He fell silent in the face of Sugar’s blazing fury. “You could have told me.”
“I figured you understood how—”
“Communists,” Benjamin wept as if it was the saddest word in the world.
Keats, sitting in his own blood just a few inches from Plath, held her gaze, and then looked over his shoulder. Plath followed the direction of his eyes. She saw his hands, bound as hers were with a plastic tie.
His wrists were red. He was using the gruesome lubrication to work his hands free. Plath saw cuts. The meat of one thumb was lacerated deeply. But his hands were almost free.
Charles yanked at his own captured arm and almost hit himself with the chair. “You can let me up now, Ms. Lebowski,” he said. “I have control of myself. I won’t harm my brother.”
Sugar Lebowski, Plath realized. Nijinsky had briefed them all on her. She almost smiled now recalling his description of: “a bleached, Botoxed, boob-jobbed suburban mommy with a stick up her ass and a gun in her purse.”
“Yes, sir,” Sugar said. But Plath heard hesitation.
Keats saw her. He tried to show nothing, but Keats didn’t have a poker face. He was afraid for her. He was sad to have failed in his brave effort to save her.
She wanted to tell him that she would rather be here with him than alone. She wanted to tell him that she would share his fate. That she was no more afraid than he was.
But the truth was that she was sick with fear. Her limbs were stiff. She couldn’t stop blinking. Her lungs were unable to draw enough breath, as though she were being squeezed in a vice. The corners of her mouth were weighted, her tongue was a foreign object, her hands trembled.
She saw then the livid bruising and battered lips of the right half of the Armstrong Twins. Benjamin. She remembered that. He was the right half.
He was shaking. He was yanking the shared head. His eye was wild, not with rage but with some unreadable emotion.
Charles was straining to look complaisant, to seem normal. It was a sort of Janus mask, and like that mythical, two-faced Roman god, Charles and Benjamin were striving to look in different directions. They were facing the same way but seeing very different things.
So she was in Benjamin’s brain.
She had twisted enough circuits to push him to malfunction. She had knocked him off the rails. Her biots were like a computer virus, disrupting and confusing, firing off synaptic signals that went to the wrong places.
That knowledge did not make her less afraid.
Charles looked past Sugar and her hesitation and saw Plath. “You would be Sadie,” he purred.
Every eye turned. Except for Benjamin.
“It will be a great pleasure to welcome you to our great work,” Charles said.
“Never,” Sadie managed to whisper. Then finding her voice, she said with more force. “Never.”
Charles smiled. “Soon many of the world’s most powerful leaders will join our cause. Do you imagine that you will resist? No, no, little girl, we’ll manage to change the way you think about things.”
An almost imperceptible nod from Keats.
Deep inside Benjamin’s brain, P1 and P2 held their last pins.
Plath stabbed deep with the first pin.
Benjamin’s whole body shuddered. He cried out, “No, Charles! No! No! Stop it!”
Charles looked as if he’d been the one stabbed. His eye widened, and his brow shot up.
On the screen a biot was being dismembered.
Plath played out the last of her wire, ran with it and the final pin. Her biots leapt across wires already laid, and each time they did the new filament touched and signals flew and Benjamin cried out, “I’m pushing as hard as I can, as hard as I can, he’s still breathing!”
“Someone silence him!” Charles demanded. “Ms. Lebowski, you silence my brother!”
The wire played out. The spinnerets failed. Plath wrapped the frayed end around the final pin.
“Die old man! Die!” Benjamin raved.
And Plath sank the last pin.
Benjamin’s body arched in a seizure so powerful that his legs smashed the bottom of the desk. The screens went dark. His arm shot out into the air, hand clenched into a claw.
Plath heard the sound of bone cracking.
She pulled the pin out.
“We’re walking out of here,” she said.
Paul Johntz stepped behind her and pressed a gun muzzle against the top of her head. “He spazzes out again, you take a bullet.”
“I’m the one doing it,” Keats said. “Leave her alone.” It was heroic, but also unconvincing.
A gasping Benjamin wept with a child’s sobs.
Charles, aghast, stared in horror at Plath.
“Which is faster?” Plath asked. “The bullet? Or the biot?”
“Listen to me,” Charles grated. “Mr. Johntz, you are now head of AmericaStrong. Here is what you will do: order your men to arrest Ms. Lebowski. Then you will—”
Plath stabbed the pin into Benjamin’s brain and again came the seizure, choking off Charles’s speech as the shared face strained and the shared neck twisted and the single spine seemed almost to form a C.
Benjamin’s teeth cracked.
Sugar Lebowski said, “I can get you out of here. But it will cost you.”
“A million?” Plath asked.
“Twenty,” Sugar said. “I have kids. Disappearing isn’t cheap.”
“Done,” Plath said.
“No one is going anywhere,” Johntz snapped.
Keats kicked with his bound legs and all the force he could command. His feet hit Johntz’s ankle. The fall wasn’t immediate; the man took a stagger step to the side and Sugar Lebowski was up like a cat. She drew the belt from her skirt and whipped it around Johntz’s neck from behind, all the while yelling, “Everyone back, everyone back, stay out of it!” to the remaining TFDs.