Ophelia said, “And I will die because Charles and Benjamin Armstrong are a disease.”
There was venom behind those words. No smile. Anger, quickly covered up, but Wilkes saw it and grinned at it.
“You’re not telling me something,” Wilkes said.
“No time. And this isn’t the place,” Ophelia said, turning stern.
“If we come out of this?”
Ophelia nodded, and surrendered what might be the last of her smiles, a wistful creation tinged with loss. “If we survive, we can play twenty questions, Wilkes.”
“Time to go?” Wilkes asked, and to her intense irritation there was a quiver in her voice.
Ophelia didn’t answer. She reached up and peeled the bindi from her forehead and slid it into the coin pocket of her jeans. Then she stood up and walked out the cafeteria door and into the gift shop.
Plath snatched a just-delivered triple-grande skim cappuccino off the Starbucks counter and smashed it into One-Up’s face.
“Ahhhh!”
“Run!” Plath hissed.
They ran from the Starbucks. The Starbucks that was the closest one to the AFGC building.
A stupid error, Plath saw that now. Stupid! Of course AFGC people would go there, of course they would. They would go there and another twitcher—another person who knew what it was like to be in two places at once—would notice the faraway eyes, the gaze that looked at things unseen in the macro, and intuit what you were.
They’d been sitting there in Starbucks, staring past each other, eyes flitting here and there, not looking at each other though they were face-to-face. The shark-toothed girl had felt what they were.
They pelted out the front door onto the street, glanced wildly in both directions. “Follow me,” Plath yelled.
“It’s your city,” Keats panted.
And there was One-Up tearing after them, her jacket trailing streams of coffee and foam. She was young and fit and fast, but not fast enough to easily close the distance, especially when she was dialing as she ran.
“She’ll warn them!” Keats yelled.
As they ran, pushing through indifferent pedestrians, slipping on dropped hot dogs, running blind despite Plath acting like she had a plan, they were each seeing the huge fingers touching the distant wounds on the beagle’s back.
“That’s not a vet!” Keats panted. “He’s stroking, not examining a wound.”
“It’s them,” Plath said.
They aimed their biots toward the wound, toward the God-fingers that reached down from a misty, vaguely detailed sky.
They raced across the fur, not descending back to the skin but racing hair to hair, leaping from horizontal asparagus shaft to asparagus shaft, grabbing and kicking and oh, wow, it would have been exhilarating except that up in the macro there was a thick crowd of people clogging the intersection ahead of them.
One-Up had only to touch them. Neither had biots on board. Neither had a defense. A single touch and a rush of nanobots would be on them, then inside them.
Race tree trunk to tree trunk!
They skirted the crowd and for a minute they thought they had gained some ground, but there was One-up rushing, halving the distance. They tried to cross the street, but it was a steady stream of yellow cabs. The only way out was to take One-Up down.
It was a game of tag. All she had to do was get a hand on them. She was yelling into the phone, “Get a twitcher on my frequency! Now now now!”
Plath heard her clearly. Their eyes met. One touch and whoever was no doubt rushing now to take over One-Up’s nanobots would send the deadly little robots onto Plath or Keats. Nanobots would rush into Plath’s eyes or ears and into her brain and pull the plug on the aneurysm, or maybe just get to work wiring her brain.
Yeah, well: screw that.
Plath grabbed a woman and spun her into One-Up’s path. The woman went down hard, but One-Up leapt over her like an Olympian. Then she landed on something wet and slipped.
The lights changed and cabs screeched to a halt and Keats and Plath were in the midst of those crossing the street, hurrying, pushing, and the goddamned God-fingers were stroking the fur now, no longer exploring the wound, a hand that blotted out the sun, an entire storm front made of ridged farmland held improbably upside down.
“Jump!” Plath yelled, and Keats at first misunderstood and jumped in the crosswalk.
Plath kicked her two biots up, twisted in midair like a cat, or a fly, and gripped onto farmland dotted with pearls of oozing sweat.
The hand went shooting past, and Keats was swept away beneath her or up in the sky or whatever the hell direction it was now.
“Keats!”
His biots jumped and missed and fell away, back onto the beagle, and Plath yelled. She spotted a man leaning on a cane. He didn’t look as if he needed it as badly as she did, so she snatched it from him, turned and ran straight at the on-rushing One-Up.
She didn’t swing the cane, she jabbed it. The rubber tip caught One-Up in the chest, and she said, “Ooof,” like in a comic book; you could practically see the word balloon.
Plath hit her again, another jab, then gripped the cane, a nice wooden cane, and swung it down hard on One-Up’s protective up-raised arm.
One-Up cried out in pain, and Plath hit her again and again and again all the while screaming, “Fuck you, bitch!”
Then, with One-Up on the pavement bleeding, Plath knocked the cell phone from her hand and sent it skittering across the sidewalk.
After that Keats and Plath ran, because New York wasn’t a place where you could just beat someone up without cops coming.