Keats nodded tightly. “Right.”
Wilkes pulled away from him. “Maybe I just transferred one of my kids to you, Keats. Just now.”
“Maybe,” he acknowledged.
“Maybe it’s me, and if I put one of my kids into Plath, maybe that’s my second one, you know? Maybe I get in there and make it worse. What’s Plath doing? What’s she up to? Did this wire make her soft in the head?”
“She’s planning to blow up the Tulip.”
“What’s a tulip? A flower, right?” Billy asked.
Wilkes snorted. “It’s a skyscraper in Midtown. Blow it up? What’s that even mean?”
“It means that she’s given the go-ahead to Caligula to blow it up. Kill everyone in it. Destroy all their labs, all their computers.”
Wilkes stared at him.
“Lear told her to—” Keats began.
“Lear?” Wilkes shrilled. “Lear told her to murder all those people?”
“That was her own … her own solution. Maybe. Who knows? She’s met with Caligula. She knows she’s wired, and she knows it’s wrong, but she can’t, you know.… she can’t pull the goddamned wires. We have to do it for her. And we have to find whatever is in there. Nanobot or biot, we have to find it and kill it.”
“Who is doing it?” Billy asked. “I mean, who is wiring her brain to do—”
“To do what Lear wants done?” Keats asked, his voice rising. “Who is wiring her to do exactly what Lear wants done?”
Wilkes drew a sharp breath. “The hell,” she said.
“I don’t have any choice but to trust you two,” Keats said. “For all I know, you’re as wired as she is. Or maybe you just think it’s okay. Or maybe I’m as messed up as she is and the way I see this is all wrong. But I have no choice, I have to … I can’t …” He spread his hands, helpless.
“You’re talking about ripping out wire that Lear or someone working for Lear put there?” Wilkes asked. “Lear’s going to see that as treason. You know what that means? You know who comes to talk to you when you betray Lear? Jesus, Keats, if she’s as wired up as you say, Plath’ll send Caligula after you herself.”
“I know!” he raged. He pushed his fingers back through his hair. “I know. I know.”
No one spoke. Keats sniffed and wiped at his eyes. “This fight has changed,” he said. “This isn’t us against them anymore. Not that simple. I mean, doesn’t there have to be some line we draw? Doesn’t there have to be something we won’t do, even if it means maybe we lose? And doesn’t there have to be some limit on how far we’ll let ourselves be used?”
“The Twins don’t have a limit,” Wilkes said.
“Neither does Lear,” Keats said. “I think he’s the one using biots—creating them, killing them—to drive people crazy. Sweden. The prince. The Brazilian.” He waved his hand vaguely. “Probably a bunch of other stuff. The Twins, Lear, they’re just two sides in the same crazy game, Wilkes.”
“Yeah. And we are playable characters, right? We’re game pieces.”
“If we let ourselves be,” Keats said.
“So now you’re taking over?” Wilkes asked.
“Only until Plath is cleared. Then …” He shrugged. “Then we … I don’t know.”
“I’m in,” Wilkes said, but her usual smart-ass smirk was gone. Her face was gray and slack. She looked far older than she could have been. “Death or madness. Right? We’ve always known it would come down to that.”
Keats nodded. “Death or madness.”
The Russian officers proved to be disappointments to Lear. A major and two lieutenants duly lost their minds as their biots died, but at the time they were not on duty. The major wandered off into the Siberian wastes and froze to death. One lieutenant was dead drunk, too incapacitated to do much of anything.
The remaining lieutenant had just finished a shift. He saw the windows opening in his mind and acted quickly. He stripped off his sidearm and threw it into the snow. Then he ran toward the medical dispensary, but lost his mind halfway there.
Naked, he charged the guarded gate of the missile silo and was arrested by security.
The lack of a nuclear event—it would have registered on seismographs—disappointed Lystra.
So she opened her laptop and scanned the list of high-value targets. She picked out the pilot of a Virgin Australia plane making the long haul from Los Angeles to Sydney.
As he approached Sydney in a few hours, his biots would be born, windows would open, and if Lystra was lucky the world would have one more thing to fear. An appetizer, so to speak, before the pasta course.
“Funny,” she said. “Yeah.”
She watched some old Beavis and Butt-head on Netflix, and fell asleep with it still playing.
Bug Man had never heard of Beavis and Butt-head. That would give him an excuse in case she woke up and saw him creep into her room with his heart in his throat. He could say, I heard this on TV, didn’t know what it was, so I came in and …
… and lifted your phone.
And then you killed me, so, yeah, yeah, crazy bitch, yeah, then you killed me. The end.
Suarez had not found it necessary to threaten him much. Dr. Babbington was amenable enough once she’d made clear that she would do bad things to him if necessary. And an assault rifle was hard to argue with.