Bzrk (21 page)

She was panting, holding on to the sink with both hands and then wondering what the hell was growing on that sink. How would the cracked porcelain look down there, up close?

They’d retrieved her biot and put it back in cold storage. But she felt it still. Felt them both. Tiny windows would open in her field of vision, and she would see groggy biots barely moving, slowed by cold, on the pink plain of sterile medium.

She would have thrown up, but the thought of what might come out of her mouth …

Plath left the bathroom, shaky, mind turning back again and again and again, drawn back and never escaping the memories and the reality.

She opened the door to her room. Her cell.

She sat on the edge of her bed and tears came. She wanted to cry without thinking of giant waterfalls splashing over crawling demodex, of the tears briefly refreshing dead skin, carrying fungi and pollen and bacteria and—

“Just cry, goddamnit!” she told herself.

Cry for this miserable room.

Cry for the trap she’d stepped into.

Cry for the loss of simplicity, the loss of the simple notion that a boy’s blue eyes were blue because the sky wanted to be reflected in them, and not colorless and not a million miles deep through a dark tunnel ringed with spasming fibers and—

“Stop it!”

Suddenly she slapped herself. Hard. The fact that it hurt was almost a surprise. The giant hand with its agricultural furrows and bright beads of sweat had hurtled through the air to land on the surface of her face, and the result was a sting.

Sensations shooting through nerve endings, twitch-twitch-twitch, and hello, there: brain says someone slapped us in the face.

A knock. The door.

She knew it was him. She didn’t want to see him. But she couldn’t say no. How did you say no to someone who had spent the day crawling through the folds of your brain?

She opened the door. She didn’t try to hide the fact that she had been crying.

He didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d seen things he would never be able to get out of his mind. The eyes were too wide, the mouth too shocked. Hours had passed, and he still looked like a near-miss victim in a horror movie.

For a moment both of them seemed to forget that they had the power of speech. They just shared their trauma with a look.

And then something simply irresistible took hold of Plath, and she grabbed his head and pulled him to her. Waxed-paper lips on waxed-paper lips. Eyes closed. Fierce. Breathing onto each other’s face. Who knew what horrors on tongues that found each other within a Carlsbad of mouth, a vast, dark cave guarded by tombstone teeth.

And for a time measured only in seconds, they both forgot.

Their hearts accelerated. The blood surged through arteries, delivering it to parts where it might be needed. Diaphragms tightened. Hormones flooded. Fingers searched through hair without thinking of mites or of Seussian forests.

For those few seconds they forgot.

And then, with a shock they were apart.

They stood now with several feet between them. Panting. Staring at each other. Amazed. Bodies still telling them to take a step, to close that space again, to wrap an arm, touch, stroke, taste, stiffen, and open.

Still they said nothing. Way beyond words, the words would only confuse what they both knew at that moment. They had found the way to shut out the horror, at least for a time. A few seconds of time that might be stretched into minutes.

It was Plath who finally broke the silence once her heart was back to something like a normal human rhythm. “How are we supposed to do this?”

He might have made a leering joke of it, but that was not Keats. No, he wasn’t that guy. Not someone to miss a huge and terrifying truth or hide it behind evasions.

“I’ve been inside your brain,” he said. “But I still don’t know you. And now here we are.”

“Suddenly you’re all I have,” Plath said. “My family. My whole life. And now here we are.”

“What are we to each other?”

Plath shrugged. She shook her head, breaking contact with the gesture. She sat back down on her bed. Keats remained standing. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but right now I don’t really give a damn. My whole family is dead. My mom from the usual: cancer. But my dad and my big brother, murdered. By them. By the other side.”

Keats nodded. “I figured that out. I figured out who you are. I think I know your real name, even, I heard it on TV. But I’ll call you Plath, anyway. I don’t want to slip up.”

She looked at him. Her eyes were dry. The demodex could stop trying to swim. The tears were being absorbed into dry flesh and evaporated into dry air.

“It’s a reaction to trauma,” she said. “What just happened between us.”

“We’ve just been yanked way out of reality. Away from our homes … violence … blood everywhere and scared pissless. And this. Things in my head, I feel them still, even when they’re supposedly asleep, I know they’re there.”

She nodded.

“And Jin says that’s it, they’ll be in our thoughts from now on,” Keats said.

“Our little six-legged children.”

That brought a completely unexpected laugh from him. She smiled in response.

“They die, and we go mad,” Keats said. “Maybe … maybe I’m not supposed to tell you, but like you said, I don’t give a damn: my big brother is in a madhouse right now. Chained. Raving.”

Plath narrowed her eyes. “He was part of this?”

“They tell me he was very good. I imagine he was. He was the strong one. The brave one. Me, I was …” He trailed off, sighed, and sat down beside her.

Their shoulders touched. That was all, but she wanted so badly to lean her head against him. This boy she didn’t really know.

“I’m not a vulnerable person,” Plath said.

“Everyone’s vulnerable. I’ve seen that up close.”

“I don’t make friends that often,” Plath said. “I think I’m kind of a bitch.”

He smiled and looked down in an unsuccessful effort to hide the smile from her. “I think that’s maybe not a bad thing when you’re with this crowd. In this situation.”

“Listen to me,” she said. She looked straight at him until he returned the gaze. Their lips were inches apart. “I don’t fall in love. So don’t expect that.”

“I guess I do. I have that inside me, I mean, falling in love. I’ve never been. But I feel it inside me. So I guess you’d better expect that from me.”

She remembered his lips on hers, and they were not tea-stained wax paper. That memory was somewhere else, still there, but this was a new memory and even more real.

He moved closer and she let him. He surprised her then, because his kiss was not the urgent, charged kiss of before. It was tender and infinitely gentle. He pulled away before she was ready for him to do so.

Keats stood up. “The idea is not to hope. They want us to be focused. Under control. Maybe Jin and Vincent and the rest are good people. Maybe they’re trying to do what’s right. But they aren’t me, and they aren’t you. And maybe they can press us into this war of theirs, but they can’t tell us how to feel.”

She locked eyes with him. And as if they were making a sacred pact, they nodded, and smiled sheepishly, and Keats left.

(ARTIFACT)

Just hacked Swedish intel. Expected data on blondes in saunas, hah. Mostly looks like unencrypted junk. But there was something weird. I saw a posting by TinyTIMPO2 last week on nanotech and thought this might be interesting.

So it’s this fragment. It was saved unencrypted, then they must have noticed and encrypted it and wiped the original. This fragment survived. Ran it through a Swedish-English translation program. The source is definitely MUST Militära underrättelse-och säkerhetstjänsten, and it’s def an internal memo.

Anyone interested?

ArmandtheGimp

TWENTY

There followed days of training for Plath and Keats. Days in which they did not kiss, but thought about it, and did not make love, but thought about that, too.

To no one’s great surprise Keats was the quicker study with biots. With his two uninjured biots Vincent took him down in the meat to stage mock battles. Vincent taught him how meaningless gravity could be, how to avoid immune responses, how to think in three dimensions not two, how to leap, stab, cut, carry weapons, and when all else failed, run away.

And when Vincent was done with Keats, Ophelia took over and showed him the patient job of hauling Teflon fibers into place and weaving them into the basketwork around Plath’s pulsing aneurysm.

Plath was not a prodigy, but Nijinsky allowed that she was really not bad, not bad at all. And in one area she beat Keats hands down. She was a born spinner. She easily learned to read the 3D holographic brain maps, to stab the probe and light up the far-flung connections of memory. To make sense of what she saw there.

Those memories played as video loops, or still photos in Plath’s mind. Sometimes both more and less than that: not an image of anything real but a monster or a saint, glowing figures built by the mind itself to represent feelings.

There was a core template of the brain that was a sort of overview, showing in general terms which parts had certain functions. She quickly became familiar with the centers of vision, hearing, smell, touch. She knew where to find the controls for hands and feet, fingers and toes, the centers of speech. Those were roughly the same in any human brain.

But the essential job of a spinner was to rig connections between parts of the brain not normally connected. A spinner had to know how to find a visual image, or a scent, or a sound, a face, and wire it to a memory that would evoke a certain emotion.

Pleasure. Pain. Fear. Hatred. They all had their locations. Wire—actually a filament much more complex than simple wire—oozed, spiderlike from the biot’s pseudo-proboscis. Electronic signals that might have found their way slowly from point A to point B along neurons, jumping synapses, now zoomed along the superhighway of the wire.

“How much difference does it make if every time I see a face I also feel angry?” she asked Nijinsky.

“The first time? Not much. But brains adapt and add new layers. So if you draw a connection between a face and, let’s say, desire, the brain begins to absorb that. The first connection is by wire, and the next hundred, maybe. But soon the brain builds reinforcing structures. Backup pathways. So soon, you can’t see that face without also feeling desire.”

“You can make someone want someone.”

Nijinsky nodded. “We can make someone want someone.”

“It’s … Never mind.”

“You think it’s wrong.”

“It is wrong.”

Nijinsky nodded. “Yes. It’s wrong. We’re doing a very bad thing in what we believe is a very good cause.”

“And the other side?”

He made a face that acknowledged the truth of it. “Yes, they think exactly the same thing. That they are doing bad things in a good cause. At least many of them do.”

“Can we undo what we do?”

Nijinsky thought about it. He stood with his arms crossed, perfectly clean and pressed as always, the only perfectly neat object in that miserable building. “We can undo some of it. Most of it, if we do it right away. Over time it becomes basically impossible to undo. Although we can layer a whole new connection and alter the brain’s path.”

“What are you doing to Anya Violet?”

The question caught Nijinsky off guard, as she’d meant it to. He gave her an approving smile. “I don’t know. She’s … Well, Vincent has responsibility for her.”

“He got to her first,” Plath said. “Right? But somehow the other side guessed his move and they were waiting.”

“We don’t think she’s been wired by them, if that’s what you’re asking. She was just infested. Vincent—we—got careless.”

“He’s wiring her now, isn’t he?”

Nijinsky said, “Let’s get back to your training.”

So she trained. She sent word to Stern, the McLure security chief, that she was safe, that she was in Switzerland at a mental health spa where she was getting help with grief counseling.

Did Stern believe that? Probably not. But she was
the
McLure. And as Stern had said, he did what the McLure asked of him, even when it meant pretending to believe a lie.

The day would come when she would have to meet with the lawyers and hear the will read, and discover what her father had planned for the unlikely reality that had now occurred: Plath … no,
Sadie
… alone in the world.

But of course Vincent had plans for handling that. “Not time to worry about that now,” he had told her. “We have the biggest fight in the war ahead of us. We got lucky the other night, thanks to Caligula and Wilkes, and we know what the other side is up to. We have to deal with that. We have to stop them. Then we’ll have time to deal with your future.”

“I don’t enjoy being treated like a piece of some big puzzle I’m not allowed to see,” Plath told him. “I’m not the dumb chick who needs to be kept in the dark.”

“No one thinks you’re the dumb chick,” Vincent had said in his grave, sincere way. “But we compartmentalize information. We set up roadblocks, so that if they take one of us, break one of us, manage to turn one of us, the damage can be limited.”

“Just tell me this. We’re not all there is, right? It’s not just you and Jin, Ophelia, Wilkes, me, and Keats. It’s not six people, right? Seven if you count Caligula. Because then I’m really just a fool.”

Vincent nodded, taking the question seriously. “It’s not just us. No. There are people above us. Lear. And there are other cells. In other places. Some will be coming soon to help us with this battle.”

That had reassured Plath. A little, anyway. And she slept better that night.
Okay,
she told herself before she fell asleep,
we’re not alone
in this. I’m not one of seven lunatics. I’m one of maybe hundreds of
lunatics.

She’d wished Keats was with her so she could say that to him and make him laugh. And for a while she’d lain there in her bed picturing him just a thin wall away, wondering what he was doing. What he was thinking. Wondering if when he saw her in his mind’s eye, he saw the bulging aneurysm deep in her brain and felt some mixture of pity and disgust.

Or whether he thought of her lips, up in the macro, the pink, soft lips, not the nanovision of tea-colored parchment.

She wondered if he knew the color of her eyes. She knew his. Even after seeing the truth down in the nano she saw his eyes as blue, blue, blue.

In her entire life Sadie had never thought this much about a boy. In fact, add up all the boys she’d ever thought about and it didn’t equal the time she spent in just one night thinking about Keats.

When she analyzed this fact, it made little sense. Keats was far from being the most handsome. Sadie had gone out with some extraordinarily attractive boys. And yet, remembering them, flipping through them like an iTunes rack, she wanted none of them here, now. She wanted none of them to knock on her door. Not the way she wanted Keats to knock, right now.

You’re messed up,
she reminded herself.
You’ve gone through
hell. You lost your father and brother while almost dying yourself.
You saw people burning. You were hurt. Your brain was messed with.
You were attached to your own little hideous, deadly, creepy insect
children.

You shot a man and watched him bleed.

And you went where only a handful of people have ever been. You
saw things no one needed to see.

You’ve been down in the meat.

The boy next door spends part of his day inside your brain, weav
ing Teflon reeds into a basket to keep you from dying.

None of this leads to a wise, considered decision. All of this leads
to rash and stupid and desperately needy decisions. All of this pain and
death and fear leads to your needing to be held, needing to be lifted out
of it all. It leads to fantasies of Keats and his hands and his lips and
his body.

Was he thinking the same things about her? Right now, this minute?

She could imagine the pictures, the fantasies in his head. He was a boy, after all, so yeah, he thought about her. In some very specific ways no doubt. Which was fine, so long as whatever he thought of her, however she looked, whatever he imagined her doing, it had nothing to do with dangerous human-eyed mutant insects down—

Footsteps. Loud, not concerned with nighttime.

A loud knock—a banging, really—on her door.

“Up. Now. Up and dressed.”

She recognized the voice. Caligula.

She rolled out of bed, stumbled to her clothing, dressed with shaking hands, and stepped into the hallway. Keats was there before her.

“What’s happening?”

He shook his head, mystified. They found Vincent and Wilkes in the common room. Anya Violet sat in a corner, meek, wary, diminished.

Caligula said, “Is this everyone?”

Vincent said, “Ophelia is visiting family. Jin is out.”

Caligula smirked. “Yeah, he’s quite the party boy, isn’t he?”

“What’s going on?” Vincent asked, impatient. Plath noticed the way he avoided looking at Anya. And she noticed that Anya’s lipstick was smeared a little, and that some of it, a trace, was left on Vincent’s cheek.

“The Beijing cell was just hit,” Caligula said. “Two escaped, everyone else dead. The Delhi cell barely escaped a team that went after them, three dead there. Armstrong is coming after us. Trying to take us out before the main event.”

“Do they know
this
location?” Vincent demanded. He was on his feet. All business now.

“Let’s not wait around to find out,” Caligula said. “Grab your bugs, leave everything else. You have two minutes.”

“All of you, get your biots,” Vincent ordered.

Plath and Keats ran, along with Wilkes, to the upstairs lab.

“Grab any crèches up there,” Vincent shouted after them.

It wasn’t two minutes but closer to five before they were ready. Plath had her groggy biots crawling into the safety of her own ear, walking through pollen and dust and around tiny hairs the size of bamboo.

In her pocket she had a crèche—two of Ophelia’s dormant biots.

“Well, that was kind of like two minutes,” Caligula said dryly. “Now, we don’t know what’s outside. I’ve got a car waiting. But we don’t know. So here.” He handed a gun to Plath. “You did okay with one of these last time.”

“I don’t want—”

“I don’t give a goddamn what you want,” Caligula said. He noted the gun in Vincent’s hand. “Rule number one: no one accidentally shoots me. I will resent it.”

In the end there were no AmericaStrong TFDs waiting out in the New York City night. They crammed in the back of a long black limo and drove out of the city toward Long Island.

Caligula sat in the front next to the driver. Vincent tapped on the separating glass and said to Caligula, “I’ve contacted Ophelia. You want to pick her up?”

Caligula considered. With his hat off for the drive Plath could see that his long hair was a fringe, and that the bald spot on top was split by a livid, jagged scar running back to front.

“She have a car?” Caligula asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell her to get on the nearest highway. Doesn’t matter what direction. Just tell her to keep moving until we can reach her.”

“Don’t you have anyone you can send to bring her in?” Vincent asked.

Caligula turned in his seat. His smile was incredulous. “I’m not Five-O, Vincent. I can’t just send Danny and a squad car. Anything from pretty boy?”

Vincent shook his head curtly. The glass partition rose again.