He wasn’t the only one who wanted this, he wasn’t by any means the only one. She wanted him, all of him, not later, now. But that meant all of his attention, too, she supposed.
She was arguing with herself now, and either way she was losing. Plath was not good at losing.
Down deep inside her brain, Keats lifted the first of the fibers and slid one end into the weave. The platelets were pouring out, a fire hose of flat red discs. His biot bent the fiber against the current, pushing the flow aside, and shoved the loose end down, held it down while his second biot came running up with a second fiber. The platelets battered the biot’s head, a Nerf machine gun.
“How bad is it?” Plath asked.
“Not bad,” he reassured her. “Just an hour’s work.”
Plath smiled crookedly, and they both felt the moment slip away.
“You realize we may never get the opportunity again?” Plath asked him.
“Horribly aware, yes,” he said.
She laid a palm softly against his cheek. He closed his eyes. He couldn’t help it. He had to close his eyes because he could not look into her eyes or notice the tremor in her lips or the pulse in her throat or any of a hundred things that would destroy his ability to focus on saving her.
She kept
her hand there. “I’m afraid,” she said.
“Me, too.”
“I told you before: I’m not the kind of girl who falls in love.”
He shrugged. “I’m the kind of boy who does.”
“It will make it so much worse,” she whispered. “Aren’t you afraid of that pain?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then let’s not. We can make love without being in love, Keats. We can be …We can be fighters together. Side by side. We can be friends. We can do, whatever, we don’t have to be in love.”
He said nothing, half his focus already gone, trudging dutifully with his titanium fibers as platelets swirled around him.
“You don’t need me here,” she said, frustration turning her voice cold. Actually angry at him for focusing on saving her life, angry at him, she supposed, for being able to resist. Or just angry at life in general.
“I’m going to take a shower,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said flatly.
It took Keats closer to two hours to squeeze off the flow of blood. Then another twenty minutes to carefully check his work.
He fell asleep fully clothed, and though he would have loved to dream of her, exhaustion shut him down.
“Difficult news,” Burnofsky said. Burnofsky brought that news to the Twins right away, middle of the night. There could be no concealing it. The best he could hope for was to save Bug Man’s life and leave his own plans intact. That above all: his own plans.
To that end he’d hoped to convince the Twins to take a victory lap, to take a tour of foreign facilities or even a vacation aboard their floating house of horrors, the Doll Ship.
Bug Man had forced his hand and disrupted Burnofsky’s timetable. In a few hours, by morning at latest, the news of the first gentleman’s death would be out. It would be seen as a tragic accident by the general public—but the Twins would know better.
If he was going to keep things running, he, Burnofsky, would have to get the Twins under control. Not easy. Never easy and harder now. Charles still saw reason. But Benjamin . . .
Burnofsky took the elevator up to the Tulip. The Tulip was the pinnacle, floors sixty-three through sixty-seven, of the Armstrong Building, headquarters of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation. It was the pink polymer, one-way transparent, nanocomposite-walled home and office of the Armstrong Twins.
AFGC still made fancy gifts at factories in China, Malaysia, and Turkey. They still owned and operated the ubiquitous gift stores seen in every American airport and in European and Japanese train stations. But gifts had long since ceased to be their main focus.
Weapons technology, surveillance, and communications technology, and above all, nanotechnology, now occupied the denizens of the Tulip and most of the sixty-two floors below. The gift stores were run out of an office park in Naperville, Illinois. In the Tulip they had bigger fish to fry.