LITMIR.BIZ

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      A voice he heard very, very clearly but through his head not his ears said, “They’ll kill you, they’ll have no choice, they’ll kill you, kill you, the mad king will send the mad emperor. Kill. You.”

      But then his arms were ripped from their sockets—Snap! Pop!—by the trains and he laughed and laughed.

      And he felt sick.

      He wanted to throw up.

      “Like my brother,” a voice said.

      The dragon, who was really just a man who smelled like perfume, had an arm around Vincent’s head. The man was crying. So Vincent felt like crying, too.

      The other one, Vincent thought maybe he was a devil, he wasn’t sure, he might have devil skin, and he had devil blue eyes.

      “I don’t have arms anymore, Jin,” Vincent whispered.

      “Jesus,” the possible devil with blue eyes said.

      Jin—Nijinsky, the dragon, the nurse—didn’t say anything.

      The drug came for Vincent. It called him to unconsciousness. As he tumbled, armless, down the long, long black well, Vincent had a moment of clarity.

      So, he thought, this is madness.

      She stood in the doorway, ready to help if Nijinksy and Keats had trouble getting Vincent into restraints.

      Ready to help. Her heart was beating as if it was made out of lead. That beat, that unnatural beat squeezed the air out of her lungs; it clamped her throat.

      Sadie McLure—Plath—had been just a little bit in love with Vincent. He had that effect on people. Not love love, not even attraction in the usual sense of the word—that feeling was reserved for Keats, who was working silently, quickly, to tie Vincent down. Keats looked as shell-shocked as Plath felt.

      So, not love love and not attraction for Vincent, but some weird amalgam of protectiveness and trust. Strange to feel that way about someone as cold-blooded as Vincent, someone so utterly in control. Well, formerly in control.

      Her fists clenched so tight that her neglected fingernails cut new and too-short lifelines into her palms. She had taken too many hits, too many losses: her mother, her father and brother. What was left to her now?

      They said what didn’t kill you made you stronger. No, it left you with holes blown through your soul. It left you like Vincent.

      Plath had been recruited by Vincent. She had trusted Vincent, trusted him even with her life. And at the same time there had always been the feeling that she should take care of him, not out of reciprocity, not because it was owed, but just because there was something in that impassive face, in those dark eyes that spoke to her and said, Yes, I need.

      Plath knew she was not alone in this. The others, all of them, felt it.

      But that Vincent, the cool, calm, relentless one whom you nevertheless wanted to shelter, that Vincent was not here any longer.

      Madness.

      Insanity.

      It had been an abstraction, but now she saw it. Now she felt it, and brave Plath was no longer quite so brave.

      She turned away, unable to watch any longer.

      Ophelia would have laughed at the idea that what didn’t kill you made you stronger. Her legs were gone, one at the knee, one six inches higher. She was not stronger.

      But worse, like Vincent she had lost her biots. Had Ophelia been capable of rational thought she might have contemplated the comparison between legs, actual, physical legs, and the biots, which were not, after all, exactly original equipment for any human.

      Her legs had burned like candles, melted like wax, down to the bone. They’d amputated the barbecued stumps in the OR there at Bellevue Hospital. But her biots were dead long before that, incinerated in the terrible disaster at the United Nations. By the time doctors had taken what was left of her legs, what was left of her mind wasn’t much.

      Ophelia was guarded by FBI agents who labeled her a terrorist suspect. There was one just outside the door to her hospital room, and one at each end of the hallway, and one at the nurse’s station. So, had Ophelia been sane, she probably would have been surprised to see a man standing at the foot of her bed who was obviously not a doctor, despite his white coat. Underneath the white coat was a faded, lilac velour blazer. His usual jaunty top hat had been set aside somewhere, but he still had Danny Trejo’s face.

      Caligula—he had no other known name—came close to her, stood beside her. Ophelia gazed up at him and in a moment of clarity, a brief gap between the painkillers and the mental anguish, seemed almost to recognize him.

      “You?”

      “Yes, Ophelia.”

      “Did? Are, uh . . . Did?” she asked. It was not a coherent question, but Caligula answered as though it was, as though she could understand, even though her eyes had rolled up into her head and a manic grin had distorted her lips.

      “Wilkes got out. The others are alive.” And then he said, “You did good, Ophelia. You were brave.”

      He put a palm on her forehead, a gesture that was tender but not, because he used the pressure to hold her head still as with a single swift motion he buried the dagger to the hilt in her temple.

      From his pocket he withdrew a small cylinder ending in a pointed valve. He pulled the knife out and pushed the valve into the hole. He opened the valve and let his own special mixture of white phosphorus flow into her brain.

      An autopsy might just conceivably produce evidence of nanotechnology, and it was part of Caligula’s brief to stop that from happening. That, and a mad Ophelia might eventually, in some disjointed rant, have given up a deadly secret or two.

      The only survivor of the UN massacre in custody was now no longer available for questioning.

      By the time Caligula left the room Ophelia’s eye sockets were dripping liquid fire.

ONE

      “Oh, I needed that.”

      The president of the United States, Helen Falkenhym Morales, was feeling gratified. She and her husband had just sat in bed and watched Jon Stewart take apart the Senate majority leader, a Morales foe. And for once the president had gone off-diet and actually eaten most of a butterscotch sundae.

      An enemy ridiculed, and a gooey sundae: a good end to an otherwise lousy day.

      Monte Morales leaned across the bed and wiped a bit of whipped cream from her chin, popped it in his mouth, and smiled.

      She liked that smile; it was a very particular smile, and if it were not for the fact that her life was lived according to a rigid schedule, well . . . he was still sexy after all these years.

      Her husband, Monte Morales, the first gentleman, or as most people referred to him, MoMo, was ten years younger than she and kept himself in good shape for a man of forty-five. It was one of the things the American people liked about him. They liked his good looks; they liked his obvious devotion to his wife; they liked the stories about his genial weekly poker games with some of the other spouses of important Washington players.

      They didn’t approve of his smoking cigars in the White House, but the American people were willing to forgive so long as he kept on being the charming, easygoing counterbalance to his wife’s razor-edged personality.

      MoMo was the living proof that the president couldn’t be all bad—even her enemies admitted that.

      “What’s bothering you, babe?” MoMo asked.

      She turned and frowned at him. It had sounded perilously close to criticism. “What do you mean? It’s time for bed, that’s all.”

      He

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