For God’s sake, Plath who is really Sadie McLure, why didn’t you just do it?

Too precious to kill, are you, little rich girl?

Then what the hell are you doing in BZRK?

Don’t you know it’s a war, Plath? Don’t you know this is a battle for the human soul?

Why didn’t you kill, Plath?

First published in Great Britain 2013

by Electric Monkey – an imprint of Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London, W11 4AN

Copyright © The Shadow Gang 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Endpage photograph © Dimarion/Shutterstock

ISBN 978 1 4052 6311 5

eISBN 978 1 7803 1255 2

www.egmont.co.uk

www.electricmonkeybooks.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.

Please note: Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont cannot take responsibility for any third party content or advertising. Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

EGMONT

Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

For Katherine, Jake and Julia

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength.

Loving someone deeply gives you courage.

Lao Tzu

Kiss the crazy.

@Horse_ebooks

CONTENTS

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

ARTIFACT

AFTERMATH

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

ARTIFACT

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

ARTIFACT

TEN

ARTIFACT

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

ARTIFACT

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

After

Back series promotional page

Author’s Note

About the Author

About Publisher

ARTIFACT

To: Lear

From: Nijinsky

Wilkes is alive and back with us.

Ophelia is alive despite the loss of both legs below the knee.

Keats and Plath are both well and performed magnificently.

Vincent is suffering from a deep depression following the loss of one biot. The second biot was badly injured but is recovering. Vincent is being cared for, outcome very uncertain.

We failed in our main objective.

We await instructions.

ARTIFACT

To: Nijinsky

From: Lear

During Vincent’s incapacity you are in charge of NYC cell, Nijinsky. You’re the wrong person for the job. Become the right person.

ARTIFACT

Central Intelligence Agency–Office of Technology Threat Assessment

Transcript of interview with Professor Edwin H. Grossman, February 28, 2012

(Page 7 of 9)

Q: In your opinion then, this is a serious threat but not an urgent one?

Grossman: I don’t know your definition of urgent. Look, the gray goo scenario is not science fiction, not any longer. Nanotech is advancing by leaps and bounds. There is some very important research going on at MIT, and at UC Irvine, as well as in my own department at Texas.

Q: But anyone researching nanotech is aware of the danger.

Grossman: Fermi was aware of the danger of nuclear fission. Watson and Crick were aware of the danger of DNA. Alfred Nobel was aware of the danger of dynamite when he invented it. No doubt the first cave man to swing a club was aware–

Q: I take your point, Doctor, but you aren’t seriously comparing nanotechnology to nuclear weapons.

Grossman: Actually, yes, I am. You see, in either case, we are talking about enormous, catastrophic power in the hands of human beings.

Q: Only a madman–

Grossman: Only a madman? (Laughs.) Has there been a shortage of madmen in human history?

AFTERMATH

Vincent felt the laugh building inside him. It was like a build-up of steam in a covered pot. Like a volcano whose time to erupt has come at last.

He was being torn apart.

His arms were handcuffed to two parked diesel locomotives, and they were huffing and puffing, and smoke was coming up out of their undercarriages, and the locomotives were so hot that the steel side panels were melting.

He stood there between the tracks.

The chains were long. The engines would be able to build up speed.

“Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah!”

He laughed, because it would be funny when his arms were ripped from his body, when the flesh tore and the bones popped out of their sockets like pulling the wings off a barbecued chicken and . . .

“Come on, man, lie down, lie down, lie down.”

Choo choo. Choo chooooooo!

“You’re going to be okay, Vincent.”

Who was Vincent? His name was not Vincent. His name was . . . What was his name?

A dragon, one of those Chinese dragons, loomed over him, a giant face, and there was smoke coming out of its nostrils and it was the same as the smoke from the trains that were starting to move now, starting to pick up speed, now.

“Uh. Uh-uh-uh! Uh! Uhhhh! UUHHH!”

The chains clanked as the trains pulled away.

“Take this pill. Take the pill, Vincent.”

Vincent thrashed, had to free his arms, they would rip his arms off, his arms would be dragged off behind the trains!

“Uhhh-uhhh-UUUHHHH!”

“Goddamn it, take the pill!”

The dragon was ripping his mouth open; he was going to split Vincent’s head open so that brains came gushing out of his mouth, vomiting his own brains and . . .

The Chinese dragon was a nurse now, no, a dragon, no, no, no.

“Nooooo!”

A vice closed around his head. He smelled a masculine perfume. Vincent felt muscles like pythons around his head and something was in his mouth, and the dragon/nurse held his jaw shut even as he tried to scream and beg for help.

“Keats. Help me! Get water.”

From the sky came a bottle.

Fiji water. Oh, yes, that was the one with a square bottle, sure he would drink some water, yes, dragon, I’ll drink some water like a good boy.

“Get his mouth open.”

But the trains!

Vincent swallowed.

A voice he heard very, very clearly but through his head not his ears said, “They’ll kill you, they’ll have no choice, they’ll kill you, kill you, the mad king will send the mad emperor. Kill. You.”

But then his arms were ripped from their sockets—Snap! Pop!—by the trains and he laughed and laughed.

And he felt sick.

He wanted to throw up.

“Like my brother,” a voice said.

The dragon, who was really just a man who smelled like perfume, had an arm around Vincent’s head. The man was crying. So Vincent felt like crying, too.

The other one, Vincent thought maybe he was a devil, he wasn’t sure, he might have devil skin, and he had devil blue eyes.

“I don’t have arms anymore, Jin,” Vincent whispered.

“Jesus,” the possible devil with blue eyes said.

Jin—Nijinsky, the dragon, the nurse—didn’t say anything.

The drug came for Vincent. It called him to unconsciousness. As he tumbled, armless, down the long, long black well, Vincent had a moment of clarity.

So, he thought, this is madness.

She stood in the doorway, ready to help if Nijinksy and Keats had trouble getting Vincent into restraints.

Ready to help. Her heart was beating as if it was made out of lead. That beat, that unnatural beat squeezed the air out of her lungs; it clamped her throat.

Sadie McLure—Plath—had been just a little bit in love with Vincent. He had that effect on people. Not love love, not even attraction in the usual sense of the word—that feeling was reserved for Keats, who was working silently, quickly, to tie Vincent down. Keats looked as shell-shocked as Plath felt.

So, not love love and not attraction for Vincent, but some weird amalgam of protectiveness and trust. Strange to feel that way about someone as cold-blooded as Vincent, someone so utterly in control. Well, formerly in control.

Her fists clenched so tight that her neglected fingernails cut new and too-short lifelines into her palms. She had taken too many hits, too many losses: her mother, her father and brother. What was left to her now?

They said what didn’t kill you made you stronger. No, it left you with holes blown through your soul. It left you like Vincent.

Plath had been recruited by Vincent. She had trusted Vincent, trusted him even with her life. And at the same time there had always been the feeling that she should take care of him, not out of reciprocity, not because it was owed, but just because there was something in that impassive face, in those dark eyes that spoke to her and said, Yes, I need.

Plath knew she was not alone in this. The others, all of them, felt it.

But that Vincent, the cool, calm, relentless one whom you nevertheless wanted to shelter, that Vincent was not here any longer.

Madness.

Insanity.

It had been an abstraction, but now she saw it. Now she felt it, and brave Plath was no longer quite so brave.

She turned away, unable to watch any longer.

Ophelia would have laughed at the idea that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Her legs were gone, one at the knee, one six inches higher. She was not stronger.

But worse, like Vincent she had lost her biots. Had Ophelia been capable of rational thought she might have contemplated the comparison between legs, actual, physical legs, and the biots, which were not, after all, exactly original equipment for any human.

Her legs had burned like candles, melted like wax, down to the bone. They’d amputated the barbecued stumps in the OR there at Bellevue Hospital. But her biots were dead long before that, incinerated in the terrible disaster at the United Nations. By the time doctors had taken what was left of her legs, what was left of her mind wasn’t much.

Ophelia was guarded by FBI agents who labeled her a terrorist suspect. There was one just outside the door to her hospital room, and one at each end of the hallway, and one at the nurse’s station. So, had Ophelia been sane, she probably would have been surprised to see a man standing at the foot of her bed who was obviously not a doctor, despite his white coat. Underneath the white coat was a faded, lilac velour blazer. His usual jaunty top hat had been set aside somewhere, but he still had Danny Trejo’s face.

Caligula—he had no other known name—came close to her, stood beside her. Ophelia gazed up at him and in a moment of clarity, a brief gap between the painkillers and the mental anguish, seemed almost to recognize him.

“You?”

“Yes, Ophelia.”

“Did? Are, uh . . . Did?” she asked. It was not a coherent question, but Caligula answered as though it was, as though she could understand, even though her eyes had rolled up into her head and a manic grin had distorted her lips.

“Wilkes got out. The others are alive.” And then he said, “You did good, Ophelia. You were brave.”

He put a palm on her forehead, a gesture that was tender but not, because he used the pressure to hold her head still as with a single swift motion he buried the dagger to the hilt in her temple.

From his pocket he withdrew a small cylinder ending in a pointed valve. He pulled the knife out and pushed the valve into the hole. He opened the valve and let his own special mixture of white phosphorus flow into her brain.

An autopsy might just conceivably produce evidence of nanotechnology, and it was part of Caligula’s brief to stop that from happening. That, and a mad Ophelia might eventually, in some disjointed rant, have given up a deadly secret or two.

The only survivor of the UN massacre in custody was now no longer available for questioning.

By the time Caligula left the room Ophelia’s eye sockets were dripping liquid fire.

ONE

“Oh, I needed that.”

The president of the United States, Helen Falkenhym Morales, was feeling gratified. She and her husband had just sat in bed and watched Jon Stewart take apart the Senate majority leader, a Morales foe. And for once the president had gone off-diet and actually eaten most of a butterscotch sundae.

An enemy ridiculed, and a gooey sundae: a good end to an otherwise lousy day.

Monte Morales leaned across the bed and wiped a bit of whipped cream from her chin, popped it in his mouth, and smiled.

She liked that smile; it was a very particular smile, and if it were not for the fact that her life was lived according to a rigid schedule, well . . . he was still sexy after all these years.

Her husband, Monte Morales, the first gentleman, or as most people referred to him, MoMo, was ten years younger than she and kept himself in good shape for a man of forty-five. It was one of the things the American people liked about him. They liked his good looks; they liked his obvious devotion to his wife; they liked the stories about his genial weekly poker games with some of the other spouses of important Washington players.

They didn’t approve of his smoking cigars in the White House, but the American people were willing to forgive so long as he kept on being the charming, easygoing counterbalance to his wife’s razor-edged personality.

MoMo was the living proof that the president couldn’t be all bad—even her enemies admitted that.

“What’s bothering you, babe?” MoMo asked.

She turned and frowned at him. It had sounded perilously close to criticism. “What do you mean? It’s time for bed, that’s all.”

He sat up, swung his legs off the side of the bed, and said, “Not now, I mean generally. You’ve been a little weird.”

“Weird?” The word was absurd applied to Helen Falkenhym Morales. Difficult, cold, critical: those were the words applied to her most frequently. No one thought she was weird.

MoMo shrugged his broad shoulders. “I mean . . . off. Just, sometimes. Little stuff. You were talking during the program.”

“So?”

“So you never do, that’s all.”

“Really? You think ten minutes before we go to sleep is time to start questioning me?” She pulled on a robe and glanced at her pad. Nothing there that needed immediate attention. There was a coup under way in Tajikistan. That could wait.

And there was a briefing book from Patrick Rios, the new director of the ETA—the Emerging Technologies Agency. Rios, late of the FBI and a real go-getter type, was pushing hard to go after McLure Industries. What Rios didn’t seem to understand was that Grey McLure and his son had been murdered in what had been—until the UN terrorist attack—the biggest headline event of the year. Go after McLure?

Well . . . why not, now that she thought of it. Rios was very smart, very capable. He reminded the president of herself, somehow. When she pictured Rios, she always seemed to see herself as a young, aggressive prosecutor.

She trusted him.

She needed to give him a free hand.

He was very like her, a good guy, reliable.

In fact, the two memories—of Rios and of herself at that age—were wired together. The president’s brain could not think of Rios without thinking of herself.

“Babe, that’s not what I’m saying,” MoMo said. He stood to wrap his arms around her, but she moved away, heading toward the bathroom and a hot shower, her end-of-day relaxation ritual. He followed. “It’s just I’m wondering if you’re okay.”

“Listen, MoMo, I’m tired. And until thirty seconds ago I was feeling like I had put a pleasant full stop on this lousy day. So if you have something to say, let’s get to it.”

She slid back the glass door on the shower and turned the water on. It would take thirty seconds for the water to heat up.

“Okay,” he said, suddenly very serious. “It’s a bunch of little things. You’ve developed a nervous tic in your eye.”

“It’s the pollen—it’s been terrible.”

“You call me MoMo. You never used to. I don’t mind it from other people, but that’s not what you call me.”

She hesitated. “Okay.”

“You ate raw tomatoes.”

“What?”

“You ate raw tomatoes. You hate them. You dropped the F-bomb in the Cabinet meeting. You never do that. The last couple days I see you staring in the mirror, and it’s like you just go blank. The other day you snapped at the photographer. When do you ever do that?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been under some pressure lately,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm.

“You’ve been under pressure since I’ve known you, Helen, you don’t snap at people who work for you, not people who can’t defend themselves. It’s just . . .” He shrugged helplessly. “I just wonder if maybe we should take a few days up at Camp David.”

“I can’t do that,” she said icily. “I’m not the first lady, I’m the goddamned president. I have actual work to do.”

The insult was like a knife in his ribs. He gulped, shocked by it. “See, that’s not the kind of thing you say,” he said finally.

She blinked.

“Sorry, Mo—, sorry, sweetheart. I’m . . .” She forced a helpless smile. “Yeah, maybe I need some time off.”

“Maybe more than that. That twitch, all this little stuff, more than I can remember right now . . . maybe you should call the White House physician. Just have him check. You know . . . could be . . . I don’t know.”

The president nodded solemnly. “Okay. Now I’m taking a shower. Want to join me?”

“You know I’m a bath man,” he said, his tone half reproach, half forgiveness.

She put her arms around him. “But I’m lonely in that big shower all alone.”

When they were under the spray she considered her options.

MoMo wouldn’t let it drop. He was nothing if not persistent. He loved her and he would keep pushing. And pushing.

Something was wrong with her—that was the hell of it. She had felt it. She knew it was true. Something wrong.

But she had a year until the election. This was no time to look weak. This was no time for doctors to be finding a tumor or a stroke or even just too much stress.

But what could she do? How could she stop MoMo from loving her right out of the White House?

Later she would recall that question.

Later she would ask herself how she had decided on the terrible answer.

But at this moment all she saw was that it would have to be a single swift blow. No second chances.

She pressed close to her husband. She kissed him. She ran her fingers through his wet hair, held both sides of his head tight, and with every muscle in her body smashed the back of his head against the tile wall.

MoMo sagged to the floor. Blood came with surprising force, more than she would have imagined.

She left the water running, stepped from the shower, crossed to the bathtub, and began filling it with hot water.

It took a couple of minutes before there was enough water in the tub.

MoMo groaned in the shower. Nonsense sounds, not words, but still she had to hurry.

She slid back the shower door, knelt down, put her hands under his arms, and dragged him the five feet to the tub. That much was easy: he was wet and soapy, and the floor was tile.

The harder part was pushing him up over the side of the tub. For the scenario to work it would have to seem as if he’d slipped and smashed his head against the side of the tub. It would be a long night of making sure that bloodstains were only in exactly the right places. The president would be scrubbing.

She manhandled MoMo into the rising water in the tub. Now he was moaning and moving feebly, like a sleepwalker, like a drunk, uncoordinated.

He splashed into the tub.

His eyes fluttered open as she ground the bloody wound against the back of the tub.

“Mwuh?” he managed to say.

Mustn’t leave handprints. Had to do this right. She pressed her palms against his chest and leaned her weight on him until his head was completely submerged.

His dark eyes blinked, seemed to gain awareness for just a moment, and his arms came up out of the water to push back . . .

Too late. His lungs filled.

He vomited into the water.

And then she no longer had to hold him down. MoMo wasn’t going anywhere.

It would be a tragedy. The nation would mourn. She would get a ten-point sympathy bounce in the polls.

Her secrets would be safe.

A sob heaved up from inside her. She loved him. She loved him with all her heart.

And she had just murdered him.

In an office in a building on the 1800 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, just streets from the White House, Bug Man tore the gloves from his hands.

He was shaking.

He felt sick. He climbed out of the chair, made it five steps on the way to the very nice executive bathroom before falling to his knees, gasping as if he’d been running a marathon.

He had been.

Down in the meat, down in the nano, he had been racing his exploding-head-logo nanobots, laying wire like some demented lineman from elements of the president’s ego, her self-image, to images of MoMo.

Bug Man had long since cauterized a number of areas storing what might be called ethics or morality. In fact, they weren’t that, they were memories of books, sermons, lectures, and—much more powerful—the images of victimization from her childhood in San Antonio that formed the basis of her core decency.

Like most politicians, and all presidents, she had a strong ego. She’d always had well-developed instincts for survival, what some would describe as ruthlessness. But it had been balanced by pity, kindness, fellow feeling, love.

Bug Man had needed a less moral, more ruthless person. He had needed her simplified—the better to manipulate, the better to convince her to give Rios and his brand new government agency free rein to quash any unhelpful investigations, to oppose any international action.

So Bug Man had made her that. He had needed her to be suggestible to paranoia; he had needed to be able to plug that heightened aggressiveness and ruthlessness into pictures of any and all whose actions might threaten the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation.

Yes.

Well.

Brains are subtle things. Some miswiring had created the twitches and tells that had alerted MoMo to changes in his wife. The president’s heightened aggression combined with weakened restraint had led now to murder.

But for the last desperate minutes Bug Man had not been trying to get Helen Falkenhym Morales to kill her husband MoMo. He’d been trying to stop her.

Once he’d seen where she was going he’d tried—way too little, way too late—to make her see MoMo as an extension of herself.

The only result was that later, too damned late, she would feel remorse. Guilt. Which would only create its own problems.

Bug Man was on his knees, blood pounding in his face, stomach churning with fear, waiting for the call.

When his phone did ring it still startled him.

He wondered how long he could go without answering. He wondered if he could keep from vomiting again. Or crying.

“Yeah,” he whispered into his phone.

“Oh, Anthony.” The voice was not the ranting fury of the Armstrong Twins. It was Burnofsky. “Anthony, Anthony: what have you done?”

“Jesus Christ!” Bug Man wailed. “I didn’t know the crazy bitch would—”

Burnofsky laughed his parchment-dry laugh. “Watch what you say. Washington is full of big ears.”

“What am I . . . What do . . .” He couldn’t even frame the question. His breathing was short and harsh. “The Twins . . .”

“Past their bedtime, fortunately. The only one watching the video feed was me.”

It was a sign of how frightened Bug Man was that he welcomed this news. He despised Burnofsky, but he was terrified of Charles and especially Benjamin Armstrong.

“But there will be no hiding this, of course,” Burnofsky went on.

Bug Man cursed, but there was no anger left in him. All was cold knife-steel fear now. The Twins—Charles and Benjamin Armstrong, those freaks—were not patient with underlings who screwed up.

The things they could do to him . . . An earlier error had been punished with a beating delivered by AmericaStrong thugs against Bug Man’s legs and buttocks. He still couldn’t sit in a chair without a handful of Advil. Now he had endangered everything.

“I’m a twitcher; I’m a fighter, not a goddamned spinner,” Bug Man pleaded with the phone. “I took down Vincent himself. I took down Kerouac before him. I’m the best. I’m important. They can’t kill me! This is—”

“Mmmm,” Burnofsky said, amused, gloating, already seeing in his opium-addled brain the price the Twins might demand. “You’re screwed, Anthony my young friend. There’s only one person on this green Earth who can save you. Do you know who that is, Anthony?”

Bug Man was trembling. Even now, no anger. Anger would come later, along with self-justification, but right now, with his face inches from the floor and his whole body feeling sick, Bug Man could only moan.

“Who, Anthony? Who can save you now, you arrogant little Limey shit? Say the word.”

“You,” Bug Man whispered.

Silence stretched as Burnofsky absorbed his rival’s defeat. Then the older man said, “Go limp. Power down. Go to your hotel, screw your girlfriend, but do nothing else until I tell you.”

The phone went dead. Bug Man rolled onto his side and cried.

TWO

Keats, whose real name was Noah, had not intended to go to Plath’s room, but there he was. He knocked.

“Yes,” she said. Not “Come in,” just “Yes.” Knowing it was him.

He stood framed by the doorway.

“You look like hell,” she said.

“So do you.”

And then they simply went for each other. They clutched and tore at each other, bruised each other’s lips.

Noah’s fingers dug into a handful of Sadie’s dark hair, and Sadie’s hands fumbled to push his shirt over his head, and his tongue was in her mouth, and her breasts were pressed almost violently against his hard chest.

They were alive when they should be dead, and sane when they could be mad.

So afraid. So lonely.

Vincent’s lunatic howl was fresh in Keats’s mind, still echoed in his ears, and the sight of Nijinsky breaking down in tears, and the awful memory of his big brother, of Alex, shrieking like an animal, chained to a cot in a hellish mental ward screaming, “Berserk! Berserk! BERSERK!”

Keats had imagined that their first time making love would be a study in tenderness. But this was not tender. They could hardly keep from hurting each other. They needed something that was not horror. They needed something that was not drenched in despair.

They needed not to hear Vincent howling like a dog.

Noah gasped and pulled back suddenly. He pushed Plath’s greedy hands down against the pillow.

Her eyes were confused, wary. “Don’t stop,” she said and her voice was not pleading, it was a snapped order. She expected to be obeyed. She could do that voice when motivated.

“You’re leaking,” Keats said.

“What?”

“It’s not bad, not yet.”

She understood him, then sat up, put a hand to her head. As if she could feel it. “Damn it.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

Keats looked at her. She closed her eyes, absorbing the frustration, then snapped her gaze up at him, blazing.

But as he looked at her face he also saw deep inside her. Not in some metaphorical way. He had eyes inside her, all the way down inside her brain.

Down in the meat.

Plath had an aneurysm, which had been serviced first by her father’s biots—before he had been murdered—and were now served by Keats’s own biots. Two tiny, nightmarish creatures, neither as large as a dust mite, neither visible to the unaided eye. Each had six legs, a tail that could deliver a venomous sting or drip acid. A spear for puncturing the metal shells of nanobots.

There was a rack of pins only a few molecules thick slung on the biot’s back. A spinneret at the rear oozed with webbing wire.

Biots were built of several different DNA strands: scorpion, spider, cobra, jellyfish, and human. The DNA of a specific human, in this case one Noah Cotton: Keats.

That DNA connection tied the biot to its creator, like a finger was tied to a brain, like a sort of detached limb, a body part controlled by his own mind. Move left. Move right. Jump. Strike. Run away.

Live.

Die.

The human DNA was most evident in the face of the biot. In addition to blank, soulless insect eyes, each biot also had structures that looked like human eyes, almost. Human until you looked closely and saw that these were as blank and soulless as the spider eyes.

The intimate connection had a very major downside. A biot wasn’t just a limb, it was an extension of the mind of its controller/creator. Lose a biot and you would lose your mind.

That was why Vincent howled. Bug Man had beaten him in battle and killed one of Vincent’s biots.

Noah kissed Plath, a kiss that was full of regret, and she accepted it passively.

Down deep inside her brain where a scalpel could never reach, Keats’s biots, K1 and K2, stood atop the Teflon fiber barrier that had been built so painstakingly around the aneurysm. It was a bulging artery, a thin spot, a swelling, like an overinflated balloon where the blood might break out at any moment and tear apart the drum-tight membrane to flood and destroy the brain tissue around it.

Pop.

A blown aneurysm could lead to anything from strokes to localized brain death to all-over, whole-body death.

The membrane was leaking. From Keats’s position it was a floor not a wall—gravity meant very little at the nano level. A floor that was gushing tiny red frisbees, like a jet of licked cough drops. These were the red blood cells, platelets. They shot up in a jet from a tiny tear in the artery wall and floated off into the cerebrospinal fluid, where blood was normally not allowed.

Within that garden hose of platelets were things of a paler color that looked like animated sponges, wads of mucousy goo—the white blood cells, the pale soldiers, the defenders of the body.

Keats saw this through two sets of biot eyes. The biots saw each other as well. And all the while, up in the macro, he was looking at Plath as she stood, and he gazed with intense regret on the curve of her breasts, and the narrowness of her waist, and saw—at least in his imagination—many other details as well.

It was painful, wanting her this badly.

Keats’s two biots scampered to the stash of titanium fibers. The fibers looked a little like strands of razor wire, each only about half the length of the biot itself. The jagged edges allowed them to be woven together. But care had to be exercised to avoid cutting into the artery wall and making things far worse.

“Can’t you do two things at once?” She leaned into him and he did not pull away. Her open mouth met his and her tongue found his and he was breathing her breath, and his heart was pounding, pounding crazy crazy crazy.

His body, his bruised, battered, painfully taut body, did not really give half a damn about doing the responsible thing but wanted very much, very excruciatingly much, to just do, and it was almost beyond his power to restrain himself and if she kept that up then things were going to move forward to the next step, a step he wanted to take more than he had ever wanted anything else in his sixteen years of life.

His words were a rasp and a groan. “Not those two things. No. Not at once.”

He held her back, his hands on her arms, and really why the hell were his arms taking sides with his brain when his body so clearly, clearly, clearly had other ideas in mind?

“I don’t want to be paying attention with half my mind,” he managed to say.

Plath liked that. She didn’t want that to be his answer, but she liked it anyway. Yes, he wanted it to be important. He wanted it to stay with him forever. Keats was always . . . She stopped herself in midthought. She didn’t know what he was always, did she? She barely knew him. They had met just weeks ago. Not a single second of that time had been anything like normal. It had been lunacy from the start.

We take the names of madmen, because madness is our fate.

Terribly melodramatic, that. Ophelia had denied that it was hopeless. Ophelia, who lay now, presumably in FBI custody, with her legs burned off.

And Vincent was the proof. Vincent, their pillar of strength. The best of BZRK, if there was a best.

How long until this beautiful, sweet boy with the sometimes difficult to understand English accent would be raving like his brother, Kerouac?

How long until he was howling like Vincent?

How long until she was alongside them?

He wasn’t the only one who wanted this, he wasn’t by any means the only one. She wanted him, all of him, not later, now. But that meant all of his attention, too, she supposed.

She was arguing with herself now, and either way she was losing. Plath was not good at losing.

Down deep inside her brain, Keats lifted the first of the fibers and slid one end into the weave. The platelets were pouring out, a fire hose of flat red discs. His biot bent the fiber against the current, pushing the flow aside, and shoved the loose end down, held it down while his second biot came running up with a second fiber. The platelets battered the biot’s head, a Nerf machine gun.

“How bad is it?” Plath asked.

“Not bad,” he reassured her. “Just an hour’s work.”

Plath smiled crookedly, and they both felt the moment slip away.

“You realize we may never get the opportunity again?” Plath asked him.

“Horribly aware, yes,” he said.

She laid a palm softly against his cheek. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t help it. He had to close his eyes because he could not look into her eyes or notice the tremor in her lips or the pulse in her throat or any of a hundred things that would destroy his ability to focus on saving her.

She kept her hand there. “I’m afraid,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“I told you before: I’m not the kind of girl who falls in love.”

He shrugged. “I’m the kind of boy who does.”

“It will make it so much worse,” she whispered. “Aren’t you afraid of that pain?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Then let’s not. We can make love without being in love, Keats. We can be . . . We can be fighters together. Side by side. We can be friends. We can do, whatever, we don’t have to be in love.”

He said nothing, half his focus already gone, trudging dutifully with his titanium fibers as platelets swirled around him.

“You don’t need me here,” she said, frustration turning her voice cold. Actually angry at him for focusing on saving her life, angry at him, she supposed, for being able to resist. Or just angry at life in general.

“I’m going to take a shower,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said flatly.

It took Keats closer to two hours to squeeze off the flow of blood. Then another twenty minutes to carefully check his work.

He fell asleep fully clothed, and though he would have loved to dream of her, exhaustion shut him down.

“Difficult news,” Burnofsky said.

Burnofsky brought that news to the Twins right away, middle of the night. There could be no concealing it. The best he could hope for was to save Bug Man’s life and leave his own plans intact. That above all: his own plans.

To that end he’d hoped to convince the Twins to take a victory lap, to take a tour of foreign facilities or even a vacation aboard their floating house of horrors, the Doll Ship.

Bug Man had forced his hand and disrupted Burnofsky’s timetable. In a few hours, by morning at latest, the news of the first gentleman’s death would be out. It would be seen as a tragic accident by the general public—but the Twins would know better.

If he was going to keep things running, he, Burnofsky, would have to get the Twins under control. Not easy. Never easy and harder now. Charles still saw reason. But Benjamin . . .

Burnofsky took the elevator up to the Tulip. The Tulip was the pinnacle, floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, of the Armstrong Building, headquarters of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. It was the pink polymer, one-way transparent, nanocomposite-walled home and office of the Armstrong Twins.

AFGC still made fancy gifts at factories in China, Malaysia, and Turkey. They still owned and operated the ubiquitous gift stores seen in every American airport and in European and Japanese train stations. But gifts had long since ceased to be their main focus.

Weapons technology, surveillance, and communications technology, and above all, nanotechnology, now occupied the denizens of the Tulip and most of the sixty-two floors below. The gift stores were run out of an office park in Naperville, Illinois. In the Tulip they had bigger fish to fry.

Burnofsky had called ahead to Jindal so he could get the Twins up and alert. Jindal met him outside the private elevator, down on sixty-two.

“What is it?” Jindal asked, suppressing a yawn but intensely concerned despite his sleepiness.

“Why don’t I just tell the story once?” Burnofsky said and pushed past Jindal to the elevator. It was a short ride.

“What in hell?” Benjamin asked the moment Burnofsky appeared.

The Armstrong Twins wore a robe, dark red silk, specially tailored for them, of course: Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s did not carry clothing in their size or shape.

Their legs, all three of them, were bare. Their feet—only the two useful ones—were in shearling-lined slippers, the third, deformed and three-quarter-size, was bare.

“Difficult news,” Burnofsky said.

“Well, spit it out, it’s the middle of the night!” Charles snapped.

Burnofsky tapped his pad for a few seconds, and the touch screen embedded in the Twins’ massive desk lit up.

It was the video from Bug Man’s feed. Like all nanobot video, it failed to achieve the high standards of Hollywood; it was grainy, jerky gray scale one moment and awash in unnatural computer-enhanced colors the next. This video was worse still because it was the result of tapping directly into the president’s optic nerve, pulling up the raw feed, so to speak, of rods and cones, uninterpreted by the visual cortex.

There was no sound, just a series of jerky images—a window, a wall, Monte Morales, a rumpled bed, the floor, Monte Morales again, a shower knob, a shoulder, an eye, a stream of water and then . . .

“Jesus!” It was Jindal. “Did she . . . Is that . . .”

It was fascinating to watch the reactions of the Twins. Charles’s eye stared hard—at the screen, at Burnofsky, at the screen. His mouth was a straight line, set, twitching in growing fury.

Benjamin seemed almost distracted. He looked to left and right. His mouth—well, it was hard, really, to judge his face fairly; it had been bashed and battered by the bottom of a glass bottle. There was a tooth missing altogether and another one chipped. Benjamin’s eye was a clenched purple fist with the pupil barely showing. He looked like someone who had been on the losing end of a bar fight.

Within the raw liver that was Benjamin’s eye socket, the cruel eye seemed far less interested than it should.

The third eye, the one between the usual two, seemed to agree with Charles that this was important. It focused its soulless stare on the video.

The file ended.

“It will be covered up,” Charles said. He tugged at the collar of his bathrobe and, as well as he could, tugged the belt tighter. “Bug Man must be replaced at once. And punished. Punished most severely. It’s that woman he has with him. She distracts him. Take her from him, get rid of her. Kill her in front of him! Bug Man will refocus. A beating for him, yes, a severe lesson, yes, that’s it, a beating! And kill his woman.”

“I disagree,” Burnofsky said as blandly as he could.

Oh, Bug Man would owe him. He wished he had video of Charles planning Bug Man’s humiliation and Jessica’s murder. Anthony Elder, that snotty little black British prodigy who called himself Bug Man, would kiss Burnofsky’s ass for this.

Burnofsky would own Bug Man.

“I don’t care about Bug Man,” Benjamin snarled. “It wasn’t Bug Man. It was her. Her!”

Burnofsky at first assumed he was talking about Bug Man’s girl, Jessica. But no . . . of course not.

“I want her hurt.” Benjamin touched his damaged mouth. Then he clenched his fist. “Damaged in some permanent way, something she can never overcome, something that will make her remaining life a horror. Not death, no, we still need her to get at her father’s secrets, but pain, such pain and despair, yes.”

Not poor, dumb, absurdly beautiful Jessica. Oh, no. Benjamin was thinking of Sadie McLure.

Burnofsky suppressed a sneer. Benjamin was losing his mind. The experience with Sadie McLure had unhinged him. He’d always been the more volatile of the Twins, but now? He was still “wired”—that was part of the problem. Burnofsky had volunteered to go in and pull those pins and wires, remove them before they became a settled feature of Benjamin’s brain, undo, insofar as anyone could, the damage done by Sadie McLure’s biots. But Benjamin couldn’t tolerate the idea of someone else inside his brain.

Irony, that.

And Charles? Well, just what the hell did you do if you were a conjoined twin and the other half of you went mad?

“She was inside my brain, sticking pins in my brain, making me an animal!” Benjamin bellowed.

“Brother . . .” But Charles’s voice wheezed out. Benjamin had taken control of their lungs.

“Something with acid,” Benjamin said, his voice suddenly silky. “Acid. Or something taken off. Cut something off her. Cut off her nose or her hands.” He chopped at the air with his hand. It was more than just a gesture of emphasis, he was using his hand as an imaginary meat cleaver.

Charles waited for an opening to speak. They each had a mouth of their own and a throat, but the lungs were shared property, and it could be difficult for one to make himself heard if the other was bellowing.

“Brother,” Charles began. “Let’s focus on this crisis. The next thing we need to consider is—”

“Next? Next? Next she suffers and I see it happen. I revel in it. I see it happen and I laugh at her. I stand over her and look down at her as she cries and begs and as the hope dies in her eyes. That’s next.”

He was shaking his fist now, a comic-book villain. But crying from his eye at the same time, a furious, frustrated, hurt child.

She was a sixteen-year-old girl, Sadie McLure, although now it seemed she used the nom de guerre Plath. So melodramatic, the BZRKers—such romantics.

Sixteen. The same age as Burnofsky’s own daughter, Carla.

Former daughter? No, death didn’t make you former, it just made you dead.

Charles and Benjamin had been much more calm when they’d ordered Carla’s death. They had been regretful. Charles had actually touched Burnofsky, put a ham-size hand on Burnofsky’s back as he ordered the death of his only child.

Solicitous.

Considerate.

She has betrayed us, Karl. She’s sold us out. You know how she would end up if we left her alone to leave us and join BZRK. Madness. Would you want that for your little girl?

Burnofsky drew a shaky breath. They might at least offer him a drink; of course, the Twins were a bit distracted. Benjamin was still ranting, and Charles was growing increasingly impatient with it.

“I was raped by her!” Benjamin bellowed. “Violated!”

Plath had managed to infiltrate Benjamin’s brain with her biots. Burnofsky knew she was new at the business of nano warfare, but she had improvised, the clever, clever girl. Given the time frame she could have had only minimal training in the sophisticated business of subtly rewiring a human brain. And she’d been in a hurry and under pressure, so she had simply stabbed pins and run wire almost randomly.

She had made scrambled eggs of Benjamin’s brain.

That was some of her father’s intelligence in evidence. She was smarter than the brother who had died. He wondered if they had killed the wrong McLure child. Stone was a stolid, dutiful type, his sister on the other hand . . .

The result of Sadie’s wiring had been severe mental disruption. Benjamin had screeched and babbled and generally made a fool of himself, straining the physical barrier that connected his own head to Charles’s—very painful—and caused the unfortunate incident of the glass bottle, the results of which were still so obvious on Benjamin’s face.

The membrane, the flesh, whatever the word was for the living intersection between Charles and Benjamin, had been strained and torn. The central eye, that eerie, third eyeball that sometimes joined with Charles and other times with Benjamin, and at still other times seemed to decide its own focus, was red-rimmed, the lower lid crusted with blood that still seeped from a deep bruise.

At the end Plath had let Benjamin live when she might well have killed him. Burnofsky wondered whether at this moment Charles thought that was a good thing or not. How many times must one or the other of the Twins have pondered the question of what happened if one of them died?

Their heads were melded. Some areas of their brains were directly connected. They shared a neck, albeit a neck with two sets of vocal cords. They had two hearts—one apiece—and had a sort of two-lobed stomach that fed out through a single alimentary tract.

Each had an arm. Each had a leg. And there was the third leg as well, a leg that dragged like so much dead weight. As a consequence they moved with extreme difficulty and usually chose to get around in a motorized cart or wheeled office chair customized to fit their double width.

Charles tried again. “We have important matters to discuss, Benjamin. We are on the cusp of completing Phase Three of our plan, brother, don’t you grasp that? Don’t you see how far we have come? But we must deal with this crisis. Bug Man’s incompetence may upset everything!”

“It wasn’t you,” Benjamin snapped. “It wasn’t you. It was me. It was me she humiliated.”

“Look, we’ll deal with the girl when we get an opportunity,” Charles soothed. “Of course you feel violated. Of course you’re angry. But—”

It was part of the strangeness of dealing with the Twins that when they spoke to each other they could not look at each other. They had never made direct eye contact in their lives.

“You think I’m being irrational,” Benjamin said, sounding rational for the first time in several minutes. “But you don’t understand. This cannot be tolerated. If we can be humiliated this way, then we will lose credibility with our own people. Do you think our twitchers aren’t talking about it?” He stabbed a finger in Burnofsky’s direction. “Do you think Karl isn’t smirking?”

In fact, Karl Burnofsky was smirking, but he hid it well. His sagging, whiskered face and rheumy blue eyes did not appear to reflect any pleasure.

It occurred to him that this was his opportunity to speak. He said, “Perhaps a vacation. Some time off. We have come a long way. You’re both tired. Deservedly so, the weariness of a long battle.”

Charles shot a sharp, suspicious look at Burnofsky. “Are you out of your mind? This thing with Bug Man and the president, for God’s sake, target number one, the purpose for which we lost so many good people. The woman has to give Rios the go-ahead.”

“She did,” Burnofsky said. “The initial go-ahead, anyway. I can show you the video. She finished cleaning up the blood and went to her pad, pulled up the ETA mission, and approved it. Rios has long since started planning counter-attacks on BZRK. The president has scheduled a meeting with him to discuss raiding McLure, blocking their accounts, arresting individuals on suspicion of terrorism. I am confident she will give him free rein; Bug Man has succeeded in that. And gentlemen, wasn’t that our goal?” Burnofsky puffed out his cheeks in a sort of world-weary gesture. “Bug Man screwed up, but—and it’s a very big but—he did accomplish the goal. We own the president, and we control ETA, the agency that will deal with any nanotechnology information.”

“Damn, Karl, you might have told us,” Charles chided, but he was too happy to be genuinely angry.

“This thing with Monte Morales, it’s a blip,” Burnofsky said. “It’s a bump in the road. And you’re . . . tired.” He tried to send a meaningful look to Charles without it being intercepted by Benjamin, but of course that was a physical impossibility.

What he wanted to say was, “Look, your twin is losing it. If he goes, you go. Get him out of here. Get him some rest.”

“I can handle Bug Man,” Burnofsky said. “Jindal will be here running the daily operation. I can go to Washington and supervise the wiring of the president personally. If I do have to take it over, I can do it without relying on signal repeaters. Meanwhile, Rios is moving immediately against BZRK in DC and New York. BZRK will be effectively taken out, in this country at least. We’ve been probed by Anonymous, but we’re confident they’ve been shut out. We have substantial control of the FBI, we have some assets in the Secret Service. Our overseas targets are being well managed. So . . . honestly? Now’s a good time for a break.”

Charles looked hard at Burnofsky, reading his thoughts. Charles knew his brother’s stability was tenuous at best.

“You’ll go to Washington yourself?” Charles asked, seeming oddly deflated. “You’ll take charge?”

“I will go. I will oversee the wiring. I’ll touch base with Rios. And I’ll deal with Bug Man.”

Benjamin frowned. Then his eye brightened, and the third eye seemed to join in sympathy. “The Doll Ship.”

“It’s in the Pacific. Somewhere near Japan, heading toward Hong Kong to pick up a very nice haul of Korean refugees, and one moderately good twitcher,” Jindal reported. He had deemed it a safe moment to speak up. Jindal was a true believer, a Nexus Humanus cultist, wired and, in the favorite Nexus Humanus phrase, “Sustainably happy.”

A sucker, in Burnofsky’s view. A fool. A middle manager with delusions of importance.

The mention of the Doll Ship soothed some of the anxiety from Benjamin’s face. Charles, too, softened a bit.

“The Doll Ship,” Benjamin said, and his bruised mouth smiled.

Sick bastards, both of you, Burnofsky thought. Sick, sad, screwed-up freaks. It would be good to get them out of the way for a few days.

He had work to do.

THREE

“Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

Vincent bellowed like a beast.

Like a lion at feeding time.

Plath put her hands over her ears.

“Rrrraaaaarrrrrgh!”

The sound was muffled, but the doors and walls of the safe house were flimsy and sound carried, especially at night.

Plath was due to start receiving her inheritance: at the very least, she decided, she could pay for a better safe house.

She took her shower. It was an awful little bathroom; no one ever cleaned up, and the mildew was eating the tile grout.

She could imagine it at the nano level. That was the start of the madness, the thing that softened you up and prepared you to lose it entirely. Like Vincent. Like Ophelia, probably, poor girl, wherever she was. Like Keats’s brother, Kerouac. It began with that terrible parallel view. Down there. Down where human eyes were only supposed to squint through a microscope’s lens, not walk among the alien flora and fauna.

Mildew. The bacteria on her own hands. The colored footballs of pollen. The mites. The soap and pounding hot water slicking it away, but not all, never all. The beasties were with us always.

I don’t want to end up like Vincent.

Keats’s biots were inside her head. So was one of her own. He was repairing her aneurysm, and she had one biot on board, as the jaunty semi-nautical phrase went, and another in a petri dish soaking up nutrients

She could have gone off to find Keats’s biots, down there, down in the meat. Her biot—P2 as it happened—was resting comfortably on the back side of her left eyeball. Occasionally she would move her biot as a dutiful lymphocyte came oozing along to clean up whatever this alien monstrosity was.

Had she wanted to, she could have had her own biot help Keats. But a biot face . . . Well, it was bad enough to know precisely, exactly, what vermin crawled the surface of Keats’s skin. She didn’t need to see the bizarro-world distortion that was his biot’s face.

She liked his face quite a lot. The too-blue eyes had at first seemed almost feminine, but a gentle face did not signal weakness, at least not in Keats.

As for his mouth, well, she had always liked that, the quirky little dip in the middle made him look wryly amused. How would he look when he was where Vincent was now?

Not madness. Not that. Death is better.

A lousy, filthy, depressing, badly lit bathroom. But a good water heater at least.

She closed her eyes and aimed them up into the spray. Take that, my demodex. Hah, I bet a few of you lost your grips and are now sliding down my cheeks. Hah! How will you like it if you go swirling down the drain?

Soap, soap, soap, everywhere. Shampoo and soap and Purell. No one showers like a twitcher, she thought, and realized that was an aphorism that very few people would understand.

A voice made her jump.

“Showering off the shame?”

Wilkes. She was using the toilet.

Definitely: when she got her inheritance, it would be time to generously agree to pay for a higher-class rental somewhere. Anywhere. Just because they were crazy didn’t mean they had to live like animals.

“Oh, that’s a loooong silence,” Wilkes said. “You didn’t do it, did you?”

“Not your business, Wilkes,” Plath snapped.

Wilkes had an odd laugh. Heh-heh-heh. “That’s confirmation. I can’t believe after all the looks and the Bella Swan lip biting—and poor Keats awkwardly adjusting his jeans any time he sees you bend over—that nothing happened. Jeez, Plath, what are you holding out for?”

Suddenly, the shower curtain was pulled back and there stood Wilkes in a faded High School Musical T-shirt. Her spiky hair was less spiky, her strange tattoos almost green in the light of the cheap fluorescent bulb.

“You have a nice body,” Wilkes said. “He’s going to like that. You know, if you ever actually . . . Turn around, let’s see the butt.”

“Wilkes, I say this with affection: drop dead.” Plath pulled the shower curtain closed again and heard Wilkes’s laugh. Heh-heh-heh.

“If you don’t want him can I borrow him?”

Plath was about to yell a heated “No!” But that would just egg Wilkes on. And anyway, it’s not as if Plath had the right to say no. And not as if Keats would ever say yes to Wilkes.

“Don’t stay in there too long,” Wilkes said on her way out. “Scrub all you want: you can’t get them all.”

Something you HAVE to see. That was the message Farid sent, using all-caps for HAVE, not his usual style, that.

Farid Berbera was not a member of BZRK. Farid Berbera was a member—if you could even use that inaccurate term—of an older organization. Anonymous had been around since Farid was a kid. He was no longer a kid, although at seventeen he wasn’t quite a grown-up, either. Not in the eyes of his father, the acting Lebanese ambassador to the United States. Not in the eyes of his mother, the public relations assistant at that same Washington, DC, embassy.

And truthfully, not in his own eyes, either.

Farid Berbera, tall, thin, amazing black hair, unfortunate nose, and eyes like Sal Mineo—he’d had to look that up, Mineo was way before his time—was scared.

Farid had once hacked the computers of the Food and Drug Administration because the FDA was stalling a pot-based therapeutic drug. That was not why he was scared.

“Have to see?” ChickenSteak had written back. “If this is some dumb LOLcat . . .”

Farid had hacked the computers of the American Cancer Society because they had supported the FDA decision. Also not terribly scary.

He had hacked the computers of an online dating company that was selling confidential customer data, and the Randall–Georgia Institute for being anti-gay, and he’d hacked the system at Safeway’s corporate headquarters because . . . well, he forgot why, exactly.

Safeway had not frightened him.

But today, for the third time in as many days, he had hacked the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. AFGC, best known for operating gift shops in airports. Also, however, known to be much more involved with weapons technology than with collectible figurines.

He was intruding on AFGC because other hackers had made their way into the systems of the cult Nexus Humanus, and there had found a surprising number of connections—personnel and finances—between Nexus Humanus and AFGC.

Why would a weird cult be so closely involved with a maker of snow globes slash missile guidance systems?

Farid had expected AFGC’s system security to be tight. It was beyond tight. It was paranoid. It was not a surprise that no one had made it through before. Even drawing on the skills of half a dozen of the best hackers in the world, Farid had not made it past the bland public face of AFGC. Until he began looking at subsidiaries of AFGC.

AmericaStrong, a division of AFGC, was a security company run by ex-CIA, ex-Special Forces types. It should have been the best-protected element in the system, and they were good, but they had grown a new problem: a link to a U.S. government agency, the Emerging Technologies Agency, ETA.

And ETA? Well, they tried to safeguard their system, but US government networks had been Anonymous’s doormats for a generation now.

So it went like this: ETA to AmericaStrong, AmericaStrong to AFGC, and pow, kiss my ass, he was in.

And now Farid almost wished he wasn’t.

He typed into the dialog box open on the left third of his screen.

LeVnteen34: You guys seeing this?

Of course they were seeing it. He knew they were seeing it. But did they know what it meant?

86TheChickenSteak: That’s the SecState.

They were seeing video. Remarkably bad video, distorted, gray scale with sudden flares of unnatural color. But that was indeed the secretary of state.

JoeyBo316: That’s the Oval.

86TheChickenSteak: Oval?

LeVnteen34: The Oval Office.

There was a pause at that before Chicken typed,

86TheChickenSteak: Thefuckwhat?

The video ended in static and jerky images. Farid opened a second video file. Papers on a desk. Some kind of briefing book, but the resolution was way too weak to make out individual words.

A third video was from the point of view of someone standing at a podium speaking to a room full of people. The fourth seemed to be nothing but a blank wall.

JoeyBo316: Like someone’s wearing a camera.

Farid disagreed but didn’t want to embarrass Joey. The aspect ratio was all wrong for any kind of camera. But he didn’t want to prejudice their opinions, better to let them see what they saw, and react.

It was the fifth video, more desk, only this time something happened.

JoeyBo316: Replay.

Farid replayed. He did it more than once. There was no getting around it: they were watching someone put on glasses. Not from outside, but from inside.

From inside the person putting on glasses.

86TheChickenSteak: Jesustitty. We’re looking out someone’s eyeballs.

It wasn’t until they had dredged through many, many more videos—walls, desks, something that was probably a pillow, lots and lots of images so jumbled and low-res they were indecipherable—that they reached one of the most recent videos, the one Farid had saved for the end.

It showed the recognizable face of Monte Morales, the first gentleman.

Recognizable at least until two hands, a woman’s hands, pushed that face under the water.

FOUR

They did not have Vincent in restraints. The sedatives they’d obtained were working for now, and Nijinsky couldn’t bear having Vincent tied up.

Nijinsky stood looking down at Vincent as Vincent stared at the butcher-wrapped sandwich on the paper plate beside the snack pack of corn chips.

“You have to eat something,” Nijinsky said.

Vincent sat in a plastic chair. It was one of those molded things with spindly chrome legs. The chair was beside a bed in a narrow room that held little else unless you counted cockroaches.

Not a place to rescue your sanity, Nijinsky thought.

“Come on, Vincent, have a couple bites. The alternative is a feeding tube, and no one wants that.”

Vincent stuck out one finger. He slid it into the gash formed by cutting the sandwich in half. He stuck his finger into that gap and seemed to be feeling the edges of the ham and cheese and lettuce and tomato. It was almost obscene.

“Here, let me unwrap—” Nijinsky leaned forward to pull back the paper.

The growl from Vincent was like something that might come from a leopard defending its kill.

Nijinsky backed up.

For a moment regret found a way to show itself in Vincent’s eyes. He had serious eyes, Vincent, deeply shadowed by a thoughtful brow. He wasn’t a large guy—Nijinsky was taller—but Vincent always seemed older than his twentysomething years, more serious, more impressive. Vincent was a young man who tried hard to blend into the background but never would.

Nijinsky—his real name was Shane Hwang—was a completely different creature. He was Chinese American, elegant, manicured, model handsome—in fact, actually a successful model.

Vincent lost focus, blinked, looked back at the sandwich.

“Don’t go too far away,” Nijinsky said softly. “We need you. We are in trouble, Vincent. We need you. I sure as hell need you. Lear knows it, they all know it. You’re you. I’m not. And, so, listen, just try to eat.”

He didn’t say, but thought: And I don’t want to be you, Vincent.

He let himself out of the room and winced at the sound of the key as he locked the door behind him.

The others were waiting in the shabby, depressing common room that Nijinsky hated. They all looked up at him. Plath. Keats. Wilkes. All that was left for now of the New York cell of BZRK.

Forty-eight hours had passed since the disaster at the UN. Just two days since Vincent lost his mind and Ophelia lost her legs and BZRK lost, period.

Wilkes had gotten out with a concussion, one ear still ringing, and some superficial burns. She was an odd girl and wore her oddness defiantly. Her right eye bore a tattoo of dark flames pointed sharply down to reach the top of her cheek. A gauze bandage covered a vicious burn on one arm. With a red Sharpie she had written FUCK YEAH, IT HURTS on the bandage.

On her other arm was a tattoo of a QR code. If you scanned it, you went to a web page where a similarly defiant message waited.

Somewhere much more private was a second QR code. If you made it that far, you might learn more about Wilkes. About a high school where the football team had been accused of rape. Where the alleged victim had walked through the halls of that school one night tossing Molotov cocktails.

Wilkes. The name was taken from a Stephen King novel.

As for Plath and Keats, Nijinsky kept telling them they had behaved brilliantly, especially given their inexperience. But the question hung in the air, unspoken, unspeakable: Why hadn’t Plath killed the Armstrong Twins when she had the chance?

For God’s sake, Plath who is really Sadie McLure, why didn’t you just do it?

Too precious to kill, are you, little rich girl?

Then what the hell are you doing in BZRK?

Don’t you know it’s a war, Plath? Don’t you know this is a battle for the human soul?

Why didn’t you kill, Plath?

And did Plath have the answer? She was asking herself that same question. What was she, Gandhi? Who did she think she was? Jesus? Saint Sadie of Plath?

“Vincent’s not coming out of it,” Nijinsky said. “Who’s got the bottle?”

There was a bottle of vodka next to the sink in the grim little kitchenette. It was frosted. They kept it in the freezer, usually. Keats was closest to the sink. He leaned back in his chair, grabbed the bottle by its neck and snagged a glass of sketchy cleanliness and swept them over onto the coffee table.

Nijinsky took the bottle, poured himself about three fingers’ worth. He drank most of it in a gulp followed by a gasp, then a second gulp, and put the glass down with too much force.

Hair of the dog, as the saying went. A little drink in the a.m. to take the edge off the hangover you’d earned in the p.m.

You’re the wrong person for the job. Become the right person.

“My brother hasn’t got over it,” Keats said. “My brother’s still chained to a bed at The Brick.”

“Kerouac lost three biots,” Wilkes said. “And he was already half nuts.”

“Screw you,” Keats snapped. “My brother was as tough as any man alive.”

“He was,” Nijinsky agreed, and shot a dirty look at Wilkes, who retreated, sulking. “Kerouac was . . . is . . . the real thing.” He poured another drink, shorter this time, held it up and said, “To Kerouac, who is a fucking god and still ended up screaming in the dark.” He tossed the drink back.

There was violence in the hearts of those in the room. Nijinsky bitter and furious and insecure. Keats damaged, resentful and wary. Wilkes already a headcase who had now killed and seen killing and watched Ophelia’s legs burn like steak fat on a grill and was itching for a fight.

Plath saw it all. And she heard the unspoken accusations: Why didn’t you kill the Twins?

“Jin,” she said. Just that. And Nijinsky at the sound of his affectionate nickname sucked in a sobbing breath. He looked down at the glass and carefully set it down far from himself.

“I love him,” Nijinsky said.

Plath couldn’t help her automatic glance at Keats.

“Stupid of me, caring about Vincent,” Nijinsky said. “Loving him. And no, I don’t mean like that. I mean, if I’d had a brother . . .” He looked at Keats, who did have a brother, and there were tears in Nijinsky’s eyes. “I mean if I’d had a brother, if I knew what that was like, that would be Vincent. I’d give my useless life for him. And I was too late.”

In a flash Plath saw what she had missed. She wasn’t the only person in the room haunted by What if ? and Why didn’t I?

“Maybe we could rescue Ophelia from the FBI . . .” Wilkes started to say. “She could . . . No one’s a better spinner than Ophelia.” She was pleading for a life and knowing better, knowing that decision would have already been made.

“You’re talking about a deep wire,” Nijinsky said, not meeting anyone’s eye.

“Yeah, deep wire. The deepest. Take some time and get all the way down in Vincent’s brain.” Wilkes sat up. “Ophelia could—”

“Damn it, Wilkes.” Nijinsky was pleading with her. Plath could see that he was on the ragged edge. He couldn’t think about Ophelia. “Ophelia was the best.”

His use of past tense did not escape anyone’s notice.

Wilkes’s face twisted. It was like someone had kicked her in the stomach. She jumped from her seat and walked on stiff legs to the sink. She turned on the faucet and drank straight from the tap. When she straightened up her head banged the cupboard door.

“Son of a bitch!” she screamed. She banged the side of her fist against the cupboard door. And then harder. Then both fists and on and on until it seemed she would beat her hands bloody.

Keats moved smoothly behind her, imprisoned her arms, and waited as she cursed him and struggled madly to get away.

“Was it us?” Wilkes demanded. “Was it us? Was it Caligula? Did Lear order Ophelia killed? Jesus Christ!”

After a while Wilkes said, “Okay, blue eyes, you can let me go.”

He did. She smashed the cupboard one last time and headed for the door. Nijinsky’s arm shot out, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her to him. She struggled for a minute but finally collapsed, sat on his lap, and let him put his arms around her.

He spoke past her spiky hair, his voice quiet, calm. “I don’t know if you’ve seen the news in the last hour,” he said.

Heads shook in the negative.

“The president’s husband is dead. Supposedly he slipped in the bathtub,” Nijinsky said. “I think that’s most likely bullshit.”

“Why would anyone want him dead?” Plath asked.

Wilkes was listening for the answer. For Keats it all meant very little: America’s first gentleman was not on his radar.

“I doubt anyone wanted MoMo dead,” Nijinsky said. “I think the other side screwed up. I think they’re having a very bad wire.”

Plath was the first to grasp what he was saying. “You think she did it? The president?”

“It has occurred to Lear,” Nijinsky said, pushing Wilkes off and standing up stiffly, “that controlling the puppeteer is almost as good as controlling the puppet.”

“We’re going after Bug Man?” Wilkes said. Her incredulous expression hardened into a feral look, which in turn brought out an almost canine laugh.

“If you can’t wire the target, wire the twitcher,” Nijinsky said.

“When do we go?”

“This is mostly on the Washington cell,” Nijinsky said. “But Lear wants us to be ready. In case they call for help.”

“So we just sit on our butts?” Wilkes demanded.

“No, we go. We go. As soon as Vincent can go with us,” Nijinsky said, and doubted the words even as he spoke them.

The group broke up. Plath stayed behind just a moment to talk to Nijinsky. “Do you still want me to go to the reading of the will?”

“You have no choice. It’s dangerous. But you have no choice. Caligula will have your back. You think the lawyer will co-operate?”

“I know what my dad’s will said. But who knows? Who the hell knows anything in this world?”

FIVE

A rebel group: misfits, borderline personalities, freaks, and definitely geeks. Who signs up to fight when the choices are death or madness?

No one joins a group calling itself BZRK expecting a country club. But among the far-flung cells of BZRK some were more conventional than others, and none was more stable, more normal seeming, than BZRK Washington.

Their safe house was on Capitol Hill, the somewhat dubious residential neighborhood near the Capitol Building where the US Congress convened.

Fifth Street, Southeast, just off Independence Avenue. It was a narrow, two-story row house painted a muddy maroon color, with dirty windows in cream-colored frames.

But unlike their New York counterparts, BZRK Washington enjoyed a very pleasant interior environment. They had a gourmet kitchen. They had brand-new faux deco bathrooms. The plumbing worked. The heating worked. In summer even the air-conditioning worked.

There were five bedrooms in all, each rather small, but all pleasantly if blandly furnished. The living room had become the common meeting room where the six members could lounge on comfortable couches or decamp to the formal dining room.

There was a crystal chandelier in that dining room.

The kitchen was small but very nicely appointed, with a six-burner restaurant-quality gas stove top, a double oven, and a massive Sub-Zero refrigerator that dwarfed the rest of the room.

The kitchen was the domain of Yousef, who called himself Andronikus after the mad Byzantine emperor. He was . . . But it really doesn’t matter what Andronikus was, because as he stood stirring the couscous he had three minutes left to live.

Four other members of the Washington cell of BZRK were also present. They were sipping teas and sodas—no booze or wine or beer: house rules—while waiting for the food.

They had put in a long day narrowing down the possible locations of a certain Bug Man.

Bug Man, they knew, would want to work within range of the White House and not be forced to rely on AFGC’s often-unreliable signal repeaters. That meant a half-mile radius for his base of action. Probably. No one knew for sure.

But there would also be a separate abode of some sort. Living twenty-four hours a day in an office attracts attention from building management. So, two possible locations: an office near the White House and a hotel.

They were running facial-recognition software on CCTV footage, but no one had a good picture of Bug Man. All they knew was that he was a male black teen. That would lead nowhere.

But from Lear had come a solid lead. It seemed the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation had a long-standing corporate discount rate with Hyatt Hotels. If they had Bug Man living at a Hyatt, that narrowed it down to seven likely hotels.

To find an office location they had gone back through occupancy permits and subtracted tenants who had been in place for more than a year. They searched the “for lease” ads for offices within the target area. They focused on those that had the greatest degree of privacy, with no shared facilities.

The list was not that long. They had fairly quickly come up with nineteen possible locations. They expected to have the exact location within three days. And with the CCTV facial-recognition software focusing on Hyatts, they expected to have the hotel pinned within a day or two.

Which was amazing work and really almost as amazing as the fact that AmericaStrong—a division of Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation—and the ETA had already narrowed the BZRK cell’s location down to one address.

Just one.

Around the corner from the house on Fifth Street SE, what looked exactly like a Washington, DC, police SWAT team had assembled. This excited only mild interest from passersby—it was hardly the first time they’d seen a SWAT team. Even the passing patrol cops shrugged it off.

“What’s that?” This from the kid—everyone called him the kid. Not The Kid, like it was some kind of cool nickname, just the kid. So he had taken it as his nom de guerre, his alias. Except he called himself Billy the Kid, because why not? Maybe Billy the Kid wasn’t clinically crazy, but he was crazy. Not insane: but crazy.

Billy’s real name was André. His mother had been Guatemalan. His father had been African American. The result of this interesting DNA mash-up was a boy of only medium height, with dark skin, a flat nose and lush, long, almost girlish—in fact, no almost about it—straight black hair. The combination worked perfectly to make him feel excluded from both the African American and the Hispanic communities of Washington, DC.

André had interested, observant eyes. Nothing scary, there, just a birdlike quickness. His two front teeth stuck out a bit, which gave him a sweet childlike look and were the only physical feature he shared in common with the real Billy the Kid.

No one called him Billy the Kid. He had not found a way to mention that he shared buck teeth with the famous gunman.

Andronikos didn’t call him Billy, either. Andronikos hated people looking over his shoulder as he cooked. Which is the last data point about Andronikos, other than the fact that as the front door was beaten in with a battering ram, and the back door was kicked in, and black-suited “SWAT cops” came rushing into the room yelling, “Police, down, down, down!” Andronikos reached for a butcher’s cleaver and was shot in the chest, head, neck, again in the chest, and again in the head.

The hole in his neck sprayed like a fire hose.

Billy the Kid didn’t so much drop to the floor as find himself knocked to the ground. Andronikos’s hand dragged the couscous pot down with him, although he was dead before he hit the floor.

The couscous—little pearls of wheat, along with boiling hot water—sloshed onto Billy as he fell and Billy screamed because the heat was instantaneous and the “cop” waited until Billy was on the floor trying desperately to crab walk backward away from the couscous and the blood and now the blood-red couscous and BAM! BAM!

The cop was shooting again.

At him? At him? At a thirteen-year-old kid?

A bullet grazed his side.

From the other room, continuous gunfire. Like a jackhammer. A wall of noise. Screams. Shouting and BAMBAMBAMBAM!

The cop stepped in the red couscous and slipped. He fell to one knee.

Billy grabbed the pot. It was a heavy iron pot, but the weight was nothing to him because adrenaline and fear and the crying need for survival make the heaviest pot weightless.

He swung that pot and hit the cop’s helmet.

The cop slipped a little more.

The hand that held the gun, that hand, he had landed on that elbow and that made it hard to shoot and his body armor made him awkward and he slipped again; suddenly it was all Call of Duty to Billy. He slammed the pot down with all his strength on the gun hand.

The gun fell from the cop’s nerveless grip.

BAMBAMBAMBAM!

They were still shooting in the other room. And screaming. Someone actually yelled, “What the fuck?” Except that the F-bomb ended abruptly in gunfire.

Not real cops, Billy realized through the blood-mad rage that was falling over him, and he grabbed the gun and had to use both hands to get a grip on it and pointed it at the visor of the stunned man and the “cop” knew he was done for and he raised his visor so that Billy saw his face and it was a middle-aged man, a little pudgy, with a silly mustache and he was starting to say something when Billy pulled the trigger and a big hole peppered with powder burns appeared in the upper lip of the cop, taking out one side of his mustache.

Billy was up and running for the back door but bullets were flying like crazy there, so he pivoted, saw the massacre in the main room, and somehow lost all conscious thought.

The original, historical Billy the Kid was a good shot. His namesake was better. Billy could aim and he could shoot. His skills had been honed in hundreds of hours of first-person shooter games: Call of Duty, XCom, Rage, Battlefield. So he knew to be quick but not rushed. He knew that accurate was better than fast. He knew not to aim for the bodies covered in Kevlar, but to aim for the face. The visors would provide only limited protection.

He did not waste ammunition.

BAM! and the gun kicked in his hand and a cop fell and BAM! and another visor shattered and the cop dropped to his knees and his gloved hand pawed the air and Billy ignored him because he was nothing but a computer graphic and a kill and he was done and there should be a ka-ching! a point on the screen.

There was no screen. Part of him understood that because no game had yet managed to create the smell of blood, lots and lots of blood, which had a sort of salty, briny smell and an unctuousness about it, not to mention the smell of bowels loosening and bladders emptying and, of course, gunpowder smoke.

The cops, well, they couldn’t call for backup because of course they were not cops at all but AmericaStrong thugs masquerading as ETA agents, and there weren’t all that many of those to call on. Not yet.

Ten of them had burst through the doors.

Five were still alive. But one of those had been wounded by “friendly fire,” and was pumping his life out through a hole in his thigh.

BZRK Washington was dead. All dead. It was down to Billy and four fake cops who all aimed their weapons at him.

He dived around the corner.

Two of the cops chased him. It was a mistake on their part because damn, this is part of every first-person shooter game ever, as they rushed he popped out and BAM! and a split second later, BAM! and that was two plexi visors with neat little holes and blood gushing out beneath.

With that Billy turned finally and ran. Out the back door.

He climbed, scrabbled, rolled over the wooden fence into the backyard of whoever the hell lived back there. The back door was locked but not so locked that a nine-millimeter round through the door handle and a hard kick wouldn’t open it.

Through a strange, unoccupied home with a startled kitty on the back of the couch. Out onto Sixth street.

He stood there, panting. They weren’t pursuing him. No one was after him. He was covered in blood. There were no sirens. People figured it was the cops, so what are you going to do, call the cops and tell them cops are shooting up a house?

He couldn’t go anywhere covered in blood. So he jogged on nervous energy to Independence Avenue, which, if you follow it far enough, will take you all the way down to the Capitol and beyond to the Mall and the Washington Monument and all of that. Except Billy didn’t go that way. He turned left and trotted back to Fifth Street SE and saw the very official-looking SWAT van and trotted on to the house, and came in through the shattered front door and saw one of the fake cops weeping and shot him in the spine where he had no body armor and another turned and opened fire, very undisciplined, and shot the wall and the clock and Billy put one right in his throat.

One more came rushing down the stairs yelling, “Aaaarrrgh!” to keep his courage up and Billy couldn’t see his visor so he shot him in the knee and finished him off when the cop tumbled down the landing.

That last one was a shock. He had thought he only had two left. What was the count? Was there anyone else?

Billy climbed the stairs. The grazing bullet wound in his side was burning like fire.

He found the last AmericaStrong fake cop behind one of the beds in a bedroom. The man had removed his helmet. He had lost his gun in the madness. Defenseless.

The man was young. He had very, very pale skin. He had very, very large brown eyes. He stared at Billy the Kid. He was shaking.

“Don’t,” the man said.

“You started it,” Billy said.

“I’m sorry about . . . about . . .” the man said, and waved in the direction of downstairs.

Billy thought he seemed okay. “You smell,” Billy said.

“I pooped.” The man laughed. It was a short, sharp sound.

Billy’s sights were leveled at the man’s face.

“Who did this?” Billy asked.

The man shrugged, but he couldn’t hold it together well enough to lie. “I’m just, look, I used to work for AmericaStrong, now I’m ETA.”

“ETA? Estimated Time of Arrival?”

“Emerging Technologies Agency,” the man said weakly, as though he didn’t expect to be believed. Or that he would be alive another thirty seconds. “My name is Joey. Joey Lamb. I . . . I didn’t . . . I don’t . . . Don’t shoot me, kid.”

“Billy. Billy the Kid.”

“Okay.”

“Look, it’s game over, right? I won. So just, I don’t know, run away.”

Joey Lamb stood shakily. He had pooped all right.

“Okay, now, just leave,” Billy said. “And don’t call anyone. And don’t come back.”

Joey ran. Billy heard him clatter through the house. He heard the front door slam back on its hinges.

Billy went downstairs. He went through the pockets of his friends, harvesting credit cards and driver’s licenses. He piled the laptops and the cell phones together and placed them all in a plastic trash bag.

Then he found some clean clothing, laid it out in the blessedly blood-free bathroom, and took a shower. It took a long time for the water to run clean.

Burnofsky stood up, heard his bones creak and his knees snap. Old age was coming on fast. But it wouldn’t be old age that killed him.

He walked from his office out into the main lab floor. It occupied three entire floors of the Armstrong Building. It was a huge space, very white with pink accents, designed to be functional but also pleasant and innocuous. Like everything the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation did in secret, it was designed to look as if it could not possibly conceal anything dark or sinister.

The lights were bright but soft. The walls bore huge plasma screens showing pastoral scenes, like slow-changing murals, a mountain stream would slowly give way to a strand of unpopulated beach, which in turn might, after an hour or so, switch to a field of flowers waving in the breeze.

The murals followed the time of day. As the sun would set outside, so the sun would set over mountain and beach and field. When full night fell, the screens would light up with time-lapse pictures of crazily zooming car lights crossing the Golden Gate bridge, or shots of the aurora borealis, or moonlight on a river.

It was really quite a lovely place to work while designing the end of the human race as it had heretofore been.

Structural integrity required the floors to have some strength, so gazing up Burnofsky looked through a loose-woven web of white tiled catwalks with pink railings and the occasional green contrast. This allowed some of the larger pieces of equipment to rise through the floors, but also created smaller, more intimate spaces.

“Dr Burnofsky.” It was Mamadou Attah. Dr Mamadou Attah, formerly of the Ivory Coast, later of Oxford and MIT, briefly a resident of Grand Rapids Michigan’s Applegate Psychiatric Hospital, and now one of Burnofsky’s hardest-working—and giddily happy—subordinates.

“Yes, Dr Attah?”

“We did it, we sure got that extruder calibrated!”

“Good,” he said.

She flashed him a huge grin. She was short and broad and, despite being brilliant, had a distinct tendency to go around giggling under her breath. She had been wired and indoctrinated, of course, all as a means of dealing with what had been crippling depression.

No more depression in her future. No more mental hospitals. Although she sometimes irritated non-wired staff to the point of rage, she was an excellent scientist and utterly devoted.

She stood waiting like an expectant dog, evidently not entirely satisfied by his wan, “Oh, good.” So he added a, “Fantastic work, Doctor. You’re the best.”

She grinned, made a pistol finger, and said, “No, sir, Dr B., you’re the best!”

He walked across the spotless white tile floor past white-coated scientists and pink-coated staff, a shambling, reedy, runny-eyed, corduroy-clad wreck of a human being. The door to his private lab was protected by a keypad and fingerprint ID. He punched in the number sequence and pressed his thumb against the touchscreen.

Inside was a very different space. Here the equipment was whatever putty or gray color it had been when first acquired. There were no plasma screens showing bucolic loveliness. The ceiling seemed particularly low. A Costco-size box of Little Debbie Devil Cremes spilled across his desk.

He pulled the bottle of bourbon from his desk, poured a tumbler full, and gulped it.

Back in the fabulous main lab the work of AFGC’s nanotech division went on feverishly. The piece of equipment that Dr Attah had been so proud of fixing was part of the SRN production line.

Self-replicating nanobot. SRN. But he along with everyone else involved in the project had taken to calling them “hydras,” after the mythological beast that just kept sprouting new heads any time you chopped one off: in effect, a self-replicating monster.

The first large-scale field test of the hydras was scheduled to occur in just a few weeks.

Twelve hundred hydras would be released in a high-crime neighborhood in the Bronx. The test would be whether the hydras would propagate, locate hosts, and avoid detection. If they performed as expected, the neighborhood would experience a sudden drop in crime rate as thousands of residents were crudely rewired for diminished aggression.

A smaller test, just two hundred hydras bearing special radioactive tracking signatures, were to be released on the subway. They would be able to follow the spread. And these nanobots had a particular function: to do something the first generation of nanobots couldn’t even begin to pull off: the implantation of an image. Actually creating a memory.

And yet, despite those specialized abilities, the hydras were poor relations to regular nanobots. They were crude, rough, and slow. The self-replicating process meant using whatever materials could be found at hand: one form or another of living tissue.

The regular nanobots were made of sophisticated alloys, ceramics and textiles. They were the Ferraris of the nanotech world. These new tiny monsters were scarecrows by contrast.

Each hydra was serviced by dozens of much smaller micro-machines, nicknamed MiniMites. These were very simple, very, very small devices whose sole purpose was to strip-mine living things for their useful minerals. They were tiny refineries, eating flesh and defecating iron, zinc, copper, calcium, magnesium, chromium, and the rest.

In the event that anything went wrong with the tests, the mayor of New York City, the governor of New York, and, if it came to that, the president of the United States should be under sufficient control to head off an effective investigation, let alone countermeasures.

Of course the whole thing had to be carefully managed. A fair amount of a human body could be consumed and turned into raw material without harming the host—most people had more than enough fat, extra bone, dead skin, resident bacteria, the contents of stomachs and intestines, and whatever brain cells were being liquefied. But uncontrolled, well, the process could be harmful. Even fatal.

To say nothing of what would happen if the MiniMites began to adapt and to chew away at buildings and bridges and so on.

But there were fail-safes and cut-offs and so on for all of that.

Foolproof stuff. And the hydras were being designed to reproduce only so many generations before dying off, and to consume only so much living tissue. The goal, after all, was to rewire the human race, not to obliterate it.

That was the plan.

That was not, however, Burnofsky’s plan.

Burnofsky carried his drink to his workstation. There he had a monitor attached to a scanning electron microscope. He pressed a remote control in his pocket and the surveillance camera on the wall switched seamlessly to file video. He doubted the Twins would understand what he was doing, but there was no point taking chances: they would see only what he wanted them to see.

On the monitor Burnofsky saw nanobots. They were rather different from the ones being so carefully created in the main lab. Burnofsky smiled to see them. Busy little creatures. Hydras busy doing what SRNs did: self-replicating.

But there were a number of differences between these and the hydras beyond his lab door. Some of those differences were visible, most not.

Funny, Burnofsky thought, gazing with pride at his creations, that people talk about the gray goo scenario, and in truth the hydras in the main lab were basically gray.

But these were not.

These nanobots were blue. The exact blue of his daughter’s eyes.

ARTIFACT

For Immediate Release

Public Affairs Office/University of Texas, Austin

The entire University of Texas family is saddened by the loss of Professor Edwin H. Grossman. Dr Grossman apparently leapt to his death from the top of the University of Texas tower. In recent months Dr Grossman had been under great strain. Students reported that his usual lectures on nanotechnology had taken on a paranoid character, with Dr Grossman falsely claiming that nanotechnology was already being deployed in a bid by unnamed forces to effectively reprogram the human race.

Dr Grossman, one of the world’s leading researchers on microscopic machines, wrote a book in 2011 warning that self-replicating nano devices could run out of control with dire consequences. The book was published without the support of the University or his department.

In 2012 Dr Grossman claimed to have been consulted by the CIA on the so-called gray goo scenario, the fanciful notion that self-reproducing nano machines could run amok and obliterate all carbon-based life-forms in a matter of days.

A student, Jing Ju Chow, who claimed to have seen two men throw Dr Grossman from the twenty-eighth floor observation deck of the UT Tower, recanted when questioned by campus police and was later fatally injured in a car-on-pedestrian accident off campus.

The University mourns both of these tragic deaths.

ARTIFACT

Drug Enforcement Agency

New York City

Surveillance Report–China Bone

Item: Subject 49630, code name “Rocker Girl.” Subject observed arriving 10:27 p.m. Electronic monitoring via her phone indicates she ordered injectable heroin. Audio monitoring produced only some singing and incoherent conversation with China Bone staff identified (tentative) as Cheng Lee.

Item: Subject 67709, unknown subject. Desc: Male, Asian, 35-40 years, 5’8”. Arrived by limo. Attempting to trace origin.

Item: Subject 42001, code name “Burn Out.” Arrived 12:02 a.m. Electronic monitoring via planted microphone 45-114. Subject ordered bourbon and opium pipe. Following ingestion suspect began to speak. Previous surveillance shows this is a common pattern for the subject. Transcript follows:

(inaudible) just (inaudible) deliver and then. And then, hah. Watch the bugs grow. (inaudible) baby, sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. Your bitch mother. Yeah. Oh Jesus I’m sorry sorry. But we all die. We all die, baby. (inaudible) We all surely do die and if it isn’t the easy way it’s the hard way and the twins would have made it hard. Bugs in your brain. Has to (inaudible) I never should have. Didn’t know they’d (inaudible). You went easy though. You went so easy baby. Hah. Thanks to your dad. Hah. My gift baby the easy death instead of the hard. My gift . . . easy . . . (inaudible.) But (inaudible) pay up. They will pay up. My little blues will end it all end it end it. Tens to hundreds to (inaudible) millions to billions eat it all up, eat it all up eat it all up down to the rock. All . . .

End transcript.

SIX

The law firm sent a limo for Plath, but not to the BZRK safe house. The limo picked Plath and Keats up at the address she’d given them: outside the Andaz Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

Plath had not been staying at the Andaz, and a cursory investigation would reveal that fact, but it was at least plausible that she might have been there. The McLure Company maintained a suite year-round for visiting dignitaries.

Plausible.

“Why didn’t you tell me you had the use of a posh suite at a hotel?” Keats muttered as the town car inched its way uptown. “Why are we staying at that miserable shit hole when we could be frolicking on clean sheets?”

“Frolicking? I seem to recall offering to frolic with you. I was going to frolic your brains out.” She was determined to keep the mood light. Wave upon wave of sadness and fear had crashed on her since that terrible day when her father and brother had been murdered. More would come.

Too much.

She couldn’t break. Maybe the day would come when she broke, but not yet. So she smiled and so did Keats. It felt like the first genuine smile for either in quite a while.

“Sorry, had to save your life first,” Keats said. “Duty before booty.”

“You shouldn’t always be the good boy, Keats,” she teased. “Don’t you know that messed-up girls like me prefer bad boys?”

“You are toying with me.”

“I used to break my toys,” she said.

“Is that a warning?”

“I wouldn’t break you. I might bruise you a little . . .”

“Okay, that’s quite enough.”

“Might bend you. There could be some chafing . . .”

Keats grinned, unable to manage a stern expression. “Now you’re going past toying to torturing.”

“Yes, I am.”

“It’s cruel.”

“Mmm. I’m trying not to be the goody goody.”

“No one thinks you’re the goody goody,” he said.

“You sure?” she asked, her tone rueful. “Jin needs me, even Lear needs me, if there really is a Lear, but I failed them, didn’t I?”

Keats glanced at the driver. He didn’t seem to be listening, and they were talking in whispers. Keats leaned closer. “Listen to me, Plath—”

“It’s Sadie on this trip,” she interrupted. “The lawyer and the others know me by my real name. So just for this trip, let’s not play crazy little BZRK games. Let’s act like real, normal people.”

“Sadie,” he said, trying it out. Liking it. Feeling flattered by the right to use it. “Do you want to know my real name?”

“Keats will do. I like it, actually. It suits you. You could totally be a poet.”

Veer away from tragedy, back onto safe ground.

We take the names of madmen because madness is our fate. But Keats, the real one, the poet, hadn’t really been mad, just depressed and addicted.

Plath, on the other hand: head in a gas oven while her children played in the next room.

Veer away from that, too.

“I know nothing about poetry,” Keats said.

Plath said nothing for a while, watching the street go by, wondering whether Caligula had them in view. Wondering whether AFGC also had them in view. The reading of a will is not a very private matter, private in terms of the actual reading, perhaps, but not in terms of who knows it’s happening.

“This could be dangerous,” she said.

“Maybe,” he agreed. “Do you know how to do this? I mean, this whole reading of the will. There’s a lot of money involved, right?”

She nodded. “Money. And power.”

“And you’re okay with all that, not nervous?”

“I’m nervous,” she admitted. “But I know what to say. I know what I want, and I know how my dad set things up. But that doesn’t mean they’ll go along with it. In fact, I’d be surprised if they did.”

“So I guess we’re talking hundreds, even thousands of dollars, eh?” he asked, deadpan.

“Something like that,” she said.

And for a while she didn’t think of Keats but of her father. Grey McLure always said he was a three-star scientist with five-star luck. But that wasn’t true. He’d been unlucky enough to lose his wife, and die alongside his son. Not lucky, but smart, and far-seeing. He had laid in contingencies she had thought ridiculous and irrelevant when he told her of them.

“Don’t forget,” he had told her. “Alice in Wonderland. The You Bullshit Bank. Your mother’s birthday.”

“Whatever,” she had replied, attention focused on thumbing a text message to some friend. The memory, like so many memories of him, came with a twinge of regret that she had not, somehow, cherished him more, him and Stone, both.

Three more blocks passed in starts and stops and her nerves were getting to her now. Small talk and banter, don’t think about it, any of it, just let it happen.

“You are a great kisser,” she said suddenly through her knuckles, choosing not to meet his gaze.

“Am I?”

“Don’t fish for compliments. A poet would never do that.”

“You’re worried,” he said. “You’re being nice to me because you think we’re about to be killed.”

“A little bit, yes,” she admitted. “But also, you’re just a really good kisser. And you know what I like, Keats?”

“What?”

“Your chest. I like your chest. It’s very hard.”

“Okay, really, that’s quite enough,” he scolded. “We’re in a limo, possibly going into danger, and you’re playing the tease.”

“I like your chest,” she repeated. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Unh?” he said, not feeling quite in control of this conversation.

“Are your nipples sensitive?”

“I sort of hate you right now,” he said, shaking his head and trying unsuccessfully not to grin.

Teasing was safe. Maybe it was foreplay leading to love, but it didn’t have to be. Keep it all superficial. Make it about bodies and pleasure. The world had it all backward: it wasn’t sex that was dangerous, it was love. She’d lost people she loved. It was love that brought unendurable pain.

“Death or madness, right?” she said with what she hoped was a brave, devil-may-care attitude. “There’s no reason not to have whatever fun we can. You’re insane for a long time and dead forever.”

“We’re here,” the driver called back.

The car pulled to a stop beside a food stand. The driver hopped out and came around to open the passenger door. Keats had already started to open the door and now felt foolish.

The law firm’s building was on a corner. There was a revolving door and flanking it regular glass doors. Security—McLure men—waited. They wore dark suits and had Bluetooth earpieces. They wore sunglasses even though it was cloudy. They screamed “security.”

The AmericaStrong thugs were less obvious. They had been nicknamed TFD—Tourists from Denver—for favoring chinos and down parkas, for dressing out of a Land’s End catalog. The McLure men wanted to look like security; the AmericaStrong people did not.

Four McLure security.

Six TFDs.

And all alone, a man in a long, faded black duster over even more faded lilac and leaf-green velvet. A jaunty top hat that matched his blazer.

Plath watched with eyes that had now seen violence and knew it when it threatened. She gritted her teeth, not so much afraid now as angry. There was a fine line between those two—fear and rage.

“Sadie, get back in the car,” Keats said.

But she didn’t. She watched, one hand on the car door, watched with eyes that now saw so much more than they ever had before. Was that what violence and fear did? Did they give you new eyes?

It all happened without any obvious action. Somehow, in some way that seemed to take place at the subliminal level, the McLure security spotted the TFDs as threats.

And somehow, those same McLure men recognized the man in the faded velvet, not as an individual, they didn’t know him, no, but they knew what he was.

And so did the TFDs.

His name, at least the name he used, was Caligula.

Plath knew he would have been the one to kill Ophelia. He would also be the one to kill her, if she ever threatened BZRK. She had seen him in action and could entertain no fantasies about surviving if he came for her.

Invisible lines connected McLure men and Caligula. Invisible, intangible calculations were made. Some scent in the air, maybe, some inaudible whisper in the ears.

The TFDs walked on by.

And Plath—Sadie McLure—walked with Keats past the McLure men, all of them smiling, a tense, alert welcome, and accepted the door held open for her.

“You okay?” Plath asked Keats.

“Just relieved not to have wet myself,” he said. “That won’t be the end of it. They’ll be waiting when we come back out.”

But Plath doubted that.

Keats’s hand closed around hers. She could picture what was happening at the nano level: skin like fallen leaves, fingerprints like the plowed furrows of some arid farm, sweat beads popped by the contact, mingling.

It was an absurd romantic illusion to imagine that they could avoid death so long as they held on to each other. But Plath, carrying the name of a poet, had a right to a small measure of illusion.

Dr Anya Violet, who had been dragged unwillingly into violence, into lunacy and horror, sat forgotten in her room, in her narrow, filthy room, and against all odds and logic thought of Vincent.

Oh, she knew it was all part of the same insanity. She knew that Vincent had been inside her head, that he had wired her. She was a scientist, a trained observer. She knew.

Once she had found Vincent desirable. That had been honest. That had been real. She remembered meeting him for . . . At least, she believed she remembered. She searched for the memory, ran the pictures back in her head, testing them for tampering. It was hard to tell. Hard to be sure; in fact, impossible to be sure. But she believed that first meeting at least, and that first visceral impression, had been real.

She had found him interesting. And sad. Sadness was not a terrible thing to her. She was Russian by birth, from Samara, located in the middle of nowhere. She was not an American raised on the idea that happiness was the natural human condition. She tired quickly of smiling people. Have a nice day. Hey, honey, smile.

She had seen wariness in Vincent, lessons learned, pain endured, limitations accepted. He was perhaps ten years younger than she, but that was only chronology.

Where it didn’t matter, Vincent was young. The other places, where it mattered, he was old, old, old and sad.

He had touched her that first time. Yes, of course he had targeted her. She was a scientist at McLure, a biot researcher and designer, and Vincent had even then been laying out a back door to McLure, anticipating the day.

So he had touched her that first time, and yes his invisibly small biots had raced up her shivering shoulder and across the neck and into her through nose or ear or eye.

Into her brain, there to probe and discover and spy and wire her. To prepare her for a continuing relationship that he needed and she wanted.

Yes, she had wanted. Yes, that surely was an honest memory. Yes, that first liquid feeling had been real, that first parting of her lips, that first animal response to him, that at least had been completely real.

And now she loved him.

Real love? Or wired love? In the end did it matter?

They had made love. Not once, more than once. Had it been enhanced by busy biots laying wire and transponders in her brain? He had claimed not. He claimed he wired her only minimally, only to obtain her . . . professional . . . services. He wired the scientist in her, not the woman.

So he had said.

Did it matter? Did it change the fact that her heart had been a desperate animal in her chest? Did it change the way he’d made her breath catch in her throat? Did it change the fact that she had gasped and made strangling, inarticulate cries into a pillow, and he had taken the pillow away because he wanted to hear her, needed to hear her pleasure, needed to experience second-hand at least what pleasure could be?

Maybe some of it, most of it, all of it, was false.

He had told her that it was not. Vincent had sworn that he only made her more suggestible to co-operating on the building of new biots, that he would never . . . That that sort of thing was not BZRK, not what they fought for.

Did it matter?

Anya sat in her one chair remembering, and while remembering thus was unable to work on the formula she’d begun to complete on the sketch pad, covered like a college chalkboard with obscure symbols.

There was a knock at the door.

Her eyes flew open. She waited a few seconds for the unsteadiness in her voice to calm. “Yes?”

There was the sound of a lock. The door swung inward, practically halving the room. Nijinsky stepped in.

Anya didn’t like him. He was beautiful and perfect and not interesting to her. And she knew that his relationship with Vincent was deeper than her own. She was jealous of him. It annoyed her somehow that he had chosen a Russian nom de guerre. The Chinese American model didn’t have a Russian soul, he was not a Nijinsky.

“Dr Violet,” he said politely. He glanced at the sketch pad, quickly at her, then resumed his usual mask of indifference. “I wanted to talk to you about . . . well, whether you’ve had any strange feelings lately.” Nijinsky raised his eyebrows and made a slight, wry smile.

“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Anya said curtly.

“Okay. I mean that Vincent still has a biot inside you.”

She nodded. The idea was not a surprise to her. “So, a little Vincent still crawling around in my hippocampus or wherever. A little biot controlled by a madman.” She had to laugh. “Wasn’t there a song? The lunatic is in my head?”

Nijinsky’s brown, almond eyes went cold.

She noticed and shook her head derisively. “Ah, I see, we aren’t supposed to say that kind of thing about Vincent, are we?”

“He cares about you,” Nijinsky said. “He saved your life.”

“Right after he endangered it,” she snapped. “I’m not sure that counts as a net plus.”

Nijinsky said nothing.

“Where are the others? His other biots? You used a singular in describing the one he had in me.”

Nijinsky nodded. “One is dead. One is in a dish, rebuilding, healing. The other one I’m carrying. It’s right here. He tapped his forehead lightly.

“And so you and I both get to keep a little piece of him.” Anya was tired of sparring. “No. I haven’t noticed anything. If anyone is wiring me I’m not noticing it, and if a . . . mentally unbalanced . . . twitcher were doing it, it would be clumsy enough for me to notice. So, I very much doubt that Vincent is even aware of the biot inside me. If he is, it’s as a series of hallucinatory images that probably mean little or nothing to him.”

Nijinsky nodded. “I haven’t seen any activity at all from his biot.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, his knee almost touching hers. In a straight man she would have suspected a flirtation.

“What’s on the pad?” he asked bluntly.

“I’m not stupid,” she said. “I know you have surveillance in here. I know you’ve already seen and investigated.”

He shook his head. Then he hung his head down and shook it again. “No, actually. We don’t have the manpower for that, I’m afraid. I mean, yes, we have a camera in here, but aside from making sure you haven’t hanged yourself or tried to dig a hole through the wall . . .”

“It’s what I was working on before you and your charming crew decided to destroy my life,” she said, but the bitterness was false and sounded it. Vincent was not something she could regret.

“Biot?” he asked.

“Biot version four,” she said. “Fourth generation. What you use now is version three. Or threes with various upgrades.”

“Okay,” he said cautiously. “Do you want to tell me?”

“It’s faster. It can jump. It has an improved rack for add-on weaponry. The legs are stronger.”

“Yes?” he asked, not nearly as cool as he wanted to sound.

“And it has a rather interesting penetrating proboscis, hollow of course, with a bladder. Mosquito-derived.”

“So it can suck blood?” He was puzzled.

“It goes the other way. The bladder can be filled with any number of interesting agents—chemical, bacteriological, viral—and injected. No more carrying sacks of germs with you if you want to plant something deadly.”

“We don’t do that,” Nijinsky said.

“Ah. Of course. I forgot: you’re the good guys,” she mocked. “Not for you, planting a bit of flesh-eating bacteria in some enemy’s brain.”

“There are limits,” he said.

“Just like you don’t wire people.”

He raised his head and looked at her. “Dr Violet, we will endeavor to remove any alterations made in your brain.”

She swallowed in a suddenly dry throat.

“We do things out of extreme necessity,” he went on, sounding sanctimonious even to himself. “Vincent wired you, as little as he could, just enough to—”

“I’m in love with him,” she said, and now her voice was no longer tight and controlled. “And your solution is to take that away from me? And then what?”

He looked quickly away, as if eye contact had become painful.

Neither spoke. His knee no longer touched hers. She wondered if his biots were now making the slow, laborious climb up the length of her thigh on their way to her brain. No, not likely: he could have simply planted them on her face, no need for subterfuge.

“What else?” he asked.

“The visuals are better. It will make wiring easier and more accurate. The downside? You feel pain when it feels pain. And God himself only knows what effect it has if you lose one.”

Nijinsky controlled his breathing, not wanting to signal his excitement. “Can you make them?” he asked.

“Version four? Of course I can make them, they’ve been successfully tested,” she said. “Get me to the lab and I can grow one in a few hours.”

Nijinsky nodded. Not an easy proposition. The McLure labs had been the scene of a bloody battle. A massacre. But Lear had been busy, and a backup existed.

“What if it wasn’t your lab?” Nijinsky asked. “What if it was a place with all the same equipment, the same samples or most of them, essentially the same data files, even better computers, and so on?”

That surprised her. “You have another lab in New York?”

“Not in New York,” he said, and offered no further explanation. She ran down a list of equipment. To each item Nijinsky said, “Yes.”

“Well, aren’t you clever little conspirators?” she asked sarcastically. “Yes, if everything is as you say, yes, I can do it. But why should I?”

“What do you want?” he asked.

“So many things,” she said with a hard laugh.

Silence again, as the truth seeped into her consciousness. The truth was a pain in her heart. “What do I want? Don’t. Don’t take him from me. Don’t send your bugs into me, and don’t cut the wires, and don’t find his last biot and take it from me.” Tears had already rolled down her cheeks. “It’s all I have of him.”

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