BZRK

For his part Noah saw a girl doing her best not to look like the sort of girl who was probably comfortable ordering around grown men and women. A girl with servants, he thought, you could see it in her look. Not haughty. Not a bitch. But also not even a little bit shy about looking him in the eye and allowing her judgment to show clearly.

She thought he might have some potential. She also expected to be disappointed.

He thought she would never agree to go out with him.

She liked his eyes.

He liked her freckles.

She thought that he probably thought she looked a little startled.

He thought she could probably smell his “I slept on a plane” breath from clear across the room.

Nijinsky and Ophelia came in together. Renfield just behind them. He took up a post leaning against the corner of two walls.

Noah looked at Nijinsky with some surprise. He had last seen him in London and somehow identified him with that city, despite his being an American.

Nijinsky smiled. He had a warm, quizzical expression, and Noah thought, hoped, anyway, that Nijinsky might not be a bad person.

Noah watched the way Nijinsky took in the physical setting. Weary familiarity and disdain. Nijinsky was not a young man who would ever approve of water-stained green walls or coffee rings on tables. He was casually dressed in a blazer and slacks and collared shirt that taken all together must have cost—by Noah’s estimate— a hell of a lot.

Noah had not met Ophelia, Sadie had not met Nijinsky, but of course no one wanted real names spoken, so neither Noah nor Sadie were introduced.

It was frankly starting to annoy Sadie. She was quite confident that Nijinsky knew who she was. Obviously Ophelia did. They all did. Except maybe the boy. The one with the startled look on his face and the eyes that kept going back to her again and again.

As for Noah, he knew that Nijinsky knew who he was, but beyond that there was no reason anyone should know him.

Ophelia sat on the couch, close to Sadie, and patted the space beside her while smiling at Noah. Noah obeyed and sat.

Nijinsky looked around, a little desperate for a seating solution, and finally lowered himself with minimal physical contact onto an armless chair. He flicked his blazer expertly so that it draped just the right way. His trouser legs stayed where they should and did not reveal above-sock flesh.

“We’ve never had two new people at once before, so procedures are a bit ad hoc,” Nijinsky said.

“But very glad to have you both,” Ophelia said. She had two smiles, one right after the other. The one for Sadie was sisterly. The one for Noah was cordial, and also included the information that she was too old for him, nothing personal, but he was not to flirt with her.

Noah hadn’t been considering flirting with her. He was in fact desperately trying to avoid looking at the sprinkling of freckles across Sadie’s nose and cheeks, and he was trying not to feel the sadness that throbbed through her tough-girl expression, because, well, there was no because, really. He just wanted to look at her. And he knew he shouldn’t. But he did look at her and then looked away and did this possibly twenty times. And bit his lip, which didn’t help.

“You’ve both been given some basic information,” Nijinsky said. “You know why you’re here. Your motivations are your own. You just need to know that you’ve already crossed the line. Sorry if that wasn’t obvious, but you are in. In. And there is no out for either of you.”

He didn’t smile, so it wasn’t a joke. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, signaling that this was serious.

“You are part of us now. You’ll get orders. And you’ll obey them.” Nijinsky’s eyes slid over Noah to rest quite deliberately on Sadie. Noah used the excuse to steal his own look, and boy, you did not want to be the guy who was on the wrong end of the defiance in Sadie’s eyes. It wasn’t a put-on; it came from all the way down deep. From reptilian brain and spine and fist.

Noah looked away and rested his own gaze on Nijinsky. Was it racist of him to think that Asian eyes showed less expression? Whether it was or not, Nijinsky was hard to read. And then, just a glint of amusement. Nijinsky liked Sadie. Not that way, but he liked her.

“We all get orders,” Ophelia said.

“Yes, we do,” Nijinsky agreed.

“We all understand.”

“Yes.”

“The stuff that matters …” Ophelia finished the sentence with a shrug.

“We’ve all lost people,” Nijinsky said.

Ophelia nodded. No smile. The skin of her face was brittle, stretched, concealing memories. It was hard now to imagine that face ever smiling. And yet she had, hadn’t she?

“We don’t want to lose any more,” Nijinsky said. “We put our lives on the line. And those who run biots risk their sanity. We do this of our own free will. We do it so that we and the rest of the human race will continue to have free will. So that people will be able to choose: right or wrong, good or evil. The other side claims to want universal happiness, and I’ll tell you: they aren’t lying.”

He let that sink in for a moment, a self-consciously dramatic pause.

“They would use technology to make the human race into a sort of insect society. To make us all one mind, united. No unhappiness, no stress, no rage or jealousy. But we choose a different world. We choose the right to unhappiness.”

“We’re fighting for unhappiness?” Noah asked skeptically. “It sounds a bit crazy when you put it that way.”

Nijinsky laughed, delighted. “Oh, it is.” Then, serious again, he said, “We fight for the right to be what we choose, to feel what we choose. Even if what we choose seems crazy to others.”