BZRK (BZRK 1)

Bug Man saw a sky of fibers, each like a bridge cable.

A garment.

Was it the president’s? Was it time?

But then the fibers zoomed away, off into the distance where they rested on the presidential shoulders.

“Just let me get that, Madam President,” Liz Law said.

Bug Man could see the president’s face clearly in the serried ranks of nanobot optics. Had he missed his moment? Fear swelled within him. What would the Twins do if—

But no, now the hand was rushing toward the president, touching, smoothing, and now, now, now!

Bug Man’s army raced across fingertips and leapt. He could see the picture of two dozen nanobots falling, like an insect army platoon jumping out of an airplane.

The ground—those same fibers—rushed up at him.

With twenty-eight tiny impacts Bug Man’s forces landed on the lapel of the president of the United States.

TWENTY-FIVE

Ophelia went straight up to the gift-store clerk and asked, “Do you take MasterCard? I mean, I know you have to take Visa, right? Because it’s the UN? Visa? Get it?”

While Ophelia distracted the clerk, Wilkes went to the book rack, bent back the pages of several paperbacks, pulled out a lighter, and set fire to as many of them as she could get to before the clerk yelled, “Hey, what are you doing! What are you doing?”

Wilkes smiled, and Ophelia turned, walked quickly to a shelf of stuffed toys and kid’s books, and deployed her own lighter.

“Oh, my God, what are you doing?” the clerk cried, waving her hands as if frantic fingers would solve the problem. And now the handful of other patrons in the store had to choose between screaming, running, screaming and running, or trying to corral the obviously crazy woman and girl.

Wilkes reached under her skirt, up into the waistband of her tights, and pulled out something that looked exactly like a pistol. In fact it was plastic and therefore had gone through security without a problem. And if the patrons who now raised their hands and said things like, “Whoa, whoa, take it easy,” and backpedaled, had taken the time to examine the gun, they’d have spotted it as a fake.

But when a crazy person is waving a gun at you, sometimes you don’t search for serial numbers.

Ophelia set fire to a bunch of glossy commemorative picture books, and a nice oily smoke was coiling up to the ceiling.

Alarms began jangling.

Sprinklers came on fitfully, spitting and then spraying water over all the tacky merchandise.

To her credit the clerk did not flee, so Ophelia reluctantly smashed a snow globe against the back of her head, and she and Wilkes pushed around the counter, into the back room, and through the door that led to the storage area. It was a fairly compact space full of flimsy cardboard boxes, most with Chinese as well as English markings.

The obvious back door opened onto a blank, overlit hallway that presumably went on to find a loading dock or freight elevator somewhere.

“That’s not it,” Ophelia said.

“It has to be here. Has to be,” Wilkes said. “Otherwise we’re just going to jail for arson.”

“And assault,” Ophelia added, still holding the snow globe.

They raced around the perimeter of the small storeroom, pushing boxes away, knocking things over. Out in the shop there was yelling, and an authoritative voice saying, “What’s going on here?”

“Two crazy women!”

“Where did they go?”

And the sound of a walkie-talkie and the UN guard calling for backup and ordering the loading dock closed down.

“Here!” Ophelia hissed. There was a space not blocked by boxes, where the wall was covered by a suspiciously large poster of former UN chief Ban Ki-moon.