She had not raged at him. She seemed too tired to be very angry that he had unwired her without permission, in fact in direct rejection of her wishes. The temperature of their conversation was cold, not hot. She stood with her hands down at her sides. Her eyes were as big as ever, but now they seemed to be looking just past him, refusing to make eye contact.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No. You did the right thing,” she said. There was no reassurance in her tone.
“Brains are complicated,” Keats said pointlessly.
“Mmm. Yeah. Complicated.”
“I have to ask …”
“What?” She frowned, wishing he would go away and let her adjust to this feeling of emptiness. She felt nauseous. She felt as if she might at some point throw up. She felt not herself, like this was not her body, like she was a head transplant attached to some new torso. Alien.
“I have to ask what you told Caligula.”
“Caligula? Nothing. I can’t text him or call him.”
Keats wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but it might have seemed as if he hadn’t trusted her. Then …
“I told Lear.”
His blue eyes snapped up to hers, and his brows lowered. “Told Lear what?”
“That Caligula should do it.”
“What?” He grabbed her shoulders. “You gave the go-ahead to blow up the Tulip?”
She nodded. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered up an atrocity. No emotion. Yes, she had ordered mass murder. Nothing.
“Jesus, Sadie,” he said, and his voice broke.
She blinked, taken aback by his reaction. “It’s okay,” she said.
He released her, and now he was no longer looking at her, he was staring into the window in his mind where his biot’s visual flow would be. But the images were grainy and indistinct. The distance was too great. The biot he had in Caligula’s head was too far out of range for useful input.
“We have to stop him,” Keats said.
“Uh-huh,” she said indifferently.
What happened next was pure instinct, and he regretted it even as his hand was flying through the air, even as the flat of his palm connected with the side of her face with enough force to snap her head around and start the tears in her eyes.
When her eyes came back around there was emotion. Anger. Finally, anger.
“Listen to me,” he said, regretful but determined, too. “We have to stop him.”
“Don’t you fucking hit me,” she snarled.
“Good. You’re not dead yet, are you? I’m sorry about the slap, but you sound like you’re in a coma.”
“And who put me there?” she demanded.
“Lear put you there!” he said. “This has all been a game for him. We wanted to stop one evil, so we never even asked questions about whether the man we served was just as bad. Or worse.” He felt her attention slipping away and wanted to grab her but knew that would be wrong. So he leaned closer to her, bending down so that she could not avoid looking at him. “Madness like a bloody plague. All over. It’s all Lear. It’s Lear making biots and then killing them to drive people mad. Hundreds of dead already. The Pope went mad and attacked little children. Sadie, that’s his game.”
“The Pope?”
“Lear. Lear! And we have to stop him. We have to stop Lear!”
“The Twins,” she said, sounding vague.
“Yeah, them, too,” Keats said. “Come on.”
He grabbed her hand and yanked her along with him.
Wilkes stood up as they burst into the living room. Billy was absorbed in his phone.
“Caligula’s going to blow up the Tulip,” Keats said. “We have to stop him.”
“Blow up the Tulip?” Wilkes said. “I thought that—”
“Yeah, well, it’s back on.”
“You’re going to stop Caligula?” Wilkes demanded skeptically. “You and what army, pretty blue eyes? You’ve seen him in action. This won’t be biot war; this will be kill or get killed, with a dude who is a genius at killing!”
“We have a gun. Just one. It’s—”
“It’s in the drawer in the kitchen, below the silverware.” This from Billy. Casual, as though it was no big thing that he knew where they’d hidden a gun. Then, “It’s a Colt forty-five. Seven-round clip. One spare clip. We have a total of fourteen bullets.”
“I’ll do the best I can with it,” Keats said, knowing in his heart that it wouldn’t work, knowing—because, yes, he had seen Caligula work—that Caligula would kill him before he fired a shot.
Wilkes, seeing that despair, shook her head and said, “Keats, you aren’t a gunman. Neither am I.” She looked pointedly at Billy.
“Yeah,” the young boy said. “I can do it.”
“No,” Keats said. He shook his head. “No. That’s wrong. That’s over the line.”
“It is over the line.” They stopped, looking back almost guiltily, to see Plath.
“This doesn’t involve you,” Keats said. He didn’t mean it to sound angry, but it did.
Plath shook her head. “Of course it involves me, Noah. I gave the order to Caligula.”
“Can you just take back the order?” Billy asked.
Plath shook her head. “That was all part of the game. Lear’s game. For whatever sick reason he wanted me to choose to do it. But that doesn’t mean he’ll stop just because I change my mind.”