“Is that true?” Burnofsky demanded, squinting hard at the Twins. He glanced at the monitor. The cameras in the basement had been redirected, searching for Caligula. A grainy image showed him walking, dragging one leg, then collapsing on the floor.
Keats had never been inside the brain of a dying man. There was nothing to see on the optic nerve, nothing changing in his immediate environment. But the eyelid no longer blinked as often, and it seemed to be drooping, partly obscuring the view.
If Caligula died before the explosion, then Keats would have been his killer. His biot might sit for several minutes in a dead man’s brain before the explosion killed his biot and plunged him down into the dark hell of madness.
How would it feel, he wondered. How would it feel to no longer be himself?
Keats’s throat was dry. His breathing was shallow. He was afraid. First would come the razor edge of madness, to be followed by an explosion that—
A brilliant flash of light from Caligula’s eye.
The same bright flash filled the monitor that had been trained on Caligula. The camera aimed at the exterior where the men had been wielding the cutting torch went dead.
“They burned through!” Jindal cried.
“System,” Charles yelled, his voice cracking. “Sublevel two, northeast corner stairwell cameras!”
Blank nothing, dead cameras.
“System, sublevel one, northeast corner!”
Here, too, the cameras were blank. A shudder communicated itself up the length of the Tulip to Keats’s feet, like a minor earthquake. A glass fell from a shelf and shattered.
The fire killed Caligula instantly. Then it began to burn through his flesh, boiling the blood in his veins, sloughing away charred skin, burning its way to his heart, to his lungs. To his brain.
· · ·
“Fire in the lobby!” Jindal reported, phone to his ear.
“They can put it out!” Burnofsky yelled. “They have to put it out!” His relief was all gone now, all gone, as his brilliant mind frantically calculated the damage that could be done to his nanobots by a burning building.
“The southwest corner stairwell is still clear,” Jindal said. “Gentlemen, we have to get you out of here!” This to the Twins, who seemed paralyzed.
“Anyone who wants to live, get out of here!” Plath yelled, pulling away from Keats.
A window in Keats’s mind went dark and then disappeared. Keats felt strange, very strange. Not upset. Just … alone …
“Wilkes! Run!” Plath pleaded.
“Not without you and blue eyes,” Wilkes said.
… alone in a strange landscape.
“No one moves!” three different security men yelled at once, waving their guns in a bewildered effort to assert control.
“It blew up early,” Plath said, looking to the Twins. “The explosion was only limited, but it’s still burning, and there’s an open gas line feeding that fire. We may still get out.”
Burnofsky yelled, “System: show Burnofsky lab!”
Such strange images. Flashing pictures of his old room in London, of playing football in the alley, of the island. Of Sadie. Of the dark, looming monster that seemed now to be emerging from her, bursting from her flesh, a dark, terrible beast …
Burnofsky’s lab was untouched. He saw assistants going about their business, clueless.
“Evacuate the building!” Charles yelled.
“No!” This came from Benjamin. Jindal stutter-stepped and stopped.
Keats saw it all. The Twins were a glowing two-headed dragon, with liquid fire bleeding from Benjamin’s lips. Burnofsky melting, somehow melting, and Keats felt the laughter rise in him, rise and fill his chest and come burbling out of his mouth. He pulled against imaginary chains, yanking his arms against nonexistent restraints.
“Noah,” Sadie pleaded, helpless, knowing what was happening to him, knowing that he was spiraling down.
A part of Keats—a fading, weakening remnant—watched it all from very far away, a shadow of his mind, watching himself slip, slip, slip.… It was all very, very clear, very, very clear to Noah, Noah like the guy with the ark, the one who liked animals, all clear, they were all devils, all of them. Mad, each of them, mad as … mad as …
A whimpering voice, Noah’s own voice, but not operated by him, no, a voice mewling and laughing and crying out, “Kill me, kill me, it’s what you all want, isn’t it?”
In that moment, a final becalmed moment, the last sane vestiges of his mind took it all in, and his laughter was not yet the laughter of the insane, but the knowing, cynical laughter of one who sees everything clearly, if only for a single second in time.
He saw Benjamin and Charles as what they were, two rejected, despised, sad little children forever bound together, neither able to feel even a moment’s freedom.
He saw Burnofsky, so desperate for redemption from suffering that he would bring down the whole world in a fit of self-loathing.
And Sadie, Sadie his love, her brain a tangled mess, wired, unwired, but even before that crippled by a dead mother, a dead brother, a dead father, and corrupted by wealth and power and crushed by responsibility. Mad. Her, too: mad.
They were all mad. They always had been.
Crazy people had gotten their hands on deadly toys. The end was inevitable.
And me, too, he thought. As mad as any of them, believing that there could be love and honor in the midst of it.
They had all tried to armor themselves against this final moment, but their defiance had been its own lie: there was never a choice between death and madness. It was always to be both.