“What? Why? Are you bailing out?”
“No, but you will be. There’s another one of these at the top of the ramp.”
Lear rose from the floor, woozy, took a stutter-step, and fell into the wall. She left a trail of blood behind.
“Fu … The … Yeah …” she muttered.
Her legs were jelly. Her head was going around and around and around and oh, no. She vomited onto the floor. Felt a little better after that. Wished she hadn’t been drinking. Wished she had more sleep. Yeah. Sleep would be good.…
Stillers came pounding in, gun drawn. Three other men, all armed.
“Boss!”
“Di … get ’em?”
“They’ve got the sleigh, but Tara’s getting airborne.”
“Kill them. Kill them,” Lear said, slurring where she wished she was shouting.
“Someone get the doctor!” Stillers yelled.
More voices yelling, all around her; voices yelling and walkie-talkies blasting away and something burning.
“I’m ‘kay,” she said. Why wouldn’t her mouth work?
She felt the side of her head, then stared at her hand, red with something she couldn’t bring herself to understand. “Mom?” she asked.
Slowly, slowly, her head stopped spinning. Her legs were still weak but she could stand. A white-coated doctor was doing something to her head. Someone else was putting something in her mouth. Water. Had she asked for water?
She blinked. Her father was here. What was he doing here?
She shook her head, which set off a cascade of pain. She was sitting now on a couch stained with red handprints.
Caligula. He had come around to peer at her, keeping his distance, but saying something. “She’s dead, Lyssie, she’s dead, and you can’t ever tell anyone what you’ve done.…”
“My head,” she managed to say. “Give me something. Give me something. Hurts.”
She blinked and her father was gone. She blinked again and pushed herself to her feet. “Kill them! Kill them!” she cried, and this time it came out right.
“Tara’s in the air,” Stillers said. “She’ll get them.”
By sheer dumb luck more than skill the sleigh made it to the top of the ramp, weakly followed by small-arms fire that drilled a hole in the canopy and brought a whinny of fear from Bug Man.
“There it is,” Tanner yelled.
“I don’t know how to drive that thing!”
“Go!”
Bug Man tried to crawl out from under Plath, who was only barely moving and definitely not saying anything brilliant. There was a pool of blood on the seat that had seeped into Bug Man’s bathrobe.
This as much as Tanner’s shout propelled Bug Man out and onto the ice. He immediately fell down, and that fact saved his life when the sleigh he was aiming for suddenly began firing. Cannon fire blew through the engines of Tanner’s sleigh, and it settled to the ground. Tanner tried to run. His legs took two more steps after the cannon cut him in half.
Bug Man screeched in terror and bolted back toward the ramp. Plath meanwhile had managed to drag herself out onto the ice and was making a red smear across it, crawling, crawling but not dead yet. Cold, dead soon, she thought, not dead yet.
In her mind there were three windows.
Three biots ran up the side of Lear’s face. Blood—a jumble of red Frisbees and expiring whitish sponges—lay strewn across a landscape of flesh.
Was she even going the right direction? Which way was up? Plath saw a stream, like a mountain spring rushing down a cliff face, but the water was a landslide of blood cells.
“Okay, that’s up,” she told the ice that was freezing to her lip.
Up and up, following the stream, the biots raced, the newest, P3, bounding ahead.
Ahead a forest of dark hair, huge, rough-textured whips sprouting from the flesh soil.
“Mmm, left,” Plath mumbled.
The biots veered left toward the falling blood, leapt atop the softtextured, tumbling cells, running, losing ground as the current swept them, then out onto dry surface.
And yes, ahead the slope leading toward the eye, a vast lake covered then revealed, covered then revealed by blinking eyelids.
This was a road Plath had traveled before. Her biots pushed through the twitching leafless palm trees of eyelashes and leapt onto the surface of Lear’s eye.
Normally biots could travel unfelt across an eyeball, but not when the biot twitcher deliberately dragged sharp claws, slicing the outer layer of the cornea.
A sky-blackening hand fell from outer space and mashed the eyelid down on Plath’s biots, but it didn’t matter. You could no more squash a biot with a hand than you could stomp a cockroach in plush bedroom slippers.
“That’s right, Lear. Still here,” Plath said. Her body was shaking with cold. She was sure she was going to die. But before she did …
Her biots skated hard around the orb, leaving tiny rips over the mineshaft of the pupil, racing ever faster into the dark, clambering over veins, stabbing them as she went, loosing narrow fountains of blood that sprayed up to beat against the back of Lear’s eye socket.
For you, Noah. For you. It’s the best I have.…
Ahead lay the twining cables of the optic nerve. P1 dropped back to sink a probe and try to see what Lear was seeing.
P2 ran after P3, now well ahead and already ripping and tearing its way through mucus membrane, widening an access to the brain itself.
Suarez saw the sleigh, but someone was already in the cockpit, canopy open, revving the engines. She ran flat out now. The sleigh driver saw her and seemed to be fumbling for a weapon since the sleigh was still too sluggish to move.