“Tell me!” If he could get a withdrawal—if someone, anyone, could be there to offer Bug Man a way to climb off the woman—then he could drag one of Vincent’s biots with him. Maybe both.
It would be unequaled game play.
Unequaled!
“What the hell are you doing?” It was Jindal bursting in. “The Twins are seeing all this! Quit screwing around. Kill him off! Kill him off!”
Bug Man felt as if he’d been kicked in the chest. In all this time it had never occurred to him that his video was also being watched live by the Armstrong Twins.
He turned sickly eyes on Burnofsky.
Burnofsky laughed. “Yeah, there’s that.”
Bug Man gritted his teeth and surged his nanobots ahead.
“Caligula,” Vincent said. He sat hunched forward in the backseat, looking like he might throw up. Plath was beside him and a girl she’d never seen before. Anya was jammed in the passenger seat with Keats. Six of them in a car made for five at most. A car with one window gone and blood all over the dashboard.
Caligula drove with the same compact precision he did everything. Police cars went screeching past, heading for the massacre at McLure headquarters.
“Caligula,” Vincent said again, and the killer in the front seat sighed and answered.
“Madness or death,” Vincent said. “Make it death.”
“You don’t give that order, Vincent,” Caligula said calmly. “Only Lear gives that order.”
“Shut the hell up: no one’s giving that order,” Wilkes said. “I’m the cavalry. Yee-hah.”
A ghost of a smile on Vincent’s face.
SIXTEEN
“He’ll be okay. Vincent, I mean. He’ll be okay.” Nijinsky looked somewhat the worse for wear. His hair was short of perfect, and his collar was limp. He almost flopped into the chair.
Plath had showered. The water had run red and she’d stayed in there quite a while, crying where the others couldn’t see her.
She sat now beside a solemn, shell-shocked Keats. He still had blood splatter on his face. He still smelled of gunpowder.
Anya was … somewhere … with Ophelia. Caligula had disappeared. Wilkes sat a little apart, noisily devouring a bag of spicy Doritos.
Renfield’s head in the plastic bag had been taken away to be incinerated, obliterating any evidence of nanotechnology.
“Two of Vincent’s four biots are injured and lame for the time being,” Nijinsky said. “They’re back in crèche; they’ll likely recover. Wilkes’s biots also were roughed up. But she went two against eight with the Bug Man. Saved Vincent and made it out alive.”
Nijinsky made a little salute, which Wilkes saw but did not acknowledge. She ate mechanically, stuffing the chips in her mouth, eyes looking at nothing.
“You both got thrown in the deep end tonight,” Nijinsky said, not quite apologizing. “It must have been tough.”
“It was a bloody nightmare,” Keats shot back. He blinked. Drew a little further into that diffidence of his and added, more quietly, “Still is.”
“Yes, and more to come,” Nijinsky said.
“Not tonight,” Plath snapped, and was gratified that Keats nodded in support of her.
“Got that right,” he said.
Nijinsky waited, letting the silence calm them both down. Plath felt like someone had rubbed her entire body with sandpaper. Like she’d been shot up with speed. Like a screaming rant was at the tip of her tongue just waiting to be released.
Ophelia came in. “She’s under control,” she said without elaboration. She was carrying a bottle and a tray of mismatched and not-very-clean glasses. She set them down in front of Nijinsky. He poured a whiskey for himself and for Ophelia. He looked speculatively at Wilkes, Keats, and Plath.