BZRK

Another shock! But it was happening to someone else. Some other Noah’s cheek was twisted in spasm, and some other eye was blinded by tears.

And the chain saw had ripped its way all the way through the chair leg; it was catching on the last half an inch, but that, too, was someone else’s problem.

Noah was batting away fuzz balls and pushing his way through a crowd and a spray of acid, and suddenly both monitors went blank. And up came that disturbing logo.

Noah was first aware that he could barely see for the sweat and tears in his eyes.

And then he felt the pinch of the clips, even as Dr. Pound removed them.

And the silence now that the chain saw was switched off.

Noah sucked in a shaky breath. He looked down at his right leg. The saw was all the way through the chair leg, with the other three legs bearing the weight. And a red line had been drawn on the quivering muscle of his calf, not deep, just enough to draw blood.

Dr. Pound moved with calm deliberation, removing the head band, ripping apart the Velcro.

“I can imagine you’d very much enjoy punching me in the face,” Dr. Pound said.

You have no idea, Noah thought.

But the emotion faded, pushed aside by stronger feelings and needs. Pride. Curiosity. The rush of survival.

“How did I do?” Noah asked.

Dr. Pound sighed. To Noah’s amazement, he laid his hand gently on Noah’s sweat-matted hair. “Young man. I’m not meant to know your identity. But the family resemblance is unmistakable.”

“You knew Alex?”

Dr. Pound smiled wistfully. “I knew a fellow who called himself Kerouac. Who bears a resemblance to you, though he is older and more fit.”

Alex.

“He was very, very good,” Dr. Pound said.

“Yeah?”

“But you, young nameless boy, if you are to live, you will need to be even better than he.”

NINE

Sadie’s arm still hurt. Now it also itched. And it chafed. Five days after it had been shattered she still couldn’t use it. But the healing was much further along than it would have been for anyone else.

The McLure company clinic had skills that were not present anywhere else. Specifically, doctors who had been trained in the use of therapeutic biots. Three biots had started work almost immediately on the broken bones. Three biots carrying bladders of stem cells that were injected close to the two major breaks.

The biots were then extracted and reloaded with a second, then a third round. Then they began to shuttle titanium strands, laying them into the microscopic spaces between the two sides of the breaks, like rebar in concrete. The biots next began the tedious job of hauling bladders of what amounted to superglue. This was used to stabilize the break so that the bone could grow easily over and around the titanium and repair without enduring repeated mini-fractures.

In a few days Sadie’s arm would be fully functional. In two weeks it would be as strong as it had ever been.

The medical biot runners sat in easy chairs in separate rooms to avoid any distraction. Even so they worked only three hours at a time to minimize the stress.

The stress. It seemed to be age-related; that was the preliminary conclusion: the strangeness of the nano world tended to overwhelm less flexible minds. Shorter version: it creeped people out being down in the meat.

If Sadie had stayed in the clinic, they’d have set to work in the depths of her brain. Doing the work her father had once done. Keeping her alive.

But now, Sadie was in a very different place. No longer at the campus in New Jersey. She had told Stern to let her go, and after some demurral, he had.

She’d had the McLure driver drop her at the Park Avenue apartment, but she’d gone in only to change clothing and pack a small bag.

She had heard from Vincent.

So now she was at Madison and 26th Street. Not one of the more exotic or interesting street corners in New York. There was a small square called Madison Square Park. It was a rectangle not a square, and not much of a park. But it was a place you could be at night, at midnight just to be melodramatic, without worrying too much about your safety.

She waited, by herself, with a scarf covering the bottom third of her face and a hat pulled down over her hair.

There weren’t that many pictures of Sadie in circulation—Google turned up only three. But she was, if not famous, then certainly notorious now. The sole surviving McLure. A potential focus of the needs of a media currently still obsessing over the stadium tragedy. She wanted not to be recognized. And she wouldn’t be, not in an empty park at night with steam leaking through her scarf.

She was cold. It was cold and the wind made her broken arm ache and her eyes run. She stood with one hand pushed deep into her coat pocket and the other hand—gloveless because she’d forgotten she would want gloves—sticking out of a sling.

A boy came up. Handsome boy. No, a beautiful boy, and older than she, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Tall and slender, Mediterranean but with a nose and mouth and brow and expression that did not say “descended from Spanish fishermen,” but rather, “descended from the sorts of people who once upon a distant time rode around on tall horses trampling peasants.”

He came to her. Raised one eyebrow and looked down at her with disappointment and said, “Are you a friend of Vincent’s?”

She disliked him immediately. Not the kind of dislike that might later give way to attraction. The kind of dislike that might, with some effort, remain mere dislike and not harden into contempt.

In fact, he was Luis Aragon, the middle of three sons of a Spanish land developer who had once been shockingly rich but was now only rich. But Luis had left his name behind in trade for the name Renfield.