LITMIR.BIZ

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and Quentin backpedaled, making sure to keep the table between themselves and the long shot for Best Actress.

      In Sandra’s eyes they were not backing away, they were coming for her, with their fangs out, and claws for fingers, and liquid fire dripping from their eyeballs—it was all about the eyeballs, it was there, in the eyes, the demons.

      Sandra Piper turned the knife around and stabbed it into her belly. It didn’t go far. It drew blood, but just a stain the size of a quarter.

      “Hey, hey, hey!” Quentin yelled.

      “No, no, stop that, stop that this instant,” Wade said.

      Nolan made another move—this time wary—to take the knife from her.

      Sandra spit at him. “Hah!” she yelled, and stabbed the knife into her own eye. Her left eye. Pulled it out bloody and clotted with viscous goo.

      Cries of horror, and now even she could see that they were backing away, the devils. It was working. Hah! Run, devils, run!

      She then stabbed the knife into her other eye and pushed it through cracking bone, pushed it until the hilt was stopped. Then she twisted the knife around as if she was trying to churn her own brain.

      Her knees gave way. The knife dropped from her hand.

      “Stupid Mission project,” she said. Then fell onto her back, laughing and howling, laughing and howling. “Devils! Dev—”

      It was Lystra Reid who took the knife from her. And Lystra who placed a napkin over the bloody craters in her face.

      Not that Sandra Piper could see that.

TWO

      Her name was Sadie McLure. She had indifferently styled brown hair and smart, skeptical brown eyes that could take on golden highlights and even suggestions of green in certain lights. She had freckles on her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. She’d never liked the freckles, they seemed to be accompanied by the word “cute” and she didn’t like people thinking of her as cute. Cute was a belittling word.

      The cute freckles had a second outpost on her chest, and a lesser presence on her shoulders. But all her freckles were now almost hidden by a rich, deep tan.

      Her name was Sadie McLure, but in certain company she called herself Plath, after the great and tragically suicidal poet.

      It was her nom de guerre. Her BZRK name. The name that defiantly acknowledged that there were only two possible fates in her future as a member of BZRK: death or madness.

      She had a net worth expressed in billions of dollars. She had a small but effective private army in the form of McLure Labs security under a Mr Stern. (She must have heard his first name at some point, but what had stuck was the Mr And the Stern.)

      She had seen terrible things, Sadie had. As Plath she had done terrible things, too, and had terrible things done to her.

      She was sixteen years old.

      A month had passed since that bizarre and fateful day when the Doll Ship had burned down much of the Hong Kong harbor waterfront. A month since the president of the United States had blown her own brains out on nationwide TV after being (correctly) suspected of murdering her husband.

      A month since Sadie, as Plath, had sent her biots into Vincent’s brain, one armed with acid to burn the biot-death madness from him.

      The great advantage of biots over their mechanical competitors, the nanobots, was the closeness of the connection between twitcher and biot. That was also the greatest disadvantage because that same connection meant that the loss of a biot sent its creator on a downward spiral into madness.

      Vincent had spiraled following the loss of one biot and serious injury to a second.

      From a desperate desire to save Vincent, Sadie had undertaken a grim mission to cauterize parts of his brain. But at this moment that terrible day was compartmentalized, if not forgotten, and Sadie was doing something that was not at all terrible. She was on a white-sand beach beneath palm trees. A picnic was laid out on a woven mat of the kind the locals used. There was cold fried chicken, cold lobster and a bowl of vanilla-spiked fruit in the local Madagascar style.

      There was also a bottle of white wine, now empty, and a bottle of vodka, now partly empty.

      And there was a boy.

      He was as naked as Sadie. His name was Noah, though like Sadie he sometimes used a nom de guerre: Keats.

      Whether they were Plath and Keats or Sadie and Noah, she was on top and he was inside her. They were both smiling because the ash from the joint in Sadie’s mouth had landed on the very tip of Noah’s nose and when she blew it away it made him sneeze. Which struck them both as funny, so they laughed, and that physical convulsion had interesting side effects.

      “Laugh again,” Noah said.

      “Not yet,” Sadie said.

      “You’re torturing me.”

      “I’m teaching you endurance,” she said, voice slurring.

      “I’m standing right at the very edge of a cliff,” he said, and his eyes closed and his smile became dreamier. “If you laugh . . . or even move at all . . . or even breathe deeply, I’ll go right . . . mmmm . . . over . . . the edge.”

      “You’re going with a cliff metaphor?” she asked, and giggled.

      Which was all it took.

      She watched his face while his body arched and thrust and shuddered and finally subsided. His expression was more animal than human in the first seconds, and the sounds he made were definitely not witty banter. Or even half-drunk and quite stoned banter. But then that feral look softened into the kind of expression you’d see on the face of a saint in a Renaissance painting.

      And then he laughed, too.

      And opened his blue, blue eyes and said, “Don’t go yet.”

      He remained inside her, in more ways than one. He was also inside her brain, and not metaphorically. A tiny creature smaller than the full stop at the end of a sentence—a creature built from an exotic stew of DNA that included Noah’s own—was deep within Sadie’s brain. This was a biot . One of his, Noah’s biots, because biots were nothing if not unique to their creator. It was designated K2. Keats 2. His other biot, K1, was in a tiny vial stuck in the buttoned pocket of his shorts, which were . . . he looked around . . . over there, somewhere.

      K2 had the job of maintaining the fragile latticework painstakingly built around a bulge in an artery in Sadie’s brain. Left alone, the aneurysm might never pop. Then again it might pop at any moment, which would almost certainly kill Sadie, perhaps over the course of pain-filled hours.

      Noah had worked with scarcely a break over this last month to strengthen the Teflon casing around the deadly bulge. It was tedious work. Fibers had to be carried through Sadie’s eye, down the optic nerve, up and down the soggy hills and deep valleys of her brain—quite a long trip for a biot—then carefully threaded in place. Basket-weaving.

      All the while a sort of picture-in-picture was open in Noah’s own mind, an artificially color-enhanced but grainy picture. Imagine a 3D special effects movie but with the color flattened out and stripped of nuance, all shot through a dirty lens.

      Noah knew Sadie with an intimacy that was impossible for people who did not travel down in the meat . When she became aroused he could feel the artery beneath his biot’s six legs pumping faster, harder.

      But it was not just the relatively monotonous, liquid-encased surface of the brain that he had seen up close. He had at various times, in the course of more than one desperate mission, crawled across her eyes, her lips, her tongue.

      She kissed his mouth and then the place just beside his mouth

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