They hobbled and slid and tripped, floor by floor, tears streaming down their faces. The last six floors were agony. Smoke was everywhere, searing their lungs. The heat of the fire turned the stairwell into an oven. At some point Plath simply stopped thinking, stopped even feeling anything but pain.
The last two floors were crowded with people—yelling, choking, pushing, panicking.
And all at once there was air.
Plath, still holding Wilkes by the hand, fell out onto the sidewalk and into light; rough hands grabbed her, pulled her away, a voice yelling, “Move, move, move, it’s coming down!”
They staggered on, not even sure what direction they were headed, stumbling into other refugees. A fire hose was spraying blessed cold water, and only then did Plath realize that some people were on fire, their clothing smoking, their hair crisped.
Glass was everywhere on the sidewalk and streets. Red lights flashed. Smoke billowed, but was caught by a breeze that cleared most of it at street level.
A block away they stopped, gasping, and sank down onto the concrete.
“Okay?” Plath asked.
“Alive,” Wilkes answered.
Plath smeared smoke from her eyes, blinked away tears and tried to look up at the Tulip.
Fire licked from windows. Smoke poured everywhere, the whole building a chimney now.
“We have to move farther.”
“Can’t,” Wilkes gasped.
“Like hell you can’t.” Plath stood, hauled Wilkes to her feet and, taking the girl’s weight on her shoulder, hobbled and ran with memories, too-sharp memories, of what happened when skyscrapers burned.
“Burn and fall, burn and fall,” Lear crooned as she watched flames and smoke wreathe the Tulip, dividing her attention between the real-world vista from her window and the TV coverage.
It was split-screened now on the news: half showed the remaining, yet-to-be rounded up loons from the Hollywood premiere; half showed the Tulip aflame. The crawl along the bottom was all about the Plague of Madness.
“Good title, that,” Lear commented. “Makes people think it can spread. Yeah. And it can, hah.”
Bug Man said nothing. This was his future now. He would live or die at Lear’s whim. Or she might just let him go crazy.
Three windows were open in his head. None of them showed much at the moment, just glimpses of the biots themselves. It was different than twitching nanobots, more intimate. You had only to think and the biot would move. No wonder BZRK had been so tough to beat. No wonder Vincent had ended up drooling nuts.
“Oh, look look look!” Lear pointed, as excited as a little child. “It’s starting to buckle. Look! Look! You can see rebar starting to stick out the side there. My dad came through in the end, I guess.”
“Your dad?”
“Yeah,” she said, almost fondly. “My dad. You must have heard of Caligula. Of course that’s not his real name. I gave him that nom de guerre. Caligula, yeah. Yeah.”
“Caligula’s your father?” He forced himself to quash the urge to say that this explained a lot.
His mouth hurt terribly. He had finally been allowed a couple ibuprofen swallowed with cold water, which had sent lightning bolts of pain shooting from his broken teeth but was already clearing up his speech. Now Bug Man was drinking raw bourbon, no ice, no water, no nothing, because it just didn’t seem to matter anymore if his brain was dulled. What was he holding out for? He was owned, body and soul. He was her slave. He was her dog.
“Mmm,” Lear said. “Was. Past tense. He killed my mother, you know. He tries to pretend it was me, yeah, like I could have done it. Like I could have killed her. Like I could have found her unconscious, yeah, and the cleaver, and thought … no. Yeah. But if I had, wouldn’t I have a tattoo of her?”
Bug Man nodded wearily, as if this proved her case.
“Adoptive parents, yeah, that’s different,” Lear said. “You saw them.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going,” Lear said. “It’s going. Oh, this will be the best. Get me a drink. I want to toast the Armstrong Twins as they die.”
“What have you done?” Charles demanded, aghast.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold,” Burnofsky said. “And you know what? Even with the fire below, I feel chilly.”
“Damn you, what have you done?” Benjamin yelled, desperation breaking his voice.
“My final work of genius,” Burnofsky said. “I programmed my SRNs to respond not just to a time signature, or even a specific energy source. I programmed them with a map. A topographical program.”
Charles began to scratch his chest, the place where his chest became Benjamin’s.
“Yep, it will itch at first,” Burnofsky said. “Then it will burn. And then, it will really start to become quite unpleasant.”
“What have you done? Tell us! What have you done?”
“I’ve granted your secret wish,” Burnofsky said. “You’ve lived with each other every single minute of your lives. Neither of you has ever been separate. Well, now you will be. The topography is you.”
“What?” Charles cried. “We’ll die!”
“Well, yeah,” Burnofsky allowed. “But not right away. Hey, I’ve put a lot of thought into this. You don’t think I’d make it easy for you. Has my life been easy? No, it has not.” He dropped the jocular tone. “You bought my soul, you two. You bought my soul …”