LITMIR.BIZ

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admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.

      In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.

      They had obtained it through numerous cut-outs and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.

      Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cut-outs had been just a bit less well-managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath’s money.

      The fake safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth surveillance but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.

      Let Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Numbers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else, believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.

      Plath, Keats and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor where Nijinsky, Vincent and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent on the couch. Plath stood leaning back against a walnut Restoration Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich and looked over her sparse troops.

      Nijinsky was a bit less elegant and well-turned-out than he’d been just a few weeks ago.

      Wilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes—named for Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King’s Misery—was a tough chick: a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of downswept flame tat under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened when Wilkes lost it.

      Billy the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong survivors.

      Keats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was; in fact she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.

      She took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she’d intended and she wondered if people guessed that she’d been daydreaming.

      Finally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He’d been their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

      The biot–human link was still not understood. The mechanism that allowed the human “parent” to see through biot eyes, move biot limbs, and to be so intimately connected with them that losing a biot was like some kind of psychic lobotomy—that mechanism, that force, was not understood. In fact, it had been a complete surprise when first discovered at McLure Labs by Plath’s father, Grey McLure, and had remained a mystery to him to the day he had been murdered in spectacular fashion.

      The effects of the brain–biot connection were plain to see. Vincent, who had once been so dead calm, so in control, had fallen into madness. And the only way to save him had been with crude intervention down in the folds of his brain.

      Plath herself had done the job. She had delivered acid to sites in Vincent’s brain that stored specific memories of his dead biot. She had watched through her own biot eyes as Vincent’s brain cells burst and boiled and died, erasing memory, thoughts, ideas and perhaps some piece of his personality.

      After that Vincent had clawed his way back from madness. He had gone back into battle against Bug Man and he’d won. But that did not mean Vincent was back .

      “Okay,” Plath said. “It’s been a month. Things have calmed down a bit. Where do we stand?” When no one volunteered an answer she nodded and said, “Jin?”

      Nijinsky turned cold eyes up to her. He had not fared well in the last month. While Keats and Plath were both tanned and rested—well, as rested as they could be given the fact that their boat had been blown up—Nijinsky had become increasingly frayed and ragged. His clothing was no longer perfect. His hair was at least two weeks past its optimum. He was still by any normal standard a spectacularly handsome, well-turned-out person, a tall Chinese American with a graceful way of moving and a sad, sympathetic smile.

      The changes would only be visible to someone familiar with his previous level of perfection. But the signs were there, even more visible in the red-rimmed eyes, the stress lines above the bridge of his nose, the grim tightening around his mouth. And, of course, the sour smell of a body oozing alcohol residue through its pores.

      “It’s been a busy month,” Nijinsky said. “Sorry you two missed it.”

      “Lear agreed I should disappear for a while,” Plath said calmly. “I’m known.”

      “Yes. And Lear agreed that I should get stuck with the shit work.” He shrugged and tried on an insincere smile. “Well, here’s where we stand. Vincent is about seventy percent.” He looked at Vincent and asked, “Fair?”

      Vincent nodded. His cold gray eyes focused, then lost focus. “Fair.”

      “Billy is thoroughly qualified for missions down in the meat. He has two biots. Wilkes is still Wilkes, God help us all.” This he said with a certain wry tone that was very much the old Nijinsky.

      “What else could I be?” Wilkes asked, framing her face with her hands.

      “Anya remains a bitch,” Nijinsky said, trying to sound jokey about it and not succeeding. “The president is dead, long live the new guy, President Abbott. The country is freaked out, but we are still not under surveillance—as far as we can tell. The Chinese premier just had a very sudden illness, and we know he’d been compromised by the Armstrongs. So, it’s possible the Chinese government is . . . aware.”

      “And Burnofsky?” Keats asked.

      Nijinsky shrugged. He looked away, not avoiding Keats, but seeing that weirdly colored window inside his brain. He had a biot resting on Burnofsky’s optic nerve. The biot was tapped into visual input from Burnofsky’s right eye.

      “At the moment he’s working,” Nijinsky said. “I can’t make out what’s on his monitor—I have a pretty good tap, but you know what it’s like.”

      They all, all except Anya, did know what it was like. Tapping an optic nerve was a bit like watching an old-fashioned TV in a thunderstorm back before cable, when the picture could be wildly distorted and never entirely clear.

      “Has he been in touch with the Armstrong Twins?” Plath asked.

      Nijinsky nodded. He tapped a cigarette out of some exotic, foreign pack and lit it. “Four days after that ship went down in Hong Kong. By the way, Lear is sure that was an Armstrong thing. Some kind of messed-up human zoo. By that point I was done wiring Burnofsky. I sent him back in. But nothing face-to-face. Wherever the Twins are now they aren’t talking to Burnofsky in person, it’s all video link.”

      “Do you have a biot in his ear?” Plath asked.

      “No.”

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