With a sound of screeching metal and shattering glass, the Tulip sagged farther and Burnofsky staggered forward and was flattened against the glass windows. The floor now tilted up and away from him. But he still held the remote.
Then Noah began to slide, his movement lubricated by his own blood. He slid straight toward Burnofsky.
With a sound like wood being split, the window behind Burnofsky cracked but did not shatter. Burnofsky tried to push himself away, to reach something, anything he could grab, but his feet were slipping on the same blood that bore Noah’s body straight toward him.
And then Noah made one desperate reach and grabbed the rolling bottle of vodka. He grabbed it and dug his heel in—slipping, sliding, but the angle helped him to rise, just a little, just enough, just enough to hurl the bottle.
The bottle smashed into the cracked window.
Burnofsky in a moment of terrible awareness pressed his thumb on the remote control, but missed the button. The remote was in his hand, but awkwardly held. He reached with his free hand to straighten it, and the window blew out.
Burnofsky went flying, flying through shattered glass, falling on his back toward the street far below. Noah had plowed into him, and for a moment the two of them were tangled in midair, grotesque acrobats trailing red.
Burnofsky fell and squeezed, but the remote was in the air beside him, falling, and his hand was held in the slippery grip of the boy with blue, blue eyes.
Madness and death, Noah thought. It was funny.
He laughed as the sidewalk rushed toward him and obliterated all that he was.
The Twins staggered into the hanging monitor, where Charles managed to grab on, powerful fingers gripping slippery steel and glass.
Charles Armstrong saw his face, their faces, in the hanging mirror they used to speak eye to eye.
What he saw was a grotesque head with two staring eyes and a third, lesser eye that now belonged entirely to Benjamin. Two mouths screamed. A line of blood had been drawn between those mouths, between those eyes, as the self-replicating nanobots chewed their industrious way through all that connected Charles to his brother.
The pain was unendurable. He could only scream and scream as his privates and rectum, his stomach and chest, his neck and back and now head were eaten away, faster and faster as the nanobot army multiplied. Eaten away and then cauterized as Burnofsky had planned, so that blood loss would not occur too quickly.
Charles did not feel the moment when his body began to disconnect from Benjamin’s, the agony did not allow for calm consideration. But he saw, as he looked down, as he and Benjamin lowered their massive head to see, that they were now two dying men, two, connected only at the brain.
Benjamin slipped, his leg going out from beneath him, but Charles still stood, as like a dividing cell they split slowly apart.
Then finally Charles lost his grip, and they fell onto their backs and slid toward the window.
Charles tried to scream, but his throat was gone.
They slid, consciousness fading in a hell of pain and terror as they accelerated.
Benjamin stuck out a hand and grabbed the leg of a table, but it, too, was sliding. And then, with a bump at the sill, they were in the air.
It would take them just under eight seconds to fall to the pavement. At four seconds before impact Charles saw Benjamin’s body separate from his, a crudely bisected man trailing blood.
He saw Benjamin. Saw him there. There! For the first time in his life.
The Armstrong Twins hit the pavement two tenths of a second apart.
Two and a half minutes later, the Tulip came down in a catastrophic eruption of flame, smoke, steel, dust, and debris that buried Burnofsky and the Twins and Noah.
And the remote that would have destroyed the world.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Plath and Wilkes had to walk and hobble the whole way back to the safe house. The subway had been shut down. The taxis had fled the streets. They saw cars pass by, heading toward the bridge, pets and houseplants inside, household goods strapped to the roof. A hard-to-frighten city had at last been frightened.
By the time they made it they were numb with cold, lips blue, teeth chattering. Plath’s tears had frozen on her cheeks. She recalled the Île Sainte-Marie, recalled where she’d been not very many days ago. A completely different world. It had been so perfect there. Warm sunshine and blue water and Noah.
They had killed him. Noah. They had killed him.
Inside the safe house at last the two girls collapsed onto the couch and shivered, burrowing beneath throw pillows in search of warmth.
Plath saw that Anya was coming to investigate the noise. In the window in her mind she saw herself through Anya’s eye. She looked pitiful. Her face was smeared with smoke; her hair was thick with ash.
“What is the matter?” Anya asked. She didn’t wait for an answer but ducked out to come back with blankets to pile on the frozen girls. Then she made hot tea and helped them hold the cups until their hands could stop trembling.
“Where is Keats? Where is Billy?” Anya asked, already suspecting the answer. The TV had been on when they came in, tuned to news. On the screen the Tulip fell again and again. Hollywood and city luminaries ran wild through the streets again and again. The lurid loops played over and over again.
Plague of Madness.
An overhead shot of the Brooklyn Bridge was a river of red lights—cars fleeing the city.
“Dead,” Plath said. “Both dead.”
“This is Lear’s doing,” Anya said. “He is—”
“She,” Wilkes interrupted. “Our overlord and master is a chick.” Then, eyes darting suspiciously toward the stairs, said, “Get Vincent down here. Get Mr. Seventy Percent.”
Anya seemed ready to argue, but acquiesced with downcast eyes.
Plath felt a wave of exhaustion that forced her eyelids down. She coughed—she’d been coughing the whole way home. The nauseating stink of smoke was in her nostrils, the taste of it in her mouth, and more came when she coughed.
Vincent arrived silently and stood with Anya by his side, looking like a man waiting for his own firing squad.
“What did you know?” Plath asked wearily.
“What do you mean?” he asked, and Wilkes was up out of her seat and swinging a fist at him, which he blocked easily. She swung again, but with less conviction, and he gently pushed her back down onto the couch.
“What did you know, Vincent?” Plath asked again with deadly, weary calm that carried absolute authority. “Did you know who Lear is?”
He blinked and shook his head. Then he leaned toward her, frowning. “Are you saying you do know who he is?”
“She,” Wilkes said. “She, she, she. She. A sister. One of the vaginally endowed. Lystra Reid.”
Vincent drew back as if frightened. “You can’t do that, you can’t talk about Lear. Caligula will—”
“He’s dead, too,” Wilkes said. “That’s his work.” She stabbed a finger at the TV. “He’s dead. And Jin is dead. And Ophelia is dead. And Renfield is dead. And Billy is dead. Even the Twins are dead. And pretty—” She sobbed, and it was a moment before she could go on, her voice low and grating. “It’s a whole big bunch of dead tonight. Now answer Plath’s question, Vincent, or I swear to God I’ll find some way to make you dead, too.”
“I met Lear once. I didn’t look at him. Her, if you say so. Maybe that explains why I was told not to turn around and look. He, she, whoever, used voice masking. I assumed it was so that later I wouldn’t be able to recognize the voice.”
“And did you know Lear planned to do this? To use biot madness this way?”
“No.”
Plath set her teacup aside carefully. Her hands were still hard to control with any finesse. The cold seemed to have sunk deep in her, joining the cold, dead spot where Noah had been held in her thoughts. “Where do you stand, Vincent?”
He did not pretend he didn’t understand. He grasped her meaning immediately. “I’m
not sure I know who I am,” he began.
Wilkes interrupted. “Yeah, well, welcome to the new reality. We’ve all been mind-fucked one way or the other.” She laughed her mirthless heh-heh-heh and said, “We really are BZRK now, I guess. Crazy.”
“I wish they would stop showing that,” Anya said, transfixed by the TV.
“Where do you stand, Vincent?” Plath repeated.
“I have to …” He began, hesitated, shook his head, and continued. “I have to go back to basics. To what I believe. For a start, my name is not Vincent. It’s Michael Ford.”
“I’m sticking with Wilkes. It works for me.”
“I’m Michael Ford,” he said, almost wonderingly. Like a little kid talking about some new and amazing thing he’d just learned. “I’m Michael. I believe … I believe people should be free, that’s why … I believe they should be left alone. That’s why I joined BZRK.”
“That’s why everyone joins,” Anya said, speaking that last word with distaste. “No one ever joins to do evil. It just always ends up that way.”
Vincent winced as if she’d struck him.
Plath said, “Burnofsky is releasing self-replicating nanobots. Maybe they were all destroyed in the Tulip, maybe not. If he did it, if they aren’t all killed, well … anyway, the Twins and Burnofsky are no longer the problem. Lear is the problem. And I don’t think she’s done. I think she’ll keep at it. She wants to …” She shrugged. “I have no idea what she wants.”
“Noah would have,” Vincent said softly. “He was a gamer. This is all a game. It’s been a game from the start.”
Plath stared at him, thinking. He did not look away. “A game,” she said finally. “And what’s the point of this game?”
“Games have no point,” Vincent said. “The point of the game is the game. The purpose is to play. But games have structure. They are built and written. And you can only play one at a time. Lear is wiping the board of the old game, replacing it with his … her own game.”
“How do we win?”
“To win you have to understand the …” He shook his head. “You can’t beat the game designer at her own game.”
“Sure you can,” Wilkes said. “I used to beat my little brother at games all the time. I’d pull the power cord out of the wall. Game over.”
Before she got on her plane, Lystra Reid, Lear, punched a code into her phone and pushed Send.
The text went to the nearest cell-phone tower. The signal went from there to a central router that pushed it up to a satellite from whence it was bounced to another satellite, and still another as it wound its way south. Eventually it was picked up by a satellite dish.
From there it traveled just a few hundred feet to a computer server that recognized the code and translated it into sixteen thousand individual digital instructions that then mostly retraced the digital path of the incoming message.
Elapsed time, 3.4 seconds.
In crèches concealed in locations in several cities across North America, Europe, and Asia, DNA stew was bathed in various enzymes before receiving three micro-doses of drugs and a final jolt of electricity.
Forty-eight thousand biots—three for each of the sixteen thousand DNA signatures—came to life.
Only fifteen thousand, eight hundred and four people (a number had died since their fateful visit to a medical testing lab) saw windows open in their minds.
Of those, fewer than a third understood what it meant.
They generated more than three thousand terrified calls to 911 in the U.S. and 999 in the UK and 112 in the European Union.
“That’s the first tranche,” Lear said. To the pilot, she said, “Okay, we can go now.”
Bug Man did not want to ask. He risked making her angry, and in this new world, where his life belonged to her, he did not want to do that. But he couldn’t help himself.
“My mum?”
“By now she’s thinking, ‘Blimey, what’s that then?’ ” Lear said, switching to an exaggerated British accent. “There’s windows in me head, innit?”
Bug Man’s throat convulsed. Tears came to his eyes, impossible to stop.
“Best to move on, Buggy,” Lear said. “Get over it. Look at me. My father died tonight, and do I seem all weepy? Hey, have you decided what color teeth you want?”
“What?”
“The teeth. The teeth!” She pointed at her own. “How about green? I like green.”
As the jet taxied the acid rolled toward forty-eight thousand biots.
“Hah, there we go, yeah,” Lear said. “Now we’re going to play.”
“We know her name now. Lystra Reid,” Plath said.
Anya typed it in. Instantly the computer monitor lit up with links and photos.
“I’ve seen her before.” Wilkes frowned, then snapped her fingers. “Nijinsky. She was there when Jin died.”
“Lear. She’s thirtysomething, born in Bogalusa, Louisiana. Parents not listed. Schools, nope. That’s about it except for later business stuff. She owns a lot of medical testing labs.”
“That would make sense,” Anya said.
Vincent, seemingly exhausted by his earlier conversation, remained silent.
“That’s probably how she met my father. And it’s how she got DNA samples.”
“She will have millions of them,” Anya said.
Plath looked at the best photograph of Lystra Reid. What was there in that pretty face to betray the existence of an evil, disturbed mind? Nothing. The eyes were clear, the expression open, the mouth smiling.
Plath remembered what Stern had told her. That Lear had used burner phones but without masking the callback number. One had been purchased in Tierra del Fuego. The other in New Zealand, she could not recall the city. But both had been connected to Antarctica.
“Search ‘Lystra Reid’ and Antarctica,” she told Anya.
That earned a raised eyebrow, but the search caused a long, slow exhale. Lystra Reid had purchased a company called Cathexis.
“Pull up any articles on Cathexis Inc.,” Plath instructed.
The four of them read silently. Wilkes moved her lips. Plath felt a new pang as just for a moment she thought to turn, look over her shoulder, and ask Noah what he thought.
But there was no Noah. No Noah, no Nijinsky, no Mr. Stern, and only a partial Vincent.
“Who has had any medical testing done in the last ten years?” Plath asked.
But Vincent shook his head. “Irrelevant. If we’ve had biots made, we’re in her database.”
“I have not had biots made,” Anya said. “But I have been tested at one of her labs.”
“So we are all vulnerable. It’s possible that at any moment—”
“Great,” Wilkes said. “Fine. Let me go nuts. I’ll fit right in.”
Plath looked to Vincent. “What will she do next?”
Vincent thought about it, eyes dark beneath his brow, mouth a grim line. “Her goal is instability. What else could it be? With her skills and her resources, if all she wanted was the whole world dead, she could have grown smallpox or anthrax in a lab somewhere. And she has nanotechnology. Why have us use biots to fight the Armstrongs? She had the upper hand all along. She could have used a lot less effort and simply obtained a sample of their DNA, grown biots for them, and inflicted biot madness.”
“Okay, why didn’t she?” Plath asked.
“Because she’s a gamer,” Vincent said with more confidence than he felt. “She wants to win, yes, but first she wants to play. We were Level One.”
“Then we’re in Level Two now.” Plath nodded. “Now she drives the whole world crazy. Watches it. Shows up in person to enjoy Jin’s death. Probably other events as well. She’s enjoying all that.”
“Sick bitch,” Wilkes muttered.
“She brought me back, made me a part of it again. Why?”
Vincent shrugged. “Because you’re her avatar. She wants you to go on playing. Bluebooking.”
“What?”
“It’s an old gaming expr
ession. It’s when a player keeps a journal of the game, but from the POV of the avatar.”
“You are smart and rich and pretty,” Anya suggested. “Just as she is. And alone. As she must be.”
“Lear sent me to recruit you,” Vincent reminded her.
“And when I was enjoying the island too much, she forced me back into the game. She even left clues for me to find that would link her to Antarctica.”
“Machines do not work well at very cold temperatures,” Anya said. “And nanobots are machines.”
“Okay, so Antarctica because—”
“Because if the gray goo has been unleashed, it will have a hard time penetrating hundreds of miles of subzero temperatures. It’s the safest place on the planet if you’re worried about that.”
Vincent nodded agreement. This was the most engaged Plath had seen him in a long while. Was he ready to take command again? No. This is my game now.
“Antarctica is also a place to ride out whatever shitstorm she’s unleashed,” Wilkes offered. “It’s as far away as you can get without being on the moon.”
“So she camps there,” Vincent said. “Safe from the goo. And safe from the consequences of her own game.”
“She camps. She waits. Why?”
“For Level Two to play out. So she can be there for Level Three.”
“And what is Level Three?”
Vincent shook his head slowly. “Only Lear knows that. It’s her game.”
“And we can’t beat her by playing her game,” Plath concluded. “We can only pull the power cord.”
“The power cord is south of here,” Wilkes said.
“She will expect that,” Vincent said.
“Expect it? I have a feeling it’s what she wants,” Plath said.
TWENTY-NINE
From New York to Tierra del Fuego was a bit over six thousand five hundred miles, which at a speed of four hundred eighty knots took eleven hours. It was not a pleasant flight for Bug Man. But he was lucky. The rest of the world was faring much worse.
During the time Bug Man was in the air eleven more tranches of forty-eight thousand biots, totaling five hundred twenty-eight thousand, were generated from stored DNA patterns. Dividing by three biots per person, that was approximately one hundred seventy-six thousand people who lost their grip on sanity.