BZRK

inside. His biots were running so fast he was in danger of getting lost. His light organs couldn’t glow far enough ahead. It was like driving at a hundred miles an hour on a dark, back-country road with dim headlights.
    Vincent stopped moving.
    “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Vincent cried. “Oh, oh, oh.”
    The hollowed-out look in Vincent’s face told Nijinsky all he needed to know.
    “No, no, no,” Nijinsky cried, and put his arms protectively around Vincent as Vincent’s eyes filled with tears and he began a low, soft moaning.

TWENTY-NINE
    “Yeah, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” Bug Man cried.
    The dead biot—so very dead, split into two barely connected pieces, dead, and floating legless, dead, through the fluid—was a miracle.
    He had lost half his force doing it, and the chiasmic chamber was dotted with legs and sensors and wheels and unidentifiable pieces of circuit and metal skin. The Bug Man logo floated by one of his screens, but none of that a mattered: he had killed one of Vincent’s biots.
    It froze him for a moment.
    No one had ever killed one of Vincent’s boys.
    No one! Only him. Only Bug Man.
    “Oh, fuck yeah.”
    He could take his time now, minimize risk, because unless Vincent was Clark Kent, he was sucking wind right now and more distracted than he had ever been before.
    Bug Man quickly took stock. He had eleven active fighters. All his spinners were safe.
    Eleven to one, and the twitcher, the mighty Vincent, was somewhere gasping and wheezing like he’d been gutshot.
    Vincent’s remaining biot had managed to propel itself to the upper surface. It was hanging from a neuron bundle, staring down at the eleven nanobots that now rose slowly through the goo.
    “I’ll be gentle, bitch!” Bug Man exulted. “Hah-hah!”
    He would form a perimeter on the surface first. Keep four of his nanobots floating, just in case Vincent launched off again.
    He had him surrounded.
    Hell yes, he had Vincent surrounded. And Vincent’s biot seemed almost helpless. It stared with its insect eyes and with its human eyes, and it did nothing, not a damned thing, as Bug Man’s nanobots closed the ring.
    *
    Keats’s biots tore across the cellular floor toward something towering and dark.
    As it happened he was facedown now on that very floor, though to him it was smoothly polished wood—very, very different in the macro than what he saw in the nano.
    In fact he was bleeding on that floor. Blood flowed from his nose and formed a pool that oozed around his cheek and the side of his mouth. Each time he breathed out through his mouth a red bubble formed. He saw a reflection of his eye in the dark pool. The eye looked scared.
    “My brother is . . . he’s not feeling well,” Charles said.
    Keats could not see his biots, of course. But he looked in every direction, trying to match up what he saw with his eyes and what he saw in his brain.
    Nothing.
    Well, not nothing exactly. He saw three legs beneath the desk. Three legs wearing identical shoes. One left, one right, one . . . neither. The leg in the middle was thinner, but it wore not only the identical shoe in a smaller size but an identical sock and identical trouser leg.
    He couldn’t see anything above the knee. And he doubted that he wanted to.
    “Egg scramble, bamble!” Benjamin yelped suddenly. “What . . . what did I just do?”
    Plath’s biots were somewhere in Benjamin’s brain, that much was instantly clear to Keats. And in a second or two the Twins would realize what had happened. A few seconds after that they would begin to torture him to find out where Plath was.
    Or maybe kill him, if they concluded he was the twitcher.
    And they would bring in their own twitcher with nanobots to go in after Plath’s biots.
    He had to get to her. Had to. But his biots were racing toward what might be a table leg for all he knew.
    More men were coming in now. He could hear them in the macro. And far more important, he could feel the vibration in the nano. The vibrations. Coming from his right, from the door.
    Which meant . . . which meant the biots were moving toward the Twins. Or toward Sugar. Or toward any of the forest of legs that now rushed past him, over him, security guys, guns in hand.
    “We don’t need more of your thugs, Sugar, we need a goddamned twitcher!” Charles bellowed. The three feet pressed against the floor. The chair was pushed back. This time the Twins rose successfully.
    The biots were close now, close to a wall a hundred feet tall,