BZRK

This brain, those firing neurons, those crackling synapses, this mass of pink cells floating in organic soup, had ambitions that dwarfed those of history’s great monsters.

This brain had murdered her family.

And yet, to look at it, down here, it was no different than Keats’s brain. No different than her own.

Where in this organ was the evil?

That was what needed to be killed, Plath knew.

And she knew that at the instant she decided that she had to change this brain, had to deprive it of its free will, her own brain would give no outward sign of having set out on a course of deliberate destruction.

Was this, at last, the goal? Was she on the hippocampus? By the light of the biots’ dim phosphorescing organs it looked like Keats’s. It matched the memories of maps in her own brain.

There was no time for a careful, cautious rewiring. Not even time to ensure that she was in the right place.

There was only time for mayhem.

Each of Plath’s biots began to extrude wire. She attached one end to a slightly protruding thumb of neurons and raced off to attach the other end … well, wherever she happened to.

Charles and Benjamin Armstrong watched with avid, fanatical attention as the battle within the president raged.

It seemed Bug Man had lost three nanobots.

It also seemed one of Vincent’s biots had lost two legs on one side.

It was all here, right here, right now, right before their eyes. If Bug Man succeeded, then victory was theirs, despite everything. The deaths of Kim and Alfredo would mean nothing.

There had been delay as Dietrich marshaled Kim’s biots. The eyebrow of the Indian prime minister, Madhuri Chauksey, filled the monitor as Dietrich sent his biots toward an eyelid entry.

“If we get Morales, Ts’ai, Chauksey, Bowen …” Benjamin said through gritted teeth.

“Despite it all, we are only down by the Japanese.”

“The British …”

“Watch. One-Up is very good, you know. She lacks discipline, but she plays the game well.”

One hand and then the other would tap the menu bars. One screen and then another would open, close, shift, focus, pull back. The Twins had their own game, and this was it: the assimilation of data from a flurry of inputs.

“If we get the president …”

“All we really need,” Benjamin reassured his brother. “Morales. If we take her alone, we have victory.”

“We’ll take them all,” Charles declaimed loudly.

On one screen, biots churned through brain as a dozen nanobots swam lazily toward them. It had a slow-motion, balletic feel. Pellets were fired but went harmlessly past. Beam weapons would be useless.

Suddenly there was a full-face view of one of the biots. Eerie, semi-human brown eyes seemed to be looking at them. Vincent’s eyes. As if he could see them watching him.

The twins sat back fractionally.

And for some reason Benjamin said, “Arabella.”

“What?”

“The … that was the name of the horse. Grandfather’s mare.”

Charles glanced at him, curious, waiting for the significance of this remark. But Benjamin’s eye seemed to be looking at things not present.

The stress of excitement, Charles thought.

Vincent’s biot grappled with a nanobot. Stabbed at the nanobot’s optics but missed. A second nanobot tried to latch on but lost its grip and floated away minus a leg.

Charles shot a glance at Burnofsky’s screen.

He had reached the brain of the Chinese leader. His nanobots, all in neatly ordered ranks, were tearing along, well on their way to begin the slow, cautious wiring of the second most powerful leader on Earth.

And One-Up? Bless the girl, she had recovered quickly from whatever had so enraged her earlier.

“Hah-hah!” Charles exulted.

“They tried to make us read Tale of Two Cities. Remember?”

“What has that to do with this?” Charles demanded, frustrated. He’d only ever had one person to celebrate victory with, and his brother seemed indifferent and distracted.

“What?”

“Tale of Two Cities?”

“What about it?” Benjamin demanded. “Incontinence. It’s spelled e-n-c-e. Like ‘influence.’ Not like ‘ambulance.’ ”

Charles stared at the mirror monitor, at the reflection of his brother’s eye. And suddenly Hardy was rushing toward them, a man who never rushed, whom the Twins would have thought lacked the capacity to rush.

“Sirs!” Hardy said, but already the cause of the interruption was clear. The Twins twisted their body to see Sugar Lebowski and four of her men carrying the squirming, kicking, gagged body of a boy.

They threw the body onto the Oriental carpet.

“What the hell?” Charles bellowed. No one entered the Tulip without a specific invitation. They might have been indisposed! They might have been unprepared!

It was outrageous. No: sacrilegious.

But clearly that was not at the top of Sugar Lebowski’s mind at the moment. The Twins had seen Sugar furious, scared, sarcastic. They’d watched her cook with her daughter, shave her armpits, and make love to her husband. But they had never seen anything like the look of disordered panic on her face.

Sugar patted her disordered hair into place. She was red in the face, her newly made lazy eye staring at the bridge of her nose. She was panting.

Scared.

Of them, of Charles and Benjamin.

“What is this?” Benjamin demanded, furious.