BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

It would be good to have someone to appreciate what she had accomplished. It would be good to have someone to watch it all play out with her.

“Minions,” she said, and laughed. “I need minions. Yeah.”

SIX

“No. Vincent is not ready to resume control.” This was from Anya Violet, and spoken in a whisper. “He may never be ready.”

Plath was making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches in the kitchen of the new Manhattan safe house. One for herself and one for Keats. And seeing Billy’s level of interest she pulled out two more slices of bread for him.

They were in the kitchen: Plath, Keats, Billy the Kid who really was a kid, and Dr. Anya Violet. Anya was of undetermined age—perhaps in her thirties, perhaps she had edged into her forties—but to Plath, at least, she seemed beautiful, sophisticated, and effortlessly sexy in a way that she decided must come only with some age and some experience.

Anya had not yet chosen a nom de guerre. She thought it was a silly affectation. Of course, she understood the thinking behind choosing the name of some mad or at least seriously unbalanced person: it signaled acceptance of the core reality for BZRK members. It signaled a break with the past. It signaled a chin-out acknowledgment of the fact that madness was very likely in their future.

She understood all that, but Dr. Anya Violet was not a child and was not interested in following the rules of the clubhouse. Nor was she sure she wanted to accept the authority of a sixteen-year-old girl. Yes, Plath was the daughter of Grey McLure, Anya’s former employer, and Plath had proven herself in battle. And it had become clear that she was a bit more … stable … than Nijinsky, who had been in charge during Vincent’s recovery.

But Anya was suspicious of money. She could call herself Plath, but Anya knew who Sadie was. She was rich, that’s what she was. Worse yet, she’d always been rich. She’d had life handed to her. Anya would rather have seen Keats in the top job, because there was a boy who had never been handed anything, and Anya instinctively trusted working people. She herself had come from nothing and nowhere to earn a PhD. She shared with Keats an emotional knowledge of hard times and hard choices.

But Keats was totally loyal to Plath.

Billy was a child. Wilkes was … well, she was Wilkes. Nijinsky had to a great extent lost the confidence of the group. And that left two people to run things at the New York cell of BZRK: Vincent or Plath.

Plath, who saw a great deal when she paid close attention, saw all this in Anya’s smoky eyes. Vincent might or might not still be damaged, but Anya loved him and would never admit he was ready to take charge again. Not if it meant risking his life and sanity.

In the matter of safe houses things had improved quite a bit. Plath had access to most of her own money now, and she had Mr. Stern and the McLure security apparatus to arrange things. So BZRK New York was quite nicely established in a five-story townhouse not far from Columbus Circle on the Upper West Side.

They had obtained it through numerous cutouts and guys-who-knew-a-guy, and bought it for cash for nine million dollars.

Just twelve blocks away was a second safe house. This had also been purchased for cash, but this time the cutouts had been just a bit less well managed. Not so poorly managed as to seem obvious; just a few scant clues left here and there for those who were watching the movements of Plath’s money.

The fake safe house was above a bankrupt dry cleaner. A sound system played ambient noise from within—TV, music, the sound of laughter, occasional yelling. A timer turned the lights on and off. And random people delivering handbills were hired to enter and leave the place at odd times of day and night. It wouldn’t stand up to in-depth surveillance, but it would do as a diversion. It was already, according to Stern, drawing the attention of Hannah Thrum, the chairwoman of McLure Holdings, the parent company of McLure Labs. Thrum was almost certainly working for the Armstrong Twins as well, but that was all right, so long as Plath knew where all the players were.

Let Thrum follow the money. She was a numbers person. Numbers people loved to believe they saw deeper than anyone else, believing their numbers were truth. In reality, Thrum was chasing numbers like a kitten chasing a piece of string.

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Plath, Keats, and Billy carried their sandwiches back to the parlor where Nijinsky, Vincent, and Wilkes waited. Anya sat beside Vincent on the couch. Plath stood, leaning back against a walnut Restoration Hardware china cabinet, bit into the sandwich, and looked over her sparse troops.

Nijinsky was a bit less elegant and less well turned out than he’d been just a few weeks ago.

Wilkes had shaved half her head and dyed the other side a sickly yellow that was only vaguely related to blonde. Wilkes—named for Annie Wilkes, the insane fan in Stephen King’s Misery—was a tough chick, a pierced, tattooed (including a sort of down-swept flame tat under one eye), leather-and-lace teenager whose personal history strongly suggested that people not mess with her. There was a fire-damaged school in Maryland that stood witness to what happened when Wilkes lost it.

Billy the Kid: a scrawny mixed-race kid who had shot his way out of an Armstrong attack on the Washington cell of BZRK. Shot his way out, and then shot his way back in to finish off any Armstrong survivors.

Keats. The working-class London boy with impressive gaming skills and too-blue eyes. And a very nice, taut body, not that Plath should have been thinking about that at the moment. But she was; in fact, she was recalling a specific moment on the island, standing at the railing of their deck, watching the sun come up, Noah as he was then, behind her, his strong arm around her waist, drawing his forearm over her body, over her breasts, kissing the nape of her neck.

She took a breath. It was deeper and noisier than she’d intended, and she wondered if people guessed that she’d been daydreaming.

Finally, of course, there was Vincent himself. Vincent had brought Sadie into BZRK. He had basically created Plath. He’d been their fearless leader until he had lost a biot in a battle with Bug Man. To lose a biot was to lose your mind.

The biot–human link was still not understood. The mechanism that allowed the human “parent” to see through biot eyes, to move biot limbs, and to be so intimately connected with them that losing a biot was like some kind of psychic lobotomy—that mechanism, that force, was not understood. In fact, it had been a complete surprise when first discovered at McLure Labs by Plath’s father, Grey McLure, and had remained a mystery to him to the day he had been murdered in spectacular fashion.

The effects of the brain–biot connection were plain to see. Vincent, who had once been so dead calm, so in control, had fallen into madness. And the only way to save him had been with crude intervention down in the folds of his brain.

Plath herself had done the job. She had delivered acid to sites in Vincent’s brain that stored specific memories of his dead biot. She had watched through her own biot eyes as Vincent’s brain cells burst and boiled and died, erasing memory, thoughts, ideas, and perhaps some piece of his personality.

After that Vincent had clawed his way back from madness. He had gone back into battle against Bug Man, and he’d won. But that did not mean Vincent was back.

“Okay,” Plath said. “It’s been a month. Things have calmed down a bit. Where do we stand?” When no one volunteered an answer, she nodded and said, “Jin?”