P3 stabbed a needle into brain tissue, didn’t matter where, spooled wire from its spider spinnerets as it ran, and stabbed a second pin.
“Toast!” Lear yelled.
“What? Why are you yelling toast?” the doctor asked.
Another pin, another wire and Lear felt an overwhelming urge to bite her lip.
Now P2 was in the act, stabbing and spooling, stabbing and spooling.
“She’s wiring me! She’s wiring me!” Lear cried.
When she wasn’t stabbing pins and running wire, Plath was simply slicing through
neurons and axons, plowing the soft pinkish-gray tissue.
“No!” Lear shouted. “No. No! Grah! Grah!”
Plath felt a strange warmth creeping over her. Not real, she knew. Illusion. The body shutting down. Shutting down, conserving blood warmth in her core, saying farewell to limbs.
If I didn’t love you, Noah, why am I thinking of you now, now at the end?
She no longer felt the pain of her knee. Numb. Her arm still ached, but it was so very far away.
I loved that you loved me, Noah.
But still enough consciousness to stab and spool and stab again.
I loved making love to you.
“Grah, I, grah, yeah,” Lear said, straining to be understood.
“She’s having a stroke,” the doctor said. “Look! Her left pupil is blown!”
Lear no longer saw the doctor. She saw her mother, her mother, the whore had actually slapped her across the face when she’d seen her daughter’s disapproving gaze, a red welt and a sting and a humiliation.
Slap me? Slap me? SLAP ME?
I wasn’t brave enough to love you, Noah.
Bitch-slap me? Me? Me? Me?
Incoherent sounds came from Lear’s mouth between manic twitches. The doctor and Stillers laid her down on the floor.
“I’m giving her blood thinners,” a funny, funny voice said, coming from her mother’s screaming mouth, the cleaver in Lystra’s hand, yeah, die yeah, slap me?
Me? Meeeee? Meeeee?
The helicopter had a top speed just ten knots slower than the sleigh. The sleigh pulled away but with painful, painful slowness.
And the sleigh was definitely not faster than cannon or missiles.
The missile grazed the cockpit with a fiery tail and exploded a hundred yards ahead. The sleigh’s computers were fast, but not fast enough at one hundred sixty miles an hour to avoid the ice and stone thrown up in the explosion. It was like driving full speed in a hailstorm with golf ball–sized hail.
But the sleigh survived, rocking wildly from side to side.
“Okay, we get one shot at this, kid,” Suarez said. “Be ready!”
Suarez hit the brakes. The sleigh slowed in a storm of ice particles, the helicopter roared by overhead, and Bug Man pushed the button.