BZRK (BZRK 1)

“Take me to Anya.”

When they found her, Plath had two pins left, and no more than a single long strand of wire.

She had built a cat’s cradle of pins and wires in Benjamin’s brain. It extended across roughly one square centimeter of the hippocampus. It would take an experienced nanobot twitcher no time to find her, but quite a while to actually reach her.

But in the macro her time was up. Someone had finally had the sense to question the two bums who had flushed Keats. And some bright AmericaStrong thug had decided it was time to take a closer look at the Dumpster.

The lid flew open and powerful hands dug down into the trash until one of those hands closed over an ankle.

Then there were loud cries and warnings, and Plath was hauled bodily up and out, dropped onto the ground, and kicked once very hard in the stomach.

In the elevator going up to the Tulip they decided she needed roughing up. She took a backhand to the face that split her lip. They didn’t want the bosses thinking they had gone soft.

The elevator door opened onto a scene of wild contrasts. Within the soaring heights of the Tulip the Twins had built a world. Offset layers of platforms hung overhead—bedrooms, bathrooms, display rooms—each connected by a short, double-width escalator. The ground floor was thirty-six thousand square feet, most of it sunk in gloom. But she had glances of amazing things back in the unlit distance: what could only be a tank, an entire carousel, a Predator drone hanging from wires, large animal cages, a firing range.

But the space directly before her, the corner of the cavernous room, was what fascinated. Half a dozen TFDs. A woman who looked as if she had just stepped out of the J. Crew catalog by way of a spa. A massive desk that had been overturned so that she could see the screens built into its surface, and see a nano battle raging, and an entire Christmas tree of police and fire department lights at the UN, and other things she didn’t recognize.

She saw them, the Armstrong Twins, as broad as two men, tall, powerfully built, but fused together in a way that made the mind rebel.

TFDs were manhandling a massive chair, like the world’s highest-tech La-Z-Boy. Others were hauling monitors, trailing wire, searching for an electrical outlet.

Keats sat on the floor. The beagle sniffed at the pool of his blood.

The TFDs threw her down beside Keats.

“You didn’t have to bring the chair up here,” a kid in an army jacket objected. “I could have run it from downstairs.”

“What?” the J. Crew woman demanded.

Army Pete shrugged. “Dude, I just needed someone to act as a pathway. One of your guys could have come downstairs; I could have put my boys on him, right? And then—”

He fell silent in the face of Sugar’s blazing fury. “You could have told me.”

“I figured you understood how—”

“Communists,” Benjamin wept as if it was the saddest word in the world.

Keats, sitting in his own blood just a few inches from Plath, held her gaze, and then looked over his shoulder. Plath followed the direction of his eyes. She saw his hands, bound as hers were with a plastic tie.

His wrists were red. He was using the gruesome lubrication to work his hands free. Plath saw cuts. The meat of one thumb was lacerated deeply. But his hands were almost free.

Charles yanked at his own captured arm and almost hit himself with the chair. “You can let me up now, Ms. Lebowski,” he said. “I have control of myself. I won’t harm my brother.”

Sugar Lebowski, Plath realized. Nijinsky had briefed them all on her. She almost smiled now recalling his description of: “a bleached, Botoxed, boob-jobbed suburban mommy with a stick up her ass and a gun in her purse.”

“Yes, sir,” Sugar said. But Plath heard hesitation.

Keats saw her. He tried to show nothing, but Keats didn’t have a poker face. He was afraid for her. He was sad to have failed in his brave effort to save her.

She wanted to tell him that she would rather be here with him than alone. She wanted to tell him that she would share his fate. That she was no more afraid than he was.

But the truth was that she was sick with fear. Her limbs were stiff. She couldn’t stop blinking. Her lungs were unable to draw enough breath, as though she were being squeezed in a vice. The corners of her mouth were weighted, her tongue was a foreign object, her hands trembled.

She saw then the livid bruising and battered lips of the right half of the Armstrong Twins. Benjamin. She remembered that. He was the right half.

He was shaking. He was yanking the shared head. His eye was wild, not with rage but with some unreadable emotion.

Charles was straining to look complaisant, to seem normal. It was a sort of Janus mask, and like that mythical, two-faced Roman god, Charles and Benjamin were striving to look in different directions. They were facing the same way but seeing very different things.