She was looking straight at him, but beyond him, too, and he was likewise looking through her and seeing not the wound but what looked like a far-distant mountain that he hoped was the beagle’s nose.
“We probably shouldn’t be talking. It sounds crazy,” Keats said.
“This is New York. Crazy doesn’t draw much attention. I need to get away from the wound. They’ll dump disinfectant all over it.”
She sipped her coffee. “What if I can’t find you? It’s like looking for someone in a hundred acres of woods.”
“Just remember the hair points to the back end of the dog. We want the front.”
Keats sent one of his biots to thread its way, like a monkey going hand over hand, up through the flattened hair, up into the light.
Biots did not have long-distance vision. At least not what would pass for long distance in the macro. They could see distant patterns of light and dark and some limited color, but not the detail of a face.
What Keats could see from his fur-top perch was an endless, undulating sea of fur, each individual hair clearly visible within the immediate circle but with distance turning spiny, horizontal hairs into a smear of brown and white. Twisting his biot around, he could form the picture—through insect and humanoid eyes—of a promontory, a peninsula, that ended in a massive black rock the size of Mount Rushmore.
The nose.
Their target.
“I’m on the head,” Keats said across the table. “I can see the wound. It looks like something plowed through the fur. If you can see the wound, you’re not far from where I am. Just walk against the direction of the fur.”
He looked up, into what felt to him like the sky. What he saw was a pale green cloud, larger than any object he had ever seen in real life. And it seemed to wrap itself around the forest of fur, but in one place ceased to be green and became a brown color. It enveloped the entire horizon.
“I think we’re being carried by the black one. The black TFD in the green shirt,” Keats said. “I can’t really see. Just shapes and colors. It doesn’t make much sense.”
Sounds were too large somehow to make much sense of, either. Like earthquake rumblings, but too confused to decipher.
Then, a single sound, audible to both of them. Like a gong being struck way off in orbit.
“Elevator?” Plath wondered.
“Maybe.”
Far-off thunder that might have been voices. But the sound waves vibrating up from human throats were too big to be decipherable by biots not specifically equipped.
“Your first biots are basic models,” Vincent had explained. “Fully capable in battle, fully capable for spinning wire. But there are tweaks and add-ons—both biological and technological—that come later. Each time we add a level of capability, we add a layer of complexity. At first, you want to keep it simple.”
And they’d been grateful for that, because “simple” was all the complexity they could handle.
And yet now they both really wished they had every conceivable upgrade.
They would have to operate on instinct. They would have to guess when some giant hand belonged to the Armstrong Twins.
If they guessed wrong, they could end up anywhere.
“How do we take our biots back?” Keats asked.
“You’re just thinking of this now?” Plath asked him as she swirled the cup to mix foam and coffee.
“If we can’t recover them …” It was a question.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s too late to stop now.”
“Do you feel that? Vibration?”
“Maybe his tail is wagging,” Keats suggested.
“Do you really think we lose our sanity if …”
“I’ve seen it.”
“That’s a new shape,” Plath said.
“Yeah.”
“Is it him? Them?”
“Might just be a vet.” Keats closed his eyes, trying to focus. “I see fingers.”
“Someone is staring at us.”
It took Keats a moment to figure out what version of reality Plath was talking about. His eyes popped open. “Who?”
“Girl at the counter. Picking up a drink. The creepy one with the fake teeth. The one who looks like a shark,” Plath said.
“Just ignore her, she’s just—”
“No,” Plath said. Her eyes were narrowed. It was like a beam of energy connected her to the girl. “She’s texting someone. Let’s get out of here.”
Plath stood up, and Keats jumped to follow her.
Then the girl with the shark teeth turned toward them, too fast, too predatory. Too knowing.
Too determined.
She reached for Plath.
The girl, who called herself One-Up, just wanted to touch them.
TWENTY-FOUR
Wilkes was already arriving at the UN. She had a prepurchased ticket for the tour—good thing, there was a crowd waiting. Mostly they were school kids, a happily rambunctious bunch of middle schoolers from some school in Harlem that favored maroon uniforms. And there were tourists, and thankfully there was Ophelia.
“How did it go?”
“I made two hundred bucks,” Wilkes said. She tried to pull off a swagger, but it didn’t go anywhere.
“This is the last tour group before they shut the place down for security,” Ophelia. “You barely made it.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Wilkes said. “Vincent has it all planned out.”