“And who sent Caligula to do this act of terrorism?” Benjamin asked, voice silky and malevolent now.
“Me,” Plath said.
Charles blinked. “But … Surely you …” His tone was almost pleading.
“Lear,” Wilkes said when Keats remained silent. “It was Lear. He’s wired her. He got Vincent to wire her. We’ve cleared her brain of wire, but—”
“So now you see that we were right! Now, now with our beautiful people all dead on the Doll Ship, all destroyed. Now you—”
“Look, you’re a piece of shit who needs to die a painful death. The two of you,” Wilkes snapped. “But we do not blow up buildings full of innocent people. We’re trying to stop this from happening.”
Benjamin’s face was a snarl. Charles was guarded, worried. It was he who said, “Jindal, get Burnofsky up here.”
Keats had reached the optic nerve. He sank a probe. “I can see,” he said in a dreamy, disconnected, emotionless voice. “Caligula is looking right at it. At the bomb. There’s a timer.”
“How much time left?” Jindal asked.
Benjamin raged at him. “Follow my brother’s orders, now!”
“I have a weak picture,” Keats said, speaking to Plath. “I’ll try for a better one.”
Jindal rapped orders to his people, then, undeterred—Accustomed to abuse, Keats thought—he said, “Our people will be through the door into the sublevel in a few minutes.”
“How are they getting through?” Plath asked.
“They’re cutting through the steel with a blowtorch and once they’re in—”
“A blowtorch? Cutting into a room full of gas?” Wilkes cried. “Isn’t that, uh, stupid?”
“She’s right,” Charles said.
“No,” Plath said sharply. “No. Maybe better to blow it up now rather than wait. Less gas now. More later.”
“System,” Charles said. “Exterior, sublevel doors.”
As one they all turned to look at the monitor. Four frames. Three showed nothing but doors. The last showed two men wearing welding helmets. The bright light of the torch caused lens flares that obscured the progress of the work.
“Seven minutes, eighteen seconds,” Keats said. “I can see it now. I can see it clearly. Seven minutes and …” And it all came back to him. The calm of battle had run its course once his biot had reached its goal. Now Keats couldn’t go on. He had run out of indifference to his own fate.
Part of him didn’t want to tell Sadie. What would be gained? But he had to speak. He had to say good-bye.
“Sadie,” he said.
She must have registered the sadness and gentleness in his voice. She turned to him. “Yes?”
“Sadie,” he said again. “I’ve thought about it a lot. I’ve seen Alex. I know what it means. Death or madness, I … I guess I believe in another life, maybe. After this one. So …”
She stared, uncomprehending. Then a sharp intake of breath. Her eyes widened. “Oh, God.”
“What?” Wilkes demanded.
“I’m getting my other biot as far from your aneurysm as possible,” he said. “But you’ll need to kill me. You can’t have it in your head with a madman running it.”
“Noah,” Sadie said. Sadie, and not Plath. Sadie. “Noah … We have to …”
He took her hand in his. “We always knew it could happen.”
“Order the men down there to cut straight through, forget cutting a hole, tell them just to cut all the way through in a single spot,” Benjamin told Jindal.