BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

She stood up suddenly. “Get dressed. I’ve decided. You’re coming with me.”

“But … where? Why am I—?”

“Where? Oh, places with tall buildings. New York City. And then cold, cold places. As cold as it gets this side of the grave. But what do you care, Bug Man?” She sounded weary now. “Don’t you want to see how the game plays out? Don’t you want to know what it was all about?”

He shook his head slowly. “Games aren’t about anything. Games are just about the game.”

She leaned down and laid a soft palm against his cheek. “See? That’s why I like you, Anthony Bug Man. You and I are going to be friends. Or I can have George put a bullet in your head.”

“Friends,” he said.

And Lear smiled.

TEN

Nijinsky was shopping when it happened.

He was at Saks, the big one, the flagship store on Fifth Avenue. Christmas was coming and he had nephews. But he was shopping more for himself than for them. He liked shopping. It was a Zen thing for him. He had an eye for style, which had been useful in his life as a model but was entirely neglected in BZRK.

Saks was already in full Christmas swing, decorated in a fantasy of silver and white; the storefront windows were dioramas of highly stylized snowmen appearing in Russian-themed settings. There were delicate flights of abstract snowflakes arched across the ceiling, and a restrained seasonal soundtrack played unobtrusively.

Nijinsky lifted the leg of a pair of slacks, felt the weight of the wool, ran sensitive, knowledgeable fingertips along the crease and then inside the waistband.

And to no one he said, “What?”

He froze, just stood there, seeming to stare at a mannequin dressed in a sleek but uninspired Canali suit.

“The hell?” Nijinsky said.

“Are you finding what you’re looking for?” It seemed an almost philosophical question, but of course it was just a salesperson, a woman, blonde, well put together but with tired eyes.

He stared at her now, just as blankly as he’d stared at the mannequin. “Something …” he said.

“Are you all right, sir?”

He was not all right. Nijinsky had four biots. One was in Burnofsky, in his eye, tapping the nerve and watching the computer upon which Burnofsky was busily typing. The others were in their crèches—holders for dormant biots—in the basement of the safe house. All were out of range, so that rather than seeing detailed pictures of what they saw, he was seeing something more like two open picture-in-picture displays with vague shapes, fuzziness, lack of detail. Like looking through a very dirty window at a poorly lit scene.

Except that now, suddenly, there was another window. And this one was perfectly clear.

A new biot.

He looked around then, frantic, searching for an explanation. A fit, attractive middle-aged man was trying on an Armani blazer. Two children and their nanny killing time, the kids playing tag around hanger racks. An attractive woman with ornate ink peeking out of her décolletage. Clerks. An older man; a store display designer carefully placing a hat on a mannequin.

“Sir?” the blonde saleswoman prompted.

Nijinsky shook his head. “No. I don’t think I am all right.”

The saleswoman said nothing to that.

And then, a second new window, as clear as the earlier one. A clear biot’s-eye view of the interior of a glass tube. He could see the curvature, the texture—like stretch marks somehow—because nothing was entirely smooth down at m-sub level.

Without so much willing it as thinking it, he turned the two new biots. They moved, obeying his will. And both biots now saw his opposite: six-legged; insectoid, but with dangerous tail stingers; a spider’s spinnerets; and the disturbing biot rendering of his own eyes, a nightmare twisting of his own face.

Biots. Two of them. And suddenly he understood.

He had seconds left.

“Excuse me,” he said to the saleswoman. “I believe I’m about to go mad. You may want to move away.” He pulled out his phone and opened his messaging app. Who? Who should he tell?