Helicopters were overhead. Sirens were still wailing as more and more security flooded the blocks around the UN.
One thing was sure: Wilkes and Ophelia had provided one hell of a diversion.
Then, Vincent saw. He was all the way down in the optic chiasma when he spotted the nanobot army racing away.
“Bug Man,” Vincent said.
“I’m on my way!” Nijinsky replied.
Bug Man’s nanobots stopped moving away. Six platoons turned, one then the next, to face the biots. The exploding head logo was faint but unmistakable in the phosphorescent light.
Vincent smiled at Nijinsky. A real smile.
“It’ll be over by the time you get there, Jin.”
The Twins were watching the windows open on their table.
They saw the blank screen that had been focused on the UN station. It was an ominous rectangle of static now.
They saw the scene outside the UN Building, a carnival of flashing lights as every fire or police vehicle in New York gathered.
They saw Dietrich acquiring control of Kim’s nanobots, already in position, hidden for the moment in the Indian prime minister’s dark hair. That had been a good suggestion from Bug Man, although of course Benjamin had thought of it first.
They puzzled at the sight of One-Up, looking battered and bloody, being hustled into the chair beyond Dietrich. They didn’t have the audio on, but they could see her rage. She kicked a trash can as she passed and punched the air. Furious.
They also saw what Burnofsky saw inside the brain of the Chinese premier.
And what Bug Man saw as he turned to face his nemesis.
The rods and cones in their retinas fired tiny electrical signals down the optic nerve.
At the very back of their brains their visual cortex translated those signals into images.
But neither Charles’s eye, nor Benjamin’s eye, nor the eye that stared out from between them, could turn inward and see the two biots that had at last reached the hippocampus.
Neither of them could know that Sadie McLure, who now called herself Plath, lay curled in a young man’s arms, contemplating their murder.
The TFDs had a twelve-block area in which the BZRK twitchers might be hiding. Each block packed with tall buildings, with hundreds of offices each. And the fact was that even that cordon was an estimate, a best guess. No one knew the exact limits of a BZRK twitcher’s reach. But as a practical matter, if they extended the cordon any farther it would have to include Grand Central, not to mention the subway stations.
At ground level there were something like a dozen coffee shops, twice that many restaurants, fast-food joints, pizza parlors, copy shops, dry cleaners, office-supply stores, shoe shops, tourist-junk shops, florists …
It was an impossible search. Sugar Lebowski had eleven guys. But she had the advantage of knowing whom she was looking for: Sadie McLure. And some guy, but the smart play was to look for Sadie.
Cars. Parking lots. Driving around in a cab. Inside about a thousand offices. They could be any of a million places, and she had to find them. With eleven guys.
Two street people were arguing loudly over who had rights to the cans in a bin. Sugar went up to them and said, “Shut up, assholes.” She held up a hundred-dollar bill, and that got their attention even through the haze of booze and schizophrenia. “A hundred bucks if you find me this girl.” She had a picture on her phone and gave them a five-second look. “Find her in the next ten minutes and you can drink for a week. Go!”
To her men she said, “One-Up said they were sitting in a coffee shop, so they are probably still at street level. If they had an office, they’d have been there to begin with. So get every hobo, bike messenger, street vendor, cabdriver, doorman, and building security guy. Offer them a hundred. If that doesn’t work, offer them a thousand. Get me that little bitch.”
The explosion threw Wilkes clear into the shop. She slammed into a stand of T-shirts. She was burning, tights curling, hair crisping, blouse smoking. She slapped at the fire on her legs and yelled, “Ophelia! Ophelia!”
There were bodies everywhere, some moving, some not. Choking, oily black smoke filled the shop, a thousand times deeper and more intense than what had resulted from her own little exercise in pyromania. The smoke was like a falling ceiling, pressing down, squeezing the air into eighteen inches near the floor.
Wilkes lay flat, rolled over to put out any remaining flames on her body and crawled like a demodex, worming her way across the floor. She swarmed over debris, over bodies, yelling, “Ophelia!” with less and less breath. The choking started then, the coughing that ripped at her throat and sent her into chest-wracking spasms.
She found two stumps burning like torches and knew, just knew, it was Ophelia. Her feet were gone. Her legs were the wicks of candles.
Wilkes gagged on smoke, vomited, wept, grabbed at UN souvenir T-shirts and pressed them over burning flesh that smelled like gyro meat on a spit.
She crawled to Ophelia’s head. Ophelia’s eyes were open, wide, indifferent to the smoke, staring in horror. That look, those staring, terrified eyes were worse than the burning limbs.
“They’re dead!” Ophelia wailed. The smoke pressed down so low over her face that the exhalation of her horror formed spirals and eddies.
“Get …” Wilkes said, but that was the limit of her powers of speech, her throat was swelling, her stomach was retching again.
“Dead! Gods, no. No! Nooooo!” Ophelia screamed.
Wilkes knew she wasn’t talking about the people who had just died.
One thing was sure: Wilkes and Ophelia had provided one hell of a diversion.
Then, Vincent saw. He was all the way down in the optic chiasma when he spotted the nanobot army racing away.
“Bug Man,” Vincent said.
“I’m on my way!” Nijinsky replied.
Bug Man’s nanobots stopped moving away. Six platoons turned, one then the next, to face the biots. The exploding head logo was faint but unmistakable in the phosphorescent light.
Vincent smiled at Nijinsky. A real smile.
“It’ll be over by the time you get there, Jin.”
The Twins were watching the windows open on their table.
They saw the blank screen that had been focused on the UN station. It was an ominous rectangle of static now.
They saw the scene outside the UN Building, a carnival of flashing lights as every fire or police vehicle in New York gathered.
They saw Dietrich acquiring control of Kim’s nanobots, already in position, hidden for the moment in the Indian prime minister’s dark hair. That had been a good suggestion from Bug Man, although of course Benjamin had thought of it first.
They puzzled at the sight of One-Up, looking battered and bloody, being hustled into the chair beyond Dietrich. They didn’t have the audio on, but they could see her rage. She kicked a trash can as she passed and punched the air. Furious.
They also saw what Burnofsky saw inside the brain of the Chinese premier.
And what Bug Man saw as he turned to face his nemesis.
The rods and cones in their retinas fired tiny electrical signals down the optic nerve.
At the very back of their brains their visual cortex translated those signals into images.
But neither Charles’s eye, nor Benjamin’s eye, nor the eye that stared out from between them, could turn inward and see the two biots that had at last reached the hippocampus.
Neither of them could know that Sadie McLure, who now called herself Plath, lay curled in a young man’s arms, contemplating their murder.
The TFDs had a twelve-block area in which the BZRK twitchers might be hiding. Each block packed with tall buildings, with hundreds of offices each. And the fact was that even that cordon was an estimate, a best guess. No one knew the exact limits of a BZRK twitcher’s reach. But as a practical matter, if they extended the cordon any farther it would have to include Grand Central, not to mention the subway stations.
At ground level there were something like a dozen coffee shops, twice that many restaurants, fast-food joints, pizza parlors, copy shops, dry cleaners, office-supply stores, shoe shops, tourist-junk shops, florists …
It was an impossible search. Sugar Lebowski had eleven guys. But she had the advantage of knowing whom she was looking for: Sadie McLure. And some guy, but the smart play was to look for Sadie.
Cars. Parking lots. Driving around in a cab. Inside about a thousand offices. They could be any of a million places, and she had to find them. With eleven guys.
Two street people were arguing loudly over who had rights to the cans in a bin. Sugar went up to them and said, “Shut up, assholes.” She held up a hundred-dollar bill, and that got their attention even through the haze of booze and schizophrenia. “A hundred bucks if you find me this girl.” She had a picture on her phone and gave them a five-second look. “Find her in the next ten minutes and you can drink for a week. Go!”
To her men she said, “One-Up said they were sitting in a coffee shop, so they are probably still at street level. If they had an office, they’d have been there to begin with. So get every hobo, bike messenger, street vendor, cabdriver, doorman, and building security guy. Offer them a hundred. If that doesn’t work, offer them a thousand. Get me that little bitch.”
The explosion threw Wilkes clear into the shop. She slammed into a stand of T-shirts. She was burning, tights curling, hair crisping, blouse smoking. She slapped at the fire on her legs and yelled, “Ophelia! Ophelia!”
There were bodies everywhere, some moving, some not. Choking, oily black smoke filled the shop, a thousand times deeper and more intense than what had resulted from her own little exercise in pyromania. The smoke was like a falling ceiling, pressing down, squeezing the air into eighteen inches near the floor.
Wilkes lay flat, rolled over to put out any remaining flames on her body and crawled like a demodex, worming her way across the floor. She swarmed over debris, over bodies, yelling, “Ophelia!” with less and less breath. The choking started then, the coughing that ripped at her throat and sent her into chest-wracking spasms.
She found two stumps burning like torches and knew, just knew, it was Ophelia. Her feet were gone. Her legs were the wicks of candles.
Wilkes gagged on smoke, vomited, wept, grabbed at UN souvenir T-shirts and pressed them over burning flesh that smelled like gyro meat on a spit.
She crawled to Ophelia’s head. Ophelia’s eyes were open, wide, indifferent to the smoke, staring in horror. That look, those staring, terrified eyes were worse than the burning limbs.
“They’re dead!” Ophelia wailed. The smoke pressed down so low over her face that the exhalation of her horror formed spirals and eddies.
“Get …” Wilkes said, but that was the limit of her powers of speech, her throat was swelling, her stomach was retching again.
“Dead! Gods, no. No! Nooooo!” Ophelia screamed.
Wilkes knew she wasn’t talking about the people who had just died.
