He was at Saks, the big one, the flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Christmas was coming and he had nephews. But he was shopping more for himself than for them. He liked shopping. It was a Zen thing for him. He had an eye for style, which had been useful in his life as a model but was entirely neglected in BZRK.
Saks was already in full Christmas swing, decorated in a fantasy of silver and white; the storefront windows were dioramas of highly stylized snowmen appearing in Russian-themed settings. There were delicate flights of abstract snowflakes arched across the ceiling, and a restrained seasonal soundtrack played unobtrusively.
Nijinsky lifted the leg of a pair of slacks, felt the weight of the wool, ran sensitive, knowledgeable fingertips along the crease and then inside the waistband.
And to no one he said, “What?”
He froze, just stood there, seeming to stare at a mannequin dressed in a sleek but uninspired Canali suit.
“The hell?” Nijinsky said.
“Are you finding what you’re looking for?” It seemed an almost philosophical question, but of course it was just a salesperson, a woman, blonde, well put together but with tired eyes.
He stared at her now, just as blankly as he’d stared at the mannequin. “Something …” he said.
“Are you all right, sir?”
He was not all right. Nijinsky had four biots. One was in Burnofsky, in his eye, tapping the nerve and watching the computer upon which Burnofsky was busily typing. The others were in their crèches—holders for dormant biots—in the basement of the safe house. All were out of range, so that rather than seeing detailed pictures of what they saw, he was seeing something more like two open picture-in-picture displays with vague shapes, fuzziness, lack of detail. Like looking through a very dirty window at a poorly lit scene.
Except that now, suddenly, there was another window. And this one was perfectly clear.
A new biot.
He looked around then, frantic, searching for an explanation. A fit, attractive middle-aged man was trying on an Armani blazer. Two children and their nanny killing time, the kids playing tag around hanger racks. An attractive woman with ornate ink peeking out of her décolletage. Clerks. An older man; a store display designer carefully placing a hat on a mannequin.
“Sir?” the blonde saleswoman prompted.
Nijinsky shook his head. “No. I don’t think I am all right.”
The saleswoman said nothing to that.
And then, a second new window, as clear as the earlier one. A clear biot’s-eye view of the interior of a glass tube. He could see the curvature, the texture—like stretch marks somehow—because nothing was entirely smooth down at m-sub level.
Without so much willing it as thinking it, he turned the two new biots. They moved, obeying his will. And both biots now saw his opposite: six-legged; insectoid, but with dangerous tail stingers; a spider’s spinnerets; and the disturbing biot rendering of his own eyes, a nightmare twisting of his own face.
Biots. Two of them. And suddenly he understood.
He had seconds left.
“Excuse me,” he said to the saleswoman. “I believe I’m about to go mad. You may want to move away.” He pulled out his phone and opened his messaging app. Who? Who should he tell?
Should he even bother? Plath had pushed him aside. Why should he help her now?
He keyed in her phone number, hit the button for text, and typed.
There was a sudden rush of liquid rolling down the inside of the tube. It was no more than a droplet in the real world, but it was as big as a house in the m-sub.
“Ah,” he said, as the acid engulfed both his new biots.
The next thing he said was also, “Ah,” but this time he shouted it.
And the next “Ah” was screamed.
And the next twenty or so.
He broke into a run—frantic, terrified, still clutching the phone with its typed but unsent message.
“No! No! No!” he shrieked as he raced to the open escalator and threw himself down it. Threw himself, as if he was trying to fly. Arms outstretched, face forward.
He hit the steel steps, and his face exploded in blood. He climbed to his feet but was pulled off-balance by the moving stairs and pirouetted down until he landed again, hard.
But not hard enough to kill himself.
Nijinsky swung around, off the bottom of the escalator, and this time he had a plan, a mad, desperate plan, one he could barely hold on to. He tied his long scarf into a knot as he descended a second, upward-bound escalator.
People ran out of his way, bounded up the steps to avoid him. They yelled things like, “What the hell, man?” But mostly they just got out of his way.
Nijinsky knelt on the stairs. Rising, rising, and lay the end of his silk scarf on the step before him.
Five seconds.
Four.
A wild, giggling shout rose from his throat as the end of the scarf was sucked into the escalator. The shout ended abruptly as the relentless mechanism devoured the scarf, tightened it around his neck, slammed his bloody face into the steel, chewed up his left hand, cut off his air.
He could no longer speak. No longer scream. Blood filled his head, and still the noose tightened.
His windpipe was crushed. Blood now seeped from his eyes and ears. The phone fell from his fingers and lay with message unsent on the steel serrated edge of the escalator.
By the time some bright shopper thought to push the emergency-stop switch, Nijinsky was dead.
The message on Plath’s phone was from Nijinsky.
It read, 2 new biots.
But she had muted her phone and would not see the message until later because she was meeting with Stern. Again.