Then she hit something she hadn’t even seen coming. An amazingly tall tree that sprouted from the flaked-flesh landscape below, rose high in the air, then veered away toward what was either down or ahead.
The biot bounced away from this tree and now was falling through a forest of them, impossibly long palm trunks. One rushed up toward her and she twisted, extended her six legs, hit it—with strangely little impact—and grabbed on tight.
In the macro she panted, almost doubled over from the nauseating sensation of falling miles through the air.
“I’m in … like trees.”
“Short stubby trees or great big long ones?”
“Really long ones!” She was shouting for no reason. Wilkes and Keats and Ophelia were all standing right there. “They look pink.”
“That’s color enhancement. If you think about it, you can actually change the color.” Wilkes laughed her heh-heh-heh and added, “Of course maybe that’s another time. Let’s just get you back where you belong.”
“I’m holding on to the tree. It looks like dead leaves down there on the ground.”
“Dead skin cells. Some folks think they look like fallen leaves. Other people think they look like shredded cardboard. Anyway, doesn’t matter. You’re down in your boyfriend’s stupid pseudo-beard. No offense, Keats.”
Keats reflexively stroked the sparse hair on his chin.
“It’s dark!” Plath yelled. “Stop that,” she snapped at Keats.
“Okay, well, this is unexpected,” Wilkes said. “We’re going to need to get some coffee or tea or whatever.”
“Coffee?”
“Yeah, honey, you got a long walk ahead of you. Up the chin, around the mouth, bypass the nostrils—you do not want to go in there—and meet me up by the eye. As slow as you’ll be, probably half an hour before we even get to go eye-skating.”
Wilkes waited, grinning. When Plath just stared blankly, she said, “Eye-skating. Ice-skating. Right?” Then she sighed. “We’re BZRK, it doesn’t mean we have to have no sense of humor.”
So they sipped coffee.
And Keats and Ophelia had some, too.
And from time to time Keats would stare at Plath as if she was a monster. He was inside her. Ophelia had led him through her eye and into her brain.
From time to time Plath would look at Keats, needing reassurance that he was actually, still, a human being.
At one point Wilkes grabbed a powerful magnifying glass and scanned Keats’s face. The light she used was like a break in clouds that lets streaming sunlight through. “There you are. Either you or a wandering mite. No, it’s you. You’re just under his left eye.”
Plath had been told about the demodex. Warned about the demodex. But still she screamed.
Like some awful crocodile mated with a dinosaur. It was smaller than she was, but not small enough. It was long, tapered from the front where its six legs stuck out, stubby, more like paddles than legs.
Plath stopped breathing.
Then breathed again, too hard, too fast. The demodex was moving. A tiny insect mouth seemed to be questing toward her.
She reared back.
“Are you sure it won’t … It’s like …” She didn’t say what it was like. Because it was not like anything she had ever seen or experienced. A living thing, its deformed baby legs motoring slowly and inefficiently. It was chewing a fallen leaf. No, a dead skin cell. Eating it contentedly.
And yet it was impossible not to imagine it as a predator. A reptile, a monster from another planet.
It was too small to see with a human eye. Too small even for a magnifying glass, smaller than a dust mite, smaller than her biot.
But size alone did not reassure. A wild boar is small, a mad dog is small.
“Aww, isn’t he cute?”
She heard Wilkes’s voice and realized that somehow she was seeing what Plath was seeing. Which could only mean …
Plath’s biot eyes looked up and saw a creature far more terrifying than the demodex.
It towered over the skin-eating monster. Spiky antenna from a smooth, green head. A long, narrow body with three tall legs on each side. The head was topped by a pair of compound eyes that wrapped down the side of the head like Princess Leia’s buns.
Where the mouth should be was a sort of proboscis, a tube, hollow and with something viscous dripping from the end, like mucus from a cold sufferer.
It had arms like a mantis. Dangerous and powerful. They ended in small asymmetric claws that had one short and one long pincer.
But it was the eyes …
The human eyes, smeared across that insect face, staring soulless from beneath the compound insect eyes. That was what finally obliterated Plath’s careful self-control and let her scream.
And scream.
And there, suddenly, a hand on her shoulder, Nijinsky standing behind her.
Nijinsky looked at Wilkes. “Is she seeing you?”
Wilkes nodded.
“You should have warned her.”
“Is that what my biot looks like?” Plath gasped. “Does it … does it have my eyes?”
Wilkes grinned. “Beware, Plath,” she said, mocking, and not in the jokey way she’d been before, but with an edge of aggression and anger. “It’s a weird world down there in the meat. And the weirdest thing of all is us.”
“It wasn’t me,” Burnofsky said, first thing, first words out of his mouth when he next saw Bug Man. He grabbed the kid and pulled him into a side room, out of sight, out of sound, and looked him in the eye and said, “I don’t like you, Anthony, but it wasn’t me.”