BZRK: Apocalypse (BZRK 3)

Plath licked her lips, nervous, angry, but feeling as if she should be far angrier. Knowing she should be far angrier. But somehow the emotion didn’t quite come. The rage did not rise in her. “Tell me what he instructed,” she said, her voice roughened to simulate the emotion she did not feel.

“He said to wire you. To reduce your skepticism. To avoid suspicion of Lear. Or of me.”

“What else?”

“Seventy percent,” Wilkes snarled. “Right.”

“There are … holes in my mind,” Vincent said. “I feel them. I know something is wrong with me. That’s not a lie.”

“Asshole!” Wilkes said, far more furious than Plath.

Plath raised a hand to silence Wilkes. “Tell me the rest,” she said to Vincent.

Anya sat beside Vincent, who seemed terribly small. She was weeping quietly, holding one of his hands in hers. Expecting him to be killed.

Plath saw herself through Anya’s eye. She saw a grim-faced girl, a sixteen-year-old girl with freckles for God’s sake, with stupid freckles. That picture of her finally brought the true emotion to the surface, but the emotion was disgust. Plath was disgusted with herself, with what she had become.

“Tell me what you did about the Tulip, Vincent,” Plath said.

Vincent flinched and broke eye contact. “You know what I did.”

“You wired the Tulip and the Twin Towers together,” Plath said bitterly. “And you looped in, what? Something that would make me less questioning, something …”

“I wired the memories of the Towers, the Tulip, and your pleasure centers, all together,” Vincent said. “They were Lear’s orders. That’s what he wanted. I …” He looked at Anya, and now Plath was looking at Vincent through her own eyes and through Anya’s. “I—”

“Did you at least argue? Did you at least question?” This was Keats now, raging. “Did you not say, ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ Did you not say, ‘How dare you?’ Did you not tell Lear to go fuck himself?” Keats looked as if he might beat Vincent to death right then and there.

“He’s been wired, too,” Plath said wearily. “We burned holes in his brain to save him, but someone else saw an opportunity in that. We never checked because … well, because we felt so sad and guilty. But Lear got to Vincent, Vincent got to me.”

“Who would have wired Vincent?” Keats asked, but even as the words were forming, he saw the answer. “Nijinsky. It’s like a disease. Lear to Nijinksy, Nijinsky to Vincent, Vincent to Plath. Like a virus.”

“Vincent, walk your biot out of me,” Plath ordered. “Do it now.”

Vincent said nothing, just looked at her, so Wilkes dropped down beside him, clapped a friendly hand on his leg, and in a flash there was a knife in her free hand. She jabbed the point against his carotid artery. “Do what the lady says, Vincent. Or I have to kill you. Give up the one you have in her, and your others, too. It’s either that or you die.”

“Do it, Vincent,” Anya pleaded. “For me, do it.”

Half an hour later Vincent’s biots were in a vial hanging from Plath’s neck. Vincent, the once-invincible Vincent, was still just seventy percent. But he was one hundred percent in Plath’s power.

STATE OF PLAY

Enough dots had been connected. But twenty-four hours after the day of the prince and the Pope, no one had an explanation. The prince was locked in a comfortable room in the palace and tranquilized to near coma.

His Holiness was locked in comfortable rooms at the Vatican, tied to his bed, and tranquilized to near coma.

Stockholm was fresh out of psychiatric beds in its institutions.

And then the new head of Wells Fargo bank drove her car off a bridge.

And several hours after that the Ayatollah Aliabadi was discovered amid broken glass cutting his wrists.

And the fashion model who leapt out of a tenth-floor window in Kyoto.

And the rock star who stormed offstage at a concert in Toronto, only to return a few minutes later, armed with a pistol, which he emptied into the audience, killing one and injuring four.

And the president of the World Bank who swam frantically into the Baltic Sea in freezing conditions. He was rescued but had to be confined.

It soon became hard to keep track of.