Vincent felt Caligula’s gun pressed against his ear.
“I’m going to lose,” Vincent whispered.
“Can’t help you down there in the meat,” Caligula said, his voice grating, then rising to yell, “Hey! Assholes! This is Vincent. You want him? I’ll trade you for free passage outta here!”
The window in the SUV lowered.
Vincent saw a man talking on a phone. Tense. Waiting for some kind of answer.
The small car lowered a window as well. A muzzle emerged, aimed at them.
Something appeared in the air. An object the size of a baseball, but dull steel. It flew from Caligula’s hand, right through the window of the SUV.
Caligula pivoted, fired, BAMBAMBAM!
A cry from inside the small car.
A shout of panic from inside the SUV.
Caligula yanked Vincent down with him as he dropped to the pavement.
The grenade exploded inside the SUV.
Nanobots had their wheels in contact with the eye, and V2’s legs were slipping, and the windows blew out of the SUV, and the doors exploded outward, and three nanobots were on Vincent’s crippled biot, stabbing and stabbing, and Vincent felt it as if each stab was in his own guts.
He cried out and Caligula fired again at the small car and yelled, “Get out here, now!” and waved his arm and Vincent saw Keats and Plath and Anya all running, and a fourth person, too.
A fourth person.
A Goth street girl with a weird tattoo on her eye.
Keats missed a step as he recognized her: the girl from the cab.
“The woman!” Caligula yelled to the newcomer as Vincent felt a terrible pain deep inside himself and Keats yelled, “Right eye, right eye!” and the Goth girl, Wilkes, jabbed a finger hard into Anya Violet’s right eye, and Anya cried out in pain and tried to bat the girl away.
V2 leapt over the ripped and dismembered body of V1, reckless, heedless, not giving a damn now, because this was the end, so all in, Vincent knew, all in.
The biot killed two nanobots before losing its legs. Both of Vincent’s biots were now almost immobile. Two of their total twelve legs were still attached.
Nothing left but the stingers in their tails and the tiny beam weapons. But without legs neither was of much use.
Eight nanobots surrounded the two dying biots.
“Can I get a withdrawal? Can I get a withdrawal?” Bug Man yelled. “What’s happening in the macro?”
“A bunch of dead people is what’s happening,” Burnofsky reported.
“Tell me!” If he could get a withdrawal—if someone, anyone, could be there to offer Bug Man a way to climb off the woman—then he could drag one of Vincent’s biots with him. Maybe both.
It would be unequaled game play.
Unequaled!
“What the hell are you doing?” It was Jindal bursting in. “The Twins are seeing all this! Quit screwing around. Kill him off! Kill him off!”
Bug Man felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest. In all this time it had never occurred to him that his video was also being watched live by the Armstrong Twins.
He turned sickly eyes on Burnofsky.
Burnofsky laughed. “Yeah, there’s that.”
Bug Man gritted his teeth and surged his nanobots ahead.
“Caligula,” Vincent said. He sat hunched forward in the backseat, looking like he might throw up. Plath was beside him and a girl she’d never seen before. Anya was jammed in the passenger seat with Keats. Six of them in a car made for five at most. A car with one window gone and blood all over the dashboard.
Caligula drove with the same compact precision he did everything. Police cars went screeching past, heading for the massacre at McLure headquarters.
“Caligula,” Vincent said again, and the killer in the front seat sighed and answered.
“Madness or death,” Vincent said. “Make it death.”
“You don’t give that order, Vincent,” Caligula said calmly. “Only Lear gives that order.”
“Shut the hell up: no one’s giving that order,” Wilkes said. “I’m the cavalry. Yee-hah.”
A ghost of a smile on Vincent’s face.
SIXTEEN
“He’ll be okay. Vincent, I mean. He’ll be okay.” Nijinsky looked somewhat the worse for wear. His hair was short of perfect, and his collar was limp. He almost flopped into the chair.
Plath had showered. The water had run red and she’d stayed in there quite a while, crying where the others couldn’t see her.
She sat now beside a solemn, shell-shocked Keats. He still had blood splatter on his face. He still smelled of gunpowder.
Anya was … somewhere … with Ophelia. Caligula had disappeared. Wilkes sat a little apart, noisily devouring a bag of spicy Doritos.
Renfield’s head in the plastic bag had been taken away to be incinerated, obliterating any evidence of nanotechnology.
“Two of Vincent’s four biots are injured and lame for the time being,” Nijinsky said. “They’re back in crèche; they’ll likely recover. Wilkes’s biots also were roughed up. But she went two against eight with the Bug Man. Saved Vincent and made it out alive.”
Nijinsky made a little salute, which Wilkes saw but did not acknowledge. She ate mechanically, stuffing the chips in her mouth, eyes looking at nothing.
“You both got thrown in the deep end tonight,” Nijinsky said, not quite apologizing. “It must have been tough.”
“It was a bloody nightmare,” Keats shot back. He blinked. Drew a little further into that diffidence of his and added, more quietly, “Still is.”