“I’m not doing that,” Plath said. “I’m saying why didn’t you volunteer to throw your biots into it? Because I have an idea why.”
Nijinsky swallowed. He was breathing heavily. He started to say something but stopped.
“I think you couldn’t do anything, Jin, because it would mean revealing where your biots were,” Plath said.
Wilkes was looking hard at Nijinsky. “Where were they?” she asked. When he failed to answer, she turned to Plath. “Where were they?”
“Where they still are. In me,” Plath said. “Wiring me.”
Keats was remembering a scene from one of the Bourne movies, Jason Bourne so far down underwater that it seemed impossible that he would ever reach the surface. That’s how he felt, but instead of water it was blood and skin and he had to claw his way back to daylight.
He’d done that, actually, yeah. His biots and the nanobots were all up and out but his mind was not yet breathing fresh air. He wondered in some abstract way if he had done permanent damage to his brain.
It was confusing. It was mad. It was impossible. The human brain created only one person, one self, and yet somehow he was no longer singular but multiple. Multiple Noah Cottons had played the game and hunted the hydras.
Now he needed to fold all of that back into a single person again, reassemble himself from component bits. Multiple personalities? Was that it? No, multiple functionalities.
Then—and goddamn, there should have been some kind of cool sound effect for it—suddenly all the parts snapped back together and he said, “Ah!” really loud.
Then, “Ah-ah-ah, oh, hell, ah-ah!”
He jerked up from his seat and hugged himself with his arms, paced three steps left, sudden turn, three steps back, rubbing his head hard making an even bigger mess of his hair.
Every eye was on him. And now he was self-conscious and feeling as if he’d been very inappropriate. He was embarrassed.
“Sorry,” he said. Then, seeing that they were still staring, he added, “Kind of a rush. Hah! Kind of bloody amazing.”
“Are you all right?” Wilkes asked, less mocking than usual.
“Aside from being taken apart like I was made out of Lego and then put back together? I think I’m all right.” Then, sensing that he’d missed something, he said, “What?”
“We were just discussing why Nijinsky didn’t want to bring out his biots,” Wilkes said with a significant look at Plath.
Keats’s memory provided the last minutes of conversation. His face darkened. “You wired Plath?”
“I’m in charge while Vin—”
Keats hit him, a looping, somewhat inaccurate right that caught Nijinsky on the jaw, snapped his head back and elicited a loud, “Ow! What the hell?”
“I think our boy here may not have all his Legos back in place just yet,” Wilkes said.
“You wired one of us?” Keats yelled, ignoring Wilkes. “You wired Plath? To do what? What did you do to her?”
He was advancing with unmistakable menace on Nijinsky. Nijinsky stood his ground until Keats was almost nose to nose.
Nijinsky didn’t answer. So Plath did. “He’s been ensuring my loyalty. Isn’t that it, Jin?”
“Nothing that wasn’t already there,” Nijinsky said. “I …strengthened your existing attachments. You would have felt it all eventually. We don’t have time for eventually.”
“Attachments?” Keats whispered menacingly. “To?”
Nijinsky’s recovered, belligerent look said it all.
“You bastard,” Keats said. “You made her care for me.”
It was Burnofsky who said, “Soldiers don’t fight for king and country. They fight for each other. They fight for the poor deluded, trapped bastard in the next foxhole.”
Nijinsky didn’t argue. He just said, “Vincent was out. Lear laid it on me to be the right man. He laid it on me.”
“Vincent swore to me he would never wire me or any of us,” Plath said. “He said if we ever discovered it, it would destroy our trust in him and he’d be worth nothing as a leader after that.”
Nijinsky moved back a step, almost like he’d been shoved.
“And you know what, Jin? He was right.”
“Yeah, well I’m what you’ve got for a leader,” Nijinsky snapped. “I may not be the right person, but I’m it.”
“Nah, I don’t think so,” Wilkes said. “I don’t think so. I like you, Jin, but dude, I’m not taking orders from you anymore.”
There followed a long silence. Finally, almost sobbing with something that seemed strangely like relief, like a massive weight had been lifted from his shoulders, Nijinsky said, “Yeah? Well, who else then?”
Wilkes jerked her thumb. “The rich bitch, here.”
Plath felt the blood drain from her face. “What?”
Keats said, “She’s right, Sadie. You know she’s right.”
“You’re a better twitcher than I am,” Plath pleaded.
“Yeah. But I saw the way you handled Thrum and Jellicoe. I saw how you called out Caligula. I also, by the way, saw you slip a note to Stern. You have the money; you have your own private army. More important, you’re a natural. Like I am down in the meat you are up in the macro. Until Vincent gets all the way back to us, you’re it.”
“Yeah, what pretty boy blue eyes said,” Wilkes said.