“No, no, no, no, no!” Plath cried.
“You fucking assholes! You murdering assholes!” Wilkes screamed.
Keats lay on his back. Three bullets had struck him in the side of his chest, in his upper arm, in the side of his head. He was not yet dead, eyes glazing, dark blood like ink pumping from him to form a pool on the floor, his mouth working like a beached fish, gasping.
“Oh, God, Noah! Oh, God, Noah!”
He tried to speak but only managed to form a blood bubble. He grunted, the sound of a dying beast. He breathed heavily, looked at Plath, grunted again. He blinked, just one eye, almost as if he was winking. Blood found its way out of his ears, out of his nose.
Plath tried to cradle him in her arms, tried to hold his head, but when she did, a part of his skull came away and she screamed. Wilkes, her own hands red, took Plath’s hand and kept saying, “He’ll be okay, he’ll be okay.”
A siren was screeching, up and down the scale, up and down in Plath’s head, but it was only her own screams.
A cell phone rang.
Plath stared at Noah, his eyes still so blue, his eyes open, his lips no longer the parchment landscape she had seen through biot eyes, now only the lips that had kissed her. They were moving silently.
Plath’s entire body was shaking. She heard nothing, and for a while she saw nothing. The world was lost to her. Only Wilkes’s arms around her connected her to reality.
The sound of a phone ringing. And going to voice mail.
“I hate people who get my hopes up,” Lear said. But she was distracted by a third eruption of flames. This one blew the windows out of half the lower floors. A shower of crystal fell through yellow flames, pursued by billows of smoke.
Bug Man dialed again. This time, the call was answere
d.
“Kind of a bad time, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.
“Lear wan’ to tal’ to th’ Twinshh,” he said.
“Oh, does she?” Burnofsky said, his voice flat. “A little late for talk, I think. Hey, Anthony?”
“Wha’?”
“I never hated you, Anthony,” Burnofsky said.
Bug Man had no idea how to respond to that, so he simply handed the phone to Lear after pushing the Speaker button: he wanted to hear.
“Who is this?” Lear demanded.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Lystra Reid. Or should I say ‘Lear’?” Burnofsky said.
“Is this one of the Twins?”
“This is Burnofsky. Dr. Burnofsky. But you can call me Karl.”
“Give me the Twins.”
“Well, we’re all kind of busy panicking and getting ready to die,” Burnofsky said. “Hey, just out of curiosity, Ms. Reid, did you ever figure out what the Twins were up to on Floor Thirty-Four?”
Burnofsky heard the silence of confusion. Then, “What are you talking about, you old fool?”
“Their secret weapon. A virus that preyed only on cobra DNA. Like the cobra DNA that forms part of the biot genome. Ironic, don’t you think? They were going to obliterate all biots, and now, hah! Now you’re the one killing biots.”
“Shut your filthy mouth, you disgusting drunk,” Charles said, now as furious as his brother.
“Oh, I’m sorry, am I embarrassing you, boys?” Burnofsky laughed. “Don’t worry, the final laugh will be on Lear.”