Plath found she was breathing hard. Audibly. “How did you know to call me?”
Was it her imagination or were there an unusual number of police sirens. Too many even for New York?
Was it her imagination, or were unflappable New Yorkers hunched a bit too tight around their lattes? Were their eyes less big-city averted and more alert-scared?
“Mr. Stern left a file to be opened in the event of his suspicious death.”
“And was it suspicious? His death?”
Camilla Strange laughed humorlessly. “He seems to have been … eaten. Consumed. His driver brought him here, dead, with maybe a third or a half of his body gone. Muscles, viscera, organs: all eaten. Like millions of ants had been working on him. That’s how he looks. Like roadkill.”
“Nanobots,” Plath said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Camilla Strange said. “That was our thought, too. A mini gray-goo scenario. They must have been programmed in advance to replicate only so many generations. And then … I’m sorry, someone is … hold on, please.”
The phone muted. Then Camilla was back. “I just sent you a piece of video.”
Plath switched apps, opened the video, and turned so that Keats could see. It showed a sedan screeching to a halt at McLure Labs. A man whose entire head and shoulders seemed to be weeping blood staggered from the car, walked three steps, and fell.
“Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God, what is that?” The voice on the video was saying.
The picture zoomed in, and for just two seconds before focus went hazy Plath could see the dead man liquefying before her eyes.
The video ended. Blessedly no advertising had yet been attached.
“Ma’am? Ms. McLure?”
“Yes.”
“You saw?”
“I saw.”
“What do we—”
“Stay hidden. Stay out of it. This is out of your hands now.”
Plath, shaken, hung up the phone. She excused herself to the bathroom. She vomited into the toilet bowl, fished in her bag for a mint, found three loose Tic Tacs.
War was on. If there had been any uncertainty, it was gone now. If she had entertained doubts about whose side she was on, the Armstrong Twins had made it easy.
Stern had been like an uncle. The one living remnant of her father’s company. The only man she knew who’d been Grey McLure’s friend.
Stern, murdered by the Twins. Her brother, murdered by the Twins. Her father …
She saw it again in her mind, the towers falling, and mingling with that imagery was the vivid personal memory of watching her father’s jet arcing crazily out of the sky, plunging toward the stadium, the fear, the panic, the flash and heat and noise of the explosion.
If she was not in this to avenge her father and brother, why was she in it at all?
Was it all wiring now, thrusting these memories to the fore? Maybe, yes. But that didn’t make it wrong, any of it.
Stern must have been in agony.… Grey McLure must have died in terror, not at his own extinction but at the knowledge that his son would die with him, and possibly his daughter as well.
If wire was what it took to give her strength, then okay. Okay.
She wiped her mouth, washed her hands, chewed the Tic Tacs, and thumbed a text.
ARTIFACT