blue, or at least a gray that was like blue. But it was not smooth; rather it was a twisted, fibrous mess, thousands of strands of raw muscle, all aimed inward toward the pupil, all with the job of expanding or contracting the iris to let in more or less light.

Close up—and it was impossible to get any more close up than V2, perched on the very edge of the lid—the iris looked a bit like layer upon layer of gray-and-orange worms, thinner at the outer edge of the iris, stronger at the rim of the pupil.

The pupil itself swept by below, a terrible, deep, black-in-black hole. A pit. But then if you looked straight down and caught just the right light, you could actually see to the bottom of that pit, down to the random blood vessels and the juncture that was the attachment point for the optic nerve.

Vincent did not get that image this time. Not in candlelight and soft, yellow fluorescence. He just saw the pupil as a black, circular lake, growing wider as the snake muscles of the iris shortened themselves fractionally.

The biot was 400 microns—less than half a millimeter—long and equally tall. But the m-sub feel of it—the image a biot runner experienced—how it felt to him, made it seem to be about seven feet long and almost that tall. To the twitcher it felt like something the size of a large SUV.

In mack it was the size of a healthy dust mite. But when you’re a dust mite, you don’t feel tiny. You feel big.

As the eyelid reached its apogee, V2 jumped off. The biot landed on the milky sea, then flattened itself down as the eyelid zoomed away, hesitated, then came sweeping back overhead like a gooey pink blanket.

Vincent thought, Light, and Lo! There was light. Twin phosphorescing organs on the biot’s head spread ultraviolet light.

He waited for the eyelid to come back up again, ate another bite of poppadom, jabbed a single leg into the underside of the eyelid and let it pull it up and over the slick eyeball, and sipped his water.

It was quite a ride. And as Vincent watched the waiter refill his glass he felt a frisson, a sort of echo of what V2 felt, its back sliding along the slickery surface of the eyeball.

The trick with entering the brain by way of the eye was to reach the hole at the back of the bony eye socket. It was possible for a biot to cut through bone, but it was never quick or safe. It was the kind of thing that would start a firestorm of bodily defenses.

Reaching the hole—Vincent had forgotten the official name for it—was best done by circumnavigating the eyeball. In the m-sub it was a long walk. And all of it through the dragging wetness of tears and the vertiginous movements of the orb looking this way or that.

The two other paths to the brain—through the ear or the nose—had bigger difficulties. Earwax and the distinct possibility of a watery blockage in the one, and unimaginable filth in the other: pollen, mucus, all manner of microfauna and microflora.

This was better. For one thing, you could, if you chose, sink a probe into the optic nerve and get some macro optics—see a bit of what the target was seeing, though it was usually very rough gray scale.

The second greatest threat to a biot was getting lost. When you were the size of a mite, the human body was the equivalent of roughly five miles from end to end. So V2 dutifully made its way around the eyeball, squeezed between membranes, became a bit disoriented, before finally reaching the optic nerve just as Vincent’s dinner was being placed before him.

And then, quite suddenly, he came across not the second greatest, but the single greatest threat to a biot.

They attacked with blazing speed, wheels spinning but still getting traction on the eyeball. He saw three of them immediately as they raced around from behind the redwood tree of the optic nerve.

Which answered the question of whether Professor Liselotte Osborne—leading expert on nanotechnology, consultant to MI5, the woman who could either push or derail the security agency’s investigation into nanotechnology—was free or infested.

Two more nanobots were behind V2.

Five to one odds. Although if he hung around for long, more would be on the way.

Who was the twitcher? Vincent watched the way the nanobots moved in. Too reckless. And platooned into two packs, mixing relatively benign spinners and fighters. Not an experienced hand. Not Bug Man. Not Burnofsky. Not even the new one, what was it she called herself? One-Up. Yeah. Not her, either. All of them could run five nanobots as individuals, rather than two platoons.

Vincent tasted the curry. Very hot.

He chewed carefully. It was important to chew thoroughly. It helped digestion, and digestion was often a problem during these long trips across multiple time zones.

And at the same time Vincent spun V2 toward the two nanobots he wasn’t supposed to have noticed.

Vincent took no pleasure in the food, but he came as close to pleasure as he ever did when he stabbed a cutter claw into the nearest nanobot, right into its comm link, and spilled nanowire.

Vincent’s phone pulsed.

Only one person could ring him and always get through.

He pulled his phone out and looked at the text. His concentration wavered, and he very nearly lost two of V2’s legs to a low scythe cut from a nanobot.

Grey and Stone confirmed dead. Sadie injured/OK.

Vincent was not good at experiencing pleasure. Unfortunately he was perfectly able to experience grief, loss, and rage.

He had set aside the first news of the crash. He had stuck it in a compartment. He was on a mission, he had to focus, and from long experience he knew not to trust news reports. Maybe Grey McLure had not been on the plane. Maybe.

This, however, came from Lear. If Lear said it, it was true.

Vincent texted back, missing a couple of letters as he jammed a sharp leg into the vulnerable leg joint of the second nanobot and watched it crumple.

But more nanobots were coming. A new platoon of six.

Tgt LO infst. Engaged. Withdrfing.

If he had two biots in this, he might fight this battle and win. With three he’d be confident. But this was a losing fight.

A follow-up text from Lear: Carthage.

Vincent stared at the word. No, no, no. This was not his thing. This was not what he did.

A beam weapon cut one of his six legs. The cut didn’t go all the way through, but it snapped off. It wouldn’t slow him much, but it would throw off the biot’s equilibrium.

This was not the time to stay and play smack-the-nanobot and maybe lose. It was time for extraction, and as quickly as possible.

Carthage. The Roman Empire’s great enemy. Until the Romans conquered it; murdered or enslaved every man, woman, and child; burned every building to the ground; then sowed the earth with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.

Carthago delenda est. It had been a slogan in Rome: Carthage must be destroyed.

Vincent wiped his mouth with his napkin.

He pushed back his chair.

V2 turned and ran from the four near and many farther-off nanobots. More were scurrying down the optic nerve. They weren’t a problem: using their four legs, the nanobots were slower than a biot. Only when they had a fairly smooth surface could the nanobots switch to their single wheel and outrun a biot.

Unfortunately the eyeball was perhaps the ultimate smooth surface.

V2 motored its legs at full speed. Back around the eyeball.

Vincent made his way slowly across the room toward Liselotte Osborne.

V2 waited until two of the nanobots were close enough to open fire. Their fléchettes ate a second leg away.

Vincent felt the echo of the pain in his own leg.

V2 sprayed sulfuric acid to left and right simultaneously. It wouldn’t kill the nanobots, but it would slow them, bog them down in puddles of melting flesh. And even on just four legs and dragging stumps he could maybe outrun the remaining nanobots.

Liselotte Osborne cried out suddenly.

“Oh! Oh!”

She pressed fingers over her eye.

“What is it?” one of the men asked, alarmed.

V2 was nearly crushed by the pressure, but Osborne’s fingers were to the north of it now, blocking the nanobots, and V2 had a clear path ahead.

“My eye! Something is in my eye. It’s rather painful.”

Vincent moved smoothly forward. “I’m a doctor; it could be a stroke. We need to lay this woman down.”

Funny how effective the phrase “I’m a doctor” can be.

Vincent eased Osborne from her chair and laid her flat on her back. He crouched over her, pushed her hand gently away from her face, and touched the surface of her eye with his finger.

Through V2’s optics he saw the massive wall of ridged flesh descending from the sky and ran to meet it.

Vincent’s free hand went into his pocket and came out, unnoticed, holding something black that might have been an expensive pen. He pressed the end of it against the base of Osborne’s skull.

V2 leapt onto the finger just as two nanobots emerged in the clear from the acid cloud.

Vincent pressed the clip on the pen and springs pushed three inches of tungsten-steel blade into Osborne’s medulla.

Vincent gave the blade a half-twist then pressed the clip again and withdrew what looked for all the world exactly like a nice Mont Blanc.

“This woman needs help,” Vincent said.

V2 ran up the length of his finger and dug barbs into his flesh.

Vincent stood up abruptly. “I’m going to summon an ambulance.” He turned and walked toward the exit.

It would be ten minutes before Liselotte Osborne’s friends and coworkers realized the doctor had not summoned anyone or anything at all. And by then the pool of blood beneath her head had grown quite large, and she was no longer complaining of pain in her eye.

SIX

Vincent was already in the air on his way back to the States, Nijinsky was relaxing with a drink at his London hotel and betting that Noah would show up for testing the next day, and Burnofsky was halfway through a bottle of vodka and thinking about his pipe, by the time Bug Man arrived home and found Jessica waiting for him.

She was standing three steps up on the stoop, bouncing a little to keep warm. She was two years older than he was, eighteen, from one of those North African countries, Ethiopia or Somalia, he could never remember which.

She had possibly the longest legs he had ever seen. She was taller than he was. And all parts of her were perfect. Crazy full lips and big, light brown eyes, and skin like warm silk, and hair in sort of loose, curly dreads that dangled down over her forehead and tickled Bug Man’s face when she was on top and kissing him.

“Hi, babe,” Bug Man said. “You must be freezing.”

“You’ll warm me up,” she teased, stepped down the stairs and held her arms open for him.

A kiss. A really good kiss, with steam coming from their lips and all her body heat transferring straight to his body, warming him through and through.

“You could have gone in to wait for me,” he said.

“Your mother doesn’t like me much,” Jessica said, not complaining.

He shrugged.

The Bug Man lived with his mother and her sister, Aunt Benicia, in Park Slope, up closer to Flatbush. The neighborhood was mostly white, well-off, infested by people in what was left of the publishing business. Writers and editors and so on. People who would go out of their way to smile at the black teenager with the strangely Asian eyes and the wide smile. They wanted him to know he was welcome. Despite, you know, being a black teenager in an upscale white neighborhood.

Bug Man didn’t live in one of the three-story townhomes the latte creatures spent small fortunes decorating. He and his little family had a nice three-bedroom, second floor, with too few windows and an inconvenient single bathroom. They’d lived there since moving to the States from London eight years ago. After Bug Man’s father had died of a stroke.

Aunt Benicia had some style, and Bug Man’s mother, Vallie Elder, had been careful investing the money from his father’s life insurance. And of course Bug Man kicked in a bit from his well-paying job in the city.

He was a video-game tester for the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. That’s what he told people. And how was anyone to know any different? Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation, you could Google it. They’d been in business since, like, the Civil War. You could go into one of their stores in malls or airport shopping areas. Bug Man could point out some of the games he had tested. There they were in the store or on the Web site.

Bug Man led Jessica inside. “It’s me,” he yelled. Preoccupied, his mother called back something from the direction of the kitchen. If Aunt Benicia was home, she said nothing.

“You want anything to eat?” Bug Man asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” Jessica said, breathing into his neck.

Oh yeah, that worked for Bug Man. That still made his heart miss a couple of beats. It had been a lot of complicated spinner work, hundreds of hours twitching his spinner-bots, identifying and cauterizing her inhibition centers. And then implanting images of the Bug Man in her visual memory and tying them with wire or pulse transmitters to her pleasure centers.

Exhausting work, since he had had to do it all on his own time. But so worth it. The girl was his. If Bug Man was honest, he’d admit he was maybe a six or seven on the looks scale. Jessica was off the scale. People on the street would see them together, and their jaws would drop and they’d get that “Life isn’t fair,” look, or maybe begin to form that “Man, what has that guy got going on?” question.

That was why his mum didn’t really like Jessica. She figured Jessica had to be after his money. As much as she loved her son, she knew better than to think it was his charm or his body.

Bug Man had an encrypted transmitter in his pocket, an innocuous key chain. He squeezed it and unlocked the door of his room.

With what he made at his job, the Bug Man’s room could have been a high-tech haven—plasma TVs and the latest electronic toys. But Bug Man got plenty of that at work. His room was a Zen sanctuary. A simple double bed, white sheets and a white headboard, the mattress centered on an ebony platform that seemed almost to float in the center of the room.

There was a cozy seating area with two black-leather-and-chrome armchairs angled in on a small tea table.

His desk, really just a simple table of elegant proportions, bore the weight of his somewhat old-fashioned computer—he couldn’t very well be completely cut off from the world—but was concealed from view by a mahogany windowpane shoji screen.

The real high tech in the room was all concealed from view. A sensor bar was imbedded in the edges of his door. It scanned the floor and doorjamb at a very high refresh rate, looking for anything at the nano level. The same technology was embedded in the window and in the walls around the electrical sockets.

The nanoscan technology wasn’t very good—lots of false positives. People who lived their whole lives in the macro didn’t know a tenth of what was crawling around down there in the floor dust.

And in any case, at the nano level the walls and baseboards were like sieves. But in Bug Man’s experience a twitcher would take the easy way in if possible—door, window, or riding on a biological. A biological being a human or a cat or dog, which explained why Bug Man didn’t let Aunt Benicia’s yappy little dog into his room.

The big weakness of nanobot technology was the need for a control station. Biots could be controlled brain to bot, but nanobots needed computer-assist and gamma-ray communication. Close and direct was best. Via repeaters if necessary, though the repeaters were notoriously glitchy.

Which meant that Bug Man took some risks being here in an insecure place. The alternative was having another twitcher running security on him day and night. That was not happening. Damned if he was letting one of those guys tap his optics and watch while he and Jessica were going at it.

Bug Man gave up enough for his job. He wasn’t giving up Jessica. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Those legs? Those lips? The things she did?

The work he had invested in her?

No, there were limits to what he’d do for the Twins. And there were limits to what the Twins could demand, because when it came down to battle in some pumping artery or up in someone’s brain, throwing down in desperate battle with Kerouac or Vincent—wait. He’d forgotten: Kerouac was out. Kind of a shame, really. Kerouac had serious game.

Well, as long as Vincent was still twitching and still undefeated, the Twins couldn’t say shit to Bug Man.

So, no, the Bug Man was not going to let some other newbie nanobot handler crawl up inside him while Jessica was crawling all over him. Sorry. Not happening.

Jessica shivered a little but shed her coat.

Bug Man locked the door.

“What do you want today, baby?” Bug Man asked, pulling her toward him.

“Whatever you want,” she whispered.

“Yeah. I thought you might say that.”

A soft trilling sound came from behind the shoji screen. Bug Man hesitated. “No,” he said.

The tone sounded again, louder.

“Hell, no,” he snapped.

“Don’t go,” Jessica said.

“Believe me when I say I don’t want to,” Bug Man said.

“Believe that. Don’t move. I mean, you can move, but mostly in a way that involves you having less clothing on. Let me just go see what this is.”

He walked a bit awkwardly from the bed to the concealed computer. A tiny red exclamation point pulsed in the upper-right corner of the screen. Bug Man cursed again. But he sat down in the chair, popped earbuds in, and tapped in a thirty-two-character code.

He’d expected to see Burnofsky’s ugly face. This was worse. Far worse. Because there on his screen were the Twins: the freak of nature comprising Charles and Benjamin Armstrong.

He masked the look of revulsion on his face. He’d met the Twins face-to-face on two occasions. This was an improvement—he couldn’t see that three-legged body—but not much of one. Not so long as he had to look at the nightmare that was their heads. The image barely fit on the screen. Two heads melted or melded or something into one.

“Anthony,” Charles Armstrong said. He was the one on the left. He usually did more of the talking.

“Yeah. I mean, good evening, sirs.”

“We are sorry to intrude. You deserve rest and relaxation after the important work you did earlier today. Truly, we are grateful, as all of humanity will someday be grateful.”

Bug Man’s mouth was dry. He had long since stopped giving a damn about the Armstrong Twins and their vision for humanity, all that Nexus Humanus bullshit. He was a twitcher, not an idealist. He loved the game. He loved the power. He loved the beautiful creature in his bed. The rest was just talk. But you couldn’t say that to Charles and Benjamin Armstrong. Not unless you had a much bigger pair than Anthony Elder happened to have, because Twofer—as the Twins were called behind their back—it, or they, or whatever was the correct way to say it, scared the hell out of the Bug Man.

“It seems that Vincent is in London,” Benjamin said. “As well as at least one other. We don’t know who.”

“Okay,” Bug Man said guardedly. The earbuds were crackling. Bad connection. He pulled them out and let the voice go to speaker. It wasn’t like Jessica would understand or care.

Charles smiled. When he did, the center eye—the eye they shared—swerved toward him.

Jesus. H. Christ.

“Time to press our advantage,” Charles said. “We are going ahead with our great plan, Anthony. Our latest intelligence is that the main target will be in New York.”

Bug Man rewarded his freak bosses with a sharp intake of breath. Jessica was suddenly forgotten. It had been all depression and frustration when word came that POTUS—the president of the United States—would skip the UN General Assembly and send the secretary of state instead.

“I thought she was Burnofsky’s target,” Bug Man said.

In order to shake their conjoined head Twofer had to move its, his, their entire upper body. The effect could have been comical. It wasn’t. “No, Anthony. Burnofsky has other duties as well. And as it happens, we’ve, for the moment, lost the pathway to your original target.”

Pathways were the macro means to a nano end. A nanobot couldn’t cross long distances. They didn’t fly. They didn’t go very fast in macro terms. In the nano a foot was a considerable distance. So pathways had to be found—carriers, people who would, wittingly or not, carry a nanobot to its target. For the kind of targets they had in mind the pathway had several steps, each step a person who would take the nanobots one stage closer.

Bug Man stared at that massive indented forehead. Tried not to look at that eye that so should not be there. But tried to imagine what was going on inside that creepy-ass head. People whispered that Twofer actually shared a part of their brain, just like they shared that center eye and, if legend was true, at least one other part as well.

The faces were framed against night sky and the green-lit spire of the Empire State Building, in what everyone called the Tulip. The Tulip was the top five stories of the Armstrong Building, what would have been floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, except that the pinnacle of the Armstrong Building was made of a polymer nanocomposite that was transparent looking out, and rose-colored frost for those looking in. The Twins lived their entire lives within that space, high above the city, invisible to outside eyes but wide open to spires and sky.

Bug Man’s original target had been the British prime minister. It had seemed right, what with Bug Man being British by birth.

But what had happened to the pathway? They’d had a clear one to the PM.

Anthony had been studying up on Prime Minister Bowen, looking through the man’s well-documented history, searching for the triggers he could pull in the old man’s brain. Oh, you like horses, do you, Mr Prime Minister? And you had a bad experience with your sister’s drowning? And your favorite chocolate bar is a Flake? All of that data was stored up in that wrinkly wad of goo called a brain.

A lot of wasted schoolwork, that, if someone else would be taking Bowen.

“What happened to the pathway?”

“As my brother mentioned, Vincent was in London.”

“It was not done at the nano,” Benjamin said, correctly guessing Bug Man’s thought. “Our friend Vincent did it the old-fashioned way. He stabbed her in the brain, Anthony. You should remember that. Because these are the lunatics we are fighting.” The Twins leaned forward, which put that third eye right up way too close, way too close, to the camera. The Bug Man leaned away.

“They are ruthless in a demonic cause,” Benjamin said, getting heated, getting worked up. “We would unite humanity! We would create the next human, the next step in evolution: a united human race! They fight to keep humanity enslaved to division, to hatred, to the loneliness of a false individuality.”

The sound of a fist pounding. The image wobbled.

“It begins as soon as you can come in,” Charles said. Calmer than his brother. “There’s a car waiting out front. You will come?” A simultaneous Twofer grin. “As a favor to us?”

“Yes, sirs,” he said. Because Bug Man didn’t want to try to guess what happened to people who refused to do “favors” for Twofer.

Bug Man emerged, serious and shaky, from behind the screen. Jessica was waiting.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve got to go. Big problem at work.”

Jessica pouted, and that was about enough to break Bug Man’s will, but no, he wasn’t ready to keep the Twins waiting.

“But I only need you for five minutes.”

The next five minutes, and all the rest of the conversation, was overheard by a single biot.

The biot—a specialized model adapted to picking up the kinds of large sound waves made by a vocal chord longer than their entire body—had spent six weeks inside Jessica’s right ear. Six weeks of earwax and near misses with Q-tips the size of blimps and earbuds blasting music that was sheer vibration.

Six weeks, weakening day by day, holding on despite everything, and now just days from death unless the biot could be taken out in a clean extraction.

In the coffee shop across the street Wilkes sat typing away on her laptop, pretending to be working on a novel, headphones on her ears.

Wilkes wasn’t the best twitcher—she wasn’t looking for a battle with Bug Man. But little Buggy hadn’t found her, had he? He had come close a few times, close enough that she could read the serial numbers of his nanobots and clearly see his creepy exploding head logo. But she had lain low. She had frozen in place. And the nanobots that might have killed her biot and driven Wilkes to madness had gone scurrying past.

Wilkes was not a great fighter down in the nano. She was much more capable in the macro, because when pushed, Wilkes was a little rage-o-holic. She affected a tough-girl style that wasn’t just style. She didn’t wear those big Doc Martens to look cool, she wore them to make her kicks count when she applied them.

Wilkes had a few interesting tattoos. Her right eye had dark flames painted downward, maybe more like shark’s teeth or the stylized teeth of a ripsaw. On the inside of her left arm she wore a QR-code tattoo. Shoot a picture of it with your phone and you’d be taken to a page that just had a picture of Wilkes’s raised middle finger and a circular logo that showed a Photoshopped pic of Wilkes stabbing a dragon in the eye.

There was a second QR-code tattoo in a, shall we say, less public location. It led to a different sort of page altogether.

She was a troubled teen, Wilkes was. Troubled, yes. And trouble, too.

But she could be patient when she had to be. Six weeks of this coffee shop, and a crappy little basement hole-in-the-wall apartment next door to Bug Man’s home.

In a weary voice Wilkes said, “Gotcha, Buggy. Got you good.”

ARTIFACT

To: Lear

From: Vincent

Summary:

Wilkes’s surveillance of Bug Man’s girlfriend has paid off.

1) Confirmed: Bug Man was the twitcher for the McLure hit.

2) Bug Man is being given a strategic as well as tactical role. This may indicate a serious problem with Burnofsky.

3) Confirmed: AFGC plans move at UN. POTUS is target #1. Other heads of state as well.

Recommend:

1) Given our need for biot resources, especially in view of the AFGC initiative and paralysis at McLure corporate, I recommend finalizing the Violet approach.

2) Accelerated training of new recruits.

Note: I am not Scipio.

SEVEN

Inside Sadie McLure’s head was a bubble. Sort of like a water balloon. Only it was the size of a grape and filled with blood.

It was thirty-three millimeters long, about an inch and a quarter. It was a brain aneurysm. Quite a large one. A place where an artery wall weakened and blood pressure formed the water balloon of death.

Because if it ever popped, blood would go gushing uncontrolled into the surrounding brain tissue. And Sadie would almost certainly die. And if not die, then lose parts of her brain, perhaps be left a vegetable.

There was an operation that could be done in some cases. But not in this case. Because the balloon inside Sadie’s head was buried down deep.

She had seen the CT scans, and the MRI scans, and even the fabulously detailed, nearly artistic digital subtraction angiography. That had involved shooting dye through an artery in her groin.

Ah, good times. Good times.

If she had stayed in the hospital, they’d have done a CT looking for bleeding. Then they’d have done an MRI to get a closer look at the aneurysm.

That’s when they would have noticed something unusual. A certain thickening of the tissue around the aneurysm.

So they’d have done the digital subtraction thing and then, yep, then they’d have had a pretty good picture of something that would make their hair stand up.

They’d have seen what looked like a pair of tiny little creatures, no bigger than dust mites, busily weaving and reweaving tiny strands of Teflon fiber to form a layer over the bulging, straining, grape-size water balloon.

They’d have seen Grey McLure’s biots, busy at the job of keeping his daughter alive.

Sadie could see them now as Dr Chattopadhyay—Dr Chat to her patient—swiveled the screen to show her.

“There are the biots in the first image.” She tapped the keyboard to change pictures. “And here they are half an hour later.”

“They haven’t moved.”

“Yes, they are immobile. Presumably dead.” Dr Chat was in her fifties, heavy, dark-skinned, skeptical of eye and immaculate in her lab coat over sari. “You know of course that I and my whole family mourn for your father and brother.”

Sadie nodded. She didn’t intend to be curt or dismissive. She just couldn’t hear any more condolences. She was suffocating in condolences and concern.

Over the last twenty-four hours she had absorbed the deaths. Absorbed, not coped with, accepted, gotten over, or properly mourned. Just absorbed. And somehow seeing those tiny dead biots was one step too far.

What her father had created was a revolution in medicine. It had taken him years. He had thrown more than a billion dollars into it, which had required him to buy back his own company from stockholders just so he could spend that kind of money without having to explain himself.

He had worked himself half to death, he and Sadie’s mother. Then, the cancer, and he was even more desperate to finish the work, to send his tiny minions in to kill cancer cells and save his wife.

The pressure he had endured.

But the biot project was too late for Sadie and Stone’s mother, Grey’s wife.

For three months after Birgid McLure’s death Grey was virtually invisible. He lived at work. And then . . . the miracle.

The biot. A biological creature, not a machine. A thing made of a grab bag of DNA bits and pieces. Spider, cobra, jellyfish. But above all, for the control mechanism that allowed a single mind to see through the eyes of a biot and run with a biot’s legs and cut with a biot’s blades, for that, human DNA.

The biot was not a robot. It was a limb. It was linked directly to the mind of its creator. It was a part of its creator.

Grey McLure’s biots had been injected as close to the aneurysm as was safe. They had set up a supply chain that ran through her ear canal to shuttle in the tiny Teflon fibers. And then they began to weave, a sort of macro-actual tiny, but micro-subjective huge, basket around the aneurysm.

“You’re lucky the overpressure from the explosion didn’t cause a rupture,” Dr Chat said. “There’s some bleeding, but it seems to have stopped. Lucky.”

Sadie wanted to say something mean and sarcastic about her luck—luck that had left her an orphan—but stopped herself.

“Did it do anything at all to the aneurysm?”

“It seems mostly unchanged. But as you know, the weave needs constant tending to remain strong. And in any case it was only sixty percent done. So I have to prescribe the blood pressure medications to lower your BP.”

“I had an allergic reaction,” Sadie said.

“There are other medications we can try. There’s a whole range of—”

“Whatever,” Sadie snapped. “I can read Google as well as you. I know that I already have excellent blood pressure, and that these meds won’t have much effect, and they’re really only there to make me feel like I’m doing something. I don’t need a placebo, Doctor.”

Dr Chat sighed and looked at her from under disapproving eyebrows. “You have a responsibility now, you know.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“This company employs almost a thousand people in six countries.”

“Seven,” Sadie said. “Dad opened a lab in Singapore. That’s where he and Stone were headed.”

Dr Chat sighed. “Is there anyone we can call to come be with you? Friends? Your grandmother?”

Sadie shot her a defiant look. “Not really, no. Not the kind of friends I want to see right now.”

So the doctor left, and Sadie was alone. It was a luxurious room. The bed might be hospital style, but there was a forty-two-inch plasma screen on the wall, sleek Jasper Morrison chairs, a pad, lovely orchids in crystal vases, soft lighting, a view through a floor-to-ceiling window of the McLure Industries main New Jersey campus. And through a side door was a marble bathroom that could have graced a suite at a Ritz-Carlton.

If you had to be sick, this was the place in which to do it.

Sadie felt her gaze drawn to the image of the tiny dead biots. The last little bits of her father.

She wondered why she didn’t cry more. She had cried, but in sniffles and single sobs. She had cried so long, so much for her mother. Maybe she was cried out. Maybe she had just accepted the fact that life was pain and loss.

Or maybe she was numb, waiting with calm acceptance for her own death. The last of the McLure family.

Sadie rolled out of bed. Not exactly an easy thing to do. A painful thing to do. Her arm was one long, dull ache punctuated by waves of stabbing, stabbing, stabbing that caught her breath in her throat.

The cast had been replaced with a lighter version that could hang from a shoulder strap.

The rest of her body was just one big bruise. She moved like an old woman as she made her way to the toilet. She peed a little blood, but less than last time.

She hesitated at the shower. She wanted very badly to take a shower. But it would be easier to keep her cast dry in a bath. Nurses had given her a sponge bath, but really that wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

Wincing and moving with arthritic slowness, she turned on the water. There was of course a selection of Bulgari bath oils and beads. She spread the green-tea-scented salts in the water.

Getting out of the hospital gown—it was a very nice hospital gown, but still something for an invalid—took a while. Finally she stepped into the water. Then slipped and fell in all at once.

Unbelievable pain as her broken arm hit the side of the tub. The shock of hot, hot water on every square inch of her battered flesh.

But then, slowly, the heat seeped down into her muscles, found the bruises and began to leach the clotted blood from them, soothed the twitchy nerve endings, and lulled her mind to a state that wasn’t quite sleep but was close to it.

She heard a door open, but it seemed to come from far away. The voice, however, came from right next to the tub.

“Sorry to intrude.”

Sadie’s eyes widened to see a youngish man, maybe in his early twenties, but with a very serious mouth and emotionless brown eyes.

“What the hell?” Sadie cried. She jerked too suddenly, and her arm bounced and sent shrieking pain up from elbow to shoulder. “Damn it! Get out of here!”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. We need to have a conversation.”

“A what? I don’t know you. Get out before security gets here and I have them beat the crap out of you.”

The serious mouth very nearly twitched. As though it was thinking about a sort of smile, but not really planning to go through with it.

For Sadie’s part, she refused to give in to an instinct to cover herself. That would have signaled vulnerability. And she might be naked, neck-deep in water, and half crippled, but she was nowhere close to seeing herself as vulnerable.

“My name is Vincent.”

“Well, good for you. Now fuck off.”

“I’m a . . . a friend . . . of your father’s.”

“So now you sneak in to get a good look at me naked?”

Vincent drew back fractionally. He blinked. “Yes, you’re not wearing anything.” Like it was the first he’d noticed. And the concerned furrowing of his brow and the way he’d kind of jerked back almost made Sadie believe it was the truth.

“What is it you want?” Sadie demanded.

“Your father and brother did not die in an accident. They were murdered. You were targeted as well. They have not given up. You will either be killed or enslaved.”

Sadie stared at him. For a good long minute. She was realizing how little the word murdered surprised her. No one had said it to her. No one had suggested it within her hearing. But in the day and a half since the crash no one had said anything like “engine failure,” or “bird strike,” or even “pilot error.”

“There’s a robe,” she said, and jerked her chin to where a thick, heavy terry-cloth robe hung. Vincent fetched it, held it open, and then turned his face away.

She climbed slowly, painfully, to her feet. Murder. Yes, that did not seem at all crazy. Her mother had taught her to listen to what wasn’t said. The holes in conversation were often the most interesting parts.

Of course, if she was in danger, maybe this guy was the one bringing it.

Vincent kept his eyes averted until she had dragged the robe slowly, slowly and carefully over her broken arm and tied it with her good hand.

Then, with a sudden fluid motion, Vincent had a pen in his hand and pressed it against her heart, just beneath the breastbone.

Sadie froze. “What are you doing? Autographing me?”

Vincent shook his head. “Making a point.” He drew the pen back, aimed it safely away, and squeezed it. A glittering blade shot up. “Making the point that if I were here to kill you, you’d be long dead by now.”

Sadie breathed. More calmly than she had any right to do.

“Let me guess: you’re here to save my life. How exactly are you going to do that?”

“For a start, like this.” He touched her face and held the contact for a several seconds. There was nothing erotic in it.

“So,” Sadie said flatly.

Vincent nodded. “Like I said, I knew your father.”

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