BZRK (BZRK 1)

“You don’t want to do it just because you’re scared and we’re thrown together. You don’t want your first time to be—”

“How do you know it would be my first time?” she snapped.

He shrugged. “Just a feeling, I guess.”

She mirrored his shrug. “Yeah, well … I guess I was hoping for something more than a desperate terror-grope. For my first time.”

“So, you’re a romantic,” he deadpanned.

She smiled, and liked him a great deal right then. “That’s me, a romantic.” She went to her bookshelves and tilted her head to look through the titles. Then, realizing he wasn’t buying that distracted act, leaned back against the little student desk and said, “To tell you the truth, Keats, I am seriously messed up. I don’t think I’m showing it. I know I’m not letting myself feel it. I’m kind of just crushing it down inside me. But it doesn’t feel good. It feels like I’m ignoring a tumor or something. Like I’m just pretending and looking away. And …”

She ran out of words then.

Keats nodded slowly, taking time to put all of that away in his memory. Then he said, “Well, you’re certainly not going to get me to have sex with you now.”

“Rain check?” she asked.

“Let’s get some sleep.”

They turned off the lights and lay together again. This time the bed was wide enough that they did not need to touch. But their hands reached out, and their fingers twined together.

“Keats?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you inside me?”

“Well, that’s not a question any boy wants a girl to ask.”

“Keats.”

He was quiet for a bit, then said, “Yes. Little K2 is currently checking on his basket-weaving work.”

“Okay. Thanks. But shut him down and go to sleep.” And then, still later. “But that’s all right? You wouldn’t ever … I mean, I know what Vincent said. You aren’t wiring me. That’s not why I feel this way, right?”

“On the lives of everyone I love: no.”

But after that their hands did not touch.

Nijinsky woke up no longer in the limo. He woke up in two places at once. One was a garage. Not one of those big, underground garages, a standard two-car garage of the sort you might find in any upscale suburb. There was only space for one car, actually, because the other half was filled with children’s bikes, boxes of Christmas ornaments, power tools.

The other place Nijinsky woke was just under an eyelid. He recognized the terrain. It was not his first time squeezed between eyelid and eye.

Nijinsky was seated. He had no choice in the matter. He was tied, hands behind his back, stretched around a wooden dining room chair, ankles tied to the legs.

Sugar Lebowski stood before him, dripping wet, wearing different clothes than she’d had on before. This was her home, Nijinsky realized, somewhere out on Long Island or in Jersey. Which meant that he was not going to leave this place alive. Or at least not without a brain filled with wire.

There was a twitching station, too. More primitive than what he would have expected. It wasn’t the high-tech marvel BZRK had been led to expect of AFGC, more like an Aeron chair with a clunky computer parked alongside; wires, a pair of gloves attached to the chair with bungee cord, and a forty-two-inch monitor propped atop a rickety occasional table.

Obviously a jury-rigged portable model.

The two thugs were not there. But a young man with fly-away blond hair was. He must have been in his early twenties. European, Nijinsky concluded, assessing the clothing brands and choices.

Sugar didn’t waste any time. She grabbed a rusty golf club, a nine iron, and swung it level, straight into Nijinsky’s shoulder. Which hurt like hell. Almost made him forget the throbbing at the back of his neck and the goose egg growing under his hairline.

It was an interesting choice. A shoulder hit like that.

Nijinsky sent his biots racing.