BZRK

He drew back at last, and now in addition to seeing her flushed face he saw through two sets of biot sensors.

V1 was headed toward the eye, running through a deep valley filled with tumbled crystalline boulders of makeup. Expensive makeup—finer grained—had a tendency to stick to biot legs, a bit like mud.

V3 confronted a landscape Vincent could not at first make sense of. He was on a long, gently curved plain of dimpled, spongy flesh. But in the distance, perhaps half a centimeter mack, was a huge pillar as big around as a redwood tree. It was vertical to the fleshy plain. V3 was sideways, which meant that actually the thick pillar was roughly horizontal.

Vincent’s actual eyes, the big, brown, real ones, flicked toward Anya’s ear. Of course: an earring. Maybe white gold or platinum. Through the eyes of the biot it looked flaked and corrugated, like an old muzzle-loading cannon. And when the biot got closer, Vincent had a view of the hole, the puncture through which the metal passed.

In the macro Vincent saw the diamond that hung below the lobe. He’d never seen a diamond from biot level. It might be interesting. But this wasn’t a sightseeing trip.

One in the eye, one in the ear.

“I just stopped off to get a few things,” Vincent said, holding up the bag as proof. “I was early. But I didn’t want to be rude and show up early.”

Maybe he could have just trusted her. Maybe he could have told her what he needed. Maybe he could have brought her into BZRK. That had been his original plan, to recruit her, to have a back door into the McLure labs.

But he couldn’t afford a maybe anymore. He needed a yes. He needed what she could give to the cause, and he needed it immediately.

Ticktock. It was all a matter of necessity, and didn’t necessity justify everything?

“It would have been okay. I was early, too.”

They shared a conspiratorial “we like each other” smile. Vincent assumed she was planning on sleeping with him. He certainly hoped so: he needed time to do his work.

He needed time with Anya. And, too, there was attraction. Vincent was anhedonic; he wasn’t asexual. Need was one thing, the pleasure one took from satisfying a need was a different matter.

Damnit. She’d been swimming. Or maybe just showering. Either way, V3, in her ear, had just run smack up against a wall of water. Probably no more than a few milliliters, but it was held in place by surface tension, so rather than forming a lake he could run across, it was more like a giant water balloon he would have to swim through.

Unless he broke the surface tension. In which case V3 would go for a sort of flume ride, probably into the outer ear. But also possibly into a hastily raised napkin and from there to a lap or the bar counter.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” Vincent said to the bartender.

Anya put her hand on his arm and laughed. “No, no, this is awful, really. No self-respecting man should drink this. Too sweet.” She was so confident in interrupting. He noticed. Older woman, accomplished woman, advanced degrees and a responsible position.

“We’ll have two shots of vodka, very cold, neat,” Anya said. She winked. “My Russian blood, you know.”

“Are you trying to get me drunk?” Vincent flirted.

“If that’s what it takes,” Anya said, voice husky as Vincent sent V1 gingerly through the mascara line, stepping over what looked like a recently deceased demodex, interesting, onto the eye, and down below the lower lid.

He withdrew V3 from the ear. Vincent had been caught in a folded napkin once before. It was hell trying to find your way out. Vincent could probably find his way out of a larynx quicker than he could a napkin.

They did their shots.

An hour and ten minutes later they were in Anya’s apartment.

Some time later still she had fallen asleep in his arms.

Vincent was by that point fairly convinced that Anya was clean of nanobots.

And he’d already begun to use V1 and V3 with reinforcement from V2—still recovering from two legs breaks on its earlier mission— to stretch the neuronic fibers from her pleasure centers to her images of him. She may only like him now. Or maybe not even that. But over the next few hours, while she slept and he did not, her affection for him would grow. Soon the mere thought of him would release endorphins into her bloodstream. And her natural caution and reserve would be degraded. She would like him; she would trust him.

Vincent vowed that he would remove it all once he had what he needed. That, he told himself, was the difference between BZRK and the Armstrong Twins. Vincent did only what he had to do. He would minimize the betrayal. As much as he could.

“Because we’re the good guys,” he whispered to himself even as, unasked for, the memories of murder in a small restaurant in London bubbled to the surface of his mind.

Burnofsky didn’t have the kind of money or juice (or entourage) that the music producer (who shall remain nameless), or the overexposed industrialist (who shall, likewise, remain nameless) had, so he didn’t get one of the larger, deeper alcoves at the China Bone.

They didn’t know Burnofsky’s name, not his real one, just the name he gave them: John Musselwhite. Did the management know it was a fake name? Probably. Most likely they’d have been horrified if he gave a real name.

It was a loft, this room, vast, but not a wide-open space. There was a sort of catwalk that went around the room, but it had been nicely done, industrial, yes, but well lit, cinematic almost. There were security guys but ever so discreet, dressed in loose-fitting black trousers and white shirts, like something you’d see Jackie Chan wear in one of his movies. Generic Asian chic. If they had guns, then the guns were concealed, and the security men smiled. Smiles, smiles. In two of the corners were tall dancing platforms, essentially open hydraulic elevators that raised the dancers up or down, like slow-motion pistons. The girls were varied and swapped out often enough that neither they nor the patrons would become bored.